How dare you take advantage of me in my vulnerable state? Here I am, sitting at home, tired, achy, taking a sick day because brain and body won’t work, and I innocently finished reading “The Boy with a Torn Hat.”

I thought this would be easy reading–a boy-book [...]]]>

How dare you take advantage of me in my vulnerable state? Here I am, sitting at home, tired, achy, taking a sick day because brain and body won’t work, and I innocently finished reading “The Boy with a Torn Hat.”

I thought this would be easy reading–a boy-book surely, full of beer and pissing rain and chasing skirts and the antics of youth. And there you go seeping in between the cracks of my carefully erected armor with insidious poignancy, exposing all the uncertainty and longing and the suffering borne of being torn in too many directions–exposing what it means to be humanly afraid, to hurt someone you love, to be victim to your own weaknesses.

I did not know how to start. How to tell you how good “The Boy with a Torn Hat” is. [Caution, spoilers] I was leaking tears for the last few chapters at the suffering, the betrayal, and the redemption. But it is not a tragedy. The book makes mention of a Hollywood ending. I did not find that moment so. It would never make it in a Hollywood script without being blown out of proportion with a man-to-man battle. It’s triumph was one of the human spirit. The redemption of having one clear moment where one small act makes a giant difference to oneself and breaks the mold was the crowning touch. How many of those moments do some of us pass up, locked in insecurity, ignorance, or fear? You made up for all of those moments for all of us.

I was a bit misled (I always read that word ‘migh-zled’) at first by the light humor of our blundering protagonist. I thought of the wit as a writing style; instead, it was a social coping mechanism, a mask for angst. His stumbling ways, his botched attempts at art and love, his inability to say something substantive to at least one of his paramours, establish him as an Everyman early on. I was embarrassed and chagrined for him, and with him, as his misadventures reminded me of uncomfortable past moments of my own.

I cringed and berated him for his betrayal of Renate, while realizing that this trip to “the dark side,” was perhaps the first thing he’d made a definitive stand about. He willfully created an alter ego to take unearned credit, just to get something he wanted–to know how it felt to have someone admire his work, and by extension, to admire him. I was relieved that he was found out so early, however painful that exposure, and I felt vindicated in the end when he learns how to take positive action for the benefit of self and others.

Despite this human flaw, this selfish and flagrant succumbing to temptation, despite his constant and desperately awkward attempts to get laid, he still emerges the hero when he glimpses desire for love of another kind. His tenderness toward Sasha and his desire to paint for the blind, for the heart, overcome the constant nagging of young male hormones that pervades his existence. When circumstances push him toward maturity, he accepts the ride with insight and grace.

There are so many other things for which to commend the book–the subtle weaving of the plot around Arthur McBride, the symbolism of the portrait of the boy as icon of the innocence and flaws of so many of the characters, the creation of real villains, the uplifting of spirit when the entire busker community comes together to support Jimmy, the finding of Jimmy’s voice alone without Arthur. There are many instances of admirable wordsmithy (my word) that I marked in the margins–I do not usually mark up books.

It is interesting that women don’t fare so well in the book. While Jimmy, Morgan, Dieter, and Tobias find themselves in larger or smaller ways, Hannah remains frozen in childhood, Sabrina remains a resentful mom, Renate chooses the sadist, and Lola goes to look for one. Still, I have known them and been some of them, so it is a fair depiction. I just wanted more for at least one of them.

I am so happy you gave me a copy of your book, Thornton. But how dare you write and touch the heart so deeply.

–
Your fan,
Diana

P.S. I wrote this today, immediately after reading Thornton Sully’s novel, “The Boy with a Torn Hat.”

As promised, here is the next installment.  Our rating slides from “G” to the right considerably along the alphabet, but I don’t use the language or the references to sex gratuitously(except in my private life, of course).  For those of you who don’t want to take another 29 weeks [...]]]>

As promised, here is the next installment.  Our rating slides from “G” to the right considerably along the alphabet, but I don’t use the language or the references to sex gratuitously(except in my private life, of course).  For those of you who don’t want to take another 29 weeks to hear the whole story, a limited number of copies signed by the author(that would be me) available for purchase:

www.awordwithyoupress.com/buy/

That would make the boy very happy.

Here we go:

*********************************

Chapter Three

In the year that has passed since that April morning on the bridge, the leaves that emerged from those saplings across the river turned the dark green of Renate’s pullover, then the brown of her beret. They struggled with German bravery against stiff autumn breezes, only to wither in place, and then just let it all go in the free-fall of despair. Most of them were dead before they even hit the ground.

But fresh hope is more tenacious than a dying leaf, and there are well received rumors adrift that another spring is working its way up the Rhine-Neckar valley. The rumors must be true, for there is vengeance in the night air, as winter has unleashed a take-no-prisoners wind to slash through the darkness one last time in what was once the old Jewish quarter of Heidelberg.

That wind, conjured up at the banks of the river, had me looking over my shoulder and burying my fingers in my trench coat. I could hear it scratching its dirty nails on well-worn cobblestones, stirring up from the Neckar and loping on all fours through the labyrinth of alleyways and side streets in search of stragglers, such as me, picking up speed whenever something fed its nostrils. I was alone by the time I got to the far end of Unterestrasse, everyone else having wisely barricaded themselves indoors. I quickened my pace, and reached the familiar oak door of the Cafe Hirschorn to join my fellow misfits before it picked up my scent. A few broken leaves and scraps of newspaper fled before it, and I could hear the whistle of momentum just as I stepped inside. I warmed my fingers by the fire and loosened my scarf, and I foolishly thought I was safe when I gave a nod to my friends who were at the table waiting for Godot, or me, or miracles.

