Nicotine Stain

    

 

 

  Now, let’s talk smoking, St. Gary … because like I told you, that’s how The Baby Judas started making his move into Zelda Rising Books, meeting Crystine for the first time when she was smoking outside, remember?  Okay, but I’m not going to be talking just cigarette smoking here and how the next song on The Scream, Nicotine Stain, is about the nicotine jones, no, I’m also going to be talking about stuff like:

 

The Last Smoke
Smoke and Mirrors
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Behind the Smokescreen
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire
Up in Smoke
Catching a Smoke

      And let me tell you … the smoke’s about to rise over everything I’m ready to tell you, you can bet on that, my friend.
      Anyway … you know how those photos of rock stars and singers holding cigarettes in their hands seemed sort of surprising back in the day?  Like those photos that would eventually come out of The Beatles with lung darts between their fingers: not a big deal to them, but to everybody else, fans, and other people out there, it was, you know, what’s going on here with the lovable moptops all of a sudden?  Course, you kind of expected it out of the photos of The Rolling Stones, no doubt about that, but even that seemed strange, at least, to me it did, like it was planned out to promote their rough-around-the-edges routine.  Then there was Britney Spears, how they were marketing her like a virgin Catholic schoolgirl, when, a year later, the tabloids shoot her dragging on a heater when she’s standing on the balcony of some hotel, well, so much for that career arc, am I right or what?
      And listen, St. Gary, I even knew of a group back in my school days, called The Dancing Cigarettes, named after those weird TV commercials that’d show stop action cancer sticks moving around in marching band formation, singing “Taste Me, Taste Me”.  They were a Punk New Wave kind of a band that even had a song called “Taste Me, Taste Me, Now”, pretty funny.
      But you never heard any songs out of these people about what smoking was really doing to them, about the nicotine jones, am I right?  Only one I can think of is John Lennon singing about Raleigh cigarettes, which my own grandmother used to smoke, those ones that had catalog coupons on the pack.  Nothing until Siouxsie Sioux on The Scream with her Nicotine Stain song, that is.  Singing about how her hands start shaking and her head hurts when she has to light up against a heavy crunch of metal machine noise from out of The Banshees.
      Now what I’m getting at here is … whenever I hear that song on The Scream, I think of how smoking meant so much to Crystine.  Seemed like a big part of her day at Zelda Rising Books was lighting up with The Baby Judas outside in front of the store.  Course, after Crystine died, nobody was saying anything about how all her smoking may have had something to do with the poor health they say hit her after The COVID closed up Zelda Rising Books.  And she was so into smoking that I can just picture her with a last cigarette in her dying lips before she took the slow dive to the bottom of the shower.
      But let’s talk Smoke and Mirrors.  There was plenty of that going on around her and Zelda Rising Books, that’s for sure, especially when it came to The Baby Judas.  He comes out of a cloud of smoke they were both making outside to say to her: “hey, I’ll be more than happy to help you I love books I’ll even volunteer with no pay, blah blah blah.”  Well, smoke got in her eyes on that one, when The Baby Judas would practically turn the place into his private library, his playhouse for his armchair socialists, and his scrambled eggheads, and his Loyola followers who spent their time sitting around inside or hanging around the one tree outside her window and doing up their lung darts.
      Smoke and Mirrors, Smoke and Mirrors, my friend.  Yeah, St. Gary, if The Baby Judas was looking into a mirror, I’ll bet you’d also see plenty of smoke at the same time in there too.  Look, nobody is going to tell me he didn’t want that bookstore from the start, thinking this hugging-listening-smiling woman was just some kind of a mark.  And what I figure was really happening here was that The Baby Judas, he was making Zelda Rising Books into his own bookstore to defeat Father Satan on the apocalyptic battleground of the mock cosmology where his foe would go up in smoke, like it said in the holy notebook I found at Café Noir.  So that The Baby Judas would come out of that smoke as the one and only true keeper of the books, see what I’m saying here?
      And wouldn’t you know it, a month or two after The Baby Judas started helping himself to Zelda Rising Books behind the smokescreen of saying he was helping Crystine as a volunteer, his foe, namely, Father Satan, lost his job as a keeper of the books at that place called The Good Books in Lakeview after twenty years there, when the business folded up.  All that was left for Father Satan to do was to carry books around in his satchel on his bike along with his The New Yorkers so he could peddle them on his own, pun intended
      But for Father Satan, he wasn’t going to start his own bookstore: he’d always be saying something like “you can’t get rich selling books these days”, even when me and Ms-topheles, we were telling him he should just do that because, man, this guy, he knew his way around books and anything else you could put into print, even more than The Baby Judas.  Because Father Satan, in the rooms of his apartment, you know he had shelf after shelf of hardbacks in mint to near mint condition, paperbacks wrapped in plastic like the perfect housewife of the fifties did to their furniture, years of The New Yorker in perfect stacks … hell, he even kept notes of their dates in a leather notebook on his desk, my friend.
      But I guess opening a bookstore was out of the question for Father Satan because he thought he was really meant to be a writer.  Waiting for that mystery editor of his at The New Yorker to publish one of the stories he would never show anybody else until he got it printed in there.
      Whatever, say what you want to say about this mock cosmology business, Father Satan, he knew the score about what The Baby Judas was up to a Zelda Rising Books, for sure.  And even if he was never what I call a regular over there, not like the scrambled eggheads and armchair socialists and the Loyola followers of The Baby Judas, he was important enough to the end of it all.
      Now, when him and me planned to go over there, first we had to make sure The Baby Judas was nowhere to be seen, but once Father Satan was in, him and Crystine did get along pretty well: he never said anything to her face about the problems going on in there, no, he’d just walk around the shelves, pick out a book or two, sniff and smack his lips to himself, maybe go down to the basement where The Baby Judas kept the old Playboys and Blue Boys in a box for sale and look over the tables of buck books and records Crystine had stored down there.  Then, he’d come up, maybe do some small talk with her and then we’d leave to him shaking his head and doing a kind of tsk-tsk-tsk thing with his mouth like only he could do and … well …
      Now remember when I said Father Satan or whatever I was calling him before, remember how that guy would pronounce two sentences on Crystine and Zelda Rising Books like him being the judge of the keeper of the books in the mock cosmology?
      Well, one day, we were walking out of the bookstore, when all of sudden, we stood still, and Father Satan, he says:
      
      SHE SHOULD GET OUT WHILE THE GETTING IS GOOD.
      
      Then, Father Satan, he says:
      
      IF HE’S IN THERE, HE’S IN THERE FOR GOOD.
      
      Yeah, well, even more than him being in Zelda Rising Books for good, The Baby Judas, he’d lodged himself into the real estate that was the Brain of Father Satan even more.  Got to the point where, whenever I was hanging with Father Satan, we spent half the time riffing on The Baby Judas, like on the fact that The Baby Judas would only buy or read hardback books, no paperback books for him … well, maybe except for the retro commie pamphlets in Crystine’s bookstore window, but that was different.  Father Satan would say something to me like: “yeah, The Baby Judas, he’s got a hard on his back” or “some socialist, won’t touch the workingman’s paperback, sounds like a capitalist stooge to me.”  On and on, with one bit of insult humor after another: I mean, get this, there was one time when Father Satan and me, we were talking about this guy name of Jerry Colona who used to clown around with Bob Hope of all people, guy who had pop-up eyes and a scrubby brush mustache, who Father Satan had just read about in The New Yorker.  Where there was Bob Hope, there was Jerry Colona, says Father Satan, and he thought making a living being a second banana, when you thought about it, wasn’t such a bad thing.
      Then he said something real strange, like, I think it was: “That’s what I am.  The Jerry Colona of The Baby Judas.  I’m his second banana, that’s all.”
      Now along those lines there, me and Father Satan liked to write little songs about The Baby Judas.  Father Satan had an acoustic guitar he would strum, just some blues chords, nothing too major, but enough to put together some tunes we’d record on an old cassette recorder.  We called ourselves The Tomb of Stalin, because Uncle Joe, they took him out of sharing that tomb in Moscow with Lenin in it during one of the commie purges and we thought it was the type of funny thing The Baby Judas would do, being the kind of guy he was.  Now let’s see if I can remember the lyrics to one of those songs, oh yeah, goes something like:
You may be a commie
You may be a red
But you’re just a sex geezer
Pulling coeds to bed

