Bernard Boyce Bennington

& The American Dream

Peter Crowther

Introduction by Elizabeth Hand

Introduction

CERTAIN PROFOUND SPIRITUAL and emotional needs can’t be met by lovers, religious institutions, psychiatrists or English cocker spaniels; even—especially—in a place like New York City. That’s why God invented bars.

Yet even God has Her ‘off days’. How else to account for the loss of places like the Cedar Tavern and Lion’s Head, hangouts for earlier generations of bohemian New Yorkers? How else to account for the loss of Bohemia itself (but that’s another story)?

And that’s why Pete Crowther invented ‘The Land at the End of the Working Day’.

“…a small way station situated at Civilization’s End, a final resting place before plunging off into who knows what, the huge sea of uncertainty that stretches, sweeping across time zones, to infinity in any direction,” Crowther’s imaginary bar is less a place where everybody knows your name, than one where everyone intuits your soul. From bartender Jack Fedogan to Edgar Nornhoevan, both of them members of the Greek chorus of regulars who preside over “Bernard Boyce Bennington and the American Dream,” the inhabitants of Crowther’s two-story walk-down on the corner of Twenty-Third and Fifth recognize their spiritual brethren as soon as they walk in the door.

Or maybe that door only opens to those who’ve already partaken of a Mystery. In B.B. Bennington’s case, that mystery is a Beckoning Fair One whose siren song is powerful enough to echo through Manhattan traffic and penetrate Jack Fedogan’s watering hole. This succubus’s aria ends on a high note that pierces B.B’s heart, and then some.

Yet the greatest mystery evoked here isn’t sexual desire, but something far more evanescent and compelling in its hold upon mortal men (and women): the frisson of ecstasy that attends the handling of a pristine comic book. For some of us—me, for one, B.B. Bennington for another and, I must surmise, Peter Crowther himself—this constitutes a pure moment of being. Virginia Woolf’s marigolds wither before the experience of holding my first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine (#56, July 1969, the one with Boris Karloff’s ‘Frankenstein’ on the cover; I was twelve); or, a few years earlier, the trance I’d go into as I stood before the racks of comics at Ralph’s soda fountain on Lockwood Avenue in Yonkers—the same rapture evoked by B.B. Bennington as he recalls “the smell of the primitive ink mixes and the feel of the resilient paper stocks used in the old Sparta, Illinois printing plants coupled with the almost primal feeling of holding a genuine artifact.”

That’s the real Beckoning Fair One. The dark American Dream summoned from the pages of EC Comics has her way with Bernard Boyce Bennington, as she did for countless others in the decades before the internet offered up new demons to feast on the young. Bless Peter Crowther for opening that door at Twenty-Third and Fifth and clearing a place at the bar for those of us who, like the regulars there, need a place to prolong the reverie.

—Elizabeth Hand

Bernard Boyce Bennington &

The American Dream

In a seemingly ever-changing and uncertain life that constantly veers dangerously close to the cliffside of loneliness, we cherish those few things that remain constant. And one of those is the neighborhood bar.

You always know where you are with a neighborhood bar, even when that neighborhood is the sprawling metropolis of New York City.

Chairs are for relaxing, beds for sleeping but there’s no place better than a bar for dreaming. And the best of them all is Jack Fedogan’s place, a two-flight walk-down on the corner of 23rd and Fifth.

The Land at the End of the Working Day—for that’s what it’s called, this bar—could just as easily have been called the Land at the Beginning of the Working Day, but it wasn’t. The truth is, apart from the Great Unknown, Jack Fedogan’s bar—for a lot of folks—is all there is outside of the working day…like a small way station situated at Civilization’s End, a final resting place before plunging off into who knows what, the huge sea of uncertainty that stretches, sweeping across time zones, to infinity in any direction.

The clientele of The Working Day stand or sit on that island, on the welcoming boards and stools beneath the pleasantly calming lighting, listening to the music wafting from Jack’s CD player beneath the counter, catching sound-glimpses of the sea of humanity that roils outside the doorway upstairs, kind of like listening to the sound of the real sea caught in a shell washed up on a lonely beach, thinking every so often of its mystery, the never-ending swells and the currents, sometimes playful, sometimes harmful, wondering whether their course at the end of this night or the next night or some night soon should be straight on out, beyond the lights and on into the shadows. But they rarely choose that course.

Mostly they go back, these folks, back into that which they know, at least secure in the knowledge that they can return another night and face the same decision, with a glass of beer in their hand or a malt or a highball, and maybe a cigarette in the other, or a stogie, with maybe Chet Baker singing a soft refrain from the speakers, thinking that maybe—just maybe—maybe tonight they’ll head off to something new, something different. Because the opportunity is there and that’s all that’s really needed: the thought that the situation can be changed and so it’s not so bad.

A few of those almost-intrepid adventurers are here now, not exactly considering their options—at least, not consciously—but they’re here and they wouldn’t know how to answer a question that asked why. They’re just here. And though they don’t know it, they’re dreaming.

These are the chosen few, these patrons momentarily lost on the long road of life. These are the few who have the potential to question. Some—though not many in this establishment—question too deeply when they get around to biting the bullet, and find they’ve submerged themselves and lost the way…find that the asking, so much asking, has left no room for answers. They only know, these terminally lost souls, that they took a drink, or maybe a couple of drinks, over maybe a couple of nights, maybe more, to get here…so maybe taking a few more drinks might help them to get back. And if it doesn’t work tonight then maybe it’ll work tomorrow night. Or the night after that one. Then the trick is getting through the long parched wildernesses that exist between those nights.

And that’s when the dreaming becomes a nightmare.

But the people in The Working Day know the ropes, know how to read the liquor…how to make it work for them and not against them. These people are the healthy ones; they still have questions, sure, but they keep a tight rein on them, keep them from building up so much strength that the questions turn on them and consume them until all there is is the liquor. And still more liquor. Liquor that they don’t use to work up the strength to ask any more…now they use it to drown out the noise of their asking.

For as we all know, no sound ever truly dies—particularly the sound of an unanswered question; it just keeps on getting softer, drifting up with the smoke around the top of a room or amidst the branches of the trees in the park or nestled with the pigeons on the narrow ledges a couple of stories up above the city, looking down on the streets and whispering its insistent refrain to you time and again…because that’s all it knows how to do.

And then, all there is is the streets…and most everyone knows that, for most folks other than the hardened store-doorway-dwellers and the troglodytes that live in the labyrinthine tunnels that criss-cross beneath the city, there are precious few answers to anything out there.

For the people gathered tonight in the Working Day, some answers have been found and the questions still remaining don’t have quite the same degree of urgency any more.

