Over the Top (Redux)

This one first appeared on the NetLit back in May of 2014. Hope no one minds a summer repeat on this the Eve of Travers Day. Feel free to post comments.

Over the Top
by Aunt Shecky
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No different from any trek to the track, that dis-stink-tive tall-tail aroma smacks you in the kisser then swiftly dissipates like the buzz of a “lite” beer, or, considering of the pricey-prized sources, forget and/or forgive. Maybe you just get used to the smell, shooing it as a fly away.

Temporarily parked in stables, those to the manure born poked their elongated mugs out their stalls whilst curiously eyeing the passers-by. These in turn ignored the shiny equine stars a scant stretch away and right above their noses, stuck instead in glossy programs and folded daily rags, both hip-hyped and hope-held, the in-the-horseflesh, blood-bred steeds no match against their font-mounted odds.

Cute they were, no tout, yet scarcely winning a glans from our own in-exacta, namely the wife and yours cruelly coupled and seldom untied but e’er united ‘til debt do us fart. We’d come of late upon “hard times,” the classic situation thought to build character, in which case we could’ve been dubbed pair o’ guns of fortitude, pills of the community, and knights exemplars whom moms and dads could daily warn their scions not to grow up to be. By the slenderest skin of our remaining teeth, we’d “hung”-- as the pendulous kitty on the poster urged–“in there,” with any off the cuff , stop-gaffe measures we’d been able to deploy, without transparently betraying our invisible means of support, possibly excepting my lovely bride, already showing signs of resembling the gaunt woman in a Walker Evans photo, though nonetheless still my winsome-lose some Winnie, not completely divorced from the forward-looking optimism of her former youth, when she was a half-full kind of lass. Me, I’m fully down with empty, all the way.

That particular Dog Day had come panting, slobbering under a milky ceiling threatening to spring a leak. Behind the whiteness Ol’ Sol resolved to rein in any precip and cranked himself up. “Hot enough for ya?” Bring it on, Sunshine old pal. Heap up heat sufficient enough to provide fat pickin’s with those brew tabs snapping and syrupy swig vessels draining, ever popping afresh. For the vin ordinaire of the plebs the Gods be thanked. Not so greatly grateful for the patricians and their willfully-emaciated Patricias in haute couture and picture hats, the privileged effete wined and entwined up in the aeries of the clubhouse even as we squeak, proximate in distance yet light-years remote in squirms of holy moley moolah. As in lousy with money, high-rolling in the do-re-mi, splashed with cash, a-drip with liquid assets, soakin’ in filthy lucre, flush(ed.)

None of these adjs. ever appearing in a sentence describing your mumbled servant and his bride, our pair instead appropriately allied with our so-called peers. They’d secured a place in line hours before post time so that the very parsec the gatekeepers creaked up the drawbridge, they could jockey into position to stake out and claim a preferential piece of real estate in the backyard area, namely a primo picnic table to occupy for the duration. Except for an occasional lengthy walk to the actual trackside, the opp to witness all nine ”live” races promised to be compromised, but the stooping ground for the groundlings attempted to provide easy eyeshot for the full program of sprints and stretches of the Sport of Kings, begrudgingly shared with the common folk. For behold the mammoth closed-circus teevees tacked to stately trees who hadn’t been allowed a bark or yip of consultation on the matter of sacrificing their trunk space for these half-hung monoliths with their screens thirsty with dust, not having tasted the skimpiest spritz of Windex since the Clinton administration.

What put the prime in a particular property was the relatively convenient access to a betting kiosk as the key to possible profit-- not, unforch, for the likes of us, devoid of the paltry deuce required for a minimum wager, with the coughed-up contents of the coffer already earmarked and paid-through-the-nose, namely for the fossilized species of horsepower providing transport to and fro as well as a duo of general admission ducats, a temporary tattoo on each of our respective southpaws attesting to legitimacy of the transaction.

Not to mention the previously-purchased pack o’ store-brand jumbo plastic bags, cleverly flattened and jammed in the dorsal pocket of my denims. Save a couple that I’d unrolled and detached, unfurled and-- after a stubborn skirmish against the tightly-adhered top ends of the ebony-colored plastic– opened with a billowing flourish. According to our ideal plan, the plain idea was to fill up a series these flimsy-filmy containers, slash ‘em in the back of the truck (obtained on loan not from a used car racket but a gracious neighbor) and with the free rite-of-way guaranteed by our inky paws, re-enter the venue to repeat the process–-an m.o. oozing moxie and momentum. My long-suffering spouse and newly-tapped business partner went about her task tentatively, not yet perfecting the fluid rhythm of bending and picking, shaking out the vestigial drops of beverage, and depositing the booty, one by tedious one, into the bag.