      We got a load of laughs out of those songs, let me tell you.  But when Father Satan got into changing his politics, well, not so much a laughing matter, I’ll tell you that.
      Must have been in the space of three maybe two years when he became a fired-up Trumpster, you know, into Donald Trump.  It was strange because, back in the day, Father Satan, he took after his semi-mate Ms-topheles, both coming in from the left: not as much as The Baby Judas spouting off his fake socialism, but something along those like that: Going to Rock Against Racism concerts, always voting Democrat, backing people like Hillary Clinton, you know the drill.  But then, all of a sudden it seemed like, it was “time to build the wall” and telling me point blank during our walks that he didn’t like all those Asians and Moslems on the street and talking like capitalism was the greatest idea in the world, how the Donald was bringing it all back home.
    Now I have a theory here.  And my theory is: his Trumpster turn was as much of a game as the socialism of The Baby Judas and all he was doing was playing out a role and only because he hated that guy so much he had to be the ying to his yang.  Like, still voting with the Democrats behind the curtain, but doing the fired-up Trumpster thing in public to shock everyone.  And maybe, just maybe, he may not have realized it himself, see what I’m getting at there?
    Anyway, I took it as just a part of the strange comedy routine that had him as the second banana to The Baby Judas.  Or part of the mock cosmology, take your pick.
      But finally, it was The Baby Judas who proved he was the real bright boy, like he did a few years after his brother Leif losing the Scrabble game in the deep woods routine … just another comedy skit between two wild and crazy Scandinavian guys, am I right?  No, because The Baby Judas, he had the last laugh when the guy who insulted him keeled over, didn’t matter if it was his brother, I guess.
      As for Father Satan, well, this last laugh had to do with him helping Ms-topheles move apartments but before I tell you about that black day, I have to explain a couple things:
      First off, Father Satan, he always sort of lived just above the poverty line, especially after he lost his job at The Good Books store in Lakeview, but even though he complained, he also seemed kind of proud of it.  Like, even though he now had Medicare, still telling people he didn’t need health checkups like he did before.  No physicals.  No blood pressure readings.  No tests.  No prescription meds.  And also, Father Satan, he liked his wine and he was always quoting St. Timothy when it came to drinking it: you know, that saint in the ad over the bar there for Tiny Tim Rose, where the saint, he’s praying in a wine cellar.  Well, Father Satan said like St. Timothy in the Bible “drink no longer water, but use a little wine for your stomach's sake and your other infirmities”.  So I guess Father Satan thought that was all the doctoring he’d ever need, when I think of all the empty wine bottles I’d see when I came over to his place.
      Whatever, it finally caught up with him and when I heard the news next day … oh boy.
      See, Father Satan, being her semi-mate and all, was helping Ms-topheles with the packing of the boxes and hauling away the furniture and sorting through the books and record albums, you know the drill.  Okay, so there’s Father Satan and Ms-topheles doing all of that until she tells him, there’s way too many books and she decides she wants to put them into boxes and drive them over to Zelda Rising Books.
      Now, as you can probably imagine, Father Satan, he threw a fit about that: he didn’t like the idea of The Baby Judas coming around, but, if he was, he wasn’t going to get any of the boxes they were using for moving: he says to Ms-topheles, tell him to bring over some good workingman’s boxes himself and we’ll put the books into brown paper bags so him and his Loyola followers can pack the books into his boxes if he really wants them so much, then they can drive them back himself, is what.  Then, Father Satan, he starts to picking through the books more careful like to make sure of who got what and who didn’t, know what I mean?
      So, here’s what happened next.  He and Ms-topheles argue about it for a while, until she calls Zelda Rising Books and tells them what they have to do, like Father Satan told her.  And when The Baby Judas and his Loyola followers get there, Father Satan heads to a back room because he wants nothing to do with it.  And once they leave with the books, Father Satan comes back and says not a thing more about The Baby Judas, at all.
      But then, get this, when some young movers arrive to start with the heavy lifting, Father Satan, this 60-year-old-plus guy, he joins right in with them like he just went into the kitchen and took shots from the fountain of youth in the refrigerator: hauling stuff around, dripping sweat, breathing heavy … didn’t matter, nothing was going to stop him from taking care of business.  Until, that is, he starts feeling funny: bad headache, shaking, going pale.  So bad that, Ms-topheles, she tells him to lie down on the couch and … just don’t move anything else, don’t do it, that’s what the movers are here for.  But then, she goes into the kitchen to pour out some water for him, comes back, and he’s lying on the floor, throwing up foamy blood.
      So Ms-topheles and the young movers, they lift him up and bring him to the moving van and head straight to the emergency room, but way too late, my friend.  He gone.  Just like that.  No warning, no nothing.
      All because of a fight about books, just like, you got it, the end of the mock cosmology.  After all they’d been through together, one last appearance by The Baby Judas in a quest for books did in Father Satan.
      And to top it off … you know, I never understood why Ms-topheles invited The Baby Judas to Father Satan’s memorial service, I mean, they hated each other, duh, but I guess she just thought, hey, they used to be friends so he should pay his last respects.  And after they cremated Father Satan, she planned out a truly special ceremony at a what I consider to be about as beautiful of a funeral home as you can get: classy place, clean and peaceful.
      Now one of the things she had arranged, she had someone read the short story Father Satan had had framed on his wall about wine bottle corks.  While that was going on, The Baby Judas was standing in the back, fingering one of his cigarettes, probably wanting to take a smoke break, and soon.
      And if you wanted any more evidence that The Baby Judas finally did in Father Satan in a way, how about this, St. Gary?  Following the proceedings, you know what I saw him doing?  Walking around some flower garden path out back, having his smoke, and talking it up with … Beeratrice, the one and only.
      You got it, taking his victory lap.
      Well, the story of Father Satan ends like this.  Ms-topheles, she asked me if I could help clear up matters at his apartment a few days after his memorial service.  And on his desk, he had this old, heavy metal typewriter sitting on it, like, when you look at it, you wonder, where do they even find the ribbons for them anymore?  Now, on the right side of the typewriter, he had left a stack of clean sheets of vintage stationery from The New Yorker, that’s right: at the top of the sheets, the mascot, the high-class gent head, his pointed snoot, the top hat, the high collar, and that one round eyeglass he’s looking through at the butterfly floating in the air.
      And want to know what I found on the left side of the typewriter?  Same sheets of the old The New Yorker stationery, only typed up from his machine.  Saying: “you must work on the character development still, though it is all coming together nicely” and “we are pleased with your current plotline, but it still lacks those certain details we discussed” and “while many of your sentences are nicely framed, we are looking for a greater nuance in the syntax,” and on and on.  Signed off by some guy name of Ross T. Sterling, Associate Editor, dated in the eighties.
    Then, when you turned those pages over, you found one page after another typed up with: “we are sorry, but your story does not fit the current needs of The New Yorker.  Please feel free to resubmit in the future, as we remain convinced of your skill and talent.”
    Same words, sheet after sheet, over and over and over again.  Only no signature, no date.
      The poor guy.  You could write a book: Rejections for Myself.  Excerpted in The New Yorker of his dreams.
      St. Gary, man, that’s how it all ended up after all that talk about writing, after all that talk about The New Yorker, that his masterpiece of the writing he wanted to do was the two sentences on Zelda Rising Books he pronounced:
      
      SHE SHOULD GET OUT WHILE THE GETTING IS GOOD.
      IF HE’S IN THERE, HE’S IN THERE FOR GOOD.
      