There will be a half-dozen people here for the little drama that will unfold tonight, and that’s counting Jack who’s always here, tending bar and playing music and passing the time of day—or night—with folks who want a few words with their liquor. Four of the half-dozen are regulars and two of them new folks. One of the new faces is still to arrive.

Over in one of the booths along the back wall, a tall man sits with his coat collar pulled up around his neck. He’s the one new face that’s already here in Jack Fedogan’s bar—one of those faces that blow in off the streets, sometimes just the once and sometimes on a few more occasions—and so Jack and the other regulars have paid maybe a little more attention to watching him than they might do otherwise.

They’ve noticed, for example, that the coat the man’s wearing is a thick coat, navy blue, in a heavy surge weave, with dark pants showing creases you could cut paper with, and heavy black shoes, laced up and double tied. Beneath the coat collar he sports a thick woolen scarf, still knotted, and on his head he wears a wide-brimmed hat, navy blue again—covering tufts of hair sticking out from beneath like sagebrush clumps—the hat’s brim snapped down rakishly over his eyes, even here inside the Working Day where Jack Fedogan keeps the atmosphere warm and cozy. And they’ve noticed the black hold-all bag on the floor next to his feet, a scuffed bag, one that has seen a lot of wear and tear, years of being carried or thrown in the bag of a car, in the trunk maybe, bouncing side to side as the car goes from here to there, or maybe many plane rides and numerous adventures on carts to and from airplanes and many trips along moving baggage claim lines, going round and round until its owner spotted it and retrieved it from the monotony. The bag looks full on this outing, though the eyes watching it can’t exactly figure out what it contains.

To the three regulars at the table in the center of the floor, their regular table, the man appears to be lost in thought, nursing a bottle of beer which he keeps on moving around from side to side, slouched back in his chair, apparently watching the condensation patterns it makes on the table. The watching doesn’t seem to contain much in the way of interest. The man looks sickly, the regulars have agreed in hushed conspiratorial tones, coming down with a head cold or maybe the flu…or maybe he’s got a more exotic ailment in these days of ailments so exotic that even their names are acronym codes of letters and symbols, because the implications of the words they hide are just too terrible to contemplate…wasting diseases that take away a man’s dignity as well as his strength and his looks and his mind.

They figure he’s here to forget something or to find it, looking for answers the way so many are. But most of all, he looks lonely.

In the small trio of regulars locked in a round of their customary joke-telling, Jim Leafman knows all about loneliness and about trying to find answers outside of The Working Day. Jim, who collects garbage for a living and carries the smell of carbolic soap with him wherever he goes, remembers sitting in his ‘74 Olds outside an apartment building on 23rd waiting for his wife to set off for home just a block away, watching her run-walk along the sidewalk, her hair newly tidied and her hose pulled up straight and the feel of another man’s hands still fresh in her body’s memory. He remembers watching her and trying to sense her shame, watching her until she isn’t there any more.

And he remembers coming back another night or maybe later that same one, the inside of the Olds an olfactory trinity of JD’s, betrayal and a red-tinged fury that licks at the insides of his eyes and makes them dry, makes his eye sockets hurt—though maybe that was just the JD’s—sitting there watching the door to the apartment building once more, this time with his old .38 cradled in his lap, with nothing making any sense at all in his life at all and so what does it matter what he does. This, Jim recalls now, must be how it starts for these folks who just walk out one day and blow people away in fast food outlets or movie house lines.

But now Jim sits at a table in The Working Day, nursing a glass of warm Bud instead of a cold automatic, listening to Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock trade licks on ‘Little One’ from the Davis quintet’s ground-breaking ESP studio set from the mid sixties while he, Jim, trades similar licks, but conversational instead of instrumental, with his friends.

Jim’s wife has been moved out for almost a year now, living with the same guy—who says monogamy is a thing of the past?—a man who sells office furniture, living in the same apartment block that he watched all those months ago.

He sees them sometimes, one or the other of them—never the two of them together—and he pretends to himself that it’s just a coincidence that he should see them, neatly forgetting that he’s been driving or walking up and down 23rd for maybe an hour, even though he has no reason to be there, convincing himself that it’s just serendipity, ducking back into store doorways or turning quickly to stare at window displays so they don’t see him. He only does this when he’s feeling wistful, hankering for something he was hankering for back then, something in which he no longer sees any intrinsic value but something he feels cheated out of achieving.

And he’s feeling wistful tonight. Wistful and lonely, thinking about a movie he saw a couple nights ago on Cable, Al Pacino as a short order cook falling in love with some starlet—he doesn’t remember her name, maybe Michelle something…funny name?—and he wonders if he’ll ever share his life with another woman.

Then he hears the footsteps on the stairs leading down from the street and he turns around, eyebrows half raised like he’s being casual.

A younger man sitting at the same table, a man with a thick thatch of blond hair, a working man’s Robert Redford, also looks around while he nods to the music and glances aside at Jim. He leans forward and lifts the pitcher, pours beer into his glass and then shouts across to Jack Fedogan—Jack polishing glasses behind the long counter…always looking like he’s polishing glasses but in reality thinking about his wife Phyllis, which fact McCoy, like everyone who’s fortunate enough to be a regular imbiber in this Watering Hole Mecca for Dreamers, knows only too well—to bring another pitcher and this time make it one that doesn’t leak. And he turns to Jim and chuckles, takes a drink and chuckles some more when Jim’s face breaks open around the mouth and he too takes a drink through an easy but contrived smile, like they’re both acting…regulars here in this wonderful place, pretending loneliness is something other people suffer from while they carry on establishing and marking their territory against all newcomers.

And that particular catch-all could well have been written with one man in mind, the man who has just come down the stairs. For this man is a newcomer in every sense of the word, looking like he wouldn’t be much at home anywhere that would have him, an outsider, lost and alone in the night and the city it shrouds.

McCoy, who some folks call Mac—but only those folks he likes or who know him really well—feels his smile fade a little at that thought. He has just got himself a new job, his fourth since leaving Midtown & Western Trust & Loan around about the same time as Jim was coming to terms with his wife cheating on him, and McCoy feels it’s cause for some kind of celebration…so the fading smile is a little disconcerting, if not downright annoying.

But then it’s also cause for some kind of reflection, and right now, tonight in The Working Day, he’s thinking back to his time with the Saving & Loan company, still the only company in the city with two ampersands in its name, thinking back to wall-to-wall meetings where nothing ever seemed to get decided but where he felt whole, the way all men feel when they’re in regular work, work they feel counts for something even when they know it doesn’t, measuring achievement by their pay packet instead of by the inner glow that comes with a job well done, well appreciated and somehow meaningful.

