The Prologue to The Stalker's Tale

 

The Traveler called on Friday afternoon after talking to the rest of our party. We were going to meet at The Sub-Pope’s Flock in a couple of hours to resume our contest. I asked if The Drunkard was going to be resuming his tale, and The Traveler went silent for a moment before responding that, in the interests of not infuriating The Writer, The Drunkard would not be continuing his tale. (The Traveler did not elaborate, but I assume that his thought process went something like this: if The Drunkard continued, The Writer would throw a hissy fit about how we shouldn’t bow to the man’s wishes just because he was the most easily-antagonized out of the lot of us.) I said I would be there and hung up.

To waste some time, I decided that I would stroll around the city gardens before going to the pub. It was a windy day, so I put on my windbreaker, tossed on my baseball cap (the Houston Astros are one of the worst teams in baseball but they were my team, and we must always represent), and walked outside. These walks were a time that I valued immensely, but today, an exploding window shattered any hopes I had of a nice walk. A human form catapulted out of the first floor kitchen and landed on the pavement of the walkway.

I ran over and found, not entirely to my surprise, that it was The Writer sprawled nearly unconscious on the ground. I looked up and saw a Greek woman looking out the space where window had just been. She screamed “malacka!” before walking back into the kitchen. I shook my head; maybe The Writer couldn’t actually control himself and angered people simply by virtue of giving voice to his thought processes. Crouching, I slapped The Writer on the cheek a couple of times.

He blinked rapidly and sat up, then rubbed his head, checked his hand, and said, “Well, at least I’m not bleeding.” He looked up at me. “Oh hello, Narrator. Do I have any glass shards sticking out of me?”

I shook my head. “What happened?”

The Writer stood up with a grunt and dusted off his jeans, then his red button-up. “Stasia and I—Stasia’s the one who kicked me out of the window just then—were discussing relationships, as healthy, sane adults do from time to time, when she said that she hadn’t been in one in a while, and she was starting to feel very lonely.” We started walking. “She mentioned that, when she felt in such a way, it was mostly in the mornings when she woke up; so I said, joking of course, she could always come to my room and I’d keep her company.”

“Ah-huh. Did you mean that? Was your ‘joking’ comment a cop-out, Writer? I think it was.”

The Writer scratched his chin. “Maybe. I’ll have to get back to you. Anyway, I said that I’d keep her company and she started screaming in Greek. When she does that, I usually try to back towards the door, so I can open it up and flee to my room. Well, this time, she was at the door, so I made the mistake of backing towards the windows—thinking that she wouldn’t try anything with the risk of smashing them.” He sighed. “Turns out I was wrong.”

I smacked him on the back. “Well, buck up. You don’t have glass in you and we’re about to go hear another story. I was going to head into town, take a meander around the gardens for about half an hour before heading to the pub. Would you like to go?”

The Writer looked back at his block’s kitchen, at the glowering Greek woman who had reappeared at the window frame, and said, “I think it would do me some good, yeah.”

It was a cool afternoon in early October. The Writer and I walked down the footpath discussing who we thought would be the next person to give storytelling a shot.

“Personally,” I said, “I don’t really care who it is. I’m just having a good time sitting back and listening to what everyone has going on in their mind.”

“You are aware that you’ll have to take a turn as well.”

I nodded. “Of course, but until that time, I shall do what I do best: observe and report.”

The Writer cocked an eyebrow. “Report? To whom?”

“Why, my readers.”

The Writer scratched his head. “Sorry?”

“I’m writing a blog, you see.”

“Oh dear Lord. You’re writing a blog about this?”

“Of course,” I said. “It’s a rather monumental time in my life; people want to know what’s going on.”

“Your parents don’t count as people.”

“There are others reading.”

The Writer kept his eyebrow cocked. It was very disconcerting, seeing that a person could hold a position like that for so long. “Like,” I said, “my friends back home.”

“I guess you’re sure that you at least have a loyal readership. Tell me: who do you think will be the next to go?”

“Well, I think that—Dog!” We passed by a woman in her early thirties who was walking her cocker spaniel, who was, in turn, pulling at his leash trying to get to us from the other side of the path. I came just short of leaping at the dog, but managed to control myself and walked over, scratched it behind its ears and made vague growly sounds at it. After a few seconds, I collected myself, stood up, and said, “Sorry,” to the woman. “Missing my dog back home.”

She smiled and said, “Oh, no worries,” and pulled the dog away, its tail furiously wagging in the air.

“Are you going to do that every time you see a dog?” The Writer asked.

“Hopefully not,” I said.

“Good. They’re not worth it. Attention whores. Cats are much better. You have to earn their respect, not like those blasted mutts who will love anyone who feeds them.” The Writer then spat on the ground.

My guess is that dogs never liked The Writer.

“Anyway,” I said, “if I had to guess, then I’d say The Student. It’s between him, The Stalker, and myself, and I think we’re all a bit afraid of what The Stalker has to say, so he’ll go last in the first round. That leaves The Student and myself: Now, given the choice between the two, who would you pick?”

The Writer wrinkled up his nose. “Considering you said that your goal was to observe and report—which sounds just slightly less frightening than anything The Stalker has to say on a daily basis, might I add—then I would have to go with The Student. Personally, I’m not thrilled about any of you going.”

Now it was my turn to arch an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Yes. You see,” he said, taking a deep breath. “You see, it’s not that any of you are disreputable individuals—except for The Drunkard, who may be the most scandalous and crass man I have ever had the misfortune of meeting—it’s more that you are all, how shall I put it?” He paused. “Yes,” he said, “that’s it. None of you have any balls.”

I coughed. “What? What the Hell does that mean?”

“Oh,” he said, “not in the literal sense. Though you might not have testicles; I haven’t checked. It’s just that you all seem to be literary eunuchs. You don’t shock the listener to their core and make them question the society around them. Hearing the end of one of your stories is like listening to Beethoven’s Ninth more than once. It’s boring.”

I wanted to reach out and smack The Writer. I could take insults against my character; I could even embrace them, as they had the potential to have a kernel of truth. But to attack the Ninth! To attack any music! Music never did anything to The Writer! Music didn’t make him into the grade-A prick he was today. “How can you say that?” I asked.

“What?”

“That horrible thing. Insinuating that the Ninth is boring! My God, man, people have been shot for saying less heinous things than that.”

“Oh come now,” he said. “Next you’ll tell me that you find Dvořák intellectually stimulating.”

I’d never sputtered before. It was an odd feeling. My mind came to a halt, started back up, then came to a halt again. I knew then how my old car must have felt in the mornings. “Yes,” I finally managed. “I do.”

“Pah!” responded The Writer.

“What do you like, then?”

“I only listen to true genius,” he said. “Like Philip Glass.”

I turned my head to one side. “The guy who made a soundtrack consisting of car honks and electrical wires buzzing?”

The Writer cleared his throat. “If you are referring to the tour de force that is Koyaanisqatsi, then yes. Beethoven is an ant compared to Glass.”

I seriously considered throwing The Writer into the River Stour—as we had made our way into the Westgate Gardens at this time—but I remembered what I read in a Zen Buddhist class about anger. I made a mental image of The Writer babbling on about Phillip Glass, stuck him in a Mason jar, and, instead of firing a gun at the jar—which is what the text recommended—I ordered a NAPALM strike on it. Then, back in reality, I sat down on a bench to catch my breath and calm down.