      Turns out that, it’s something that was finally finished.  In more ways than one.
      Yeah, let me tell you, man, watching this all go down was way, way creepy.  Older guys hitting their sixties and a woman in her thirties who just wanted to be left in peace to start the bookstore of her dreams.
      But wait, it wasn’t just older guys, no … if that wasn’t bad enough, you had Ms-topheles going at her too.
      I found out about that one because, one night at an open mike over Zelda Rising Books, the smoke really rose.
      Now, Crystine, she was pretty good at putting on events, like … I remember one time, she held a poetry reading for Walt Whitman’s birthday, that grey-beard poet I always liked because, when I was just a kid and Kennedy was shot, the TV kept playing that thing he wrote “Captain Oh Captain” about some captain who went down with his ship, really dark and sad … yeah, okay, well, back to this open mike event.
      So, I’m sitting in Zelda Rising Books in the front row, waiting to hear what was new when it came to Chicago poems, when all of a sudden like, there’s Ms-topheles, stomping through the door, going up to Crystine behind the counter and just … laying into her, I mean, really going after her in front of all the people waiting for poetry in there, saying stuff like: “what did I tell you?  You aren’t listening to what I say?  You think you are running a community event?  You really think that?  You’re not listening to me.  Why won’t you listen?” blah, blah, blah.
      Now me, I would have said to her, “get out of my place of business, here and now” but not the smile-hug-listen Crystine … she was listening but saying nothing while Ms-topheles, it was like her ears were blowing out smoke with her going high-pitch with that yelling of hers.  Man, St. Gary, it sounded like a Chicago cop wailing on a bullhorn at some rioters trying to tear open an ATM machine, it was that bad.
      I hated it.  I jump off my seat, I head up to Ms-topheles, and I tell her, I think it was, “hey, stop with the drama queen act, yelling at Crystine like you’re doing.  I think you should just shut up and leave her alone,” like that.  Well, Ms-topheles, she gets all squirrely and throws a few F bombs at me and takes off, quick like.
      Some kind of psycho stuff, if you know what I’m saying, and man, you want to talk psycho, Ms-topheles wasn’t psycho like The Baby Judas, but psycho enough when she got into those moods, let me tell you.  And in this mood, it was because she was playing at being a mentor to Crystine.
      Now St. Gary, let me tell you first, straight up, if there was one word I always hated it is: Mentor.  Always sounded to me like the name of a CGI version of that horned bull in Greek myth, snorting in a digital maze of trapped victims.  But not to Ms-topheles: she must have thought she was a mentor because she had all this experience working in city hall and at newspapers being the boss and writing business articles and stuff.  And with her seeing a young woman trying to start her own business, well, maybe she saw Crystine as a sister in sisterhood or something in her head that must have kicked in when she up and decided to be the mentor of Crystine.  Not that I ever heard Crystine herself say Ms-topheles was her mentor or anything, and, come to think of it, I never heard it out of Ms-topheles either until it was at the memorial services after Crystine died.  But there you have it: a mentor.
      And who cares, St. Gary, who cares if she was a mentor or what?
      Well, here’s why I care:
      Stuff like hearing people yell and fight in front of me always feels like a trigger for diving into the booze again: because of my crazy dad who used to shout at my mother when they bitched at each other about money, then sometimes he’d slap her around just to take her to the bank … and let me tell you, St. Gary, women talk about “domestic abuse” these days, but it’s not only them: it’s me too, one of those guys who gets it because I know I feel like standing up for those victims, fighting till the last man standing, which would be me: you don’t want to meet me in a street fight, because it’s swing batter swing, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
      So, when I start to feel like pulling the trigger, I go straight to any AA meeting I can find and …
      … oh, I just thought of something: what am I doing talking AA meetings to you in the Crash Palace when that isn’t exactly, well, good for business?  But I figure, I have those 30 silver AA coins lying on top of the bar over there and … could we call that a down payment of sorts for listening to me?  You okay with that?  Great fine, let me continue then.
      So, in the case of triggers, I go to any AA meeting I can find and I tell them what’s happening with me, and in this case of the one I found this time, I probably said something like:
      “People, she’s been a friend for years and she’s usually okay and all, but she gets in these psycho moods where she starts yelling at me, and it gets to me.  It makes me want to go to Holiday Liquors up the street and take a liquor holiday, know what I’m saying?
      “She goes on about how she can’t land a full-time job these days and … I mean, here’s someone who worked on business newspapers, daily Chicago newspapers, over at city hall even, and she’s expecting me to go find her a job because I just happen to have one?  What am I, a temp agency?  What happens if she throws down her attitude at the job and it backfires on me?”
      Well, I must have been channeling something is what they call it, right?  Because after the meeting, a guy comes up to me with a sly smile on his lean face with big ears coming off the sides and short hair and wearing big-framed glasses.  He holds out his hand, I shake it, and he says something like:
      “I think I have an idea of the woman you are talking about here.”
      “Oh yeah,” I says. “Says who?”
      “Says me, Mike R.  See, I’m retired from the newspaper business and I worked over at the place where she worked.  I know that because she was my boss.  That’s right, my lady boss.”
      “Man, what was that like?” I says.
      And he tells me: “She was the worst boss I ever had.  She would come to the office late and she never looked happy about it.  Not that I’m exactly the happy type, but at least I wasn’t talking to myself under my breath when I first arrived at the office.”
      “I also used to work with her so I know how that could go.”
      “A regular terror.  She screamed at people and she threw fits.  She kept her eyes on one target who practically crawled under her desk and would cry like she had just finished watching her favorite soap opera where everyone dies of a fatal disease in the end.  And this boss of mine almost always blew her deadlines.  Then she went and assigned me to a beat in the suburbs even though I know this city like I know the lines in the palms of my hand.”
      Here, I thought, well maybe this guy just has an axe to grind … but who knew?  So, I just listened to Mike R.
      “But here is my favorite story about her,” he then says.  “One time, she planned to interview the state’s attorney.”  We all know in Chicago, of course, that’s she’s also the daughter of the congressman who practically runs everything downstate in Springfield, plenty of major clout.  Then Mike R says: “But my boss never showed up for the interview.  She just left the state’s attorney sitting there, from what my sources told me.”
      “No, this isn’t the woman, couldn’t be, I says. “She has all these friends on Facebook from her working days and I know she’s into Eastern Religion and all that, you know meditating and chanting and ....”
      “Is that right?” he says. “Well maybe she should have meditated on the fact that you do not jilt the state’s attorney who is the daughter of the most powerful man downstate because you suddenly want to take a vacation that day, on the spur of the moment.  And the scuttlebutt was that she was off to see the some wizard in La-La Land on the West Coast who happens to write kooky science fiction tales about UFOs that would make Rod Serling look like Dr. Seuss.”
      I could still not believe what Mike R. was telling me.  “But she acts like she’s pretty much on top of things,” I says, “when it comes to business and the city and …
      Mike R. says “All I know is, they laid off a lot of people at the paper a few years back and she was one of the first to go.”
      “No kidding.”
      “No kidding.  And you snub the state’s attorney who is the daughter of the most powerful man in Illinois, well, don’t expect to land a full-time job in the city of Chicago anytime soon, not to mention the state of Illinois.”
      “Yeah.  Word travels.”
      “The grapevine grows far and wide, my friend,” he says.  “Far and wide.”
      “Some boss, this woman.”
      The smile that Mike R. had been wearing all the time during our little talk got a bit wider.  “Well, nice talking with you,” he then says.  “Maybe we’ll go out for coffee one of these days, but right now, I need to talk with a guy who was a higher power in city hall many years ago.”
      And that, as they say, was that.  Never knew if what he was saying was true or not but, it does kind of fit the mold, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
      Now, you know, when you hear something like that about a friend who’s having problems finding a job, you want to tell them why they are having those problems, don’t you?  But in the case of Ms-topheles, no way was I anywhere close to doing that.  From what you’ve been hearing out of me all night, St. Gary, you think she’s going to thank me, nod her head, and start going through inner changes?  I think not.  She would have pestered me with “who said that?” and yelled that it never happened: not that it mattered, if someone was spreading stories about me on the job, wrong or right, it’s my reputation on the line and it’s all about me changing it up so you never hear from them again.  Because you can only change yourself, nobody else.
      Can you?
      Oh well, I still hang around Ms-topheles, no question, and when she goes off on one of her “I haven’t had a job in 20 years” screeds I’ve gotten pretty good about ignoring her.  But this whole mentor angle: what with Crystine struggling to keep Zelda Rising Books afloat, well, what kind of mentor you think Ms-topheles turned out to be, not to mention unloading on Crystine like Mike R. said she did at the newspaper?
      Hated, and I mean hated, all of this, St. Gary.  Watching people who were my friends turning mean and nasty over a neighborhood bookstore.  I mean, I had some good times with all these people.  Just great Chicago fun, drinking or not drinking.  Like, taking long urban hikes with all three of them, starting off from where The Baby Judas used to work at the Loyola offices downtown up to Rogers Park.  One time, he claimed he had had hernia surgery two days before but he was still walking that walk … and from that point, we started calling them “The Death Marches”, cool, am I right?
      And I used to go to Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs with Father Satan.  Yeah, there I’d be, sitting in the bleachers, watching batting practice with Father Satan in his 1950s men’s hat, looking straight out of one of those old black-and-white photos where the heads of the guys filling the stands are all wearing 1950s men’s hats.  See, Father Satan, he told me I should always be one of the first into the park just to see all those balls flying out during batting practice to kids in the stands in the outfield, waiting with their baseball gloves.  Then he’d say, baseball is the only pro sport where you can get a free souvenir out of the game itself … got to throw the ball back if you catch it in basketball, football, soccer, not in baseball, am I right?  Another one was, Father Satan, he’d say, wouldn’t it be fun if you could leave your seat when the game was over and jump on the field and run around all over the place?  Man, you paid for the ticket, you bought the hot dogs and peanuts and Cracker Jack, so you should be able to enjoy yourself out there.  Of course, he was joking … or was he, because a couple years later, all these baseball parks, they were having “kids run the bases” family days, you know, lines of kids running around out there, all ages, even a couple sliding into home plate … and, I’m sure, Father Satan would have done that too.  Then he’d tell me, he’d say you had to then stay in the park up until security cleared you out, just so you could watch the groundskeepers sweeping, watering, raking to put the field back together like it was before.
      And all this baseball wisdom from a guy who, years before, was complaining to me when we were drinking at The Pentagram about “Cubs Scum” invading Chicago from the suburbs to watch games: but, you know St. Gary, once he saw he was dealing with a real true blue bleeding heart Cubs fan wearing a dirty old Cubs hat all the time, I like to think that swung him over to seeing what Wrigley Field really meant in the greater scheme of the known universe, or something like that.
      As for Ms-topheles, well, like I told you, we worked together and partied after we were done and later on in the years, given that she brought me into her group of friends that included Father Satan and The Baby Judas for one, stands to reason I would have my share of the good times with her too.  Some of the best were hanging out with her and Father Satan and sometimes even The Baby Judas too to watch movies together at her place, like, there’d be Gone With the Wind that always made her tear up, or The Trouble With Angels that brought back strange Catholic schoolgirl memories or, one of her real favorites, Gaslight, that weirded her out about how some guy could worm his way into a woman’s head until she didn’t know if she was coming or going.  More entertaining than sitting around in the dark in some movie theater, I will tell you that.
      So how did it end up like this, St. Gary?  What was it about some bookstore somewhere near Clark and Devon run by some woman who had a thing for Zelda Fitzgerald and the 1920s writing scene … how did this turn The Baby Judas into a glorified stalker, Ms-topheles into a mentor monster, and Father Satan he just, poof, goes up in smoke?  Well think about this: Father Satan, he says he can’t start a bookstore, Ms-topheles can’t find a job, and The Baby Judas, he invites himself into Zelda Rising Books and then calls himself a volunteer … it’s like, they were acting like they weren’t there to help her, they were there to help themselves to her.  And being the smiling-hugging-listening person she was, well … ripe for the picking.
      
