Norman Mailer Describes Why He Didn’t Join in the Protests Outside of the 1968 Democratic Convention or the Silent Vigil Afterward

Ever modest, Mailer seems to offer that he was too tough to risk a beating by police as well as too tough to risk joining the candlelight vigil afterward protesting the police beatings. The means by which he was able to attain the objectivity necessary to make such statements may have something to do with Mailer referring to himself in the third person as “the reporter”:

The Protests:

“The reporter had an aversion to this. Besides, he was afraid of his own violence. It was not that he was such a good fighter, but he was not altogether courteous either – he had broken a man’s jaw in a fight not so long before, and was not certain the end of that was yet heard…He was not afraid of his own violence because he necessarily thought it would be so heinous to break a policeman’s jaw, good law-abiding citizen that he was! It was more that he was a little concerned with what the policeman’s friends and associates might do to him immediately afterward.”

The Vigil:

“The reporter did not join them…He could see them attacked by gangs, and the thought of taking a terrible beating in this company of non-violent McCarthyites and McGovernites, shoulder to shoulder with Arthur Miller, Jules Fieffer, Theo Bikel and Jeremy Larner, no, if he was going to take a beating, it was best to take it alone or with people he felt close to, people who were not so comparatively innocent of how to fight.”

--Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Actual footage of the reporter's own violence

Favorite Quotes Explained: Part 241

Quote: "I think therefore I am." --Descartes


Explanation: N/A as it's now accepted that Descartes was misquoted and actually said "I think I'd like some ham."

This Day in the History of Crazy: Thomas Eagleton

Thomas Eagleton (September 4, 1929 – March 4, 2007) a United States Senator from Missouri serving from 1968-1987 is perhaps best known for briefly being the Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee, sharing the ticket with George McGovern in 1972. Between 1960 and 1966, Eagleton checked himself into the hospital three times for physical and nervous exhaustion, receiving electroconvulsive therapy twice. The hospitalizations, which were not widely publicized, had little effect on his political aspirations. George McGovern had asked several politicians to join him and run on his ticket including Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and Birch Bayh, all of whom refused. McGovern sought to ask then-ambassador to France and minor celebrity Sargent Shriver to run with him but Shriver was reportedly unreachable by phone on board a flight for Moscow. McGovern next asked Senator Gaylor Nelson who declined but suggested Eagleton. Perhaps frustrated, McGovern asked Eagleton with only minimal background check. Eagleton accepted with alacrity making a decision in the process not to inform McGovern of his history of serious mental health issues including a powerful course of anti-psychotics which allowed him to serve as Senator though they were issued in his wife’s name. The first whiff of Eagleton’s possible instability may have come when he made anonymous mention of McGovern’s fondness of Acid to journalist Robert Novak. It has since been speculated that Novak may have manipulated the overly-suggestible Eagleton. Eventually Eagleton admitted to McGovern some of his history of hospitalizations but admonished McGovern that if he tried to remove him from the ticket he would fight it with everything he had (left). Eventually Eagleton agreed to withdraw but only after McGovern read a statement that Eagleton had prepared which essentially said that Eagleton was not crazy and that it was those who suggested such that were actually crazy. McGovern went on to lose the 1972 presidential election in what was then the second largest landslide in U.S. history.

ALTERNATIVES TO DEFINING INSANITY AS DOING THE SAME THING BUT EXPECTING A DIFFERENT RESULT:

-doing the same thing but expecting Steve Guttenberg to now be flattered by your rendition of the song that the three men sang to the baby in the movie.

-eating nothing but potatoes but expecting to be something other than coquettish.

-only toweling off your feet and then not expecting the rest of the bananas glacee to drip down from your torso where you spread it in an effort to demonstrate you were the kind of guy who enjoys the finer things in life.

-stealing packets of butter from restaurants without a real plan as to how to transport them without them perishing en route.

-foolishly believing that by eating only sticky foods you’ll be able to reverse the process of your molecules slowly dislocating that the ferret told you in no uncertain terms was too far gone to undo now.

This Day in the History of Crazy: Dr. Franz Lipp

The Bavarian Soviet Republic was part of the German Revolution of 1918, the short-lived attempt to establish a socialist state in the form of a council republic in the Free State of Bavaria. Established on April 6, 1919 by the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (The “USPD”), the USPD would not retain control for long perhaps because of poor personnel decisions including the installation of Dr. Franz Lipp as the Foreign Affairs Minister. During his brief tenure, Lipp, who had been admitted to psychiatric hospitals several times, unilaterally declared war upon Switzerland for their presumptive refusal to lend the Republic 60 locomotives, sent threatening and altogether lude letters to the pope and sought the personal intervention of Vladimir Lenin via cable after claiming that the ousted former Minister-President Johannes Hoffman fled to Bamberg and took the key to the ministry toilet with him. The regime collapsed within 6 days.

Le Pétomane

Le Pétomane was the stage name of the French professional farter and entertainer Joseph Pujol (June 1, 1857 - 1945). His stage name combines the French verb péter, "to fart" with the -mane, "maniac" suffix, found in words like musicomane (music lover). In English, a translation might yield "the fart maniac". His profession can also be referred to as a "Flatulist," "Farteur," or "Fartiste."