“Are you okay?” asked The Writer.

I nodded.

The Writer sat down next to me and said, “Excellent idea. It’s been a while since I relaxed in a park.”

Thankfully, he didn’t try to continue our conversation about music, and we sat in contemplative silence. This was the first time I had been in the Westgate Gardens, and the weather had changed its mind and become sunny. A British friend of mine once said that an Englishman’s garden is his castle; if you were to apply that to the Westgate Gardens, then you’d have a castle on par with Camelot. The Gardens were carefully and closely manicured; flowers seemed to be chosen to create an almost masterpiece of color to complement the natural pastoral beauty of the trees drooping over the River Stour, the green grass (I’d noticed that Kent’s grass was almost uniformly a deep, rich green, and that no one seemed to have to work to get the grass in such a condition), and the ducks floating along the river, quacking and flocking towards elderly people sitting on the banks. Being in that place and simply watching people go by made me almost thankful that The Writer had launched into one of the more pretentious tirades I was to hear that year. The Writer shifted in his seat, cleared his throat, and said, “Really, if you listen to ‘Pruit Igoe’ and compare it to the choral movement of the Ninth, then you’ll—”

“Shut up,” I said. A mallard and its mate floated along the river, quacking. A breeze rustled the trees. I didn’t want The Writer to pollute the moment with his yammering.

We made our way to The Sub-Pope’s Flock after a half hour spent in silence. On our way during the five-minute walk, the sky became dark with clouds and rain pelted the earth. I’ve heard that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow, and I’m surprised that the English do not have thousands for rain. I’d been here less than a month and I’d already come up with thirty. This rain, the one with the heavy drops that seemed to hurl themselves from the sky like kamikaze pilots and only seemed to appear on days where the wind could knock over an old woman, was what I called “invictarain.” (So The Writer and I dashed through the High Street, through the invictarain, dodging French children left and right, and barreled into the pub in record time.

We shook ourselves to get rid of some of the rain, went to the bar, ordered, and joined The Stalker at the usual table. “Stalker,” said The Writer, “do you ever go places other than this corner?”

The Stalker slurped his customary cider. “Of course I do. Sometimes I go to the corner in the opposite side of the room. Wherever the wind takes me, you might say.” He took another slurp. “Judging from your presence, am I to assume that we are meeting for a story-telling session?”

“What?” I asked. “Did The Traveler not give you a call?”

“Yesterday, I received a call from an unknown number at half-past three—thirteen seconds into the minute, to be precise—and I threw the phone into the river,” he said. He followed up with a slurp.

“That…” I said.

“Odd of you to do, don’t you think?” asked The Writer.

“Not at all. There are individuals whom I do not wish to speak to. When receiving a call from an unknown number, I find myself in the precarious position of having to do away with that phone number, lest my enemies find me.”

The Writer and I nodded. There was a silence filled only by the music playing from the jukebox and The Stalker’s slurp. I thought about bringing this up with The Traveler, that we should perhaps meet at a time when there are other people in the pub. Not that I was afraid of The Stalker, but there were times when I thought that I should be spending my time with someone else.

The door opened and there was a thump. The Writer and I turned around and saw The Student laying face-up on the floorboards at the foot of the door. He was giggling to himself and, even from across the room, I could tell that he smelled like a distillery. “Oh Hell,” I said, getting up and walking towards him. “Hey Student, hard day?”

“It’s been a hard day’s night,” he crooned, “and I’ve been driiiiiiiinkin like a drunk!” He then burst into another fit of the giggles.

I sighed and dragged him to the floor next to our table.

“Hey, mate,” said the bartender, “I know you guys come in here a lot, but you have to take care of that one if you want to stay in. I won’t have anyone getting sick on the rug.”

The Student continued humming away to himself on the floor, and I walked over to the bar. “No worries,” I said, “we shall. Do you have any green tea or juice?”

“We’ve got orange juice.”

“Splendid. I’ll take four bottles of orange juice.”

The bartender put the bottles on the counter. I paid and brought them to The Student. I put one next to him and said, “It’s rum.”

He drank the bottle in ten seconds and let out a mighty belch.

I nodded and turned to The Writer. “Give him a minute or two and then give him the second bottle.”

The Writer sighed. “Must we take care of this imbecile? Really, it’s his fault for indulging too much. A wise man would know their limits and not surpass them—especially at two in the afternoon when—”

“Shut up and do it,” I said.

The Drunkard entered and asked the bartender what time it was. The bartender answered and The Drunkard said, “Fuck it, it’s past noon. I’ll have a whiskey.” He walked to the table. Today, he wore a very interesting shirt that had a picture of a hammer smashing a typewriter. On it were the words, “Fuck Writing.” “What’s up with him?” he asked.

“Dunno,” I said. “He walked in and—”

“Fell in, more like it,” said The Writer.

“Fell in. He fell in the pub like this, reeking to high heaven and shouting Beatles lyrics.”

“Son of a bitch,” said The Drunkard. His face fell and you could see some speck of sympathy on his face—both eyebrows went up, he shook his head just a little bit from side to side, and his mouth went downturned for a moment. He bent down next to The Student and said, “Hey, buddy.”

“She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” responded The Student.

The Drunkard nodded and patted The Student on the head. “Fuckin women, right, man?”

“Damn straight, chum,” said The Student. “Buddy ole pal o’ mine.”

The Drunkard noted the bottles of orange juice and nodded. He grabbed the one The Writer was holding and said, “Here, man. This’ll help.”

The Student grabbed the juice and downed it.

The Drunkard stood up, took his whiskey, and sat down next to me. “Poor bastard. You know, Writer, if The Student ever decided to write poetry, you’d find yourself vastly outclassed.”

“Oh?” Asked The Writer. “Oh? And how, pray tell, do you figure—do you reckon—that?” He grew redder and redder.

“First off: Your stories are crap. People want to read about the time it all works out in the end instead of when it all falls apart—”

“But that’s not real!”

“Bullshit. People need hope and happiness wherever they can get it. And The Student there, he’s probably got enough of the romantic in him to blow you out of the fucking water. My bet is that, after the first story, we’ll see a bit of that.”

The Writer snorted. “My ass.”

“Not your ass,” said The Drunkard. “My ass. You couldn’t write a happy ending if you had to.”

“That sounds like a challenge.”

“Might be. Might be.”

The two stared at each other as if they were Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in a spaghetti western.

The Traveler walked in, ordered a stout, saw The Student and asked, “What’s up with him?”

“Women,” responded The Drunkard.

“Ah.” The Traveler nudged The Student—who gurgled in response—with his foot. “Chin up, buddy.”

“Chin up. Why? Why be happy if you’re so fucking lonely?”

“No, really, chin up. If you puke like that, then you’ll probably choke and die on your own vomit. You’re a pretty cool dude, but the only people who can do that are rock stars; and you’re no rock star.”

The Student scooted his way back against the wall and managed to prop himself up to a slouched sitting position. “There,” he said.

“Good man,” said The Traveler. He sat down at one of the remaining chairs, took off his ball cap, and said, “Okay. Who’s next?”