      *********
      Whatever, about now, we’re heading to the end times here.  I’ve just about had it.  I laid out all the pieces of my puzzle to you and I’m ready to get it together, right now.  And thanks for sticking with me too, man, I know I was taking a risk boring you there, going on like this: so many pieces, only so many hours and I … what you saying there? you just said … I have all the time in the world in the Crash Palace?  Well, you the man, my man, you saint of a guy, you, you St. Gary, my favorite bartender of all time.
      So here’s where I’m finally going with this and … what’s that? oh sure, mix me another one of those Hi-NRG Bull Runs, like you say, I’ll be needing it.
      But first, before we start, you should know that, I’m using the mock cosmology names of these people in what’s to come, not the other names you usually heard out of them.  The real names, I guess you could say.
      Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk Day 1.  At the start of this Day 1 I’m talking about here, Ms-topheles dropped me a Facebook message that all it said was “Crystine died”  So I message her back, I says something like “she died?  I knew she was having problems, but now you’re telling me dead”?  Yeah, she says, The Baby Judas found her in her apartment, dead in her shower … but Ms-topheles, she didn’t say much more than that, just, I have to go, I’m busy, we have to talk later … well, okay, friend of mine dies and you don’t want to talk particulars, right, okay.
      Now, at the time, I had been looking on my computer screen at a picture of Bozo the Clown and Chicago mayor Jane Byrne smoking cigarettes together that somebody had sent me, just joking around.  Ever see it?  Boze looking tired and beat, Jane wincing serious-like through the smoke.  And that photo will always come to my mind whenever I think about first hearing the news of The Baby Judas finding Crystine dead.
      What do you think why?  Go figure.
      Anyway, after the message from Ms-topheles, I go in my bedroom and lie down for a while so I can stare at the ceiling: it was just like I was waking up from a bad dream about an evil circus of zombie clowns or something.  Nothing about this felt right, even then … like, what was The Baby Judas doing going into her apartment, just opening the door, not like she met him there or anything, being dead and all, I mean, am I right or not?
      First time I started to thinking: where there’s smoke, maybe there’s fire even?
      And what about all those armchair socialists and scrambled eggheads and Loyola followers of The Baby Judas over at Zelda Rising Books for, what was it, three years and … if there was something really, really wrong, well, why didn’t they try to make it right?  I mean, hanging out and watching over the bookstore, that was practically this guy’s justification for his very existence these days, least it seemed that way: did The Baby Judas do it just out of the goodness of his heart and/or brains, you know what I’m saying?
      And then another thought came to me.  I had to work for a living all the time Zelda Rising Books was there, but wouldn’t it have been cool if I could have just sat in a cozy bookstore instead, all day and night, reading, playing a little Scrabble here and there, stacking a few books, talking about Emmanuel Kant and Lee Harvey Oswald and Astro Nazis zooming around in UFOs … look, if Nazis were doing that, you think they wouldn’t have won the war?, I mean, duh … well, not a bad setup for sure.  Course, I might have given it a try, helping Crystine actually build the business so she would turn at least some kind of profit, I mean … St. Gary, a few weeks after The COVID lockdown was ending, the free community paper around town, it printed a map showing the location of all the independent bookstores in Chicago to drum up sales, but you know who was not in it? yes, my friend, no sign of Zelda Rising Books.  Crystine had the paper available in her bookstore: you’d think with all the smarts in there, someone may have had a connection to hear about somebody planning a map of the independent bookstores before they printed it and both Ms-topheles and The Baby Judas knew people in journalism and … well, there were going to be other articles about Zelda Rising Books after she died to come down the pike.
      Were there ever.
      But later for that.  Back to me lying in bed, thinking, thinking, thinking away.  And that’s when the idea finally came to me … why can’t I be the one just hanging out for days at Zelda Rising Books?  I could take funeral leave from work for four days … I mean, it wasn’t like the three or four years of The Baby Judas making his presence known in there, but at least it was something, kind of like my own private wake.
      So I took out this old lawn chair of mine … not one of these modern carrying bag models but an old-fashioned fold-up one with the plastic weave and a metal frame … and I took off for Zelda Rising Books on the Ridge to Clark Way, as usual.  Eventually, I stopped for a breather in the little park with the Abe Lincoln reading a book statue like I always did.  And while I was staring at it, I see an elderly Black gent of a guy dressed in a neat, all-white suit and what they call a Panama hat, all-white too.  He’s riding a bike up to the statue where he gets off, walks behind the statue into a spot of trees there, and starts taking a leak.  That’s right: this gent, he’s draining his lizard behind Young Abe.  I felt strangely sad for both them watching this, don’t know why, but that’s how it was going those days, people venting their political gripes on statues in Chicago that had been there for years, so there was that.  Whatever, the gent zips up, climbs back on the bike, and wheels away.  
      I sit there for a while longer, wondering about what I just saw, then stand up and tip my dirty old Cubs hat to the Great Emancipator to Be like I always did, and go on to the bookstore, okay?  And I’m thinking … you know how I just told you about how Father Satan, Ms-topheles, The Baby Judas, and me used to walk on what we started calling The Death March?  Well, here I am now, going on a Death March for real, almost like it had been a prophecy or something, coming straight out of the Testament of the Mock Cosmology.  Funny huh?
      Well, whatever, so I eventually reach the bookstore and first thing I see is, well, it’s wide opened up now: the Books for Sale sign, the plastic storage bins full of buck books and DVDs, chairs for the smoking circle around the big tree up front.  All there.  Couldn’t figure out why: I mean, hey, Crystine didn’t want to open shop until she was sure everybody would be safe from The COVID and everything was back to normal after The COVID, well, I guess that didn’t go now that she was dead.  Also saw a couple of the Loyola followers of The Baby Judas standing around, looking kind of in a daze, but no sign of the master himself.
      So all right, I unfold my lawn chair and sit down by the big tree and I start staring at this building across the street with peaked triangle crests around the roof, looking like some kind of medieval German fortress, where Crystine had moved into a new apartment about six months before she died.  Like I was half-expecting her to come stepping out fast and free like she always walked and then trying to get into my head that she was real gone, man, real gone.
      And, St. Gary, I was feeling all sad about it, like, instead of her walking out, I was watching a cloud of her smoke on the rise above the peaked triangle crests and just floating apart into the air.  But don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t moaning or in tears or anything, I just wanted to sit there and remember her talking about Zelda Fitzgerald and celebrating Walt Whitman’s birthday and that video of her standing up to the polar vortex, I just wanted to do that.
      Then, a little later on, I see a cop car stop in front of the 24/7/365 donut shop across the street.  Two cops get out of the car, but they don’t go inside.  Instead, they lumber toward the apartment building and look up at it for a while.  Then they start pointing along with some other gestures, and talking loud, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying because of all the traffic noise.  Then, of all things, they both give out with a laugh before they get back into the car and pull away.
      And right after that, The Baby Judas comes walk-running out of the building.  He’s wearing what some clueless people actually call a wife beater, those sleeveless white men’s T-shirts, only his had raised fabric ribs on it so he looked all Euro and such.  So The Baby Judas, he walks near to where I’m sitting by the tree, but he doesn’t look at me, just at the logo in the window of Zelda Rising Books.  He has this stern face on him: not sad, no tears or anything like that.
      I say something like: “Good god, man, you found Crystine dead up there?”
      And still walking, he says: “I’ve found dead bodies before, so, so what?”
      And that, St. Gary, was that: he shoots right past me and into the bookstore.  Made me think: now where have I heard those words before?
      Now I don’t care about what his armchair socialists and his scrambled eggheads and his Loyola followers were saying about him having so much on his mind that day: you’re close to someone in their store day after day after day, and it’s natural you’re just going to be feeling slow and low about it, know what I’m saying?  But not him.  Seeing the way he was moving back and forth in there, stacking books, running around all over, moving the books, restacking the books, putting everything in place: I mean, she died that morning and he’s open for business all of a sudden?  Then he’s got his half-brother in there, wiry and nervous looking, guy name of Helson, sitting behind Crystine’s desk with his eyes glued to the screen of her computer.
      Now I wanted to see exactly what that was all about in there, so I get off my lawn chair and walk over to the door and step inside.  And there’s The Baby Judas, kind of hovering over the shoulder of the half-brother and looking down into the screen along with him.
      The Baby Judas, he says something like: “Do you think you can get into that file eventually?”
      “It will take some time,” says this Helson guy.  His fingers are moving super-fast on the keyboard, like they have a life of their own.
      “Do you think in a couple hours?” says The Baby Judas. “We should get this done.”
      “Without the password … I mean, I might be able to find the right work around, but that could take hours.”