“Atta girl, keep ‘ em comin’ “ --a few words of encouragement while showing the ol’ gal how it’s done-- first a sweeping scope of the territory, then a flashing down like an trained falcon, gracefully seizing the prey among the gallimaufry of empties: paper-thin aluminum cylinders, bulbous and bulky 2-liter plastic (you should excuse the expression) jugs, and lager shippers shaped from handsome yet potentially hazardous glass in decorator clear, green, or brown. The size and weight differentials meant not a whit, their worth never varying a cent either way; for the state’s bottle law, literally designed to dispense with litter, did its level best for democracy by leveling the field: i.e., keeping it low. Five cents deposit per returnable, no more no less. The operative word was quantity, inspiring your humble collector to count by fives, then-- ‘twere to be hoped --twenties.

And more to come, as yours drooly caught a full rear-view of one of the fiefdom’s grande dames bent over a cooler like a privateer digging through a chest of booty. Speaking of which, the ample backside appeared indubitably fated to be a mere double cheeseburger away from burgeoning into an aisle-blocking width at your local Wal-Mart. She must’ve been mindful of that ever-looming danger, for as she resumed an erect position, she clutched the treasure, a 12-ouncer of fizzy whose label pledged its allegiance to the diet variety. Assiduously I stood, ready to pounce like a cartoon mouse about to snatch a wedge of Swiss out of a hair-trigger trap, yet the fubsy soccer mom ingested the contents with two throat-throbbing gulps, punctuated with a satisfying burp, then in short ordure tossing the spent can over her linebacker-wide shoulder, whereupon, in mid-air, it met my alert interception.

Meanwhile yon fair lass was ripe for a bit of intervention, requiring a swift application of my micro-manglement skulls. “Winnie!”

“Who are you talking to-- me or a horse?”

“Don’t waste your time with those water bottles. Not to mention taking up space ‘n’ weight in the bag. See the label?” quoth I, pointing to same. “No stamp. Worthless.”

Rolling her baby blues and shrugging her bony shoulders, she dumped the dud into a nearby wire basket. “ Who pays good money for water?”

The daily double had long past been posted and the Third Race was a short furlong away from the finish line by the time we’d packed a pair of bags apiece and dumped them into the borrowed vehicle, waved the backs of our hands in the face of the insouciant attendant in the booth, and re-emerged into the backyard area, with the possibility of discovering another cache of cash-creating empties, a consumer nation devoutly to be whisked.

At that point we inched along, in search of relatively greener swaths of the picnic pasture. Thanks to our keen diligence, having left no return unspoiled, the immediate environs had been picked clean, including the aforementioned trashed replicas, into which we’d been game enough to dig deep and dirtily down.

Our loosey-goosey peregrination brought us to a grove of tables, groaning with the weight of hard-liners, seriously parlaying and profiting amid heavy cigar smoke and sudsy loads -- a prospective father lode! --until the unvanished truth reared its ugly, foamy head as a half-keg. No redeeming virtue in used plastic cups. Nor would the surrounding land yield much in the way of coin-generating fruit: atop the swatches of puddled earth, scruffy grass, and criss-crossing cemented walkways only here and there could a stray can or bottle be harvested.

“Time to hit the raccoon deli for paydirt, play in the dirt perchance to scheme.”

Winnie looked at me if she’d just swallowed arsenic. “You know, your highfalutin’ talking is starting to get on my nerves–“

“And yet, my love, you’re forever preferring Spoonerisms to spooning–“

The lady’s expression further discussed its disgust. “So sticky!” Meaning the viciously viscous dregs clinging to the exteriors of a few holey grails. Without warning, she went to her pants pocket and exhumed a tiny vial of Purell with her trigger finger on the tiny latch of the lid already flipped upside down and aimed toward the back of one of her mostly-immaculate pattywhackers.

“Noooooo!” My voice nearly matched the celebrated tones of the track announcer reverberating throughout the part. “Don’t do that! If you scrub that stamp off, we won’t be able to get back in!”