So, McCoy’s job working at a Midtown agency as a copywriter on the annual accounts for company that produces some kind of ball bearings up in Schenectady seems like both a step forward and a step back, in that paradoxical way everything seems some nights, when the darkness seems a little deeper and a little longer than usual. But there’s a girl there that he likes and a couple days ago he built up the nerve to speak to her, over by the photocopier, asking her if maybe she’d like to do something sometime. The girl just looked at him like she was seeing him for the first time, wondering what rock did this guy crawl up from under, and she said to him that she was busy that night. Someone at one of the desks over by the water dispenser let out a snigger that sounded like a duck’s fart and the girl walked off away from the photocopier leaving McCoy standing there, feeling like he was buck naked in the middle of Grand Central at 8.30 in the morning. He took the response as a clear sign of disinterest on her part.

Coming home on the subway these past few nights, with the autumn turning into winter and people all around kind of snuggling up against each other, McCoy has been wondering where he can go to meet somebody, and that thought occurs to him again right now, with the entrance of the new arrival…McCoy wondering where in hell this guy would go to find someone he could be happy with.

Jack walks across from the bar, eyeing the man who has just stepped out of the real world and into his private domain, and places a fresh pitcher on the table, takes the other one away with a grunt that to some might seem rude but to others not that way at all, and around the grunt he’s tum-tumming in tune with Wayne Shorter’s tenor break on ‘Agitation’ like he’s got no worries in the world…like he’s still got a wife in the apartment upstairs, a wife who’s still alive and well and waiting for him when he closes up.

The third man at the table, the ‘Holy Ghost’ of this particular trio, reaches for the new beer and fills his glass, shaking his head and smiling at Jack Fedogan’s back, thinking all the time about the annual check-up he’s got day after tomorrow, thinking about the seeing-eye pipe the doctor’s going to run down his dick and into his body, twirling it around to get a good look at his prostate—my, will you just look at that!—and wondering whether it’s going to be followed by meaningful stares as the doc tries to find the words to tell him, tell him not to start any long books or get too engrossed in any TV serials.

Then he notices the man standing over at the foot of the stairs, in the bar but looking like he’s still a little bit outside, like he’s wondering whether he’s done the right thing coming in here, looking around at the empty tables and at the one where the three friends are sitting—all of them now watching this new addition—and the booth over on the back wall, where a pasty-faced man makes table-top mosaics out of beer puddles, seemingly oblivious to anything…except his eyes are watching intently.

This man, the third of the three friends, is Edgar Nornhoevan, a big man, big and bearded, a big bearded man whose toes never curl and who never grimaces in pain except when the doctor runs that pipe down his dick every six months. The next time is just two days away, and Edgar is not looking forward to it one bit.

Edgar knows diddly about loneliness but he knows all there is about cancer. The way Edgar figures it, you’re never lonely with a tumor.

It’s been almost a year now since the cancer that Edgar expected turned out to be just a slight enlargement, and the pills have been working just fine, so fine that Edgar can once again hold his own—pardon my French, ma’am! as Jack might say, Jack who speaks no language other than English-American—when he takes a pee, sometimes feeling like it’s the best sensation in the world that meaningful expulsion, so all seems okay and it would be just fine and dandy if Edgar were not going for his check-up day after tomorrow. But the fact that he is has brought back the memories and the uncertainty, like he’s never going to get rid of this feeling even if he really is okay, never going to get rid of the feeling that maybe something’s happening that just shouldn’t be happening. Something inside his body. Someplace where he can’t see, can’t get at.

And this is why Edgar Nornhoevan never feels lonely, except when it’s late and he slips between the sheets, turns out the light and listens to the sirens caterwauling in the nighttime streets. Hey, a little voice says to him then, faint in the darkness, I sure am lonely.

Jack gives a flourish with his ever-present cloth, sweeping it across a bar-top that’s already clean enough to eat your food straight off of it without so much as a plate or a napkin, and he nods to the newcomer.

“Get you something?” Jack asks.

The man look at Jack and then around at the rest of the bar, frowning, like he’s considering this strange language…wondering whatever could it mean, this bizarre sing-song of grunts and wind. Then, without so much as a word, he sidles up to the bar and onto a stool. Dutifully, Jack wipes the portion of counter right in front of him. “Beer?” he suggests.

The man rubs a hand over his face, allowing it to linger a little on his mouth, pulling it down some and letting the bottom lip flap up into place like it’s one of those exaggerated lips on the cartoon cat in Tom and Jerry—the lip makes a flapatapatap sound in Jack’s head and for a moment he fights off a smile.

The man wears his hair long, unfashionably long by today’s standards even if he were a twenty-something—which he is clearly not…unless one could stretch the ‘something’ element into another three decades—and it hangs over his ears and his forehead and his collar in black curls that look like they haven’t seen soap and water in a long time. Meanwhile, what there is of it on top is a little thin, combed or brushed back across a balding pate.

“My name is Bernard Boyce Bennington,” the man says, the first word of which he pronounces with an emphasis on the ‘ard’ syllable, stretching the vowel out like taffy, while the first comes out as ‘buh’, like he’s just been gut-punched. He holds out a hand to Jack.

“Jack Fedogan,” says Jack Fedogan, shaking the proffered hand.

“This your bar or are you just tending it?”

“It’s my bar.”

For a few seconds, they both seem to be satisfied with the exchange of information, even Jack…who now regards the man with a squint, wondering if he needs to reach under the counter to retrieve his pacifier—a smooth-handled baseball bat he keeps there to quieten down trouble-makers—or make an excuse to go to the cash register where he keeps the Saturday Night Special Phyllis used to rag him about. But the man seem harmless enough—if a little on the flaky side—and the ever-patient Jack is prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least until he hears what he’s after.

“I have a story for you,” Bernard Boyce Bennington tells Jack, “if you want to hear it,” he adds.

Jack waves his hands magnanimously. “That’s what bars are for,” he says, “telling stories. But they’re also for buying drinks. So I’ll make a deal with you.” He leans on the counter. “You buy one of my beers and I’ll listen to your story. How’s that sound to you?”

The man looks around again, does his lip thing—flapatapatap—once more, and then nods. “That sounds fair to me,” he says, and he scans the refrigerated shelves at the back of the bar, the ones with all the bottles on them. “Give me…I’ll have a Michelob,” he says after some deliberation, his eyes scanning the brightly-colored labels first one way and then the other.

“Coming right up.” Jack produces the bottle, flips the cap off with the bar-top opener, and pours about half of it into a glass he’s pulled from the back shelf. He puts the glass on a coaster right in front of the new customer, and the bottle next to it, then polishes the counter around it, even though he hasn’t spilled any beer. Jack Fedogan never spills beer.