      “Well, we really don’t have that much time.”  The Baby Judas then sighs.  “I’ll try investigating further into her papers,” he says.  “She usually wrote everything down in some journal or what have you.  It must be in an entry somewhere.”
      Then, after hearing that, I walk back to my lawn chair, sit right down, and, again, I’m staring at the apartment building across the street.  Why’s he needing so bad to open her computer files all of a sudden, I’m wondering, I mean, what’s with that: maybe it has something to do with finances?  But I was too much thinking through my sadness to try to answer all that in my mind … even if it was real strange, what with The Baby Judas acting almost like he did after beating his brother Leif in Scrabble, years ago, in that cabin in the woods.  Him and his stone-cold face.
      Few minutes later, The Baby Judas, he steps outside and starts to tossing books into the buck boxes.  So I turn around to ask him:
      “Where can I go to pay my respects?  What funeral home is Crystine at anyway?”
      He stands up and says, kind of firm like:
      “Nobody can see her body.  They took it to the county morgue on the West Side after I found it, where they plan to cremate it.”
      So I says something like: “They took Crystine all the way to the West Side?  What’s with that?  That’s miles away.”
      He shrugged.  “That’s the only county morgue in Chicago,” he says.  Then he tosses a few more books into the buck boxes and heads back inside.
      And I go back to staring at the apartment building again.  What, I’m thinking, where’s the immediate family through all of this?  Wouldn’t they want Crystine’s friends to get together in a funeral home to mourn her, or something?  So I come off the chair to put these questions to The Baby Judas … but before I can, I notice two books have replaced the retro commie pamphlets and the coffee table books she had in the window.  And those were:
      The Dance of Deception
      AND
      The Dance of Anger
      The Dance, I thought, just like what Crystine told me Zelda Fitzgerald wanted to do like a pro, even though it was way too late for a serious ballet career move.  And, oh yeah, there was also Crystine dancing with her cat on her Facebook page.  Deception and anger, what?  Spooked me out, for sure.
      But that was just the beginning of this spook story.
      So okay then, I go back to my lawn chair, where I start thinking about what someone once said from a book I was reading about The Sex Pistols of all things: “the pavement, the beach”.  Well, lounging around there, it made me feel a little bit better when I thought: “Clark Street, the beach” with all those cars and trucks whizzing by, the metal waves.  I say that because, when I started to get real bummed out about her body at the city morgue, I remembered, hey, I have a couple days off here for my private wake: doesn’t have to be at a funeral home, it can be like on a beach, even if this was a concrete beach.  But any beach in the storm, know what I’m saying?
      Anyway, while I’m thinking on this, all of a sudden, a city garbage truck pulls up to the corner and a big-strong Black guy with heavy muscles gets out to pick up and empty the trash bin there into the truck, but then he sees me sitting around and he comes over to ask me, he says something like: “hey, where’s Crystine?  She comes out here to say hello when she sees us, always does.”
      So I says something like:  “Man, it’s a gross bummer here.  Crystine, they found her dead in her bathroom this morning.”
      “They what you say?”  His face went sad.  “How could that happen?”
      But you know, St. Gary, I realized then that I had no clue how Crystine died.  Matter of fact, I didn’t want to know, because I had to wait out my shock before I even could start asking that.  I mean, Ms-topheles practically hung up on me and The Baby Judas said nothing about it while he was running around to show off he was in charge now, it looked like.  Didn’t want to pry either.
      Anyway, I told this guy “wish I could say.  But I just got here and everything is confusion to me.”
      He was then quiet for a bit, until he says: “But Crystine, she always came out for us.  I’m talking always.  Always asking how we were doing, how she appreciated us doing the dirty work on the streets.  But to me … she thanked me, real personal like, with that nice smile on her, nicest smile you could ever want to see, you know what I’m saying?”
      “A smile to end all smiles.”
      “I mean, here’s a lady who’d .. you know what she did?  She never forgot to bring us out bottles of water and, man, you know what she brought out one time when there was that polar vortex going around?”
      “Coffee and a box of little donuts.”
      He chuckles and says: “Hey, man, how you know that?”
      I shrugged and I says: “Oh, I just know.”
      “Man, I’m feeling the Chicago blues about this,” he says.  “She was young too and that’s always worse than anything, dying young.”
    “In her thirties, my friend.”
      “You know how many people come out to thank us personal-like when they see us picking up their garbage?”
      “I’m saying none.”
      “Except for Crystine.  Like I told you, a real lady.  So can you tell me where to pay my respects?  What’s the funeral home she’s in?”
      My voice was only a bit louder than a whisper when I says: “There is no funeral home.”
      “What you saying?”
      “They took her to the county morgue on the West Side.”
      “No, can’t be,” he says.  “That’s where they send people who die in the streets with no home.  I mean, if we find somebody lying dead in some dumpster, you know where they go?  Straight to the county morgue.  And man, that’s no place for Crystine.”
      “I wouldn’t think so either,” I says.  “Unless they think somebody murdered her, and they had to do an autopsy.”
      “Who’d want to do that to Crystine?  She was the kindest, nicest …”
      “Nobody I know,” I says.
      “Okay, man, you hear of any memorial services … you going to be around?”
      “Maybe.  But if I’m not, you can always ask inside.”
      He sighed.  “Well, thanks for news, even if it sure was bad,” he says.
      “Yeah, not a problem.”
      He laughed then.  “I’d shake your hand,” he says. “But I don’t want you to get dirty hands.”  Then he smiles at me before he leaves to climb back into the cab of the garbage truck and drive off with his crew.
      Then, you know what happens next?  Few minutes later, The Baby Judas, he walks out of Zelda Rising Books to catch a smoke.  But before he can light up, he sees that the trash container has been emptied, but there’s still bits and pieces of garbage lying around the bottom on the ground.  So he goes over and he starts picking it up and tossing it back into the container.  Not that I’m surprised about that, understand: he was always street cleaning for other people, like, one time, we were on one of our Death Marches, walking along in a park, when we notice he’s not with us anymore.  So we look around and, sure enough, he had stopped a few paces back, where someone had thrown a picnic and left the grounds full of wrappers and Styrofoam and cardboard containers and other stuff, and there he was, scooping it all up and carrying it to garbage containers around the place.
      Matter of fact, I remember around the time that Father Satan went Trumpster, he also started littering on the streets, you know, eating something like a sealed tuna sandwich then tossing the wrapper on the sidewalk, just like as if in the back of his mind he was seeing The Baby Judas walking behind him just to clean up.
      Whatever.  After he’s finished with that, The Baby Judas strides back into the bookstore and does something or other in there for about a half hour until he comes out and stands in the doorway where he’s got a prescription medicine bottle in his right hand.  And St. Gary, I swear to you, his real-strict, I-got-business-to-do attitude changed right on the spot.  The only way I can explain it … and I know it sounds strange when I say it but … he sounded almost playful, acting real cute, like a kid who just dug out the prize in a Cracker Jack box.
      And he’s saying stuff like: “Look at this, we found all of these bottles lying around her apartment.”  He shakes the bottle around a bit before he then says: “Some doctor told her she had a mental problem, whether that was true or not.”
      The Baby Judas did not exactly have respect for the medical profession, especially psychiatrists and the like.  Kind of strange, considering he was carrying some kind of a counseling degree where he had to learn something about mental health, I would think.  Anyway, he always acted like he was above all of that when you talked to him about therapists, those people.
      “Not a good thing,” I says. “Maybe she came off them when she wasn’t under doctor’s supervision.  From what I hear, you can’t just do that all of a sudden, it has to be step by step.”
      “Oh, society in general is overmedicated,” he says.  “It’s one of the ways the medical establishment holds sway over the populace, to the benefit of the insurance companies.”
      Which got me to all of a sudden thinking: did he tell her to stop taking them, because he was against it all?  And was he now walking around with her empty prescription bottles, to show off she listened to him?
      “Okay, whatever,” I says.  “Did you tell the police then that you found them?  They’d probably be interested, I’m thinking.”
      Then The Baby Judas studies the bottle for a moment and says, going back quick to his firm voice, “they know” and then turning to go inside the bookstore again.
      Well these days, I’m thinking “smoking gun”, which is one reason I am here at the Crash Palace, telling you what went down.  But that’s me talking, not anybody else, too bad.
      Way too bad.
      Anyway, things were getting more and more strange for sure, St. Gary.  The Baby Judas, he was so up and down in his moods on Day 1, coming and going in and out of the bookstore: it looked to me like he was really trying to forget something really serious with all that rapid-fire action … even more than Crystine dying, which was serious enough by itself.