She jumped not so much for joy but out of schlock, produced not by my sharp reprimand but the startling sight of an interloper who, unbeknownst to me, had crept up directly behind, close enough to breathe down my neck. Apparently he was not a ghost, because he spoke first.

“What’s the problem?” He was all decked out in an outfit which was uniformly Navy blue, the quasi-official attire which posed him as a member of the ranks of the platoon of para-police, a squad of whom I had seen earlier at the front gate, the checkpoint at which random coolers and picnic baskets were perfunctorily examined for any contraband that might pose a Security Risk.

“There’s a ‘problem’? We’re very sorry to have distracted you from your, uh, work,Officer, but we’ve got things under control. On this here corner everything is copasetic.“

“Yeah, well. I heard yelling.”

“Yelling”-- at a race track? What did he think this was, the Christian Science Reading Room?

Even when the guy wasn’t talking, his creaseless mouth ceaselessly shifted and chewed on a segment of chicle, teeth on gum. But no gun. In lieu of a weapon, a black oblong hitched a ride on his hip, along with an antenna set at such a precipitously erect angle that it seemed to move independently from its host, who, were his absent mind decide to sit down, would’ve have subjected his gluteus maximus to a sudden unpleasant surprise.

Meantime he adjusted his highway patrol-style shades and cased out the little patch of territory which my comely partner and I at the moment occupied. “What’s the deal with all these cans and bottles?”

At their mere mention, I clutched the plastic bag to my heart like an enchanted troll protecting his purloined gold.

“Ya mind telling me what you’re doing with ‘em—um, Sir?

“Why, I’m a eco-warrior!”

Even behind those tinsel-tin cheaters, his rapidly narrowing eyes could prompt anyone to see that the words exchanged within our confrontation had begun to pour rage into the wannabe law enforcement agent. He may have been uncertain as to the particular import of each word uttered by yours truly, but his gut absolutely associated something markedly Marxist with “eco,” recycled into an even more insidious context, tanks to the red flag raised
by “warrior.”

“ Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the premises,“ he said, followed by a mumble I couldn’t quite peg.

Our of the cornea of my own peeper I happened to see my lovely accomplice ever-so-slowly back-stepping, not so much to prepare for a getaway as to pretend she was enjoying a day at the races with a separate and unrelated party, a group not guiltily-marked, say her fund-lubbing brothers.

The pseudo-cop repeated from between gritted teeth: “I said: drop the bag!”

“Pray tell, why? It took us the better part of the afternoon to–“

“Drop it!”

“What for? It’s just trash!”

It was then that this junior Torquemada deviated from the training manual as he actually “collared” me and yanked my mug so close to his I could smell both halves of his Doublemint. “Trash, huh? Then why don’t you just leave it be?” He punched up his question with a raised fist. Evidently the thought-process of not letting one hand know what the other was doing proved a bit too much to pull off simultaneously, for as the left paw rose, the other fell, extricating itself from the neck of my bared thread shirt.

As swiftly as a–well, maybe not a thoroughbred racer, but slightly faster than one of those compliant supernumeraries who escort the celebrity four-legged runners toward starting gate– I made a break for it with one hand grasping for the long suffering spouse and the other clutching the slippery bag for dear life.

Just a few breath-heaving fractions of a furlong away from the exit, a sauntering tourist fully aware that he was blocking our path, failed to yield the rite-of-weigh, instead stopping- short his slow sojourn with a most unwelcome cry of acknowledgment.

“Artie! Art, is that you?”

The recognition was mutual, as the stroller, clad in garish shorts known by the same name, was none other than Morgan Wadsworth, my once and not-at-all-likely-to be-future immediate stupidvisor. Having been already downsized and dismissed as a vassal of the muddle-manager, yours truly harbored no residual desire to be cut down further by his bloating and gloating over the self-putrefaction of retaining a job versus the manor-less serf before him. Ergo, I shifted my noggin for a backward glance pretending that I assumed he was talking to someone else, and with a quick sidestep, I leapt aside, all but shoving my bride out the gate. All instantly executed amid rueful puzzlement. That my nemesis and I should suddenly meet while crossing two highly divergent paths spat in the face of probability, but if a long shot had been predestined to come in, would that it had taken the form of my brandishing a fistful of winning parimutuel slips rather than an odoriferous bag of old beer cans slung over my shoulder, as I tip-toed away from the scene of the crime as furtively as a thief.

