“I’m carrying all my weight tonight,” he mumbled to himself.

Trudging up and down the boulevards he haunted the space between the neon patches of dandelion fire and quicksand marble archways.

With a garbage can moan and a 10 dollar suit he had watched it all slip away.

Some prey should not elude him.

He was a machine, with a gummed up cerebellum and a grudge against one eyed watchmakers who could not set his dials.

A sky-born signal, the stars had faded, replaced by an intricate pattern of static haze winding through the stratosphere.

He could see patterns, wincing through the smog and sparks of broken telephone poles and minutes after each reading he felt very clear about things.

The feeling was fleeting, like foxtails whipped up in a dust devil.

A short excerpt of something I have been working on for way too long. Dedicated to my lovely sister who will soon be traveling the discounted, economy class, security laden skies.

      A voice comes on over the intercom, “Welcome to flight 735 everyone. This is Glen your captain speaking, I have beside me first officer Roger and your flight crew today Delia, Morgan, Tracy and Pat. We’ll be cruising up to 37,000 feet today with some headwinds at take off. Other than that it should be a smooth ride. Make yourselves comfortable and thanks for flying with us today.”

     A stewardess directs our attention to the front. She’s wearing a smile that her body can’t back up. “Good morning everybody. Before we get up and on our way, we’re going to have a safety demonstration. If you’ll pull out the pamphlet in the seat pocket in front of you, we’ll begin.” Before we get up and on our way. There’s always something. Before we get up and on our way. As if these stale seats create any sort of community that warrants a statement of our intentions as a collective. The only thing that binds all of the passengers on this jet is the assurance that we are going somewhere else, perhaps better, perhaps worse than where we departed. Motion is the key.Static.

“Now one more time in French.” The flight attendants deft movement is a familiar one and I am always struck at the consistency of their performance. I imagine that they must have an atmosphere of an aerobics class, a taunt leader directing proper arm motions, swinging forward, to the side and directing proper buckle presentation barking orders at the amateur performance, screaming: “if YOU don’t know where the exits are, how will THEY?!” Eventually after hours of practice, muscle memory would start to take over and slowly but surely things would start coming together they would be doing it, directing the imaginary crowd, that they soon realize would not even pay the slightest attention to their efforts. I believe there are mimes who were once disgruntled flight attendants.

**** I once saw a real crime show that featured an in-depth look at an airport luggage theft ring. It seems there was a well-organized effort at SEA-TAC between luggage handlers and security guards alike to smuggle out the luggage undetected. What was slightly absurd about it was this ring extended to the middle-class, second hand luggage dealers in the greater Seattle area. The effort of this little band was not to steal what was in the baggage but merely the casing itself. Once they had the cases out of the airport they would drive around and dump the contents in various drug store dumpsters. At that point they would deliver it to a church as a donation.

The church was nondenominational and a front, mostly, although the program said that they did have a pastor who was ordained on the Internet. It was the head deacon that was running the show. They still collected people’s money, in other words. They would buff and shine that luggage in the basement and then distribute it in small quantities to what it would seem to the average person to be a reputable second hand luggage dealer.

The talking heads conveyed an overall sense of general disappointment at the whole situation. It was as if they had started this venture from a lack of vision and opportunity. Even the officers looked tired, a reminder that their lives were as futile as the criminals they caught, only a difference was in the architecture of the prison. As it turns out it had been the deacon’s second wife who had turned in the whole lot of them. On the television screen she looked like the second wife of a deacon or maybe even the third wife of an unsuccessful dentist. It was a wonder that she would risk the security of having a husband to the upholding of a skewed sense of righteousness.

The narrator, in his brooding voice, kept referring to the level of security breach in the realm of post 9/11 air travel. To me it makes perfect sense, I mean as a traveller it may seem that all the levels of security in an airport make it difficult to try anything illegal but all those levels are operated by likely disgruntled underpaid, average citizens who could really give a shit. Get your gut reaction or racial profiling in a couple times a day and you have met your quota. The personal responsibility of any major disaster is on the airline as a corporate entity. Since the mentality of the cog in the corporate machine is to believe that an individual cannot make a difference, there would be no trace of guilt. None.

“Come see the sensational, supernatural, sidewinding swipes of Sentinel City’s fastest son: The Duke!”

There used to be posters. Slung up to telephone poles, they announced the matches that in their day were the best way to spend a night. In this city under run down hotels, shitty bars, in abandoned warehouses, anywhere we could set up some rope. It was the fire in the streets, illegal yet on any given night there were cops, crooked or not, in attendance. It was intoxicating, it took men and made them lions for as long as they could hold on, it was bare knuckle boxing.