“I will go,” said The Stalker.

A collective shiver went down everyone’s collective spine. The Traveler, who had been taking off his jacket, put it back on. The Drunkard downed his whiskey and went to ask for another one. The Student belched. The Writer, after handing The Student another juice, muttered a prayer in Hebrew. It was as I feared: With The Student out of commission, the only person ready to tell a story was The Stalker. (True, I could have easily said something like, “Nonsense, my good man, I shall be the one who goes today; for I have a story of such thrilling, swashbuckling adventure that” etc. etc. etc. until someone stopped me. I could have said that, but I really, really wanted to be the last one to take his turn this round.)

“Ah,” said The Traveler, once The Drunkard had returned to the table with three glasses of whiskey. “Well, do you have anything to say before we start?”

The Stalker looked at us for a few seconds before he spoke. “No.”

After My First Seminar

After my seminar the next day, I found myself in a café with a group of British students. One of them, a tall man named Errol, spoke with an accent would could simply call ‘educated’ and he seemed like a living member of Victorian aristocracy. There were times when I expected him to say, “By Jove, I believe you’re right,” or some other sort of thing that would seem dredged from the pages of Sherlock Holmes. In fact, because of this man’s presence, the entire group seemed to be made more British by the man’s aura that projected a bygone era of Empire.

“So tell me,” he said, “how are things in the Colonies?”

The rest of the group fell completely silent. I had to be impressive. (Especially since I had made the mistake of falling for one of the girls—auburn hair, green eyes, body of a goddess and—right, sorry, I’ll continue.) I cleared my throat, searched for the right term. How could I express the sense of hope after the last election? The sense that after eight years of being led astray and being dragged around by nincompoops with corporate expense accounts, everything might just be okay—even if we were in the midst of a horrible recession, and even if there were a substantial amount of loud, pissed off people with guns convinced they were seeing the next Hitler? Yes, it was quite a task, and—“Good,” I blurted.

The Brits nodded. “Ah,” said one of them. “That’s nice.”

Shit. Good? Good? The girl turned away from me to a man who, in his undergrad at Oxford, was on the rowing team. My mind’s eye showed me ruthless banging my head against a nearby white wall in frustration. I looked at the coffee in front of me and desperately wished that it had whiskey in it.

At this point, The Writer entered the café and was, by default, my saving grace. I leapt up, shouted, “Writer!” and beckoned him over with a gregarious wave of my hand. He screwed up his eyebrows under his—new, I guess—gray flat cap, looked behind him, turned back to me, and mouthed, “Me?” I nodded furiously. He ambled his way over, took off his corduroy jacket, and sat down next to me on one of the red sofas. “Everyone,” I said, “this is The Writer.”

Errol asked, “The Writer? Is Writer your surname?”

The Writer grunted. “Never been asked that before.”

“I sincerely doubt that,” continued Errol. “Tell me, is it fashionable to wear corduroy where you come from, or are you just mad?”

His girlfriend, seated next to him on the blue sofa, punched his shoulder. “Stop that, be nice.” She—Dani—was a very nice girl who wore glasses, had blue eyes, and, judging from her continued presence around Errol, had the patience of a saint.

Errol laughed and said, “Just kidding, mate.” He extended his hand, French-cuff shirt extending out from his second-hand RAF flight jacket he wore instead of a coat. His cuff links were Union flags. (As I found out from him later, the flag is not a Union Jack until it flies from a ship at sea. Oh, the things you learn!) “My name’s Errol.”

The Writer showed a bit of tact, shook his hand, and introduced himself all around.

“What do you study, Writer?” asked Dani.

“Ah, my dear,” The Writer said, visibly becoming smug, “I do not study so much as I create. I utilize that creative energy which flows so naturally through the world, capture it, and, like a master potter,” he started miming the act of creating a piece of pottery, “shape it to create what I desire. What the world should be. I,” he paused, took a breath, “am a Writer.”

If The Drunkard were here, The Writer would probably have been unconscious after speaking in italics.

“What a twat,” said the Oxford man. Suddenly, he went up in my esteem. (But still, did I seriously say good?)

“Hey,” I said to The Writer, “how about going and getting a drink?”

“But I just got here.”

“Exactly, so you’re not attached to staying.”

“Well I—”

“Nonsense, let’s go.” I stood, pulled The Writer up, and said to the Brits, “Well, really nice hanging out with all of you—we’re going to have to do this after next week’s meeting.” I pushed The Writer towards the door and we left the building.

Once we were outside, he said, “Now what the Hell was that about?”

“Are you serious?” I asked, moving towards one of the bars on campus. “All that talk about molding the creative energy like a master potter? Man, you have got to tone it down, you look like a prick.”

He stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I seem like a perfectly erudite individual well attuned to their calling in life. If that’s not confidence, then I don’t know what is.”

“Confidence,” I said, “is being able to talk about what you do without glorifying it and trying to make it seem like you’re some supernatural gift to society. And, come the fuck on,” I said, dodging a group of Chinese students and speaking over them, “you’re speaking in capital letters and italics. No one does that. No man with half a brain should ever, ever do that.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “It worked magnificently back at college.”

“Really? Did it? I think you’re full of shit.”

The Writer blushed a bit. “Well, maybe not all of the time.” He fell silent. We crossed the road to the college in which the bar was located. Entering the doors, he said, “I can see your point, and I’ll try to be a bit more subtle in the future.”

“Thank you. Man,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, “you should just bring a tape recorder some time.”

“That bad?”

“Atrocious.”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” he said, “why did you wave me over? It’s not as if we’re the best of friends and, to be frank, it surprised the hell out of me.”

“Well, how should I put this? They asked me about the States, and, while I was trying to think of a good response that would impress this really attractive girl—”

“The one with the long brown hair?”

“That’s the one. While I was trying to think of a response, some part of me took the reins of my vocal cords and responded with: Good.”

“Good?”

“Yup. Just good. Not even great, or anything about coming out of an eight-year period of xenophobia and fear, but good. Chipper would have been a better word, but I couldn’t even come up with that.”

The Writer winced. “Ouch.”

We entered the bar. It was a place that was trying very, very hard to be a rock music-oriented bar. They played Foo Fighters and that sort of alternative rock that was popular in the 90s. The floor was black tile, all of the chairs and tables were chrome-plated and really, really uncomfortable—except for a few sofas that were black and padded. Generally, before about six o’clock, the bar was empty.

It seems that the Universe would not allow me to have a one-on-one with anyone in my group; any time there was one person with me, another one turned up—usually The Student looking despondent about women. Today was no exception. He sat at the bar, clutching a Guinness for dear life. I nodded at the bar and said to The Writer, “And there is our studious companion. Let’s go join him, shall we?”

The Writer shrugged. At this point, I wasn’t sure about how he felt in regards to the rest of our party, so I took his shrug as a completely noncommittal response. We walked to the bar and sat on either side of The Student. “Howdy, partner,” I said.

The Student looked up at me. Behind his glasses, in those bloodshot eyes, I knew that he’d stumbled upon another taken woman. “Hey.”

“Problems again?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Never fear,” said The Writer, “based on the Law of Averages, you will, eventually, come across someone for whom you have it really bad and they will feel the same. Just a matter of time.”