The man takes a sip, more like it’s meant to pacify the bartender than to relieve any inner thirst, and then sets the glass back down on the bar, making sure it sits squarely on the coaster. “I’m looking for someone,” he announces out of the blue. “A woman.”

“And it’s a big Amen to that one, friend,” Edgar Nornhoevan observes. Edgar is halfway across to the washrooms and well within earshot of the man’s conversation with Jack Fedogan. He turns back to the table, towards Jim Leafman and McCoy Brewer and says, “Fella here looking for a woman. Do we have any we can spare?” And he lets out a deep throaty laugh.

McCoy shakes his head. “Don’t think we can help with that one,” he says, and the wistfulness of his tone overrides the self-deprecating humor by around a hundred to one.

“She come in here, this woman?” Jack asks, his mind already running through the images of the various women who occasionally sit on the stools at his bar or over in one of the booths along the back wall, nursing Manhattans and Screwdrivers as they reflect on the barren ground that their life has become, Jack trying to match up one of the images with the man sitting right in front of him now.

Jim Leafman and McCoy Brewer pick up their glasses and the pitcher and stroll over to the bar, Jim taking the stool a couple over from the newcomer and McCoy standing a few feet away from the counter. Edgar goes off in search of the restroom.

“Truth is, I don’t know,” Bernard Boyce Bennington says.

Although Bernard Boyce Bennington is indeed the man’s name, it is not the one he has most often been called these past 45 of his 51 years. It’s Daisy, which, he explains to Jack and Jim and McCoy in a tired voice, comes from the fact that his two first names—and his last, for that matter—begin with the letter B, hence ‘Daisy’, the stock-in-trade BB gun that graced a million homes at around the same time as Forry Ackerman kicked off Famous Monsters of Filmland, and you could earn extra money by delivering Grit door to door which you could then spend buying hundreds of toy soldiers for a couple of bucks or packets of seed to grow your own underwater monkeys.

The 1960s were wonderful times for him, the man continues, times during which he read comicbooks voraciously before going on to spend inordinate amounts of money buying up back issues from dealers who stretched out the once acceptable grading system of ‘Mint’, ‘Fine’ and ‘Good’ into a myriad sub-categories which involved buyer and seller alike studying, with magnifying glass and plastic gloves, the item under dispute—a comicbook, for goodness’ sake!—while haggling over such heinous deformities as ‘small crease on back cover’ and ‘small chip from bottom of spine’. By this time, school had given way to college and college then emptied BB out into a world for which he was wholly unprepared.

Jack glances across at Jim and McCoy—and Edgar, who has returned from his safari to the restroom, retrieved his glass from the table and sat down next to Jim—and gives a quick raise of his eyebrows that says So when does this story get interesting? but nobody seems to be taking any notice. Jack gives the counter a quick wipe and looks back at the man.

“My first job was as a computer operator, handling the mainframe for a small Savings and Loan outfit in Jersey City,” he says, taking a sip of Michelob that wouldn’t have quenched a fly’s thirst. “It was a machine whose numerous metal boxes and whirling tape- and disk-drives filled a room the size of an entire floor of a plush apartment out on Riverside Drive. Of course,” he says, turning to his audience, “this same long-ago machine had but a fraction of the processing capacity of the word processor that now sits on my cluttered desk  but then that’s progress.”

Progress, the newcomer explains, moves life on with casual disregard for the Bernard Boyce Benningtons of the world but he didn’t let this bother him too much. He moved into programming, which meant he could spend his life even further away from other human beings…filling his days with printouts as tall as the small boy he once was, and which he would scrutinize for long hours to find the misplaced or juxtaposed numbers that had caused a particular program to fail, and his evenings surrounded by his beloved comicbooks.

And oh, how Bernard loved his comicbooks.

“I had full runs of most of the Marvel titles that had turned the industry on its head in the early 1960s, and I’d bought back and filled out DC titles such as House of Mystery and House of Secrets, all of which I just adored.” Here he stops for a few seconds and glances around the bar—which is still empty save for the man in the booth, still wearing his hat and coat and scarf—like he’s checking to make sure nobody sneaked in while he was talking. Apparently satisfied that he’s in control of the situation, the man called Daisy continues with his story…which even Jack, who has long held a secret fascination for the old comicbooks of his youth—things like Sad Sack and Mutt and Jeff and, his favorite, Archie—is beginning to enjoy.

“Trouble was, I found it annoying that, in order to protect my investment—because these things are damned expensive,” he says, frowning—”I was reduced to reading some of the books wearing a mouth mask and skin-tight gloves. And that took away much of the sensation of reading.

“To me, comicbook reading is a multi-sensory experience and full enjoyment can only truly be achieved with as many of the senses in contact with the actual book—the smell of the primitive ink mixes and the feel of the resilient paper stocks used in the old Sparta, Illinois printing plants coupled with the almost primal feeling of holding a genuine artifact were considered by many to be as important (and by some to be more important) than the occasionally infantile drawing techniques and frequently infantile plotting employed in the sweatshop creative bullpens of the 1930s and ‘40s.”

Edgar’s eyes are wide as saucers. This guy sure knows a lot of two-dollar words, he’s thinking, but Edgar is glued just the same.

“How does all this tie into the woman you’re looking for?” Jack asks.

“I’m getting to that,” the man says, and he takes another sip. McCoy gives Jack a sneaky frown to back off and let the guy talk…so Jack gives the counter another wipe and waits.

“Those were the days, the days before Frederick Wertham declared war on what he considered to be the sadistic and evil manipulation of kids’ minds carried out by the pre Comics Code Authority comicbooks, when horror truly was horror.” Bernard Boyce Bennington stops and his eyes go all dreamy. “My, but I loved them all, those ridiculous books, despite the predictable denouements and the scrawky pen- and pencil work. I loved the monsters and the dragons, adored the animated rotting corpses seeking vengeance; I delighted in the alien horrors stalking far-off worlds…but, most of all, I loved vampires, particularly those in the old EC comicbooks, before Bill Gaines fell foul of Doctor Wertham and was forced to anesthetize the stories in Crypt of Terror, Haunt of Fear and Vault of Horror to the point of virtual emasculation. Long-toothed creatures of the night drawn by Jack Davis and which owed more to Nosferatu than to Bela Lugosi’s tuxedo-clad European Count…and paved the way for the TV adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and the almost animal-like Mr. Barlow.”

“But this life-long fascination with horror comicbooks and, in particular, with the undead made me a difficult man with whom to strike up a casual conversation. I accept that without question. And this, in turn, meant that my chances of companionship were slight at best, what with the vast majority of the fairer sex’s staunch ignorance of such fundamentally important matters. Sure,” he went on, shrugging his shoulders, “I had passed time in comic convention bar areas chewing the fat with like-minded souls—most of whom could recount exact dialogue and page numbers of ‘key’ stories in the favorite books—but  these brief liaisons were ill-fated and amounted to nothing even approaching stability. But then something happened that was to change my life.”