But as the wind sliced past The Hirschorn and into the square, over its shoulder it caught sight of me cozied up at our table. It came to an abrupt halt, and bristled. I had just edged into my usual window seat in our booth and saw it face to face when it pressed its snout against the glass. It bared its yellow teeth and snorted, steaming the window. I didn’t make a move. The antique glass is thin and fragile. It reared and tensed on its haunches, preparing to strike, but at the sight of a log being tossed on the fire, it recoiled and hissed “Never mind. I’ll be back next year. You won’t.” With that threat did winter abdicate. I watched it shuffle across the dimly lit square and lift its leg on a fountain before trotting up into the hills, the darkness, and some undisclosed cave.

“Who’s paying?” The barmaid, Sabrina, held a full tray shoulder high, and had no intention of setting it down until she had her answer. She knows us well.

“Arthur is,” said Tobias, with a grin made forever boyish by the gap between his two front teeth that made taking him seriously an acquired talent.

“Bloody Hell!” said Jimmy. “He doesn’t even touch the stuff! Why should he have to pay?”

At that, Lord Adrian pulled a knotted-up bandanna filled with lint and treasure out of the pit-deep pockets of his rumpled Siberian overcoat, and plunked it down on the table. He’s our English diplomat, whose keen sense of fashion he artfully appropriated from Fagin. He picked open the knot, and the afternoon’s take spilled out in all directions. No paper money, just a collapsing pyramid of coins. He quickly set a stack a little taller than it needed to be on the edge of the table to cover the first round. Satisfied, Sabrina set down the beer and swept the stack into the geld pouch slung just below her belt buckle. She reached into the remaining booty and helped herself to another ten marks. “You shorted me the last time,” she said, as she scanned our blank faces to see who among us would dare to protest. We were aghast and agape! Indignant with indignation! We were, after all, almost innocent. And she had the cheek to calculate the interest and punitive damage as well!

Orders were backing up and she never really did appreciate our theatrics. She spun around without another word, back to the bar where her boss, Manny, was working two or three pumps at a time.

Youth and beauty were required credentials for anybody working tables in this university town, and Sabrina with the scandalously long legs was no exception. As she paced back to the bar, working those illegally tight American jeans, somebody said over the clatter and din, as somebody always does, “Did you ever notice that little brown pouch of hers hangs directly over her little brown pouch?” Of course we did, as we always do. Hannah was running late, which gave us time to talk about women in all ways Neanderthal before she arrived, and we got that obligation out of the way. Hannah was Wendy, and we were the Lost Boys. The whole tribe consisted of Arthur McBride and Jimmy Joyce (who were inseparable), Tobias and Lord Adrian, Uli, Deiter, and myself. I’m Morgan, the only Yank, and the only one at the table who can’t strum a guitar well enough to open up his case and his heart on some street corner for passing Deutchmarks. Jimmy keeps threatening to change that. He’s offered lessons on the sly if I’ll make him look handsome when I ever get around to forging his portrait. Might be a stretch, but why not.

If I ever forget their names, if I ever forget my own, I just have to find my way back to the Cafe Hirschorn and sit at that table. All of us but Arthur carved our names so deeply into the varnished oak that even the relentless tide of spilled beer cannot erode our certificate of ownership. It was our table, undisputed.

Tobias, deemed leader of the band because he was the one who had the finesse to work out most of the harmonies and give them a ring, jacked his glasses back up the slope to the bridge of his nose and got right into things. “You should have been at the meeting at the Rathaus this morning, Jimmy. Deiter kept raising all kinds of objections, like it was a criminal trial. Talking about student’s rights and free speech and all that. Finally, the mayor cracks his gavel and says ‘Are you trying to show your contempt for these proceedings?’ and Deiter says right back ‘On the contrary! I’m trying my best to conceal it!’ ”

Jimmy says, “You’re marked.” A dedicated hornithologist, he lays down his field glasses and note book and cuts short his scientific observations of the flock of women preening their feathers at the bar and returns his full attention to the table.

He’s probably right. Deiter may now be under official screwtiny. But we all know he couldn’t help himself. Rehearsing, no doubt. He intends to become a lawyer, just like his father, and, more than likely, just for his father. As for Tobias, far more astute than his Alfred E. Neuman grin portends, he’s plugging away at a university degree that will give him the required credentials to examine all those young ladies perched at the afore-mentioned bar as a medical doctor some day. (The rest of us are already in private mal-practice, unfettered by the lack of a diploma.)

“So in the end,” says Tobias, “the council all went along with what the mayor was saying. If buskers are allowed to perform in the streets unregulated, sooner or later a street car is going to run over somebody and turn them into…what did you call it, Morgan?”

“Street pizza. Strasse strudel. Carnage asada.”

“Yes, one of those, and it will be our fault. That’s the excuse. All of us have to go down and register at city hall. Anybody who plays the streets, whether they live here or are just passing through. Fingerprints, photograph, everything.”

“They don’t call it the Rat-haus for nothing, now do they. Then what?”

“You have to give three day’s notice ahead of time where you want to play, and what time. They give you a permit for two hours.”

“Oh, yes, ‘We all love the wandering minstrels now won’t you kindly wander along and play somewhere else!’ I suppose you have to let ‘em know what octave you intend to play in, as well.” Jimmy honored a previously booked engagement with a hangover that precluded him attending the meeting. “Photos and fingerprints? Are they serious?”

“And you must pay five marks to register, and five marks each time you play.”

“Is that for the whole band?”

“That’s for each of us. We’re dead. That’s twenty marks.”

“Thirty if you and Adrian are with us,” added Uli, his voice quietly drifting through a thin veil of smoke that was in constant hunger for crushed leaves.

“Christ Almighty. How do they expect us to support all these pubs?” Jimmy rolled his eyes.

Uli rolled a cigarette. “This all begins the first of May. That’s not much time.”

“About a month,” somebody says, with a sense of urgency that Uli could never muster. When the house is on fire, Uli will be certain to first take out the trash before sounding the alarm.