      So I decided to ask around to other people about it, to maybe some neighbors of Zelda Rising Books to hear what they were thinking.  I asked first of all a man who had a professional photography studio next door – friendly sort of a guy, you could tell he was wondering the same as me about what was going on – and the owner of the café next door that Crystine was hoping would draw more business to the bookstore, before The COVID shut everything all down.  This guy, he was more blunt, kind of like the way a Chicago bus driver talks when you don’t have enough change for a ride, and seemed to be holding something back, but then again, he didn’t know me, so there’s that.
      Well, they both pretty much had the same story to tell.  Sirens and flashing lights from cop cars and paramedics all of a sudden across the street in the early morning hours.  Catching sight of Crystine’s body under wraps being rolled out.  People gathering around to see what’s up.  Know what I’m saying?
      But what really got to me was, both of these guys asking me the same question, same words:
      “Do you think foul play was involved?”
      Course, when something that sudden happens around the neighborhood, where someone is here one day then gone the next, you’re going to be asking a question like that … but what with the way The Baby Judas was carrying on, well, I figured, I can understand why anyone would ask it, whatever they were thinking.
      So I caught up with him when he was running around outside doing something or other, and I put the question to him:
      “You know, people are asking if there was foul play, are the police thinking something like that?”
      And you know what, St. Gary?  For someone who is usually so sure about what he’s saying and what words he’s using to say it, The Baby Judas all of a sudden was jabbering away like I swear I never heard out of him ever before.  Something like:
      “That could not have occurred.  There was no back entrance where … where an intruder might have made his way in and there was no sign of a struggle or contusions on the body that could have led to a conclusion of foul play … that could have shown that … such an incident might have in the slightest way been possible … no, it was completely ruled out by everyone involved in finding the body … no, definitely not, no, not at all.”
      He was going on like this in … the only way I can describe it is desperately excited.  Well, because he was all shook up about it, I shrugged it off and says “okay just asking” and he real quick left to go back to Zelda Rising Books without saying anything more.
      So that was pretty much it for Day 1, St. Gary.  Nothing more to add that’s too important, I guess.  Just me sitting there in my lawn chair, kind of letting everything flow around me.  Listening to my iPhone a lot, heavy on the Depeche Mode and Joy Division.  Looking through my annotated version of Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer novels I brought along, mainly because Zelda Rising Books had been the only place where I’d found this book that was pretty special to me.
      Anyway, I left the scene around the time when evening came down, walking away with a tall Indian kid, one of the Loyola followers of The Baby Judas, who talked non-stop.  I mean, with these people, it’s like every other sentence has to start with “The Baby Judas said” or “like what The Baby Judas was telling me” and if that wasn’t enough, this kid kept also yapping about that favorite pet peeve of The Baby Judas: about how modern psychology was just some fake gimmick that didn’t solve anything: blah, blah, blah, this kid, he was having none of it, more blah, blah, blahs until they sounded like the baa, baa, baas of your typical sheeple.  Still a nice-enough kid, and pretty smart too, just didn’t seem like he was quite playing with a full deck or, more like it, not enough tiles to put on the Scrabble board
      So that, St. Gary, was Day 1.  Strange enough, for sure, but Day 2 was the Day of the Zelda Tattoo.
      I get there around the time the bookstore opens, 10 in the morning or so, and first thing I see is The Baby Judas running around, picking up from what went on that night after the bookstore closed, maybe early morning too before it opened: a makeshift shrine in memory of Crystine.  People who knew what Crystine was about had left those holy glass-tube candles with saints and angels and the pope that you find in Mexican dollar stores and empty beer cans to commemorate party times with her, I guess, and plastic vases of mourning flowers of death, not like the weed flowers I used to leave in her door, maybe hoping in the back of my mind to somehow bring Zelda Rising Books to life again.  The Baby Jesus and the Indian kid were carrying around black rubber trash bags and clearing everything away, then tossing the bags into the trash bin on the corner.  They were moving like they were in a real hurry to get rid of it all and, seeing that, I started wishing they’d leave everything the way it was all day: seemed like, these people took the time and cared enough to lay out the makeshift shrine, if you tore it down so quick like that, bad karma might come of it, just a feeling.
      Well, whatever, things eventually settled down and I went back to sitting in my lawn chair and drinking a mug of the cheap coffee The Baby Judas had brewed up inside like he and Crystine used to do, with my mind on life and death and death and life, even if it felt sort of too soon to be thinking about such things when the coffee hadn’t even kicked in yet.  Then, an hour or so later, one of the Loyola followers who kept coming and going during the four days I was sitting around there in my lawn chair, she rode her bike that looked like it was made of thick plumbing pipes up to the front of the store, stopped there, and got off.  This Loyola follower, she was sporting orange hair and white shorts and black basketball shoes and a Grateful Dead T-shirt that had a skull screaming flames out of its mouth, if I remember right.
      So, she went up to The Baby Judas who was taking one of his smoke breaks outside and … St. Gary, might just be me, but I want to say she was talking to him about how the cremation they were planning at the West Side morgue was going to burn all the tattoos off the dead body: he gave out with a small laugh at that and winced through his smoke, telling her “she only had one that I am aware of.”
      So I interrupt to say something like: “you talking about the one she had with the logo of the store on it?”
      And he says, “no, there was another one.”
      “Really, what did it say?”
      He seemed bothered by the question.  “I have no idea what the other tattoo had to say,” he says.  “I believe it had something to do with Zelda Fitzgerald.”
      But it got me to thinking … the whole point of a tattoo, wasn’t it to show off to the world your individuality and all, well, wasn’t it?  It’s like, there you are, doing lots of something and lots of nothing in the bookstore, how are you not going to know about any and all tattoos on the owner?  And this one, you think it had something to do with Zelda Fitzgerald of all people, so wouldn’t you be curious about what the Zelda Tattoo on the owner is actually saying? I mean, it’s not like you go into one of the many tattoo parlors in the city of Chicago and find designs based on Zelda Fitzgerald and the 1920s literary scene in Paris.  Is this not something more than unusual?
      So later on, I started asking around about it, thinking, one of these armchair socialists or scrambled eggheads or Loyola followers, with all their powers of smarts and coming up with small details about something or other you never heard of, they must have seen what the Zelda tattoo was all about.  But no, all that question did was draw a blank on their faces, like I was asking them what they drank at the local bar 10 days ago, and they went back to reading their books or staring into their laptops … same old, same old.
      None of them understanding that whatever about the all-knowing and all-seeing overlording wisdom of The Baby Judas and whatever they thought about the return of their funky and oh so cushy playhouse where they could sit around for hours and not buy anything, and whatever was going to happen with what was left of her at the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office … well, Gary, let me tell you, you saint of a guy you, none of that mattered much next to what was the Zelda tattoo.
      But whatever, whatever, whatever, let’s get back to the art of cremation, or lack thereof.  Later on during the day, there I was, listening to the first Psychedelic Furs album on my iPhone, that one with Sister Europe and Flowers on it, when I see from the corner of my eye this lady wearing a full-white dress and sharp black high heels and carrying a dark red purse and she’s walking brisk and straight into Zelda Rising Books.  Bit later and The Baby Judas is just returning from lunch when he walks back inside, but then, all of a sudden, he’s back out and looks kind of excited.  Well, seeing this, I take out my earphones to hear him ask me:
      “Might you have seen someone coming into the bookstore while I was gone?”
      “Sure did,” I says.  “A lady wearing a full-white dress, sharp black high heels and carrying a dark red purse.  Somebody you know?”
      He thought for a moment, then he gets excited again and says something like: “I think it’s somebody Ms-topheles sent over.  She’s in the basement right now, looking at the books.  But I think it is more than that: I believe she wants to sell a cremation ceremony.”
      Well, yeah, it was about something like that for sure, because soon after the lady appears, Ms-topheles finally enters the scene an hour or so later.  Kind of was expecting her to be spending more time around Zelda Rising Books day after Crystine dies, considering she was her mentor and all, but I guess she was busy with something or other, like she was always saying she was busy with something or other … her and The Baby Judas, they both liked to say they were busy with something or other, or more like, announce it.
      Sorry, I went off the subject there, these strange people you know … okay, we end up all sitting around the Zelda Rising Books smoking tree out front and Ms-topheles and The Baby Judas are about to start talking about what’s going on with the woman in the basement, when who should walk up next but the Great She of the Mock Cosmology, that is, Beer-atrice.  Hadn’t seen her since her and The Baby Judas were doing the victory lap at the Father Satan memorial so I didn’t recognize her at all, because this woman here, she didn’t have that bright charm from back in the good old days of Café Noir and she was speaking with pauses and more slowly than in the Testimony of the Mock Cosmology: she seemed an entirely different person, dressed in a blue button smock top printed with flowers and loose-fitting pants.  