The man stopped and took another drink, this time a bigger one which almost drained the glass. Without even asking, Jack Fedogan pulled another Michelob off the shelf, flipped the cap, and placed it on the bar.

“Eventually, earlier this year, just as the summer was giving way again to autumn’s moods of melancholia, the lure of settling down coupled with a suddenly looming mortality persuaded me to actively look for a mate. But the question was, how should I do it?

“Singles bars were out. They were filled with folks that I could scarcely identify with, sharp dressers all, driving sleek continental cars and wearing the latest colognes and playing the latest CDs. Sex was what those folks were after and it wasn’t—at least not primarily—what I was after. What I was after was The American Dream…a wife, a house, Norman Rockwell-style picket fences, and the smell of meatloaf coming from the oven.”

“That’s quite a dream,” Jack says, his mind drifting back to his life with Phyllis.

“You know,” Jim ventures, “I had a dream once…dreamed I won the Lottery.”

Edgar nods. He’s thinking of informing the others that sex would be pretty high up on the list of things he wants right now, but instead he says, “Yeah?”

Jim carries right on the way Jim can do when his mind isn’t fully on what his mouth is doing. “Bought a car.”

“Why’d you need a car in New York?” McCoy asks.

Jim gives a shrug, shuffles his glass around on his coaster. “I don’t.”

“But that was the first thing you did?”

“I didn’t say it was the first thing. Just that I bought a car.”

“What else did you buy?” Edgar says, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, taking a rise out of Jim.

“Don’t remember. Just remember the car.”

McCoy says, “What kind of car was it?”

“A Mustang.” In Jim Leafman’s mouth the word sounds like a mantra—musssss-tannnng—or a sibilant call for rain by an old Apache or Shawnee, staring up into the sky looking for water-bearing clouds.

“Now that was the American Dream,” says Edgar. “That’s what they called it. By the 1950s, young couples marrying, heading out to the suburbs, buying houses and cars, starting families. It must’ve seemed like we had it all.”

“Ah had a dream!” McCoy says, trying to capture the milky rounded tones of Martin Luther King.

“I was six in 1950,” Edgar says. “Didn’t know nothing about no American Dream. My folks lived-”

“You want to let the guy finish his story or what?” Jack asks, frustration spread thick in his words.

Edgar nods and waves for the newcomer to go on with his tale.

“Dating agencies were the next consideration but even those made for a short-lived solution, the problem being that I just couldn’t cope with the intrusive questioning of the patronizing proprietors.”

And so it was, Bernard Boyce Bennington explained, on a cloudy and cold October day, with the leaves in Central Park blowing across the street in crinkly brown flurries, that he hit upon the idea of checking the ‘want ads’.

“I sounds a lot easier than it really is,” he tells them. “Most of what was available fell either into the outré style of the Village Voice, which failed to deliver any solutions, apart from providing lurid photographs of ‘college girls just minutes away’, ‘outcall Asian bodywork’ and ‘hot and horny local girls’—most of whose names seemed to be Cherri or Jade or even Strawberry, and all of whom ensured complete satisfaction and discreet billing…not to mention ‘All Major CC’s, ATM & Debit Cards Accepted’—in amidst the usual three- or four-line enigmas such as ‘Bottom in need of Top’ and ‘Romantic SBF Seeks Big Dipper’…or the traditional of New York magazine, whose ‘Strictly Personals’ section offered ‘matchmaking’ and ‘marriage’ in amongst advertisements placed, purportedly, by ‘professionals’, a select band with which I did not, in all honesty, believe I had much if anything in common.

“In a moment of rare desperation, I even called up an ad which promised ‘A Hot Line To My Wildest Dreams’ only to find that the sultry voiced girl—who actually sounded as though she was expiring-”

“Expiring?” says Jim. “You mean, like…sweating? How can you sound like you’re-”

“That’s perspiring,” Edgar points out.

Jim grunts something by way of an apology and visibly shrinks on his stool.

“Anyway, this girl,” the man continues, “offered only Tarot readings, phrenology sessions, numerology classes, palm-reading and my future as prophesied by the stars…and, as I assumed Michael Keaton—my favorite actor, by the way, since Tim Burton’s Batman movies—didn’t know me from Adam or Zachary, that had to be something to do with astrology.”

Bernard Boyce Bennington drained his glass and, with a quick salute to Jack, poured the new bottle.

“Then came the big break, a small ad in the New York Press’s ‘variations’ section.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a folded piece of newspaper, its print smudged in places and the folds starting to tear. He held it out to Jack. “Here, read it yourself.”

Jack took the paper and unfolded it, holding it so Jim and Edgar and McCoy could lean over and read it at the same time. The paper read:

Single White Succubus Seeks Soulmate

Tired of the same old humdrum?

Is one day just like the next and

the one before it? Do you see less in front

of you than what’s gone before? Take a break

and enjoy a relationship you will never forget

But be warned:

once you’ve decided, there’s no turning back.

The ad finishes with a cellphone number.

“What’s a sucker-bus?” Jim Leafman asks.

“A Greyhound headed for Las Vegas,” says Jack, who has never held with gambling.

“A succubus is a female demon,” Bernard Boyce Bennington answers. “Legend has it that they have sex with sleeping men…and,” he adds, “they steal their souls.”

Jim Leafman sits up from the bar, wondering if it’s his imagination or has it suddenly gotten cold in the last couple of minutes. “She the woman you’re looking for?”

The man nods and takes a drink of beer.

“Couldn’t you just call her?” McCoy says.

The newcomer shakes his head. “I tried that, many times since. Just get a solid tone. But the first time, I got straight through,” he says, setting his glass back on the bar. “It was a little before 2 am on a particularly black night during which the wind buffeted my apartment windows and rattled the glass in the casements. A woman’s voice answers—in the background I could hear soft music, and glasses clinking and muted conversation—and, so help me, she says my name. ‘Good evening Mister Bennington,’ she says to me. ‘Where do you want us to meet?’”

McCoy gives out a low whistle. “How’d she know your name?”

“I have absolutely no idea…but, if she was a succubus then one can only presume that she had abilities far beyond our understanding.”

Jack pushes his cloth to one side and leans heavier on the bar. “Did you go meet her?”

“I regret that I did.”

“You regret? What? Was she a dog?”