“Yes. Get us off the streets before all those Japanese tourists come to snap pictures of themselves in quaint little Heidelberg without the degenerates dealing music and dope on every corner. None of this would ever have happened if we played Wagner!” Jimmy, the most foreign of foreigners at the table, had the most to lose by all of this. The music was all that kept him here.

“There’s one more thing,” said Lord Adrian, without looking up from parceling out the bounty into equal piles for each busker, which was pointless since it was all going to stagger into the black hole of Sabrina’s famous leather pouch before the night was over, anyway. “If they catch us playing unregistered after the first of May, they take the guitars right on the spot.”

Jimmy stiffened and pressed some muscle over Arthur McBride. “Never!” he declares. “Where’s me fuckin’ shillelagh?” With his free hand he tosses a swallow of ale down the hole in his beard.

“You might be careful, Jimmy. You’re spilling some of that in your mouth.” I was sitting with my back to the wall, across the table from him. Jimmy put down his mug. He’s looking my way but what he sees is hanging just over my shoulder above the wainscot on the pale red velvet wall. There is a very old photo, similar among dozens here, of a dashing young German aristocrat from another age, all epaulets and sash, with a sword at his side and patch on his eye.

“And what are you looking at?” Jimmy scowled at the Baron von Leftover and accused him of spying. “That bastard’s always got his eye on us. His good eye, anyway. Did you ever notice that?”

“Maybe he wants to challenge you to a duel.” Deiter had been sipping his beer and decided to weigh in. Deiter is our goatee-ed historian, and I believe the only one among us who admits to carrying a comb. Also the only one whose hair seems too short to be bothered. All that’s missing is a monocle.

“Saber and rapier? I’d take him on, if only to drink me beer in peace!”

“Do you know anything at all about the duel, Jimmy?”

“Only that it’s better to win than to lose.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“For fuck’s sake, what are you talking about?”

“Look around, Jimmy.”

He did. This is the very hall where that princely student, Mario Lanza urged everyone to drink, drink, drink. In two or three hundred years the only thing that’s been changed—and it’ll be changed again sometime after midnight—are the wood shavings scattered in snowdrifts on the old oak floor to soak up spilled beer and soften the blow if you fall on your face. Oh, and the wall sconces no longer smell of lamp oil or require a match. Antlers on the wall—the hirschorn—still offer to hold your coat and scarf when you come in the door, if you care to surrender them, and oak beams still hold up the ceiling, though now they grumble about it. On every wall where Jimmy looked were photographs, even tin-types, that had been hanging in place on the velvet wallpaper so long the watered down zinfandel-of-a-color was bleached ten shades lighter than the deep burgundy behind the frames, but it’s nothing to wine about.

“All these photographs, every one, are the ones who lost the duel.”

“These blokes on the wall, they’re the losers? They lost the fuckin’ duel?”

“Every one of them.”

“But they’re not dead, at least, not when they refused to smile for the camera?”

“If somebody got killed, it was usually an accident. You see, Jimmy, the duel had nothing to do with murdering your rival. It had to do with defending your honor.”

There was a time when honor was an honorable thing.

“First drop of blood, no matter how slight, and the duel is over. Nobody wanted to kill anybody.”

“Fuckin’ pathetic!” said Jimmy, invoking the most pretzel-of-a-word in his lexicon. I sit in awe when I see him bend it into a noun, adverb, adjective, pronoun, improper noun and god knows how many other parts of speech all in the same sentence, especially when he feels obligated to be the drunken, cliche’ Irishman. “In fact, that’s the most fuckin’ pathetic story I’ve ever fuckin’ heard in me whole fuckin’ disgusting life!—fuck all! If you’re going to duel, just run the bugger through and be done with it!” And then, having belched for punctuation, he put his arm over the shoulder of Arthur McBride to show he wasn’t completely outnumbered in his sediment. His Irish accent was stronger than stout. He even burped in Paddy. “What about the winners? What about the ones who actually won the duel?”

“Forgotten.” It was Uli, who drew his elegantly long blond hair behind his head as he spoke. (Everything about Uli was long—his hair, his fingers, the pause between words and even the length of the syllables he spoke, like his voice was walking a footbridge swaying over a ravine, a thousand foot drop to the rapids and boulders below.) “Nobody photographed the winners. No scars. No proof of courage. But lose? You’re famous.”

It’s true. Your picture on the wall with these other immortals. Your opinion sought after, in all matters, political and personal, your integrity beyond reproach, tenured. Steins of brew paid for by somebody else, consumed in your honor.

“You really had a lot to win by losing.” Tobias wanted back in on the conversation.

“He’s right. What you are really hoping for after you’ve drawn swords is that your opponent has the skill to inflict just the right wound, after you put up a good fight, of course. A slice, not a stab, and it certainly had to be visible.” Deiter held his finger as if it were a saber, and demonstrated on himself. “He had to hold the sword just so, almost perpendicular to the ground, so it strikes across the forehead and cheek, but misses your eye.”

“I just can’t see it, for fuck’s sake. Lookin’ at those pictures, seems more often than not that polite little nick across the noggin managed to slice and dice the eyeball, in spite of the rule book. What could possibly be that fuckin’ important to fight over?”

“Women,” said Uli, master of the one word dissertation and all-nighters.

For a brief moment Jimmy pondered conceding the point, but the moment quickly passed, slipping on its arse and then sliding down his throat on a cascade of amber ale.

“Genaou—exactly. The duels were almost always about women,” said Deiter.

“Still are!” said Tobias, on top of a burp, pleased, as ever, to inject his nervous wit, and thinking it’s well received. Tobias, or not Tobias—that is the question. He can be annoying, but he’s one of us, and we all recognize the signs. That boy needs an oil change. Everybody sees the smoke coming out of his tailpipe but him.

“Yes, yes. Now let me finish if you expect a little pro bono some day. I swear you’re going to need it!” Deiter doesn’t like being interrupted when he has the floor. “A lot of the squabbles started right here, in this hall. Somebody would flaunt his less-than-honorable intentions about some woman. Some jealous fool would protest. An insult would follow. An insult returned. Back and forth until a duel was arranged to settle the matter.”