The Student sighed. “I know what you’re trying to do, and I thank you for the good intention. However, Writer, I suggest that in the future, you just pat someone on the back instead of saying anything.”

The Writer shrugged, ordered a lager, and rested his chin on his palm, looking around the room.

“Cheer up,” I said to The Student, “you’ve got good health, you’re—at least for the moment—not in any sort of money woes since you’ve got family who are willing to help you, you’ve got a group of good friends who are here for you. In fact, I’d say you’ve got it pretty good.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So, how about we play some pool? Get you away from the bar.”

“Oh, I’d rather not play,” he said, “but I’ll watch.”

I ordered my drink. The Writer and I took our beers, set them on one of the circular chrome tables next to the pool table a couple of yards away from the bar, next to the windows looking into the courtyard, and set up the table. “I’ll break,” said The Writer. This was fine with me. I was never good at breaking.

British pool is different than American pool. In the time I have lived in the UK, I have yet to see a pool table with numbered balls. Instead, they have a red set and a yellow set—thankfully the cue ball is the same. The rules for scratches—fouls, as they call it—are slightly different, but, as this is not a manual for the rules of pool, I shall not bore you, Dear Reader, with them. The Writer lined up his shot, studied the triangle of targets, and let loose. With the loud crack of the cue meeting the head ball, the triangle broke apart and The Writer sunk three reds. The yellows scattered around the table at odd angles to the holes. The Writer looked at me, grinned, and shrugged. “Luck, I guess,” he said. He then sunk the rest of the reds in rapid succession. I never got to make a shot.

“Well,” he said, stretching after the five minute game, “that was fun. Up for another one?”

I glared at him.

“That’s a no?”

The Traveler and Religion

Canterbury Cathedral is one of the most impressive buildings that I have seen. If I had to guess why, I would say that it is because the area around it—including the city center—gives off a medieval atmosphere. That’s not to say that there are people dropping dead from the plague left and right—that would be absurd. It is just that one walks around the city center and is surrounded by buildings older than the U.S. by a couple hundred years. I feel sorry for the English, because they are used to this. They are missing out on a legitimate feeling of awe by virtue of living in a country where this is normal. Now, coming from the University’s campus, situated on a hill, the feeling of awe is amplified. The only tall building in view is the Cathedral, and it is quite easy to imagine oneself as a pilgrim on the trek from Oxford or Cambridge or London, or wherever else, clearing a hill and seeing the top of the Cathedral’s tower poking above the town, houses and shops spewing smoke from chimneys.

Then again, I might just be easily impressed.

The grounds of the Cathedral are well-kept, though the building itself is in a nearly constant state of repair—which may be the biggest drawback to being such an old structure. The lawns, courtyards, and gardens are always green and flowering. The grey stone of the Cathedral (those portions which are not hidden behind scaffolding, that is), chiseled by the work of masons over the centuries and decorated with images of kings, saints, and gargoyles, stands as a testament to the importance of religion to humanity over the centuries. If I remember what my professor said from my medieval civilization course, it is a nearly perfect example of what the Gothic architecture was supposed to do: inspire a religious sense of awe in the viewer. Even for someone like myself, who is agnostic at best, the Cathedral does the trick.

Admission is usually £7.50, but as students of the University, The Traveler and I had a free pass in the form of our student IDs. We crossed through the gate, under the carved image of St. Thomas á Becket and made our way into the Cathedral. Adhering to the proper décor of a sense of awe, we kept our conversation to a whisper. “You never struck me as the religious type,” I said to The Traveler, who had been walking around with a very odd, satisfied grin on his face since we passed through the gate.

“I’m not,” he responded.

“Then why do you seem so…” I searched for the word. It eluded me. “With it?”

We passed the tomb of a long-dead bishop.

“There’s something about places of worship,” he said, “and holy sites in general. I can’t really place it. Being religious is the wrong word, since that implies that you have a strict adherence to a singular dogma; being spiritual is the wrong word, since that has a connotation that you go around saying stuff like ‘I am so one with the Deity’ or ‘my chi is really in balance today.’ It’s just…” now it was his turn to search. He stood in front of what I would call the bimah and looked at the podium, the front of which was a golden eagle to represent—I think—John the Evangelist. “Comforting,” he finished. He turned to me, “you know what I’m trying to say?”

I made my way around the choir pews towards the back of the church, where there were around eight stained glass windows depicting miracles. “Not really. I walk into a cathedral like this and I see excessive wealth and the violence perpetrated in the name of God.”

The Traveler thought on this for a bit. “There’s always that, but I would say that such things go into the realm of dogma. I don’t know,” he said, “it’s hard to explain. There’s something that’s separate from that in a place of worship. Something that’s not Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or whatever. Something that just is.”

“That might just be silence,” I said.

“True,” he said. We now stood in front of the place which was the focal point of centuries of pilgrimage, the site where there would have been the shrine to St. Thomas Becket. “That might be what we need most in society: just somewhere where we can go to be quiet and think from time to time. But, then again, it’s a different feeling than I get from just being in a silent place. Take libraries, for example. They’re silent, but I go to a library and I don’t get the same feeling. It’s a fulfilling silence, like you’ve just had a nice warm meal and are looking forward to the cheesecake at desert. That’s what I get out of religion.”

“A warm meal and cheesecake?”

“Funny, isn’t it? Want to go into the gardens?”

“Sure,” I said. We walked out of the cathedral, passed a priest who nodded to us with a welcoming grin—we nodded back. The gardens were neat, tidy, and calming.

“You joke about the warm meal analogy, but that’s the way I see it. A feeling that life’s going to be good after all, that no matter how many times you get down into the doldrums, there’s good in the world, even if it’s just in a nameless silence.” We sat on a bench across from a marker dedicated to an archbishop from the nineteenth century. “I went to a monastery for a week once.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You joined a monastery?”

“No, I just visited for a week. It was free room and board, and I was going through a rough patch—I get those from time to time, where I just feel like the most base, absolute shit on the planet—so I figured I’d give it a shot. There was a British journalist there as well; he stayed in the cell next to mine. We had a vow of silence and everything. Woke up in the morning for Matins, worked in the fields if we felt the need, or just sat around in contemplation. By the second day, the Brit was talking in his sleep, reciting Doctor Who episodes and scores from Premier League matches.”

“And you?” I asked. “Did you walk around with showtunes stuck in your head?”

“No, actually,” he responded. “I meditated about my life. The chanting helped out a lot. I imagined what it would be like to go into a monastery as a young man—cause some of these guys were in their mid-twenties or early thirties—and spend the rest of your life in silence, completely cut off from the rest of the world. The Brit imagined the same thing, I think, but judging from the faces he made at the monks that week, he came to the conclusion that they were insane. I admired them. It takes a lot of self-discipline and -knowledge to know whether or not you can hack it in that sort of condition. I enjoyed that week in the monastery, and I came out of it with a bit of a new perspective on life, but, man, I don’t think I could have done that for my life. At least the Zen monks have koan to think and discuss.”

We fell silent for a while, let the breeze pass by us, listened to the other tourists walk around in their families and chatter to each other in foreign languages. Foreign languages? “Holy shit,” I thought, “I’m a foreigner.” I shivered. “So, a warm meal and self-knowledge,” I said.