“No,” the man says to the bartender with a sad smile. “No, far from it. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

“Long story short, I met up with her, corner of 23rd and 3rd, and we walked into Gramercy Park, hand in hand. I remember how cold her hand felt to the touch, but I didn’t think anything of it…at least not then. It was late at night and it was a cool night and I just put it down to bad circulation. Anyway, unusually for me, I became quite…shall we say, stimulated by her—there was something about her, some aura, some intoxicating scent…a mixture of fresh flowers and musk or patchouli, something sweet-smelling and yet old and musty…hard to explain. And I stopped, just inside the park, and suggested that perhaps we could go back to my apartment, but she declined. Or perhaps hers, I suggested…and she laughed. She didn’t have an apartment. She lived out in the city, she told me, in the bars and drinking holes, the hotel lounges and the nightclubs, a different one every evening. She said that she got all the custom she needed from these places and that the newspaper advertisement was simply an experiment. Mine had been the only call, she told me, and she would not be repeating the experiment.

“We carried on into the park and-” He stopped and looked at his beer for a few seconds. “This is a little difficult for me.” He took a deep sigh and a long gulp of beer, draining the glass. “She was very attentive to me. So attentive in fact that by the time we had gone but a few yards into the park, barely out of the glow of the lamps by the street, she had fully removed her clothes, pulling them off in bravura sweeps of crinoline and lace, whisking them up into the night air to expose white flesh which seemed to exude some kind of aroma all of its own. The grass around us became quickly littered with her clothes, a skirt, then her blouse, followed by a satin vest and a brassiere, and finally by her panties.

“Then I removed my own clothes.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Edgar mutters.

Jim Leafman twists awkwardly on his seat.

McCoy says, “That kind of thing can get you locked up.”

Jack Fedogan agrees.

“Believe me,” B. B. Bennington says imploringly, “this is not something I normally do. I was…I was drunk with her, I felt the heavens coming down to meet me and me crashing upwards to meet them; I felt that I could lift a mountain and live forever; I felt so happy I wanted to weep. But that was only the beginning.” He looks up at Jack. “Could I have another of those beers?”

In a flash, Jack reaches behind and pulls a Michelob across, flips the cap and stands it next to the newcomer’s empty glass. Then he shifts his weight to his other leg and says, “Then what happened?”

The man pours the beer, takes a sip and continues with his story. As he does so, he takes something out of his jacket pocket—something in a brown paper bag, folded in a rectangular shape like maybe it’s a book—and he sets it on the counter. All eyes watch the stranger’s hand place the object but no eyes move away with the hand: they stay on the object, four minds wondering what on earth it could be and what significance it could have to the story now unfolding.

Bernard Boyce Bennington shrugs. “Then the inevitable happened, of course. Right there on the grass in Gramercy Park. I…I won’t go into the details here, gentlemen; it is sufficient to say that I have never felt such a feeling before. More than that, I truly never believed such a feeling were possible. She moved with a slow grace, her body lithe and supple, and her mouth…well, it was everywhere. As was her voice.”

It is Jack Fedogan, suddenly aware that there was no music playing, who responds first. He pulls out a Charlie Mingus CD and slips it into the player, keying in track numbers and hitting the play button. As the first strains of music drift into the air, he says, “Her voice?”

“I had my eyes closed, so great was the feeling of elation and spiritual contentment, but all the time we were making love she was speaking to me.”

“What was she saying?” McCoy asks.

“All kinds of things…things about my past, that nobody else could know, and things about comicbook stories, all of which she appeared to have read. She knew everything about me and everything about what I had done or read or hoped for. And she told me that this night, right then and there, lying on the grass in Gramercy Park, was the pinnacle of my life. She told me I would never be lonely again.”

Then he stops speaking.

Jim looks at Edgar and then at McCoy and McCoy looks at Jack and then at Edgar, and then everyone turns to look at the stranger, waiting for him to say something more. Eventually it’s Edgar who breaks the silence.

“And then what?”

“And then she was gone,” comes the answer.

“Gone?” It’s a single word delivered by four voices.

Bernard Boyce Bennington reaches for the brown paper package and all eyes follow his hand. “I must have…I don’t know, blacked out or something. But when I came to and opened my eyes she had left me…no clothes, no note, nothing except this.” And he pulls open the bag and removes a small battery-operated cassette player.

“Listen,” he says, and he presses the play button.

At the same time, Jack Fedogan turns down the volume button on the CD system hidden below the bar, forcing the familiar strains of ‘Goodbye Pork  Pie Hat’—in particular John Handy’s flutter-tonguing alto duel with Mingus’s tremolo basswork—off into some ethereal background, like in a party scene in a movie, when the opening pan shot with the loud soundtrack has finished and now the characters have something to say.

And it’s fitting. For as one melody—Mingus’s eternal paean to Lester Young, who died less than two months before this legendary 1959 recording—stops, another melody filters into the Land at the End of the Working Day…a melody without notes or words, but rather one with the sound of the wind in the trees, and the distant hum of traffic and occasional muted shouts.

Suddenly, somewhere deep inside the recesses of the newcomer’s cassette player, the far-off wail of a siren hums like a fly, disappearing before it’s hardly gotten started. And then, closer, there’s a grunt. It’s a man’s grunt.

The grunt is followed by another, deeper this time, more drawn out.

Then a sigh, also deep, again unquestionably a man’s sigh.

For several minutes the quartet of regulars sits or stands entranced by the sounds coming from the machine sitting on the counter.

They hear trees rustling and they hear the sound of movement, interspersed with sighs and soft kisses and even an occasional word, always in a man’s voice, an Oh! or an Ah!, and then an Oh, God!, the word ‘God’ drawn right out, long and thin and deep.

They feel they’re intruding, Jim and Jack, and Edgar and McCoy, feel like they’re peeping at another man’s keyhole in the dead of night, and deep within them they feel, to a man, the stirrings of desire and companionship, the feelings forcing away the blight of loneliness that affects so many people in cities and towns and lonely truck-cabs lit only by the orange or green glow of the dashboard dials and the waft of cigarette smoke.

And then it stops.

The stranger reaches out and presses the button, cutting off the silence.

Jim Leafman takes a drink and shakes his head.

Jack Fedogan stands up from the bar, thinks about reaching for his cloth and then decides against it. Instead, he turns up the volume again on his CD player, turns it up without hardly realizing he’s doing it, and the opening strains of ‘Self Portrait in Three Colors’, a song with no solos, the very same haunting music that graced John Cassevetes’s directorial debut movie, Shadows, fills the bar..

Edgar Nornhoevan looks at Jim and then at McCoy, whose eyes are closed, his hands thrust deep into his pants pockets.

And then Bernard Boyce Bennington speaks.

“You didn’t hear her, did you?”

The four men exchange glances and, silently, elect a spokesman.

Shaking his head, the Working Day’s bartender says, “No, there was only you…only your voice we heard.”

“I heard her,” a new voice says.