I’ve heard all this before, right here in this booth. So has Mr. Joyce, though he was asleep with his head on the table in a puddle of drool and Irish whiskers at the time. After the two rivals settled up their account at the bar, it was up the cobblestones, entourage in tow, to the broad and grassy lawn in the shadow of Heidelberg Castle, where capes were removed and handed to the trusted second, swords were drawn, angers flared. Parry and thrust, parry and thrust, slash, advance, parry and thrust.

“Now, for the precision. The perfect cut, the signature of honor upon your face. Remember—a slice, not a stab. You hope it’s swift and he doesn’t blind you.”

“Are you daft? By this time the woman you’re fighting over has already named the seein’ eye dog ‘Scruffy’, had him to the groomers and fitted you for a red-tipped cane. You’re blind already to get sucked into all this,” mutters the Irishman.

“Deiter, tell him about the tree sap,” mutters the Englishman. Lord Adrian moves his lips no more than is absolutely necessary. He considers mumbling an art form, and he’s at the top of his game.

“The resin? Oh, yes, I forgot to finish about the resin.” I think Deiter had been waiting for somebody to ask. Lord Adrian was no more interested now than he was the first time he heard all this, but he had a sense of what people wanted, and intuitively, he obliged. The future barrister went on, “They used to take the pitch from a pine tree, and fold it into the wound. It was supposed to clot the blood, but really they did it so when it healed, it made the scar ruby-red.”

“Like I said, fuckin’ disgusting!” Jimmy feels vindicated.

“Maybe so, Jimmy, but here we are, a hundred, a hundred fifty years later, and we’re still talking about them. Who’s ever going to remember us?” As the words come out of my mouth, I realize immortality might still be an option for them, even without the validation of a duel or a photo on the wall in this shrine of the chivalrous. I can strum a few chords, but I don’t pretend to be a musician. I pretend to be an artist, but my friends? They are musicians. Buskers! Not rock stars playing for twelve-year-olds. Real musicians. Fifty or a hundred people so thick in the street listening to them play that streetcars couldn’t pass. These friends of mine. They have the music. Delirious with music. Music so contagious and intoxicating and liberating that the mayor of Heidelberg himself boasted that he even forbade his own daughter to drop coins in their coffers and made it his personal mission to tone them down, rein them in, before their hedonistic ways spread uber alles, and youth (that would be us) takes over the world!

“I don’t bloody well care who remembers me. I’m not ruining this perfect face me ma gave me for a woman.”

“Jimmy, I don’t think anybody has seen that face of yours in about five years. It’s asking a lot for us to take it on faith that it’s perfect.”

“Well said, Lord Adrian,” nods Tobias, lifting his glass. Jimmy has been hiding behind a beard ever since he could grow one. I don’t know that it’s been trimmed since he left the family farm in that cow-infested County Wicklow and ‘the little woman’ he swears is nursing a pint until he returns, sheep-shears in hand, no doubt.

In this fashion the hours piss their way along at Cafe Hirschorn. Hannah still hasn’t shown up and probably won’t, and Sabrina comes over with what must be round…four? (or is it fourteen? Our higher math skills often struggle when converting pints to liters). Adrian tries to chat her up, as he often does, embarrassing everyone but himself. “Tell me,” he says to her, “Is it true you’re the queen of the land?”

It must be getting late—she takes the bait.

“What?”

“I said, are you queen of the land?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s that ribbon holding your hair together. May I have a closer look?” He sits up straight and fondles the black hair tie when she bends over the table to pull together the empties, and before she knows what he’s up to, he’s made his move, lightly grazing the nape of her neck. “Yes, definitely velvet. And, of course, the diamonds. That’s the give away.”

The baffled Sabrina looks to us for rescue. She’s on her own.

And then Lord Adrian comes in with an ancient Saxon song Hannah and Tobias caught him singing when he first tested the acoustics on some street corner here one mid-summer night and decided he was home:

“Her eyes, they shi-ine like di-iamonds,

I thought she was queen of the land.

Her hair, it hung on her sho-oulders,

tied up with a black velvet band.”

She loads up her tray, casually wrings out a beer-soaked rag over Adrian’s head, and saunters back to the bar. Hard for the table to hold in a giggle. Only the truly warranted fear of adding strains to the over-stretched bladder keeps us from bursting open into fully fledged laughter.

“She loved it, actually.” Adrian feels obliged to interpret her true feelings hidden just beneath the surface of her disgust.

“You might try brushin’ your teeth, every now and again,” says Jimmy. “Women love it. A shower might also work to your advantage.” The bell tower in the church steeple brings the lesson in hygiene to an end. I lose count, but it must be a quarter ’til footless from what I can make out. We’re running out of insults to hurl at each other and we’re all congratulating ourselves for completing our civic duty to keep all this beer out of the throats of drunks and derelicts. In fact, deserves another round. Sabrina floats back from the bar with the final finale. “Pay up,” she says. “I’ve got to get home.” The fire’s dying down, but there’s not too much in-and-out at the door at this hour, so it stays warm enough. A few loners slumped over their mugs, molting, but most everyone else is gone. Manny himself, who leases the place, trudges out from behind the bar with a big street broom and starts flipping chairs over on the tables and sweeping beer-soaked wood shavings into a pile, but returns to his pulpit and all those levers when the oak door swings in for what has to be the last customer for the evening—and the last man I would ever want to share a pint with.

“Steady, Morgan,” says Jimmy. But I’m already gagging on the smell of sulfur when I see the devil enter our house of worship, and I’m dead sober.

It’s possible, tucked in our little corner booth as we are, that he doesn’t even see us. He doesn’t even look in our direction when he stands by the fire and dusts a few flakes of the road off his cape as if it’s snow. The fingers on his right hand are bandaged. He drags a back-pack and bedroll along with his weapon to the distant end of the now empty bar, where he claims a stool with his back to us. I think he saw us. I think he circled the place twice just to see what he was getting into before he even opened the door.