The Traveler shrugged. “Yeah. But really, I’d say that, out of all the possible feelings one could have towards religion, that’s not too bad.”

The Epilogue to The Drunkard's Tale

Suddenly, The Drunkard stopped talking and sat back in his seat. He took a swig from his flask, took a drink from the glass in front of him, and started whistling.

“Well?” asked The Traveler.

“Well what?” responded The Drunkard.

The Student leaned forward on the table. “You’re telling me that’s where your story ends?”

“Oh, God no. That would be ridiculous.”

The Writer snorted. “As if you have any idea how to tell a story.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The Writer cleared his throat. “Shall I count off the mistakes you made? No, for that would take far, far too long. I shall, however, say that the entirety of your introduction could have been summed up in no more than two to five sentences instead of the dragging, alcoholism-glorifying dung you threw at us. I mean, really, what was that? Do you expect your audience to slog through such a list without yawning or, worse, chucking your book through a window?”

“And what would you suggest?” said The Drunkard, speaking in a low tone that could only be described as pants-shitting-terrifying. “I instead list off the emotional description one would expect to hear from a Livejournal post from a freshman in high school?”

The Writer matched The Drunkard’s tone as best as he could—which, coming from him, turned into a comical and not at all threatening semi-rumble, “The reader needs some emotion other than the desire to drink.”

“The reader,” responded The Drunkard, “is fully capable of deciding to read something other than the pining love letters of an obsessive, jealous maniac who dumps women because they have the sheer audacity,” he pronounced these words about two times louder than any other, “to wink at a man other than their batshit insane boyfriend.”

“Don’t you dare pretend to be capable of understanding my reasons of—”

“I think,” said The Stalker, cutting through the tension with a steel knife in his voice, “that both of you should stop this bickering before we are thrown out of the pub.” He nodded to the bar, “The bartender is glaring at us and, since you started arguing, the lounge has emptied. Now, as I actually like this corner quite a lot,” he continued, “and would like to return here often, I will say that if the two of you do not stop immediately, you will find several dead rodents in your room over the next two weeks.” He finished speaking with a slurp from his cider.

The bartender nodded to The Stalker and brought over another cider. “Compliments of the house,” he said before walking off.

The Drunkard and The Writer glared at each other with red faces.

“I think,” The Student said, “that the two of you should apologize to one another. Clear the air.”

The two combatants muttered apologies at each other.

“Right,” said The Traveler. “We need to lay some ground rules for the future. First of which being the following: All tales must be finished in one sitting. The tale should not be split up into more than one part unless we are interrupted by an outside force—such as The Interloper. As we have not instituted this rule until now, The Drunkard will be allowed leeway in his tale; he shall be allowed to continue his tale in the manner already proscribed under the agreement that his tale shall not exceed three parts, and each part shall be judged as a singular entity in its own right, without regard to the preceding part. Are we in agreement?”

I, personally, was amazed that The Traveler could exercise such a legalistic turn of mind off the cuff. I would have required at least two days to come up with any sort of rule resembling what he just turned out. That aside, we all agreed to the rule he set forth, as it seemed just and fair for each of us be courteous to the rest and not leave everyone hanging, so to speak.

“Good,” continued The Traveler. “Next, in regards to the criticisms immediately following the telling of a tale: As this is, in theory, an exercise in storytelling, we must treat this contest as a sort of workshop; the ultimate deciding factor—in place of a grade in a workshop class—at the end of a workshop being the final judgment of our party. Now, in a workshop, it is imperative for all involved to be courteous to one another and refrain from personal attacks.”

At this, The Writer and The Drunkard grumbled.

Unfazed, The Traveler continued: “All criticisms immediately following the tale shall be made with the preceding in mind. The tales shall be judged on their own merit, with no pretensions to the belief that there is an all-powerful, overriding definition of what makes a legitimate work of literature. If a tale is a fantasy tale, then it shall be judged with that in mind.”

“But fantasy is—” started The Writer.

“I repeat,” said The Traveler, using a tone of voice usually reserved for angry fathers speaking to children who will not stop complaining, “all tales shall be judged without literary pretensions. None of us—especially you, Writer—are Hemmingways or Dickenses or Rowlings or Tolkiens or, etc. etc. ad infinitum. All tales shall be judged to the merits of whatever genre they are in. If a member of our party has an inherent hatred of a genre, then they will refrain from speaking following the telling of a tale, so as to avoid any unnecessary criticism based on biases. I’ve been in several workshops and—”

“What?” spat the Writer. “When?”

Had you not seen the vein poking out of his forehead at that moment, you would have not known that The Traveler was annoyed at the interruption. “Five years is a while to be in college, and I’ve been in enough Creative Writing classes to know your type, Writer. You’re a bad influence for anyone who is putting the Creative before the Art of Writing, if you get my drift.” Indeed, we did. The capital letters were quite audible. “Now, the best writing classes I’ve been in—the ones that produce stories that have been published—are the ones that act in such a manner, the ones that place respect for the author and respect for the story above all else. Are we all in agreement with the suggestions I have put forth?”

Everyone but The Writer agreed, and he eventually nodded and grumbled the affirmative.

“Good, then we shall abide to these rules to the best of our abilities,” finished The Traveler. “As we have all finished our drinks, we have the option of remaining here or going our separate ways and adjourning our meeting for the time being.”

“I think,” said The Writer, “that I need to go to my café for a while.” What he didn’t say was the words “you troglodytes,” though we could all see that he wanted to say such by the contorted, red face he was making. At any rate, he stood, drained the rest of his glass, put on his flat cap, and left.

“And I,” said The Student, “shall head back to campus. Maybe the cleaners have finished my flat and I can cook before the Chinese turn it back into a swamp.” He put on his jacket and left the pub.

“Drunkard,” I said, “are you sticking around?”

He shot a quick glance at The Stalker and said, “No, I’m… uh, going to head off to… somewhere else. You know. Things to do and whatnot.” He practically bolted out of the pub.”

The Traveler sighed, finished his drink and said to The Stalker and I, “I was thinking about poking around the Cathedral for a bit. I haven’t been in there yet, and have heard it’s absolutely gorgeous inside. You two want to come?”

The Stalker slurped from his drink. “I think,” he said, “that I shall stay here for the time being. Get my thoughts in order.” He pulled out his laptop, started it up, and immediately put in his earbuds.

I turned to The Traveler and shrugged. “Guess that means I’m coming with you.”

The Drunkard's Tale

ITN wasn’t going to win any awards for journalism. Our most controversial and important article in the last year had been on the subject of the university’s landscaping. Specifically: Were the hedges out of control? Not that I hadn’t tried. My articles were hard-hitting; they exposed what was going on behind the scenes, where no one really wanted to look. For example: During one homecoming celebration, I slipped the Dean of Students some acid and showed his latent homosexual tendencies when he—voluntarily—dressed up like Marilyn Monroe and humped the county sheriff. Of course, that one didn’t make it into the paper. The editor said it was too risqué, that the dean would probably shut us down. Of course, I then suggested we use it as blackmail leverage to get more funding, but, once again, the pansies on the editorial board backed down.