They turn around and come faces to face with the old man from the booth along the back wall. He must have come across while they were listening to the tape, come across real quiet so that nobody noticed him. And now here he is, sitting propped against the table right behind them, his battered valise by his feet. “I heard her,” he says, shaking his head, a smile playing across his mouth.

“She did me too,” the man says, and he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small cardboard strip. “Did me in a train station down in Philly, late at night, in one of those booths where you can get four photographs for a dollar, behind a floor-length curtain oblivious to the world and the night. I fell asleep afterwards—right there in the booth, which was the only place we could find that offered any kind of privacy—and when I woke up, curled up on the floor like an abandoned child, there on top of my clothes was this.”

He hands the strip across to McCoy who accepts it and takes a look.

The strip has four photographs on it, each one with a man in the foreground, his back to the camera. The man appears to be naked, though the camera has only caught him to the small of his back, and his face, though it only appears in profile in just one of the shots, looks enraptured.

But more than that, tufts of his hair are sticking up no matter which way he moves his head…like someone is holding them, tugging them. Only there’s nobody else in the photographs.

Bernard Boyce Bennington lets out a stifled moan. “That’s her,” he says, “Oh my God, that is her.”

As McCoy Brewer hands the strip across to Jack Fedogan, the old man says, “But you don’t see her, do you? You see only me.”

“There isn’t anyone else on this except for you,” Jack says. “If it is you. Fella here looks a lot younger and, well…in a mite better shape than you look right now. No offense,” Jack says as he hands the strip across to Jim Leafman.

“None taken,” the old man says. “It was a long time ago, almost 20 years. She left me with that-” He nods at the strip of photos. “-and she took everything else that I had. My job, my home…and my sanity.

“I was getting a late train, going home after an all-day meeting that had gone on into one of those corporate dinners that offer only headaches and indigestion. I wasn’t looking for excitement, wasn’t looking for adventure—at least not right then, though I’d been getting a bit down, you know…lonely…wondering what life was all about. Maybe that was it: maybe I’d gotten the scent of vulnerability about me…because that’s what loneliness is, isn’t it? Being vulnerable.

“Then, out of the shadows, she came up to me. There was hardly anyone else in the station, just a couple of bums sleeping off the booze, and a guy sweeping up the concourse way down away from me. And she says to me, ‘Mister Yordeau, where can we go to be private?’”

“She knew your name, too?”

The man nods to McCoy. “Knew everything about me. Said she usually hung out in bars and clubs and so on—here in New York—same thing she told him.” He nods to Bernard Boyce Bennington. “And that was it. I went with her, may God have mercy on my soul…I went with her, looked around for someplace we could be alone, my heart thumping in my chest, and I saw the photo booth. We went inside and clothes started coming off right away, no questions asked, no conversation, no nothing.” The man stopped and shook his head. “I had never felt anything like that before in my life and I’ve never felt anything like it since.”

“So what did you do?” Jack asks, passing the old guy a beer and handing bottles out to everyone…like it’s a private party.

“Well, everything went to hell…like I said. I left everything behind me—and I mean everything. And I started hanging around in bars trying to find her…to get her back…to-” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I was wanting—wanting her back, I guess…wanting to do it again.

“And I had conversations with bartenders and their regulars, showed them the photographs. And nobody could see her. Pretty soon, I realized she’d done something to my head. And after a few years, I changed.”

“Changed?” says Edgar. “Changed how?”

“Oh, I still looked for her—and I still do, even now—but not with the idea of getting her back again. I stopped showing people the photographs. Now I just go to a few bars every night…and I watch. And when I find her…” He turns and glances down at his bag, then stoops and picks it up, runs the zipper along and pulls it open.

“Jesus Christ!” says Jack Fedogan.

The man pulls out a wooden-headed mallet and a fistful of sharpened stakes, each one about a foot long.

“I mean to end her power,” the old man says, dumping the mallet and the stakes back into the bag. “I mean to free myself, free others—like him—and I mean to make the world safe from her, whatever she is.”

Bernard Boyce Bennington lifts the brown paper bag from the counter, having returned the player into it, and slips it into his pocket.

Jim Leafman says, “So how come you both end up in here…tonight?”

The man shrugs. “Coincidence. Nothing more. I guess it had to happen one day in one bar…two of the people she’s tainted coming together in the same place at the same time.”

“You followed me,” says Bernard Boyce Bennington, backing away now, backing towards the stairs.

The old man shakes his head, eyes closed.

Jack, also shaking his head…and waving his arms around, says, “Hey, hold on now…this guy was in here bef—”

“You followed me and you want me to lead you to her.”

And right about now, there’s a sound from up the stairs…maybe even from out on the street, and jack feels a breath of fresh air on his face.

The four men facing the stairs look up at the first footstep, then Jack looks too, and Horace Parlan lets his fingers drift along the piano keys in Jack’s CD player, lost in that long-ago impossibly wonderful session with Mingus. They look up the stairs, suddenly aware of the silence contributed to the scene in classic western style, the way any good honky-tonk ivories man would do when someone walked in through the saloon doors…aware of that and the foot on the wooden stairs, hearing another step, leaning over to try get a glimpse of whoever’s coming down into the bar, but they can’t see anything.

Then Bernard Boyce Bennington stops right where he is, his heels jammed up against the bottom stair, his brown paper bag clasped in his hand, and he breathes in deeply.

McCoy Brewer notices that there are tears running down B. B. Bennington’s cheeks, and he breathes in again, savoring the smell of the outside must be, McCoy thinks and he takes a step forward.

The man turns and looks up the stairs.

The others lean still further, like vaudevillian stuntmen or Keystone Kop fallabouts, still trying to see up the stairs. The feet have stopped, and all they want to see is an ankle…a shapely ankle, maybe…in a high heeled pump, standing in that narrow right-angle triangle of a gap between the upstairs floor and the banister rail leading downstairs…but then whatever made that foot-stepping kind of noise turns right around before they can see anything at all, never mind put a leg to the imagined ankle, and a waist to the leg, and a torso to the waist, a neck to the torso and, most desired of all, a head to crown off their creation. It turns and moves back up the few stairs its come down, back to the outside world and the mischievous air that waits there.

And for a few seconds right now…and even more seconds and minutes and maybe hours in the times to come and all the times that these men have left to them to think their midnight thoughts, the four men watching the stairs and the stranger called Bernard Boyce Bennington think maybe they imagined it, the footsteps…that maybe the night and the hour and the stories have gotten the best of them…that maybe it was the wind blowing down the New York City streets the way it does, a lonesome wind looking for a little late-night company, blowing the door so it clanged a little, nothing more: because, hey…it was late for a woman to be walking down into a bar by herself wasn’t it?

But not all of them harbor such doubts.