“You know,” says Jimmy, in a whisper, “someone saw Renate, maybe this side of Christmas, selling her stuff again, in Paris. I was meaning to tell you.” It was not her fuckin’ stuff, and it was not fuckin’ Paris. Even Jimmy knelt to pray whenever Renate offered communion.

“I heard the same,” confesses Uli. I suppose they all had. “Did you ever find out what happened to her, after she left here last summer?” He’s not offering to enlighten me, he really doesn’t know. Nobody at this table but me knows anything other than that she went down in flames, disappeared, and was rumored to have re-surfaced on a Paris street corner. And they know, they have learned, I don’t mind if they gamble for my clothes but do not puncture my rib-cage with the spear tip of her name. All the time Deiter was talking about honor and duels that took place a century ago, I was holding my breath in a rabbit hole, hoping nobody saw me. I just can’t seem to evict this shame that’s taken up residence my heart, that still festers even with the passage of time, which is vastly over-rated as a cure-all.

Of course I know what happened to Renate, or at least, half the story. I’ll wager that boney-cheeked son-of-a-bitch at the dark end of the bar knows the other half.

My friends at the table here are all discovering their multiple virtues. Isn’t that what our twenties is supposed to be about? They’re finding loyalty, discipline, love, talent, even the capacity to hold several gallons of beer at a single sitting. The very first discovery I made about myself since I crossed the pond blind-sided me. Until I was tested I always assumed I was brave. That mother-busker squatting on a bar stool sucking on a pretzel and chewing a beer taught me otherwise. I never drew a sword in Renate’s defense, when I could have made a difference. I froze up. All last summer. I let him ruin her one day at a time.

“She’s got a great cunt. Personally, I prefer her ass-hole.” A year ago, before we knew who he was, before we knew what he was, we had asked him to join us at our booth, extending a little hospitality to a fellow street player, new to the place. “Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to try it on for size yourself, Morgan.” Renate, who was there with him, had just gotten up and gone to the loo. “Go ahead. Hit her up for it. I’ll give you each a one night pass.” She returned and he was all sweetness and smiles…

Maybe he didn’t see us, but even with his back to us that flickering reptilian tongue of his is picking up information if it’s warm enough at the bar for his blood to circulate. He knows we’re here.

He knows I’m here.

So many loyal followers of the blog have wanted to know what happens next, after reading the first chapter which launched The Boy with a Torn Hat at 12:01 April 27th, that I have decided to post chapter 2 tonight. Not sure if I will do Chapter three next [...]]]>

So many loyal followers of the blog have wanted to know what happens next, after reading the first chapter which launched The Boy with a Torn Hat at 12:01 April 27th, that I have decided to post chapter 2 tonight. Not sure if I will do Chapter three next Friday, as our “G” rating moves a little (a lot) further down the alphabet.

*****************

Chapter Two

1974

I go for the ones with the limp, and Renate walks on air.

The day I discovered her she was setting up shop in Heidelberg along the river walk, a promising spot to pull in anybody limbering up with a stroll after the stiff hibernation of winter. The first buds of spring spattered a hint of color on the hills across the Neckar, and the tourist boats coughed up a little Diesel out their lungs while their crews prettied them up for the start of the season.

An outline was beginning to take form on the easel she’d propped open, and completed watercolors and pastels for sale leaned against the parapet of the stone bridge, in an open portfolio for anyone to leaf through. A little folding table by her side held scattered bullets of color, dimples of paint, a flask of water and a few brushes. She was lost inside a loosely knit pullover, dark green, that hung down past her hips but showed no mercy, failing to conceal her elusive, womanly features. A thick braid of hair, not quite the chocolate brown of her beret, tapered down to the small of her back, and swayed ever so slightly, like a pendulum of woven silk, with each stroke of the brush or sweep of the chalk across the tablet on her tripod. She stood while she painted.

I couldn’t help but listen in when I came up from behind her for a chance to work my way through her drawings. A Frenchman was looming over her, trying to talk her down on price for a landscape he’d picked, apparently to impress himself with his negotiating skills, or perhaps the woman he had attached to his arm. He pulled out (from the color of it) a twenty. With great flair he held the money in one hand and the watercolor in the other, gesturing for the artist to choose. She promptly snatched back the drawing and threatened to tear it in half, and though I don’t speak French, which she spoke quite rapidly, I believe I understood where he was supposed to put the twenty marks. “Non non non non non!” he said. He reached back into his pocket and pulled out the other half of her asking price. The deal was done.

I quickly stuck my nose back into her portfolio, crafting my alibi if she sniffed out I was eavesdropping. She’s got a temper! I thumbed through her work. My own paintings mumble, even whine, when they’re not shouting obscenities. These sang in the choir. For most of us the colors of the day were brick and rust and carbon dioxide—dark, angry oils smelling of barbed wire and factories, scraped hard against a canvas with a palette knife or stiff, screaming brush. Renate’s chalk and water colors were soft green and softer blue, oxygen, instantly feminine, the possibilities of a perfect world, all springtime and hope. Even her stone and steel cities were somehow in bloom.

And yet, in her full array of landscapes, street scenes or nudes, everything was slightly blurred, as if the colors had slept on a bed of morning dew, forcing your attention to the one small circle the size of a silver dollar that was dry and in perfect focus—the view through a rifle scope. It found what appeared to be the same blissful woman in every painting, and zeroed in on her, sometimes picking her out in a crowd. But though all the figures in her paintings were animated, youthful and vibrant, and rich with detail, invariably the face within the cross-hairs was only a plaster-of-Paris replica of a woman, a mannequin. The message was cold as a bullet alone in a chamber, the waiting room of destruction before the friction of flight: Go Ahead. Pull the trigger. I won’t feel a thing.