      So Father Satan says to Ms-topheles something like:
      “Who is that woman looking for books in the basement now?”
      Ms-topheles says: “She’s the one who arranged Father Satan’s cremation at the funeral home.”
      “MMM, hmm,” he mutters, as he takes a drag on his cancer stick.  “And I suppose you told her about Crystine and now she’s out for a business deal.  I wonder how much she charged for her services with Father Satan?”
      “About 2,000 dollars …”
      “Two thousand dollars?  That much?”
      Ms-topheles says in a stern and hard voice: “It’s really not that much, not when you consider the arrangements that have to be made with printing cards and catering and flowers and everything needed for a memorial service.”
      “And who said we are having a memorial service any time soon?  The family wishes to have her cremated at the morgue.  It costs only 65 dollars for the county to do it.”
      It was at that point, hearing all these burning issues, that I decided to play second banana to The Baby Judas, to become his Jerry Colona like Father Satan put it.
      “Yeah,” I says, “who wants to burn through all that money anyway?”
      He ignores me.  “This is what the family wishes, he says, “and we will have a simple memorial service after we have finished with this COVID situation.”
      “That could be months away,” says Ms-topheles.
      “This is what the family says they want and I agree with them.”
      Meanwhile … I wasn’t understanding what this guy was doing, taking care of the family business like this.  How did he get so special all of a sudden, some stranger who just three years ago walked in and started hanging out?  Now I had seen photos of him hovering around Crystine’s parents when they were visiting Zelda Rising Books, true, but he was there constantly, so his unsmiling face was always showing up in photos, nothing special.  And now… he’s making funeral plans and doing it on the cheap?  Yeah, I knew her parents were in their sixties and didn’t want to be travelling around the country with The COVID still in the air, but maybe you hire a lawyer to handle the death of your daughter, you know, not some scrambled egghead who hasn’t had a full-time job in, what was it?, 20 years?
      I got a little miffed hearing all this and I says something like: “All I know, Crystine was the good kid.  I think she deserves better.  If she’s cremated, then put the ashes in an urn, fly them to Paris, and spread them at that cemetery where Jim Morrison and all those other poets are buried.  Crystine loved the Paris literary scene and I don’t think she ever had the chance …”
      Sounding impatient, The Baby Judas snorted: “The family wish, again, is to have body cremated on the West Side for 65 dollars and the ashes will be dealt with later.”
      But then I thought: Considering how he beat Father Satan in the final battle of the mock cosmology, maybe The Baby Judas was now doing the same with Crystine.  Remember how she complained to me last time I saw her, about what a cheapskate was The Baby Judas?  I figured they had some fights about it and now he was down for a budget cremation on her, like him doing the victory lap with Beer-atrice after the memorial service for Father Satan.  But you have to admit, convincing the family to do it was pretty slick, even for him, like hitting an end-of-the-ninth, two-outs, walk-off home run.  Or maybe it was true, he was just following their wishes, which still felt like a low point to me: who wouldn’t want their daughter given a little more caring honor if she died the day before, even if it cost you?  None of it particularly made much sense: Crystine, the good kid, treated kind of like some … well, stray carcass.
      Well, once they got settled about the winning bid to torch the body, the talk went to how Zelda Rising Books could become a non-profit entity, is what they were saying.  That was one reason that, all of a sudden, Beer-atrice shows up: see, she long ago took a swerve from Dante and the Inferno to becoming an accountant.  No doubt, The Baby Judas went to her after he thought up the non-profit angle, to start crunching the numbers.
      You could tell by then where his thinking was heading: No use waiting until the cold body of the former owner was in the ground, because it was going up in flames soon enough anyway.
      “The bookstore never made a profit in here, ever,” says The Baby Judas, in his firm, take-charge mode.  “So Heldon and I have been talking about the possibility of turning the business into a non-profit, where it won’t be so onerous in the future.”
      “If you think you’ll no longer need to make a profit, think again,” says Beeratrice. “In the state of Illinois, you must bring in at least $5,000 or so to keep your non-profit status alive.”
      “And we can raise that through our Kickbacker account Heldon just started …
      I interrupted, telling him: “I think you mean Kickstarter, chief.”
      “Kickstarter account,” he says.  “She has many friends and acquaintances more than ready to contribute to keeping her memory and the bookstore alive.  Besides, turning the bookstore into a non-profit will leave a good impression, too. We would move toward helping the community instead of how it was phrased before, contributing to the community.”
      “What’s with this community stuff?” I says.  “Does it have more of a name, I mean, what kind of community we talking about here?”
      “Our community, the community around us,” says Ms-topheles.
      The Baby Judas took a drag off his lung dart.
      “Oh, that community,” I says.  But I dropped the Jerry Colona bit when I saw her twitching around, fidgeting, which usually meant she was about to get testy.  I wanted no part of that, not with my mood shifting around itself, from ripe second banana to feeling like I was slowly slipping on a peel.
      “Well, The Baby Judas, I’ll look more deeply into this,” says Beeratrice.  “You can always apply online for it, but I’ll be glad to help arrange it without charging you, out of sympathy for Crystine.”
      “MMM-hmm,” muttered The Baby Judas. “Maybe several months after we reopen all the way here.”
      Well then, a few minutes later, Ms-topheles leaves so she can go be busy somewhere or other and the Indian kid walks out of the bookstore where he’s been stacking and restacking books, takes the seat where Ms-topheles had been, and he shows he’s holding a book called The Idiot’s Guide to Carl Jung, you know, that doctor in the AA Big Book who says alcoholics need a spiritual experience to come out of their trap.
      “Look at this fellow,” says the Indian kid.  “All this talk about the supernatural and meditation and yoga and synchronicity.”
      “Imagine whole groups of gullible people talking for hours about the mere coincidences in their lives,” says The Baby Judas.  “And paying all that money to do so.  Carl Jung wasn’t Swiss for nothing.  He probably charged them by the hour with one eye on his cuckoo clock.”
      “It’s like you’ve been saying,” says the Indian kid, “the whole mental health field is a scam of vast proportions.”
      “MMM-hmm,” mutters The Baby Judas and takes a dramatic drag on his heater before he says: “Oh, Carl Jung with his ghosts and seances and dream analysis, all that nonsense.  And the whole concept of the collective unconscious is obviously ridiculous, to say the least.”
      With that, I decided it was time to pull another second banana routine on The Baby Judas: “Well, you got to admit, he did make it to the cover of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s album, so he must have had something going for him.”
      The Baby Judas snorted.  “As if that meant anything,” he says. “That isn’t particularly profound, appearing on the cover of a rock and roll album.”
      “Well, this Immanuel Kant guy of yours, he didn’t make the cut,” I says.
      Then he says: “It’s all so pathetically whimsical and fallacious.  A so-called psychologist who is revered by whole groups of loyal followers who practically …”
      “Hey, wait a minute, didn’t this Carl Jung … wasn’t he also into UFOs, you know, what they used to call flying saucers?” I says.
      The Baby Judas sat there, smoking, suddenly saying nothing.
      “Yeah, sure he was,” I says. “I don’t think he wrote that there were Astro Nazis in flying saucers, but he had a thing about them.”
      The Indian guy looking through his book for anything about Jung and UFOs.  “I have found this,” he finally said. “Jung said they were not real, but mental projections of anxiety.”
      But The Baby Judas was in the middle of his death stare.  He lost the argument, he knew it, but he wasn’t about to admit it and laugh it off, no, not him.  Instead, he just sat there and took a drag off his cigarette.  Then, he said, “well, this place needs more work” and hurried off his chair to go back inside and stack and restack books again.
      So much for Day 2.  Day 3 was all about Him/His/He.
      I only slept a couple hours later that night after I got back to my place from Zelda Rising Books.  Too much cheap coffee, too much excitement over there, and once I did go under, I had this dream about that flaming guy on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album turning into Crystine and shaking hands with herself and from then on, sleep was out of the question.  I think it was about 7 in the morning when I said to myself “hell with it” and left with my lawn chair: The Baby Judas would be back to open up the bookstore at 10, but I wouldn’t mind just sitting out there a couple hours before and sipping some coffee, eating a doughnut or two from across the street.
      When I got to the doughnut place, I decided to buy a newspaper there.  I don’t usually do it these days, I mean, who’s paying a buck fifty when you can just go online for the same news and sports, but all that talk about books gave me the urge to see print again and I also wanted to read the morning funnies, for a couple laughs to start Day 3.  Besides, I had a sandwich in my backpack for later, so I could eat it using the newspaper on my lap for a place to set it between bites, after all, can’t do that with a tablet or a laptop, can you?
      So while I’m waiting for the people behind the counter to pour the coffee and gather the doughnuts into a sack, I opened the newspaper and turned to the features section.  And there was an article about Zelda Rising Books, with a picture of The Baby Judas standing in the doorway, looking all sly and cool, not smiling, totally satisfied him.