Without so much as a word, B. B. Bennington takes the stairs out of the Land at the End of the Working Day, a low deep sad moan building in his throat as he takes the stairs two and even three at a time, putting distance between himself and the people still standing watching him…McCoy’s hands partly outstretched in a mixture of defense and reasoning, Jim Leafman holding onto Edgar Nornhoevan’s arm, and the old man with the black valise already starting for the stairs. Jack Fedogan watches it all in dumfounded amazement.

“Hey!” Edgar calls, sliding off of his stool, though nobody is sure whether Edgar’s calling out to Bennington or to the old man with the valise.

And then there’s the sound of a car horn, squealing brakes, raised voices…and the unmistakable dull crump! of something being hit out on the street.

Already, the old man is nearing the top of the stairs.

Edgar Nornhoevan is halfway up.

McCoy and Jim are on the first couple of steps, and Jack is stepping from behind the bar.

They arrive in that order out on the rainy windswept street.

It’s late at night on the corner of 23rd and Fifth, and there’s nobody to be seen. Nobody except a small man with what might be the beginnings of a beard or just stubble from laziness. He’s wearing a small peaked cap, a sleeveless cardigan sweater and his rolled-up shirt sleeves are already soaked. He’s standing by the side of a yellow cab, its motor still running, the driver’s door wide open and the strains of rap music drifting out into the night, savoring a freedom of sorts. The man is looking down at a bundle in the road, partly covered by his cab, and every few seconds he looks around, his arms spread in confusion…and just once in a while he glances across the street at the empty sidewalk which carries on along 23rd in the direction of Park Avenue South and, beyond that, Lexington which, of course, gives onto Gramercy Park.

“Not my fault,” the man is explaining to anyone who will listen. “Not my fault, man,” he says again, waving a hand whose fingers are kind of pointed and kind of curled in, waving it at the people who have suddenly gathered on the sidewalk. “Guy comes up out of-” The man looks around and sees the sign, The Land at the End of the Working Day, and his eyebrows flick up, just for a second or two, and everyone knows there’s a voice in the back of his head asking What the hell kind of a place is that, man? but immediately dismissing it because he’s a New Yorker and he’s seen many strange names on the buildings around town and many strange people coming out of them. “Guy comes up out of there, man, runnin’, and he gets to the curb and he looks around and then it’s like he sees somethin’ across the street and he just steps off, man…I mean-” He does the wave with his pointy-curly hand again and then smacks both hands together. “-and Blammo!, you know what I’m sayin’, man? I couldn’t do nothin’, I mean I couldn’t do nothin’ at all. Dude just steps out and Blammo! Shit,” he concludes, dragging the word out so that it’s two syllables, ‘shee’ and ‘itt’. He shakes his head and pushed his cap back. “I ain’t never hit nobody, man, and I been drivin’ cabs for eighteen years.” His voice is a little high-pitched and he sounds close to tears. He turns to the others and says, “Any of you guys a doctor or somethin’?” He looks down at the bundle again. “Shit,” he says, “you think maybe he’s dead?”

Jack steps across and leans over Bernard Boyce Bennington and looks into the man’s open eyes, watching the rain drops fall on the pupils without so much as a blink. There’s a thin trail of darkness at the corner of his mouth—his smiling mouth, Jack notices—which washes away every three or four seconds and then reappears, and there’s a wide stain of blackness on the man’s shirt front.

The cab driver has turned away and is now looking down 23rd. “You know, he says over his shoulder, “there was somebody across the street, you know what I’m sayin’ here? Some woman, looked like. She must’ve seen it wasn’t my fault, man but she just up and went. Where the hell did she go?”

The old man with the black valise steps forward and places a hand on the driver’s shoulder. “Where’d she go?”

“Huh?” The cab driver looks like someone’s just asked him an arcane algebraic formula known only to Harvard lawyers.

“The woman. You see what she looked like … where she went?”

The driver shrugs. “She looked like…I don’t know what she looked like, man,” he says. “She was…she was just a woman.” Then he shakes his head. “Maybe there wasn’t any-”

“You see where she went?”

“I think it was a woman, man,” the driver says looking around at the street and trying to piece it all together again because everything has happened just so fast. “Too dark and too wet to tell for sure. But seems to me she was standin’ right there, like she was makin’ to cross but standin’ well back from the curb.” He shakes his head again, trying to shake free the sight of a woman’s face—oh, such a sweet face—looking up at him, speaking silently to him about the loneliness of the streets and the night…telling him, deep down in his head, down where everything mattered and nothing mattered…telling him that she understood and that one day she would take that loneliness away from him…and that all he had to do was wait, wait and keep silent…because one day they would meet again. And she reached down to the man on the road way and lifted a brown paper package from his hand.

“She saw it, man. She saw it wasn’t my fault.”

From his crouched position next to the bundle in the road, Jack Fedogan says, “He’s dead.” Jack feels around the body, beneath the jacket, and then leans over to look beneath the cab. Then he stands up and looks out into the street, shielding his eyes.

“What is it?” McCoy Brewer asks.

Jack shrugs. “The cassette player. It’s not here.”

“It must be there,” McCoy says, crouching down.

The old man spins the driver around. “Which way?”

“What?”

“Which way did the woman go?”

“Hey, man, I didn’t see her go no way, man.”

“How far is Gramercy Park?” the old man asks.

“Huh? You want to go to Gramercy in this?”

“How far?”

The cabbie points down 23rd. “Couple blocks down to Lexin’ton and then one block down, man.”

The old man pulled his coat collar up and started across the street, his arms wrapped tightly around his battered valise and its cargo of release. He’s already across the street before the shouts but he doesn’t respond, just keeps on jogging along 23rd, passing beneath overhead lights, growing smaller and smaller, his footsteps growing fainter and fainter.

“I’d better call 911,” Jack says. He removes the apron he always wears and drapes it across Bernard Boyce Bennington’s face and chest. The rain immediately pastes it down and the first tell-tale signs of darkness start to show amidst the apron’s stripes. “You want to come inside?” he says to the cabbie, who is still staring down 23rd, staring and frowning, although there’s nobody to be seen any more.

“What’s he want in Gramercy Park?” the driver asks.

It’s Edgar Nornhoevan that answers. “He wants what we all want,” he says. “A little companionship to keep out the cold.”

The driver reaches into the car and switches on his hazard flashers, slams the door. Then he joins the others and, as one, they go back down into the Land at the End of the Working Day, prolonging the dream and putting off that dreadful moment when they, like all of us, must be alone again.

Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream

Copyright © Peter Crowther 2008 & 2011

The right of Peter Crowther to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form in The Land at the End of the Working Day by Humdrumming.co.uk in 2008. This electronic version is published in March 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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