I couldn’t let that happen. Who would do such a thing to her? Before I drew my next breath I made a vow to rid the world of her assassins, and I fell in love with the artist before I even saw her face. I was hoping that she was plain, or even ugly, attainable. Or, impossibly, a beautiful woman who might see something in me I have yet to see in myself.

I watched the French couple cross the bridge. The mec wore a concrete trench coat and scrolled up the watercolor he bought and tucked it under his arm, like it was nothing more than the Sunday paper, to be consumed at his leisure. The fool.

Renate—I would soon learn her name—got past their little flair up and right back into her work, peering over the top of her easel to pick up whatever details on the hillside caught her fancy. She must have glanced behind briefly in my direction, while I was still browsing through her sidewalk gallery, but I missed it. “Those are forty marks each,” she said, over her shoulder. “The smaller ones are twenty.” This she spoke in English, with a German accent. How did she know to speak English? My disguise needs a little work. Still a few cogs in my Yankee incognito.

I had been crouching over her paintings all this time, each one holding me for a moment in its tender grip before passing me on to the next. I could have lived inside that portfolio of hers, but I had to break free. I had to know, I needed to know, the face of the woman who had done this to me with a few soft strokes of a brush and a piece of chalk.

She was completely absorbed in her work, and when it was clear she wasn’t going to stop for me just because I willed it, I got up and stood where the Frenchman had been standing. My abrupt appearance on the other side of her easel startled her, and I broke her rhythm, the unpardonable sin against an artist, mime, or musician. I stepped to the side, stuttered an apology, and for the first time I saw her face-to-face without the shield of the easel or the glare of the morning sunshine reflected off the river. There is some mistake, I thought—she was so unlike the expressionless targets in her paintings begging for someone to breathe a little life into them, or blow them away.

Her dark brown eyes were those of a fawn on the run, forest fire, panicked and vulnerable, and when she mouthed a few words to me that I didn’t even hear, it was with lips so full and with breath so tender she could have blown the dust off the wings of a napping butterfly and never disturbed its sleep. She smiled for me, and I felt it in my heart and in my hips, each scrambling to be the first to knock upon her door.

I was struggling to sort all this out. Her mannequins could muster no more than a blank, bloodless glaze, as if they had French-kissed a vampire, but that obnoxious patron of the arts with the woman grafted to his arm proved beyond doubt the artist herself was all flame, just waiting for something, or someone, to stoke the embers. I didn’t know what to make of the contradiction. I only knew I wanted in.

It was my moment to speak, to say something fresh and good and just be somebody else. I could feel words crawling up from my heart as senselessly as ants but I couldn’t make a sentence. I was about to speak, but over her shoulder, a hundred yards in the distance and coming our way, was Lola. I couldn’t make out her face, but it was Lola.

It’s that slight limp of hers.

*************

Chapter three makes references, very slightly, to subject matter some readers might find offensive, and language(used playfully and not in any way cruelly or in a demeaning way)that may be offensive to some as well. I’ll let you know later in the week if I intend to post it. If I get through that barrier, it may be good to go until chapter 27, perhaps this will be our regular fireside read!

What do you think?

Synopsis

The Boy with a Torn Hat is a coming of age tale in an ageless city, and salvages a story of love and youthful camaraderie that would have been lost forever were it not for a chance discovery years later and a continent [...]]]>

Synopsis

The Boy with a Torn Hat is a coming of age tale in an ageless city, and salvages a story of love and youthful camaraderie that would have been lost forever were it not for a chance discovery years later and a continent away.

A surprise find in a Manhattan pawnshop transports us back to the year 1974 and the old Jewish quarter of Heidelberg, Germany. In the shadow of the ancient castle there thrives a warren of bohemian misfits, painters, poets and prostitutes, street minstrels and mimes, and a clutch of university students eager to demonstrate to the world at large that they are not the goose-steppers that their parents were.

Skipping across the pond and stumbling into their midst is Morgan, an American rolling stone determined to earn his place among them as a portrait painter.

Morgan encounters the gifted but troubled artist Renate one spring morning selling her paintings to passersby along the Neckar River. He is enchanted by the genius and beauty of her work, and falls in love with her before he even sees her face. He is at once aware that her talent far exceeds his own, and that notion humbles his desire for her, and, besides, she seems to be under the dangerous spell of a nefarious street musician whose calculated indifference makes him irresistible to her.

All summer long, as his fellow vagabonds animate the streets of the Old City with music and art and intrigue on every corner, Morgan conceals his longing for Renate, and resigns himself to his role as her best friend.   Love on a thermostat. When he squanders his one opportunity to turn up the heat, and break the spell that keeps her on the leash of his rival, he hungers for a second chance. But it had better come quickly—the Heidelberg city council has decreed that all those free-spirited artists and troubadours who pull in a living from the streets must officially register, the first step to curbing their hedonistic ways. Their dance is about to become a march. Morgan must find the courage to take what he wants, before it is too late. But there are obstacles…

There is music in the air! Come.

Have a listen!

Excerpt (Chapter One)

“Are you sure? I’m just around the corner.”

“Thanks. I’ll pass.”

“Winter rates?”

I can’t help but smile. Convenience and a discount. We exchange apologies as strangers do for bumping into each other, but I decline her generous offer. I regain my stride after our little sidewalk samba, and I reach intuitively to check the breast pocket inside my overcoat. Still there.

I really should have been watching my step, and yet, how can I not have my head in the clouds? Though the air is crisp my chest is still warm from a superb cappuccino that left me daydreaming of the cafes of Europe. I could book out of JFK tonight, if I liked. My agent tells me he’s firmed up another West Coast show and is asking me for inventory. I’m bulletproof in the age of Uzi economics. (Did I really let him call my stuff inventory? I make a note to be offended the next time I see him.)