Still, they knew I was the only one on staff who wasn’t doing their job just to pad their résumé. I cared. I knew what good media practices could do. I wanted to be like the guys who busted Nixon. I wanted to change the world, to show people that they had a choice in life. That they didn’t have to be stepped on day after day by the authorities. The press, when it’s not in it just to sell papers, is a tool for the people, the only way they can have their voices heard in an intelligent way. Of course, try telling that to the suckers at Newsweek, or, God help you, the putzes at CNN or FOX News.

So, come election time and when the full staff is back at the presses—being on a university paper means that you are held in thrall by summer and winter breaks—who do they turn to in order to get a good look at what’s going to go down on the election trail? Yours truly. Of course, the editor approaches me with a certain amount of fear in his eyes—I was suffering from a massive hangover that day, the result of a night with a Beta Phi and a bottle of tequila, and was in deep thought that I had contracted crabs as a result of said contact with said sorority member—and broached the subject with me. I’d learned that the only way to deal with an editor-in-chief, regardless of whether or not they’re of a magazine or a newspaper, is to treat them like the shit they are. The scum-sucking, brown-nosing schmucks whose main concern is to keep the newspaper selling ad space, and this patsy was the worst of them. So, naturally, I treated him like he was the worst. I shit on his desk once after he struck a paragraph from an editorial of mine on the war. It was more out of principle than anything else: the paragraph was total crap. I listen to this scum’s offer, tell him to wait one second. I pull over a trash can, puke into it, then say, “You give me a spending allowance, then I’ll go.”

He can’t believe me, says that in all his career (career my ass, he’d been EOC one year, and before that he worked at a desk in one of the dorms) no reporter had the gall to demand an expense account.

“Ah,” I said, “you shit-kicker, it’s not an expense account. Truly, that would be absurd. I just want two grand up front so I can afford modest accommodation and sustenance along my merry way. Don’t want your star reporter to starve, do you?” I pulled the trash can close again, puked.

The insect gagged and agreed. That’s why I didn’t have any respect for him: he gave in too easily. All you had to do was say something that sounded even a little bit like logic and the man would cave. If he fought tooth and nail for that meager expense fund the paper had, then maybe I wouldn’t have puked in front of him or shit on his desk. But, there you have it; there are some people in this world that stick to their guns, and some people who don’t. He gave me two grand and a three week deadline. It was September first right now, and I was to have the article in the offices of ITN by the beginning of October, when the editor figured that the election circuit would be winding down—not that I gave a damn about deadlines. Deadlines are for people whose editors have a pair of testicles to their name. I was a senior at this point, one class away from graduation. The university had given me the shaft and essentially forced me to only have one class in my final semester, leading to my almost omnipresence at either the ITN offices or the bar across the street in which I worked and wrote. I arranged with my professor to have a creative project for my grade in the class, and managed to wiggle my way out of work for a month and a half—turns out that they’d make more money without me there to scare off customers.

After I got done with all the administrative bull, I took the check from the editor, cashed it, and got in my car to start my way. My car was an old Chrysler Lebaron that was constantly on its last legs. Emily, as I named the car, didn’t take to starting up and expressed her discomfort by backfiring five times in rapid succession, sounding like a burst from a machine gun. I loved her for her eccentricities. I drove her off campus, down the only road into town, onto the only road in town (Eldritch, Tennessee was a town that didn’t even have a stoplight to its name) and into the only liquor store in town. The county was a dry county by law, but the district representative was from Eldritch and owned the liquor store, so, of course, allowances were made.

The manager and workers knew me by name, knew what I liked, and how much of what I wanted just by looking at me. If I came in slouched over with bloodshot eyes, they knew I wanted vodka. If I came in with bags under my eyes and looking pale, like I had a weight to rival Atlas, then they knew I wanted whiskey. However, today I came in whistling in joy and greeted them in a singsong voice. This they had never seen.

“Now,” said Rob, the manager in the early shift, “I have no idea what we can give you to make your day better.”

I walked to the counter and plopped down my wad of cash totaling two grand. “Fill her up, my boy.”

“That money’s not dirty, is it?”

“Rob, give me credit. I only take money from those who don’t deserve to have it in the first place; and those who would willingly give me two thousand dollars sure as hell don’t deserve to have two thousand dollars in the first place. So,” I said, “fill her up.”

And friends, I had such a cornucopia of booze that Dionysus would be in shock. A gallon of Jack Daniel’s and Southern Comfort each. A case of half-Grey Goose and half-Smirnoff. I had such a wide variety of malt liquor that I could not begin to describe it in anything resembling list form without completely losing your interest. I had the best Scotch I could find, and then, for balance the worst Scotch I could find. I made my way to the exotic, high-alcohol beers, took a look at the selection, and bought it all. Since I was a loyal customer and was spending so much, Rob gave me a fantastic discount that, essentially, had me buying double what I would have been otherwise. About the only thing I didn’t get was wine and tequila. Tequila since it is the devil’s piss, and wine because what I had in mind for the trip was nothing that would justify wine.

We carted the lot out to my car, hoisted it into the trunk and the back seat, and wiped our brows. I still had a twenty left. “Anything else?” asked Rob.

I thought for a moment. That twenty could get me twenty hefty meals from Taco Bell, or a bottle of champagne for when I finished my plan. I scratched my chin—which at this time, sported a fantastic goatee—and came to the conclusion that I could easily purloin champagne where I was going. “No, Rob,” I said, “I think I’ll keep the twenty. Man’s got to eat somehow, am I right?”

Rob nodded. “Right on, man.” Rob may have been a pusher in his own right, but he was an ethical one. He wouldn’t force you to spend your last cent on his product, but he wouldn’t mind if you did. Ask me, that’s the difference between a legal drug like alcohol and an illegal drug like… well, most anything else. That’s also why I didn’t touch the other stuff: It’s easier to get off the hook with a bottle of Budweiser in your hand than it is with a joint.

Rob and I did our handshake. It’s a special relationship, the one between a liquor store owner and his favorite client. “Be seeing you on the news, Rob,” I said.

“Of course.”

# # #

The first beer on the road is a special one, so I made it a special beer. It was a brew gleaned from the trace remains of alcohol on a cup from, I think, a pharaoh’s tomb. Wherever it came from, the contents of the bottle were delicious. There was definitely some grape in there, as well as some hints of honey on top of the usual barley and hops. What was more important was that it was powerful and delivered a hell of a kick. “Em,” I said, patting the dashboard, “if we make it out of this trip alive, I’m taking you to the car wash.”

I backed out of the parking lot and started down the two-lane roads until I reached the Interstate. Now, if I had been coming from somewhere like Knoxville, then I would have been fucked. There are cops infesting I-40 from Crossville to Knoxville, just waiting from some drunk yokel going to get his kicks in the closest thing to a metropolis he’s ever seen. I, however, was not a yokel, nor was I planning on going to East Tennessee any time in the near future, for it’s one of those places you should avoid like the plague. The accent grates on your ear worse than country music or yodeling ever could and blowing up an abortion clinic is seen as a form of legitimate political protest. Aside from the University, an oasis of thought in the madness, there’s nothing for a discerning man like myself in that direction.