As the rattling pickup toted us through a myriad of nighways and nearby ways, the cargo in the bed jostled and jangled and clanged over every errant dip in the road or expectorated bump. Off we were on a quest for redemption.

My shotgun-riding bride fumed more than the sputtering exhaust, letting off steam now and then with a sad sigh. “Well, that was humiliating.”

“Nah. Socially speaking, Mr. Success and I run in entirely different vicious circles. The odds of our running into each other again are slimmer than your embraceable and regrettably wasted, neglected waistline. ”

“No, I mean almost getting arrested back there.”

“Aw, fuhgeddaboutit. That punk wanted to confiscate our loot so he could cash it in himself. What do those guys make? Minimum wage?”

A sideways peek at her showed me the normal pink hue of her face had deepened into a rosier tone, the result perhaps not of a changing mood but her earlier refusal to apply sun screen.

“I’m sorry what I said back there. About your crazy way of talking. We may be poor–God knows we’re getting there– but at least your speech is rich.”

“Bon mots instead of bon bons, huh? Sometimes I wish I could eat my words. But as a little bird once told me, ‘Talk is cheep, cheep, cheep.’ “

She neither laughed nor grinned but instead touched the top of my thigh. Feeling that familiar gesture was reassuring. Not to mention exciting. Rare as it occurred, its womanly power never flailed to set the secret little man in me a-twitching, instantly inspired with the nearly irresistible urge to swerve the borrowed truck to the side of the road, stop it short and hold her.

And speaking of holding, from time to time I couldn’t help speculating on how many of the passion-fed and panting promises she still remembered, and implicitly held me to– conjuring up for instance the dream of conning a cottage in the pine-lined East, where lobsters lumbered beneath the waves of the wind-kissed coast. Or the vow to spirit her southward to stash our hides away in a fabulous Avalon. If she recalled any of those blue-sky pledges, she never brought them up. After lo these many tears, she had stuck with me like goo, through thin and thin.

“Wait a minute. Where’re ya going?”

“Shopping plaza. There’s a Cost Cutter, right over there.”

“Oh, Art. Why here? Of all the stores in the world, why’d ya have to pick that one?”

“Why not?”

She hit me with her trademark exasperated sigh. “Because I don’t want to run into anyone from work. I’ll be embarrassed as hell if the boss sees me grubbing for bottle change.”

“Well, let’s hope he does! What an auspicious opportunity to shake him down for a raise. Or at least more hours. Listen, Win, don’t worry about it. The odds of our bumping into two
people we know today are pretty slim. Hey! Maybe Morgan Wadsworth will be ahead of us in line at the service counter.”

In the so-called “bottle room” – a completely segregated section of the supermarket near the front entrances– the din was deafening and the floor was sticky. A mammoth sign proclaiming “The Cost Cutter Gang Goes Green” hung over our heads as we pushed a quartet of grocery carts, overflowing with plastic bags packed with empties, up to the “self-serve” machines.

There was a long row of these devices, each earmarked for a specific type of returnable container: some for plastic, more for cans, and flanking each end was the designated spot for glass, one for clear and green bottles, the other for brown. The apparatus resembled a miniature MRI machine, coffin-like and intimidating. Through the round opening on the front of the machine, the customer would insert the can and watch it whirl around thick and closely-curled coils whilst invisible eyes deciphered the “bar” (!) code on the can’s label until finally thrusting it through the rear of the machine, where the can became audibly crushed amid horrifying, unrecognizable sounds. The similar process held sway for the other species of vessels, differing only in the sounds of their own destruction– with plastic, a tonal variant on the can-crushing sound and with glass, the expected, nonetheless nerve-wracking shattering. The only silent part came with a push on the button which released a slip printed with the monetary sum accrued by redeeming the deposits. But ceaseless was the constant unsettling hum, counterpointed with a rancorous whompa! whompa! resounding when the can took its circular journey. Flipppt! Whompa! Whompa! Swoooosh! Crash! Flippt! Whompa! Whompa! Swoosh! Crash! A Thurberesque soundtrack minding its onomatopoeia and these queues. The cacophony was so incessant, I felt a modicum of sympathy for the battered auditory nerves of the Cost Cutter employee (called on the premises an “associate”) who’d been ordered, unforch, to report to the bottle room.