And oh, my god. Money in my pocket. Enough to insulate me from just about everything unpleasant, and enough to self-medicate with just about any vice I choose. A half a dozen American wars have been fought, won and lost since I first walked these Lower East Side streets. There have been more presidents than I have enemies, and I can’t recall, except with effort, who their vice-presidents were. Women have come and gone (mostly gone—irreconcilable similarities), and perhaps they were never really there at all. My children are old enough to adore me once more, after the obligatory rage of extended adolescence. We’re still in touch. I am oblivious to the beggars and indifferent to the hookers who are positioned on the sidewalk like random stones in a stream, but I’m as unperturbed as water as I flow by them. Life is good.

Some of the shops are only now rolling open their awnings. The smoke shop on one corner is aflame with anticipation of the return of Cuban cigars now that Fidel is retiring and moving to Florida. On the opposite corner, smoked ham sways on meat hooks at mortifying eye level in the window of a less-than-kosher deli, while next door Einstein Bagels retaliates with a schmear campaign. And lest there be any doubt that life has been neutered here, Kinko’s and McDonald’s each offer facsimiles on the same side of the street. I stroll past them.

Like many people who have no intention of buying anything at all, I linger by the fruit and vegetable stand that seems so out of place. Fresh fruit in this city seems as improbable as a tree that has been spared the dog on a leash. I fight the temptation to fondle an apple. This Manhattan mix of stores and stands includes bars that never close, and banks, it seems, that are never open. Except of course, for the poor man’s bank, the neon-windowed pawn shop, like the one adjacent to the grocer. Always an intrigue, and all those presidents in my pocket are talking to me. I peer through the glass. Something on the far wall catches my attention. I can’t resist. I never could.

I am immediately charmed as I enter. There are actually little brass bells disturbed by the sway of the door to announce my entry. How quaint! I smile for the surveillance camera—Rod Steiger is preoccupied behind the glass counter. He gives me only a furtive glance to assess if I am lethal. I remove my doe-skin gloves and prod them into my overcoat. My glasses have steamed up, and I loosen my flannel scarf to dry them off, but that does nothing more than chase the moisture around the lenses. I have a paper napkin from the coffee shop that I used to jot down something vitally important, which I now come to realize is not quite so vital or as important as drying my lenses, and it is sacrificed to the cause. I position the glasses back on my face, and then, as the world comes back into focus, the small miracle begins to unfold.

“That guitar.”

The proprietor cocks his head.

“May I have a look?”

“It’s not available.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s not available. The owner still has three days to redeem it.”

Nobody ever redeems things, once they’ve passed through portals such as these. I never did. This is the funeral home of abandoned heirlooms and Makita power tools. We are negotiating, and he’s telling me the fruit is forbidden. He has, of course, whet my appetite. The game is on.

“Would there be any harm in taking a closer look?”

He has yet to look back over his shoulder, where the guitar hangs on a hook on the pegboard, with a tag wired to its big toe. The proprietor pretends indifference very well, and I admire and respect him for it. A credit to his profession. He closes whatever catalog or ledger he was studying (or pretending to study), and turns to the wall behind him and removes the guitar. He hands it over the counter, and just when I think I have possession he tightens his grip to remind me it’s still his. “It’s a Martin, you know.” And then, with equal showmanship, he releases his hold, having cautioned me that this is expensive, or delicate, or both.

“Really?” Of course I know it’s a Martin. I, too, feign indifference. If I decide to make him an offer I’ll need to appear less knowledgeable than I am—(Stradivarius? What’s that? I thought it was a fiddle!). But I’ve already sighted the neck, seeing how close the spacing is from the strings to the frets. Rookies don’t do that. He’s taking all this in. I momentarily hand it back and remove my bulky overcoat and scarf, draping them over the counter. I look for someplace to sit. There is none, but the guitar has a strap. There was a time when I always stood when I played, but now that seems awkward. No matter. I tune the guitar.

I give the lower and upper strings a squeeze, to see how long they resonate, and to see if equal pressure gives each string an equal life-span, or if one drowns out the other. Clearly, they’ve been singing together for a while. By the end of eight counts, the dust in the sunlight is swirling in cyclones, and something I don’t quite understand is happening. The guitar feels warm, and has a pulse. My hands and my heart thaw quickly after thirty-five years of winter. Blood surges through me like the D train, rattling windows and plates on the shelf. The manly, baritone voice of this guitar starts filling up the room like a genie let out of a lamp, and memories that I thought I had neatly manicured begin clawing through the lining of my heart. I can see it in the old man’s face, but I just don’t care. And I don’t care if he knows about all those founding fathers in my breast pocket. I can afford whatever ransom he demands, which will be exorbitant, and more so now that he knows he has me. This becomes dead serious, even before I know why.

The vigor in my fingers has returned, but I restrain myself and pluck only a few, simple chords, not even a riff for my audience of one. The two or three chords that I have strummed are luscious, erotic and cerebral—the triad of seduction, and I’m swallowed up by this unexpected find. I feel my whole body resonate, as if the guitar were a tuning fork. A seasoned Martin guitar can do that. I close my eyes—this is a private affair. In the dark, my rambling fingers stumble upon the trail of an old Irish ballad. They’ve got the scent, and when they run with it, I can’t rein them in. The words come back as well. I have a first cousin, named Arthur McBride. He and I took a stroll on down by the seas-side… Jimmy taught me that song. It’s the one he usually opened with. He never liked playing alone either on stage or busking on the street, so one day he just started referring to his guitar as Arthur when he would banter with the crowd between sets.

And suddenly, my eyes flash open. The tone that rises from the Martin is not only irrepressible, but familiar, and stinks of Guinness. My fingers get tangled in the strings and can’t recover.