I grew up on the south side in a row of apartments that were a testament to how shitty a building can get while still standing. I think the city would have fire bombed the fucking place if they even gave it a thought. Part of learning to tie my shoes was kicking the cockroaches from their midnight campground. Shaking them out like a trove of brittle leaves collected on a fall day.

My father was a hard worker despite his immediate shortcomings. Trudging out before dawn with his tool belt slung over his shoulder and heavy boots creaking against the floorboards.

It wasn’t so much an obstacle that resulted in our life there but a lack of inertia. Why pay more if there is no where else to go. I think my mother also lived in the area but for as much as my father talked about her she could’ve been dead. The only time he spoke to me was when he was seated at the kitchen table. The bare bulb extended overhead as his communion with a bottle of whiskey turned into a lengthy confession. He alluded to a score of potential half brothers and sisters of mine in the neighbourhood. I always thought about them, kids on the playground, the legions on the bus and sidewalk, then later, each opponent in the ring. With each blow it could have been my own blood I was spilling on the ground, my own flesh I pounding.

The only other thing my father imparted to me with was a fucking mess. I came home late and the kitchen light was still lit, dangling like it was always about to fall. There was blood everywhere. My father’s frame lay on the floor. On the ground beside him was a kitchen chair overturned and a twelve gauge shotgun. My old man’s vacant neck made me aware of the bits of red and miscellaneous colours splayed across the kitchen cabinets: what was left of his head.

Any empty bottle of Maker’s Mark and a manilla envelope streaked with little bits of gore were all that sat on the table. The envelope was blank. I ripped it open and inside was one thousand dollars cash and a letter:

Son,

I’ve left you all I could. The rent is paid till the end of the month but I can imagine you’ll want to find a new place. First of all, I am not sorry. You are a man now, as much as you’ll ever be, and I am sure you can take care of yourself.

You are probably wondering the “why?” Son in this life things happen and as pertinent a question as “why,” is we rarely get the luxury of an answer. All you can do is accept what has happened and realize there is an ebb and flow to life that has no concern for your needs or preferences. You must act on your own behalf to ensure your survival.

Son, there is something you should know about your family. Generations ago or so my father told me our ancestors were cruel and hard-hearted men. We attacked and burned a caravan of gypsies alive. There was one old woman who stumbled out of the inferno. With her dying breath she cursed our blood. Always would the men die a violent death. A lonely violent death.

There will be a day where and it might make no sense why, you will be standing on one end of a shotgun. When that trigger is pulled you will die. There is your luxury. There is your reason.

I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope Then I grabbed a duffel bag took what I needed from my room and left. I was sixteen.

For the last fifteen years I have scraped through the darker corners of Sentinel City. A path like a drunken taxi driver weaves to and fro, across familiar avenues.

I picked up jobs here and there mostly through the connections in the gangs I ran with. I lived in shittier apartments and kept to myself if there wasn’t any action on the streets.

Boxing. The memory of when I started crumpled and left in the gutter. It might of been my whole life. As if I hadn’t existed before I stepped into the ring. Pounding into another man’s flesh, each blow tolling the end like the final church bells at a funeral. My life washed away, if not for my father’s letter stuck in the top drawer of my nightstand. It left a subtle and ominous presence that I could not dispatch nor could I completely ignore.

The nickname, the Duke. My career in boxing got to the point where I put enough bodies on the ground that someone remarked, “Man, you’d even put John Wayne on his toes.” Or maybe I just liked Stagecoach. Either way the name stuck. The way I figured it was only John Wayne who could have ever given me trouble. Only problem is that the fucker died.

Then there was one night in a cramped hole under an old magic store downtown this wop from the north side laid me out. I’d been knocked down before but never out. What was even more humbling was a strong-arm to my back and a boot in the ribs. Someone thought I wasn’t supposed to lose.

After being tossed into the back of what I thought was a Buick I wondered if my father had been a fighter. Then the trunk popped open. Two barrels stared me in the face and I thought, “This is it? It can’t be this fucking simple.” A voice commanded:

“Get out of the car.” I staggered out and stared at the shadowed figure dumbly. “What? You think we’re gonna shoot you? You dumb fuck, a corpse don’t pay out. Just don’t fucking lose to no more wops.”

A slam of car doors and the pale glow of tail lights proceeded past a sign that read: “Sentinel City limits” then, well then, I started to walk.

She knew that dress. In the way that a pilot knows his ground control, they’re on the other end and I hope to god they’re right about all this. Lying there, casually on the oak floor, the dross looked is if it was ready, actively engaging out of the corner of her eye as if it would suddenly slide up onto the bed and she would be sucked into its form. Like a movie on cassette rewinding she’d be out the door, down the stairs, in the car, reversing out of the parkade screaming backwards down the freeway.