Speak of the poor devil, the aforementioned worker appeared in the flesh: a full-bodied mouth breather allegedly named –according to the plastic name tag pinned to his apron above his heart–“Lance.” I jerked a surreptitious thumb in his direction and looked at Winnie as if to ask, “Know him?”

She shook her head and mouthed “no,” but to this day I know not whether she was relieved or regretful. More certain that this Lance wished they were mutually acquainted, for he shamelessly ogled my life’s love in her purple tank top bending over the basket of bottles. The would-be swain seemed to indulge in a fantasy right before my very eyes and could have used the benefit of the proverbial wake-up call, namely a reminder that my wife was old enough to be his--- older sister.

Presently he spoke. “All these carts yours, Mister?”

“Sure thing, Pal. Why do you ask?”

Lance pointed to a sign, not as prominent displayed as the “Gang Goes Green” sign, but there none the less. The message read: “Customers are limited to 126 returnables per visit.” It was pretty self-explanatory, but Lance felt the need to clarify: “You got more than a hunnert twenny-six in there.”

“Really? I hadn’t counted.” Winnie and I continued to go about our business. Flippt! Whompa! Whompa! Swoosh! Crash!

“Maybe you didn’t hear me. You don’t supposed to cash in more than a hunnert twenny-six at a time.”

“Uh-huh.” Flippt! Whompa! Whompa! Swoosh! Crash!

“So maybe you ought to stop now, Mister.”

“Yeah? Well, perhaps I ought to call your boss, or maybe Cost Cutter’s head C.E.O. and tell him that when I tried to cash in some bottles to benefit The Sunnyside Home for Neglected Children one of his employees gave me a hard time. Want me to go ahead and do that?”

He scowled at me for an inordinate length of time, and stared desperately at Winnie even longer. At last he removed his apron, crumbled it up into a ball, and tossed it into a corner. “Whatever. Right now I’m on break.”

When all was said and dunned, or our efforts we’d reaped something slightly shy of a double sawbuck. Enough to keep going for a while. Enough to give some of it right back to the store for much-needed comestibles, maybe with some protein. Momentarily I entertained the prospect of indulging in a brand-new, filled (!) six-pack, until I came to my cent-ses and remembered it would cost an extra thirty cents, which I’d get back only upon returning the empties, like carrying the cans, no longer New, to Coalcastle.

All of what’s been previously transpired expired in August. Over the ember months, the daze dwindled down to a precious phew, for then was then and now is yow. The parade of hits shot up to Number One with a bullet: the weakly checks from unemployment had been a fit, but cinched that time, the maximum number of weeks had run out and so did the benefits. And right after Xmas Winnie’s minimum wage hours at the Cost Cutter had been deeply cut, cutting us to the quirk and costing us un-endearingly.

In truth, we were up against it, our backs to the wail. Winnie’s kitchen cupboards gleamed more immaculately than e’er before, making Mother Hubbard’s fabled cabinet look like a groaning board on a cruise ship. While our own maws groaned and gurgled, a situation even more dire had bubbled up: the apartment mangler had been dogging us for (lack of) payment, his woof at the dour, next step down, viz a viz commandeering the sheriff of the shire forcibly to separate us from our cozy castle. Dreadfully anticipating such an inevitable fate, yours ghoul-ly snarled at the window, ruminating on how we might keep our rooms thereby delaying our doom.

By cheered coincidence, that particular day happened to have been the Monday following the Stupid Bowl, the irrational national event during which snickering fans grazed on sodium-soaked snacks under the daze of the ever-watchful teevee. On this hollow hoopladay it was assumed–nay, almost legally mandated --that Americans would consume massive quantities of cold ones. Once quaffed, their emptied vessels waited for collection– if not by the original consumer then a hopeful and ambitiously hopping opportunist – to return them to the point of purchase to reap the promised nickels upon redemption. Out the glaze my gaze switched to a brighter view.

“Think of all those empties out there, just tripe for the shakin’,” I said. “Those crouched pertater quarterbacks discarded all those nickels, passed to yours truly to intercept. Free money!”