I worm out of the strap, and hold the guitar at arms length, to confirm with my very own eyes what my heart already knows. The remarkable sunburst pattern, the deep mahogany color and deeper, richer sound. I know this guitar, this guitar, from half, no, more than half my life ago, and a continent away, when youth was not an embellished memory but a lily-white neck into which I sank a full set of fangs, before passion turned to pabulum, wine to water. My god. Renate predicted this, all those years ago. “It’s gonna find its way to a pawn shop,” she said, when all of us hunkered down that night to console Jimmy with theories of how to recover it, and what we were going to do to that thieving I.R.A. bastard who betrayed us, if we ever caught him. The guitar—this guitar—it’s Arthur McBride, himself.

Excerpt (Prologue)

The beginning…

No one knew for certain how old the woman really was. Those who had quietly seen their own hair turning gray could only recall from distant childhoods that she had always been as old as they themselves were now becoming.

She slept on a low [...]]]>

Excerpt (Prologue)

The beginning…

No one knew for certain how old the woman really was. Those who had quietly seen their own hair turning gray could only recall from distant childhoods that she had always been as old as they themselves were now becoming.

She slept on a low bed made of straw, and silk, and clouds, and she slept very soundly until she felt the breath of Bendihara, the tiger, blow hot across her cheeks and brow. He had padded through the halls of the temple to find her, to join her.

“Your breath!” she said. With her eyes still closed she reached up to push away the tiger’s chin, but he was persistent, and would not let her rise until that chin of his was properly scratched.

“All right, all right!” she said, with pretended anger. “Only, don’t drool!”

Bendihara turned his chin this way and that to make certain she got all the spots that itched, and then, feeling more content, he stretched out alongside her bed, and waited.

The old woman sat up and took one of the green leaves from the clay pot beside the bed and slipped it into the side of her cheek. Night-to-day, sleep-to-wakefulness, even, life-to-death; these were transitions that required dignity and she was not going to rush any of these events.

It was a while, then, before she stood.

Barefoot, she ambled through the archway that opened to her private garden, where the morning sun was illuminating the ferns and warming her favorite spot. “Are you coming?”

Bendihara followed at her heels and watched as she ascended the stone with some effort. Bendihara leapt up beside her with no effort at all. The broad, flat granite had been worn smooth over the centuries, by the old woman and those who came before her. The sun quickly penetrated her thin, white tunic, entered her shoulders and rejuvenated her blood. She sat, lotus-like, as she did each morning, and invited the tiger to rest his head in the hollow of her lap. She scratched behind his ears and adored the fire in his perfect, golden eyes.

The old woman began to feel the power flow from the leaf that was softening in her toothless jaw.

When the tiger had fallen asleep, his head heavy in her lap, she tuned her own breathing to the rhythm of his primordial purr, and she entered the dream-sleep of meditation. There she gossiped freely with her younger selves.

Before the trance evaporated, before Che’ Wan approached her with a cup of warm, green tea and kissed her brow, it was they, the blissful inhabitants of dream-sleep, who on this morning foretold the coming of the rat and the bird of paradise.

Excerpt (partial chapter mid-way through the story)

The King, the Datuk Agung Nasrudin bin Abdul Asuhd, was very pleased with his new title, and very pleased with his new horse, the withers being a full hand taller then he was himself, in the way that the English measured the stature of a horse. The long legs of the fine animal assured a gentle and rhythmic trot, an easy, melodic canter, and an exhilarating gallop that almost rivaled the speed of his Arabians, though it had been bred for hunting. And, sitting upon the saddle of his dark, chestnut mount (the English diplomat who had given him the stallion told him what a chestnut was as he explained the horse’s smooth brown color), he was indeed the agung, the highest, an advantage that he rarely enjoyed when standing erect among men on the ground.

The riding crop seldom touched the hind quarters, for the horse loved to run, the weight of its exclusive rider hardly an encumbrance. The King would boast that he had no need of the crop, so swift and responsive was his coveted stallion. But the truth of the matter was that the King feared its power, and the horse was almost unstoppable, and generally indifferent to the slight rider who recently, by title, could claim dominion over man and beast.

The King had an American revolver with a short barrel that he carried in an ornate leather holster on his rides through the palatial preserve, and when he would ride specifically for a hunt, he would select one of several shotguns always close at hand to take down game birds flushed into flight by the obtrusive trot of his horse through the few fields not overrun by jungle. Except for an occasional boar or tapir, larger game was uncommon. The high perimeter wall to the southeast abutted raw jungle that was almost frontier. It was not unheard of to find the impression of tracks on the soft banks of the river, but generally there was too much human activity within the walls of the preserve itself to encourage the presence of a predator, such as a leopard or tiger, which might easily spring the walls from the high trees on the other side.

He had heard that a leopard once had entered the preserve, and probably had gone undetected for weeks before it was found out. There had been no way for it to escape the way it had come, for the wall was too high and the vegetation trimmed along the inner perimeter, leaving no way to climb out. The leopard had been shot.

The King himself had often hoped he might find leopard or tiger tracks on his rides, but it had yet to happen. In any event, as head of state, he had a duty to protect the tiger, for it was their symbol of unity and power. Still, he wondered privately what it would be like to take down such a beast, to confront it fearlessly as a man and then fire only at the final moment as it sprang to attack. The English did it.

With his horse he could run down wild boar, which, in the absence of real predators, would stray from their runs in the dense underbrush where a horse could not pass, and through the open vulnerability of cultivated orchards that provided fresh mangoes and jack fruit, durians and rambutans for the royal table.

King Nasrudin could discharge his revolver at short range, and his horse would not brace or bolt. Occasionally he would send the stable boys for the carcass, but if the boar could be hefted, he enjoyed the sensation of returning home with his kill strapped behind his saddle as bleeding evidence of his prowess.

Alone on his forays, he imagined himself leading charges against armies of infidels, or leading duly impressed English noblemen on a fox hunt. He imagined the English ladies wanting to bed him. He imagined being received by the Queen of England, which was, with his recent ascension to the throne, a distinct possibility. He imagined himself a full head taller. But mostly what he imagined was that there were those plotting his overthrow.