Though the qualities endowed to this garment were partially due to her rampant imagination one should keep in mind that throughout history there has been extraordinary attributes to quite common artifacts.

It was composed of 100% cotton. Spun from the cotton of Dellstown, a small county in Alabama. It had been part of the yield of the 2001 harvest, a particularly good year as anyone could remember. The people of Dellstown took pride in their cotton and if anyone had asked they would’ve told them as much. Yet, no one asked because no one knew that Alabamans grew cotton anymore or really any Americans for that matter. “They” (being median mass of North American consumers) assumed Bangladesh got their cotton from somewhere else and when would they just get their white discount t-shirt already?

From Dellstown the cotton was sent to a textile factory on the outskirts of Dallas. There it was made into appropriate cloth. The floor manager of the factory was one Nathaniel Parker. The heat in Texas didn’t agree with Nathaniel but he was trying to stick it out. Textile factories were becoming a rare sight in American and Nathaniel thought that if we gave up on textiles then we’d given up on freedom. It also didn’t help that he had criminal charges pending for shoplifting at a local department store. He was caught switching foreign made products with seconds from the factory. It was enough to keep him from leaving the state.

The day the cotton for the dress was being processed through the textile factory Nathaniel had received an unpleasant phone call. His Ford compact was illegally parked and had been towed to the impound lot by a Honda tow truck. Ironies such as this were one thing Nathaniel couldn’t appreciate about life.

As Nathaniel prepared to trudge home in the Texas heat the cotton had been made into cloth, appropriate into suitable coloring and was awaiting shipment. This was a particularly efficient textile factory despite the shortcomings of its individuals.

The garment manufacturer receiving the shipment was A-1 Supreme, a small operation based out of Cleveland, Ohio. The owner, Gladys Benchport was a feisty woman of sixty-two who would often walk about the shop muttering vague threats to no one in particular. In actual fact there was someone in particular: Doris Lynchberry.

Doris and Gladys had been best of friends back in their “golden years” and often talked of making and designing their own clothes. Until the fateful summer of 1968 when, with no word, Doris left. Gladys had tried her apartment, her parents, her part-time job, not a soul knew what had become of Doris.

Five years later she turned up. Doris called her mother from the Cleveland bus depot. In her absence Gladys had gotten married and had started her own company. Wounded by the disappearance of her friend she was unwilling to enter a partnership. Doris was hurt by her former friends grudge. She thought that an appropriate revenge would be the publishing of her story rather than personally telling Gladys where she had been those five years. Her story was picked up by The Cleveland Reader, a tell-all local rag. Though the editors of the Reader denied accusations the layout and design bore a distinctly striking resemblance to Reader’s Digest.

As it turns out Doris had made off with a Mexican witchdoctor, blasting out of town and screaming down the I-90 W. He promised her magic, LSD and a high that wouldn’t quit. In the end the only thing he delivered was a beater jalopy, a few cheap card tricks and some highly motivated sperm. These sperm fertilized an egg that produced a child who would become a man. A man highly interested in the national production of textiles.

With the money she earned from the sale of her bizarre expedition Doris started her own company: Supremely A-1. Needless to say this caused quite a bit of confusion in the yellow pages.

The dress. The dress was to be Gladys supreme triumph. A limited run of an article of clothing to foil the menace of Doris Lynchberry. The dress, though a fine work of a talented seamstress did what clothing does: cycle to a boutique shop, through a closet, back to a consignment shop, through another closet, then to a thrift store.

She found the dress at this thrift store on the backstreets of Burlington, Vermont. Maybe not so coincidentally it was this very day that, upon receiving a letter from www.whosyourmamma.com (a popular genealogy website with an unusually high hits per services used ratio) a distraught Doris Lynchberry drove her Lincoln town car into a pet store. Witnesses confirmed that the accident was a result of Doris’ speed and her efforts to avoid hitting a troupe of Cleveland’s nationally renowned midget barbershop quartet. She succeeded in saving the vocalists as well as freeing a large number of parakeets from the pet store. The coroner ruled the cause of death as heart attack from an acute case of Ornithophobia, the worst in Cleveland’s history.

Gladys attended the funeral for Doris laying the first dress she made on the coffin. Nathaniel, receiving no response from his online query cursed the validity of internet genealogy websites.

That was the day she found the dress. It would not tell her its secrets for it didn’t know them. If she could say anything more about the garment it was that it wanted to be worn. When she slipped it on she didn’t think of Alabama, textiles or Cleveland; but once, she thought she heard parakeets.