“Oh, no, Art! Dumpster diving? Are we that bad off? “

Her mis(for)givings evidently emanated from a fear that the whole world --or at least the tiny sphere on which the two of us revolved – would witness this desperate measure as a sign of our rock-bottom degradation. My opinion was let ‘em gawk.

But life’s sweet ale had turned all skunky, the fizziness gone flat. What was I do? I could, I suppose, massage an old PBR bottle ‘til a bare-chested Rex Ingram pushed himself through its narrow neck toward eventual freedom following the temporary servitude of fulfilling a triad of wishes. Or maybe I should have summoned up an ancient wizard and bade him to druid his own thing by waving his shaft and instantly making the misery go pouf!

Presently I was out in the end zone of the nearest parking lot , one of many eyesores fronting several identical apartment buildings rudely occupying multi-roods of formerly sylvan acres. Winnie and I were but a couple among several hundred residents of the apartment complex, owned and operated by an overseeing overseas conglomerate and mangled by local parvenus with pretentious notions that the blight of hastily and cheaply constructed shelters constituted an impeccably respectable “community,” --nay, an upscale “village.” So much for upper muddle-class aspirations, as I tilted up the lids of the recycle barrels and sifted through, gathering only the preferred contents, as if a nocturnal pest burrowing through the sodden trash had sullenly become a snobbishly discriminating gourmet. Simultaneously my beloved stood at the window, as she raked nervous fingers through her salt-streaked but predominately peppered hair. She looked like the erstwhile cinematic chronically worried wife as portrayed by June Allyson, but instead of crying at the window, my Winnie was cringing. Poor ol’ gal, cleaving unto my side through thin and thin- not at the moment quite through with me, but one, alas, never knows.

While busily pushing a line of empty beer cans along with the occasional soda can into the steadily-filling plastic bag, I heard sounds of clamoring and slamming. Nothing but nervous pair of noises, I thought at first, then to my dissed dismay realized that my stupid visions were being consquirmed in real life. A pack of sneering youths un-parent-ly had been endowed with a similar idea, regarding the debris from past festivities of the previous night. It appeared that a group of muddle-schooler -sized boys (why weren’t they in class?)were unsystematically but nonetheless squarely knocking over the oblong-shaped bins onto the pavement of the all-but-deserted islands of successive parking lots perchance to pluck out the valuables buried within the blight.

Upon closer (and closer) inspection I saw that the boys, though indeed youthful , looked big and burly enough to vanquish any interloper daring to thwart their mercenary efforts, backed-up by the (sin)ister presence of a ringleader-- a dolt, muddle-aged and world-weary, evidently micro-mangling the underlings with a hirin’ hand. One could surmise that the spell he had cast over his henchboys had been powerful enough not only to put a damper on their natural contumacious tendencies but rein in any inchoate independent entrepreneurship, perhaps by a vague promise to share with the crew a cut of the eventual proceeds.

Whatever the case, in my own case there was a definite feeling that I was the person being cased, targeted, a marked man about to be marked down–chased and tackled to the ground seconds before they’d contemptuously confiscate my hard-won cache. My first in-stink was to hurry the hell up and finish my picking, grab my plastic bag, and retreat to Winnie’s reassuring arms within the relative safety of home sweat home --at least until the sheriff (b)locked us out for good.

Thinking that I had everything wrapped up and ready to roll, I was about to twist and tie the opening of the plastic bag when I saw one last bit of refuse that I flat-out refused to leave for the invaders. Directly behind the dumpster itself stood a snowbank, the residue of a heavy storm long past, plowed up and parked there by the grounds-keeping crew warned and forearmed to remove from the all-important parking lot the traces of every inconvenient and possibly hazardous (i.e. litigious) flake. Having stood there for a month, decreasing in size at a much slower pace than a glacier infected by global warming, the snowbank had resigned itself to unescapable defacement, powerless to prevent a gradual, granular film of automotive exhaust and soot of unknown origins, as well as sporadically squiggly yellow lines, courtesy of local curs, here and there streaking the erstwhile white purity of its surface.

Out of said snowbank protruded the glassy arse-end of one final beer bottle, which I suppose had been facetiously stuck there on the night of the blizzard, perhaps by the plowman himself. I couldn’t resist the temptation of grabbing it; a nickel’s a nickel after all. But wouldn’tcha know–no, the mixture of snow–plus the melted snow reverting to ice–had over time had cemented the bottle’s neck deeply in a kind of frozen stone, keeping the prisoner tightly trapped until Spring.