I popped the cap on another one of the ancient beers. The road twitched a bit in front of me. It didn’t swim, but there was a definite twitch. I blinked a couple of times and checked the alcohol percentage on the bottle. 20%. Stronger than wine. Fuckin pharaohs knew how to party. I put Emily on cruise control, took another swig, and steadied my hands on the wheel. The road could twitch all it wanted, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to. What I was going to do was check my dashed-up itinerary. I reached in the back, knocked aside a couple of Jack Daniel’s bottles and took a glance. The candidate was first scheduled to appear in a city called Murfreesboro, a little less than an hour south of Nashville. I could get there in about that time, if I wanted to rush it. And, brother, I didn’t.

A very harsh sound came at me from in front of the car. “Fuck!” I shouted, spinning the wheel to the right and just avoiding a semi-truck that had been blaring its horn at me. Now the road swam. I drove another mile and finished the beer when I passed a hitchhiker on the side of the road. Emily’s brakes hadn’t been changed in what would have been eight years, but damned if they didn’t act like pieces of high performance engineering. I left skid marks that went about a quarter mile, then I put the car into reverse and stopped in front of the kid. I poked my head out, turned towards him, and squinted into the sunlight. “Where you going, kid?”

“Murfreesboro,” he shouted. He stood about six feet tall, had feathery blond hair, wore a black suit, carried a black duffel bag, and was just about the ugliest son of a bitch I’d ever seen.

I opened the door, staggered out, and walked up to him. He was virtually standing on the grass at the side of the Intestate, and when I approached, he almost tumbled into the fence marking the border of someone’s tree-lined farm. “Stand still,” I said. “I’m not in my right mind.” I staggered up. “My right mind’s back in my apartment,” I said, belching out laughter.

He let out a crooked grin. “Mister, you smell like booze.”

“Yup,” I said, “there’s a very good reason for that. Hung over. Know the best way to cure a hangover, kid?”

“Mister, I’ve never drank before on account of its being—”

“Shut up. You start drinking again. Thus, in the spirit of good health, I am drinking again.” I looked him up and down. “You’re an ugly son of a bitch, you know that?”

He scratched his head.

“How old are you?”

“Well, I reckoned that I’m probably twenty-one or –two. Mr. Chang, the Census man what got chased off the farm by Mr. Gamble didn’t tell me my age, but he—”

“Old enough to drink, and you never done it?”

“Well, Mr. Gamble only drank after watching me on the plow all day, and then he’d start shouting about the gumment, so I never been that interested in drinking, and so—”

“All right,” I said, “shut up. Let’s get in the car so we don’t attract attention having a chat on the side of the Interstate.” I started walking back and he picked up his duffel and followed. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Cloyd, Mister.”

“Well, Cloyd, can you drive?” I opened the trunk, tossed the duffel on top of a couple crates of vodka.

“Dale let me drive his truck, but that was a few weeks ago, and I think I remember, but it didn’t look nothing like this an—”

I shut the trunk. “Same thing. Press the pedals, turn the wheel. You seem like a reasonably intelligent man, I’m sure you can handle it.” I opened the passenger’s side door and tossed a few bottles of whisky in the back seat before sitting down.

Cloyd got in the driver’s side and whistled. “Gosh, mister, you got a lot of alcohol in here.”

“Sure do, my friend. It’s a celebration.”

“Oh boy!” he said. “What for?”

“The political demise of a charlatan and scoundrel whose goal is the governor’s mansion. Now, this celebration may be a bit premature, but I assure you, it shall not be in vain.”

“No kidding?” Cloyd said. “I don’t know what a charlatan is. Is that a Frenchman?”

I laughed. “Yeah. To the French!” I shouted, raising a bottle of whisky and taking a swig.

“Apple used to tell me about the French. He said that they ate horses and snails and drank wine and did the sex about eight times a day.”

“I…” That was definitely a new one. “Apple? Are you from a commune?”

Cloyd scratched his head. “What?”

I leaned over and turned the key in the ignition. “Let’s get moving, Cloyd.”

He put his foot on the pedal and Emily lurched to a start. It was a little too much for me, and I belched. One of those belches that, if it were just a little bit harder, would have turned into a stream of vomit. “Try to go a little smoother, Cloyd. All this fun is going to make me get sick.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry, mister.” To my surprise he did go a lot smoother. The car, actually, ran better than it ever did with me. “Say,” he said, after a minute or two of silence, “did you mean what you said earlier about me being smart?”

“Sure I did,” I said, taking another drink from the bottle. If this guy were as dumb as he seemed, then he was either stoned, retarded, or from a sheltered life in the lovey-dovey world of some hippie commune. He didn’t stink and he wasn’t so bad off as to be retarded, so I was pretty sure the poor bastard was from a commune. Maybe not The Farm, but it wouldn’t surprise me, someone leaving that place. I did a story about The Farm once: it ended up with me setting fire to their crops and running away in the middle of the night. I never got along with hippies.

“Well gosh! I wish Apple were here to hear that! He always said I was dumb as a big bag of rocks, ‘cept that rocks could pull their own weight and I couldn’t,” he said, a look of either pain or indigestion crossing his face. Yep, he had to have come form a collective; kicked off for being too stupid, probably. Heartless, gutless hippies. “Tossed him by the wayside, I did. I kind of miss him, though. Apple had some great stories. He had this one about a fella named Mack Beth—which I always thought was a strange name for a guy to have—and him going all crazy and seeing knives and spots and witches.”

“The spot was Lady Macbeth,” I said.

“Gosh!” Cloyd said, getting so excited he stamped his foot on the gas pedal and sending the car jerking forwards. He looked at me and said, “Oh, sorry, mister. But you know that story? How?”

“Everyone knows that story, pal. It’s Shakespeare. Macbeth. ‘Out, damn spot!’ ‘Double, double, toil, and trouble.’ ‘Lay on, Macduff.’ Fucking Macbeth, man.”

“Well gosh, I never heard it.”

Those bastard hippies didn’t even teach the kids Shakespeare. How could they expect anyone to get through life without knowing a bit of Shakespeare? It was downright uncivilized. I found I had to take a drink in order to quell the rage rising within me. “Fucking hippies,” I muttered.

“What’s that, mister?”

“Nothing. So tell me, Cloyd, why are you going to Murfreesboro? It’s not exactly a tourist destination.”

“Ah well I’m not going there for to be a tourist, mister. I’m going to go find my dad.”

“And your dad’s in Murfreesboro?”

“Nope, Apple told me he’s in Nashville, but the Silvers—they were this Jewish family that I stayed with for a week and had a great big honking meal with—said that there was a train that went from Murfreesboro up to Nashville and that I could make life easier on myself if I went that way, so—”

“Okay, take a breath,” I said. The kid was panting and apparently finding it very hard to get all of his ideas out at once. “Tell you what Cloyd, you can stick with me as I make my way around Middle Tennessee. As part of my goal, I just happen to have to make it up to Nashville—mostly because this pig is going to be campaigning there. Then again, there are a few girls I haven’t seen in a while and, God willing, they’re still in Nashville.” I took another swig from the rapidly-emptying bottle. “Whaddya say?”