      Once the coffee and doughnuts were ready, I took them to a table and sat down to read this thing.  It wasn’t so much about Crystine herself as it was about The Baby Judas first then Crystine.  The article said he was now on some kind of a mission to keep Zelda Rising Books alive, but as a volunteer, not as the employee that Crystine told me he was claiming to be on his Facebook page, which got her so angry.  And even though he didn’t have a full-time job, the article made it out to look like he was making this big sacrifice to work there seven days a week without pay, just to make sure everything stayed all wonderful and cozy in the place.
      Oh, they talked some about the polar vortex video and they did have a smiling photo of her surrounded by flowers, but those were set below the photo of The Baby Judas and all this talk about, you know, how he helped her put together events and how hard he worked stocking and arranging books on the shelves.  Yeah, Crystine, her starting a bookstore was a long shot from the start, he says, like she was betting on a slow nag at the racetrack, but it was a “noble effort”, is the way he put it and now he was going to make her dream a reality.
      But there was a paragraph about how close he was to her that really hit me … and hard, St. Gary.  How he was the obvious choice to “take over the reins” now in her quest for “contributing to the community” because he used to go out to lunch and play Scrabble with her at Zelda Rising Books all the time.
      Yeah, Scrabble.  And, man, did I ever know about him and Scrabble.  That game in the cabin in the deep woods of Michigan years before, I started replaying it in my mind, with Leif sitting there after he lost the game and … then I saw in the article, get this, how The Baby Judas had “never seen grown men cry like that before” when he told them about Crystine dying.  And remember, St. Gary, when I was telling you the whole story earlier about Leif carrying on like he did up there: didn’t I tell you that I had never seen a grown man cry like that?
      Man, reading those words in the article, I began to understand kind of what was going on here.  His “I’ve found dead bodies before, so, so what?” line when I first saw The Baby Judas crossing the street from her apartment on Day 1, him shaking that empty medicine bottle around, him acting all bothered when I asked about foul play, him wanting the cremation on the quick and cheap.
      For all I know, she beat him at Scrabble one night and that was the beginning of the end of her, like it was for Leif.
      I didn’t think I had ever felt so down and disgusted, like I did after reading that article.  But, no, it got even worse later on, after he opened the bookstore, and people started coming up to him and saying how they saw the article and how wonderful it all was that The Baby Judas was sacrificing all his time and energy on keeping Zelda Rising Books going.  Same thing on the bookstore’s Facebook page after it was posted: even her father was writing what a great thing The Baby Judas was doing.  Dad might as well have just been saying he was giving the keys to the family Ferrari to …
      … wait a minute, St. Gary, now I suddenly have the thought, how did The Baby Judas get into her apartment to find her dead anyway?  He must have had a key, and how did that happen?  Maybe it was the one Crystine had hanging off her neck in the polar vortex video?
      No, no, I’m not cashing in my 30 silver AA coins in the purple velvet bag I have sitting there on the bar, no, not now, even though everything that went on over there, all of it is flooding my brain again and I want to dam it up.  Like, how I decided that day to walk up to Andersonville, to a local feminist co-op up there, to tell them, you all are into helping victims of abuse and empowering women, there’s some guy over at Zelda Rising Books who got rid of the woman owner some way or other and I think he’s taking control, look at this article.  But some thin-boned, sour-faced woman behind the counter just kind of sniffed in the air and all she told me was she knew that Crystine and her dad had been looking for a space to lease for Zelda Rising Books before putting it on Clark and Devon, but Andersonville was too expensive for them.  Then she told me just to email the reporter and tell her about my suspicions.  I don’t know, maybe I turned her off with my dirty old Cubs hat on me or that she just didn’t want to get involved … but I still wonder to this day, why she didn’t steer me to an abuse center or a social worker or help me help Crystine who, even if she was probably nothing but ashes in a plastic bag now, still needed some kind of help from me, was how my mind under the dirty old Cubs hat was twisting and turning on itself.
      By the way, I did email this newspaper reporter on my smartphone after I talked with this woman at the co-op, telling them, hey, look there’s something wrong at Zelda Rising Books, maybe you should, like, do a follow up?  But no answer that day or days after.  Nothing.  So I’m figuring the reporter was another one of his sheeple that The Baby Judas schmoozed with and, man, sometimes, I’m thinking that The Baby Judas, it seems like he’s planted them all over, as tools for doing what needs done, or something.  Where’d he get this knack from, anyway?
      Well, whatever.  When I got back, I found my chair on the same spot: not that I expected it to be moved or anything, look, I was still on good terms with The Baby Judas.  No way was I myself going to even bring up the article to him and risk losing my seat with the good view, like at Wrigley Field during a sold-out game.  But I still felt there were dark feelings in the air about what might have happened to Crystine, St. Gary, and it was like for real too, because an hour later my smartphone pinged a warning about a tornado aiming to hit Chicago in a few hours.  I mean … what?  Tornadoes had not touched down anywhere in Chicago itself since the sixties, I’d heard: that was for places like the suburbs or Kansas or Oklahoma, not here.
      But no question, the sky was getting all funny, filling with grey clouds, then streaks of blue through them, then we got light grey and dark grey and no more blue in the mix, pushed around by swirls of wind, going strong in quick bursts.  Then, I felt dashes of rain on my face that soon started to pick up so hard, I had to fold up the lawn chair and bring it inside, where The Baby Judas and his half-brother, the Indian kid, and a couple of the Loyola followers were there to wait it out.
      Now all this drama in the weather had me feeling like somebody or other was messing with my head and the weather was mirroring it.  All that confusion, all that disturbance, circling around together behind my eyes that were seeing The Baby Judas with Heldon still going at it on Crystine’s computer, the Indian kid sitting on a couch and talking and talking some more about what he thought was going to happen next with the weather, the Loyola followers in there looking into their laptops.
      Then, all of a sudden, wham, the door slammed open, like the tornado had just landed in front of Zelda Rising Books and wanted in with a fierce bang.  But you know something, St. Gary, The Baby Judas acted like nothing much just happened, all he did was get up from behind the desk and go to lock down the door.  And right when he had it secure, the power went off.  Which meant no more of him and Heldon trying to get into Crystine’s computer, though nothing phased the Loyola followers, they just kept tapping away on the keyboards of their battery-charged laptops.  And eventually, The Baby Judas and the Indian kid, they took down some candles from off the shelves and lit them up and put them here and there in the place.
      But it was the candle under the logo in the front window that got to me.  You know, the one I told you about?  With one of those bathing beauties from out of the twenties?  That Ultra-Venus, who looks like she’s rising out of the waters of a lake?  Holding that book, Save Me the Waltz?  Well, there I was, sitting in an armchair in the middle of the room, facing that front window, when real slow, the flame on the candle starts growing, but it doesn’t flicker or anything like that, no, it just seems to shape shift into a glow ball above the wick of the candle, looking almost exactly like … well, like a baseball on a tee ready for batting practice, is what.
      Then suddenly, the ball disappears and there’s a crash outside, where wind is going full blast and rain is slapping down all over the ground, flooding the street next to the 24/7/365 doughnut shop.  That crash finally wakes up the people inside and we all go to the window and, wouldn’t you know it, a big-as-all-hell limb from the tree where people would gather and around and smoke, it had fallen right smack dab on the sidewalk, lying there, rain pounding on the wood and the leaves, all tangled up.
      And The Baby Judas, all he says is: “if it flies into the window, that would have been the end of the logo.”
      Me, I was already starting to think of the end of Zelda Rising Books itself, the one Crystine wanted.  Once the rain calmed down to the point where I could walk back to my apartment, I was feeling too on edge to sleep.  Maybe dozed off for an hour or two, but by the time it was Day 4, I wanted no more of The Baby Judas, this guy acting like he was going to take over the bookstore, maybe from the day he first found out about it and Crystine.  So I had a fierce desire, you could say, to call him on what he was laying down.
      Instead, I ended up calling the Chicago police.
      Well, actually, what I did was call the station and they linked me up with some detective who asked me to tell him everything I saw.  So I told him, exactly like I have been telling you, St. Gary.  When I finished with my little story, all he said was:
      “No, we have nothing on what happened there.  But this guy, he sounds like a wretched human being.”
      “Wretched human being”.  Not the usual kind of words you hear out of a Chicago cop, my friend.  More like what I finally told The Baby Judas when I walked over to Zelda Rising Books on the morning of Day 4, and found him sitting in my lawn chair next to the cracked limb, catching a smoke, and saying loud to the Indian kid:
      “I’m certainly looking forward to not having to hear about the Paris literary scene in the 1920s and especially anything else about Zelda Fitzgerald from now on.”
    It was more like “Fuck You, Fucking Fucker” is what I’m saying.