Meanwhile, the savage horde of Fagin and his overgrown urchins inched closer and closer. The prudent thing to do was to leave the damn thing there, and get out while the getting was good --or by this point– fair. But I did not want to concede the tiniest crumb to this crew of marauders and their prick(ing) kingpin. Thus I decided to follow the impulse to retrieve that damned imbedded bottle, no matter the truth of the consequences.

I pulled and I pulled. The glass, though covered with its own layer of gray film, had retained its original slipperiness, forcing my hand to fly off free but not itself. I tried pulling again, but the unyielding ice refused to budge. I tried pulling on the bottle again. And again.

Each successive attempt was pissing me off by degrees, inspiring stronger yanks accompanied by air-shattering curses. Older angers had begun to surface as well (as ill): the unplayable card which the universe and the stalled economy had dealt us, the untenable, un-tenantable position into which I had lately thrust my Winnie, who by all that’s good and holy deserved the unqualified amenities graciously laid at the foot of an anointed queen, an empress for that matter, yeah verily a saint whose uncomplaining suffering without bounds compounded daily; and most unnerving of all , the unshakable feeling, hidden way down deep in some obscure compartment of my psyche, that yours fooly– a loose-lipped loser, a preternaturally consistent ne’er do-well, had been at least partially responsible for the wretched lot into which I’d thrown our lives.

All of which made even more resolute and progressively angry, pumping up the flow of adrenalin until– until, mirabile dictu the bottle broke free! And I do mean “broke” for my hand held a jagged portion three quarters the size of the whole, while still steadfast in the rock of snow, the remaining fourth of the bottle held recesses that could accept the sharp points of the larger part of the bottle in my hand in a perfect fit, like pieces from a well-jigged puzzle. That part–my part-- had in the gray of the late-winter afternoon taken on a kind of metallic sheen. As I gripped the still-intact flat bottom of the glass, it looked for the all the world like a weapon, a sword which with a little imagination could in extraordinary circumstances be dubbed “mighty.” In that instant I felt myself mysteriously changed, transformed –L’morph de Arthur!

Meanwhile the latter-day Atilla and his Huns had appeared just a few yards away on the edge of the parking lot. More than a few of the punks wielded jackknives and box cutters (though, to be fair, probably not originally intended as lethal weapons but as tools to slash swiftly through recalcitrant plastic bags.) Their eyes, however, looked fearsome; they were–as the late night movies would say–“gunning for” me. Not to mention seizing my goods. “Bring it on!” quoth I, a most unlikely champion of truth, justice, and so forth. But, galled is my witless, I would defend my turf!

Fool-hearty as the concept was, I was determined to do what it would take–even if it meant jousting and jostling with them, waging a blood-spurting battle to the death. And if I failed (or fouled)– what of it? What’s the worst that could happen? My own demise? (Oh shoot! and I’d been having so much fun!) Incarceration? Apart from leaving Winnie in the lurch (though in the long run she might be better off), yours truly would thereby meet the assurance of three hots and cot.

Alternatively, what if the gang merely swiped my bag of bottles without the slightest interest in mutual violence? What then? Whatever action I took that afternoon would only result in postponing the inevitable.

For on that day, in the damp and blustering February air, I had a vision of ending my remaining days in an area euphemistically dubbed “downtown”– the city’s waterfront dregs, the seedy and seamy “bad section” where any side of the tracks is wrong. There yours truly would blend in with The Homeless, another euphemism for a bum, rank and raggedly-bearded and scruffily- clothed, lice-and-vice-ridden, with all his earthly possessions hastily bundled into the basket of a wobbly shopping cart, rattling and rumbling on the crumbling asphalt of the streets, where battles of the bottle are hourly waged in cheaply alcoholic encounters of the weird kind. Written off and essentially banished to that realm no cartographer has ever bothered to chart, I’ll join my true peers, my scuffed-sole brothers, my misbegotten brethren, whom the rest of society summarily disowns as expendable, disposable, and unredeemable, as we from time to time stoop even lower to pick up some scattered loose change and the occasional returnable deposit bottle, scratching for dimes and begging for quarter(s), as we stagger and stumble through this wonder-famished, breadless blunderworld all the while shamed and defiled, pickled and slimed, and nickeled and nickeled to death.