“Well gosh,” he said, “that’s about the nicest thing a person’s offered and it sure would be nice to have someone to pal around with now that I tossed Apple away after he made me leave the Silvers.” I considered the possibility that Cloyd was completely insane, but then again, here I was with a liquor store in my car and going on my way to ruin the campaign of a gubernatorial candidate, so did I really have any room to talk?

“Glad to hear it, Cloyd. We shall be a great team. One for the ages. One day, I might let you drink some of the pharaoh beer. But not today. Today,” I said, screwing the lid back onto the Jack, “that’s all for my inaugural journey.” I took another pharaoh beer from the pack and popped the cap. “How bout some tunes, Cloyd?”

“Sure! Whatever you say, mister—say, what’s your name?”

“Yudavitch. Omar Yudavitch.” I liked Cloyd, but my mom always told me never to give your name to a hitchhiker, and we must always listen to our mothers.

“Omar Yudavitch. Okay. Whatever you say Omar Yudavitch.”

“Just Omar.”

“Wow, that makes it a lot easier.”

I turned on the radio, and one of the stations was playing “Looking Out My Back Door” by CCR. “Ah,” I said, “great tune. Great. Tune.”

“I’ve heard this before,” said Cloyd. “Dale was playing it when he almost ran me over with his truck.”

I took the opportunity presented by the ensuing lull in conversation—Cloyd howled along with the lyrics as best as he could—to think about exactly what I would be doing to this schmuck who had the audacity to pretend that he was a God-fearing individual with the People first in mind. I’d never been one for political protests. As a rule, I found that any time a large group of people marched in unison chanting things, my mind went to Nuremburg or Soviet military parades—not the Civil Rights marches. Up until the past couple of years, I had believed that politics should be discussed in groups of three or four over coffee or beer; but after seeing what havoc could be wrought by those in power, I decided that acts of gleeful prankage were the only things that could turn the tide of rising idiocy in this country.

As the next Creedence song came on—“Fortunate Son,” appropriately enough—I thought about this guy’s track record. He was a vocal member of a fundamentalist Baptist church based out of Memphis and had been sighted at a rally held by the church at which the leader of the church stated that AIDS was the scourge of God upon those who were not clean in His sight. (I thought about how fucked up our country was that hearing something like that come out of the mouth of a clergyman wasn’t that shocking.) He owned a construction company that routinely hired illegal immigrants (this coming from the man whose platform was based on punishing those employers who hired illegal aliens) and intimidated—and, on one occasion, badly injured—union workers. He presented himself as a good head of a moral family; I knew—in the Biblical sense—both of his daughters when they went through Cumberland Rift University on their way to Knoxville. (I wasn’t alone. They had quite the night of debauchery in Eldritch.)

In short, everything this man said about his life was grade-A, USDA choice bullshit. And me, I hated bullshitters. The only people who deserved to bullshit, in my opinion, were journalists—and that was only if they had a good reason to.

“So Mr. Yudavitch,” said Cloyd, “where’s Murfreesboro?”

Suddenly, I realized that the trip would be even harder than I thought.

The Prologue to The Drunkard's Tale

A couple of days later, we all met in The Sub-Pope’s Flock to attempt to start off where we were before The Interloper’s tale of nationalism and racism. It was a Monday around two o’clock, and the only one of us who had had a seminar was The Writer. As such, most of us were in the pub for a while before he arrived with the most exasperated look I believe I had ever seen on a man’s face. He walked to the bar, leaned forward on it, and said, “Whiskey. I don’t care what kind, I just need a whiskey to restore my faith in humanity.” He got a Jameson and sat down at our table.

“What’s wrong?” asked The Traveler.

The Writer knocked back his whiskey and said, “The professor actually asked what a story is.”

The Stalker jotted something down in a brown leather-bound notebook. The Traveler cocked an eyebrow. The Student did the same. The Drunkard tilted his head to the side. “What?” he asked.

The Writer leaned forward on the table, took off his brown flatcap and wriggled out of his corduroy jacket. “I’ll tell you what she said. This is verbatim, mind you, ‘If I were to ask you what a story is, what would you say?’ So, this being a Master’s class, I answered that it is a tool to change the world, that the word ‘story’ is indeed a condescending term that should only be applied to filth like Anne Rice and Dean Koontz; I was about to go on further with this train of thought, for the moment had taken me to heights in which I had not dwelled since my time of being an editor, but she cut me short.

“‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s all well and good, but what is a story?’ I blinked. I answered the question, or so I thought. But no, she then proceeded to define plot, character, and action. Gentlemen,” said the Writer, “I am in Creative Writing 101. And that is why I was in desperate need of whiskey.”

We nodded, unspoken went the sentiment that truly, his life was in shambles.

“I’ve got a journalism class tomorrow,” said The Drunkard. “I wonder if they’ll ask us what an editorial is.”

“More likely,” said The Traveler, “they’ll ask you, flask in hand, how to stave off the impending demise of the newspaper industry. How was London?”

“Oh,” said The Stalker, slurping his cider again, “I’m sure they found some, ah, oddities that one would not find in any guidebook. Broccoli soup, for example?”

The Drunkard leapt up from his chair, pointed at The Stalker, and shouted, “You stop whatever the fuck it is you’re doing, kid. You hear me? I don’t know how the fuck you keep finding out what’s going on in—”

“I have my ways.”

The Drunkard sat back down, pale.

The Student cleared his throat. “Um, I’m sure you’ll find out one way or another fairly soon. So,” he said, putting his hands on the table, “shall we continue in our contest, or leave it festering in the shadow of The Interloper?”

“Rightly said,” said The Traveler. “Drunkard, I believe it was your turn to tell us a story.”

The Drunkard, though, did not hear The Traveler. He was still pale, locked in a death stare with The Stalker’s black [contact-covered] eyes. The Writer poked him in the shoulder, causing The Drunkard to react by reflex and shove The Writer out of his chair. The poke did the job, though, as The Drunkard shook his head and said, “What? My story time?”

“Yep,” said the Traveler.

“Okay. Well, as you may know, I was once a reporter for the liberal arts college known as Cumberland Rift University. My being the only person on the staff with even a hint of talent, I was given certain privileges that, to be completely honest, they shouldn’t have given me.”

“Freedom of speech, for example,” said The Writer.

I snickered, low enough so that he could not hear me: the worst thing in the world is letting a jerk know that they can get away with being funny.

The Drunkard, for his part, pushed The Writer off of his chair again.

“Anyway,” he continued, “as I mentioned the other day, towards the end of election season and the beginning of the year, Cumberland Rift University’s newspaper, The Independent Times of the Nation—we called it ITN for short—sent me to cover the Republican candidate for governor. They also gave me an allowance of two thousand—”

“You said one thousand,” said The Writer.

“Are you fucking serious?” asked The Drunkard.

The Writer took a small black notebook from the inside of his jacket, licked his thumb, and flipped through some pages. “Yep, ‘they gave me one thousand dollars.’”

A small vein throbbed in The Drunkard’s forehead.

“What?” asked The Writer. “I just want you to be as accurate as possible. Don’t want to lose points because someone’s being pedantic, do you?”

The vein throbbed harder. In fact, it was on the verge of bursting out of his forehead.

“Let it go,” I said.

“Right,” The Drunkard responded.