Pujol was born in Marseille. He was one of five children of François (a stonemason and sculptor) and Rose Pujol. Although a baker by profession, Pujol would entertain his customers by imitating musical instruments, and claim to be playing them behind the counter. Pujol decided to try his talent on the stage, and debuted in Marseille in 1887. After his act proved successful, he proceeded to Paris, where he took the act to the Moulin Rouge in 1892.

Some of the highlights of his stage act involved sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, as well as playing 'O Sole Mio and La Marseillaise on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus. He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. His audience included Edward, Prince of Wales, King Leopold II of the Belgians and Sigmund Freud.

In the following decade Pujol tried to 'refine' and make his acts 'gentler'; one of his favourite numbers became a rhyme about a farm which he himself composed, and which he punctuated with the usual anal renditions of the animals' sounds. The climax of his act however involved him farting his impression of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

With the outbreak of World War I, Pujol, horrified by the inhumanity of the conflict, retired from the stage and returned to his bakery in Marseille. Later he opened a biscuit factory in Toulon. He died in 1945, aged 88, and was buried in the cemetery of La Valette-du-Var, where his grave can still be seen today. The Sorbonne offered his family a large sum of money to study his body after his death, but they refused the offer.

Johnny Depp has repeatedly expressed interest in portraying Pujol in a major motion picture.

He'd always thought the phrasal verb "to bargain against ones self" with its negative connotation was sort of silly because who better to bargain against than someone with the same values and with the same longterm commitment to spaniels.

My Desires In The Event That I Should Be Incapacitated

I wish to be resuscitated, intubated, rehabilitated, preserved by artificial means, preserved by natural means, preserved by preservatives, if you need to, you should take me home and feed me something home-cooked, perhaps you ought to give me a bath too and one of those study pillows so you could prop me up and maybe even pretend that it's me who's saying the witty things you say in my voice which are incisive though always discreet and maybe also give me money too.

Get to Know a Historical Figure: Charles Sumner

Charles Sumner (January 6, 1811 – March 11, 1874) was an American politician and statesman. An academic lawyer and a powerful orator, Sumner decried the "crime against Kansas" and was almost immediately severely beaten by Representative Preston Brooks on the floor of the United States Senate.

The top of the world; the highest point within 100 miles of Iowa City, Iowa; where, it's said, the sky is revealed to be but a lens giving out on to other floating worlds. Still Madge couldn't shake the thought that despite not having had cheese in years there was quite clearly a cheese stain on her shirt.

The Principle

There are certain thoughts which one can merely think and they will never be the same. These thoughts are all around us like nourishing banana clusters. There are a finite number of these thoughts. Think them all and you will be as wise as the four winds or the three flavors (sweet, salty, salty-sweet) or those two guys in the back. However, each of us has a unique order – with slight variation permitted – in which we must think these thought or risk schizoid embolism. The stakes are high indeed. But without thinking any of these thoughts you risk collapse into the merest carnality: rampant sex without attachment, lust without devotion, having more pie without thinking about your one fat leg. The process of this principle is additionally complicated by the fact that the mark of many, but not all, of these thoughts is that it will be forgotten almost as soon as it’s thought. This is all made even more complicated by the existence of the “flouters” or “octogenarians” or “malamutes” whose role it is to try to rename the thoughts as hokum base and banal – never you worry about that mallet they’ll implore you. One may ask: if the very thinking of the thought will render me changed-forever how come I’ll forget it once I’ve thought it? But there is no simple answer to that question; no simpler anyway than to a question like how many plums is all of them plums? But the question serves to point up yet another danger: simply thinking one of the thoughts then forgetting it then thinking it again. Subsequent repetitions of the same thought will not have the same effect though there will be a slight yet gratifying tingle which for some is all the vindication they need. Those types find a life spent do-see-do-ing through the same thought rewarding. These people may set up huge temples to coax others to do their little fever dance but in the end they will meet violent ends as the axis on which they spin crumbles under the toiling mass of their bottom-heavy convictions heaving like a bag pipe even just walking down to the corner. One may think this terrain unnavigable, this game intractable, but this should not counsel resignation which would be met with foul language and insinuation about the city of your birth. Indeed, the road is long and not really even a road as much as a parkway or thoroughfare but perhaps I’ve already said too much; though I will conclude by noting that if you should ever have the thought why all these flowing robes? why so much pepper? you’re doing it wrong.

Walthingham

He was not a fat man; nor was he a particularly skinny man. He was likewise neither rich nor poor. And so he bore no mark of, or ready explanation for, the uncommon and unrelenting fervor with which he pursued food of any quality, at any time, and by any means. His methods ranged from simple footraces towards the food source to more cunning ruses - bait-and-switch, rope-a-dope, follow-the-birdy, breathe-very-deeply, lookout-for-that-bear and three-card-monty - usually called for when he’d lost the race or when other factors conspired to see another possessed of the food before him, such as the restaurant industry. Nothing in his past told of any period of deprivation and so theories of compensation were of no greater merit than those which posited some sort of inner emptiness as he was a particularly joyful person. Except, that is, for whenever food was present or presented shades of its own possibility at which times an assiduity overtook him as if the existence of his race depended on his immediate attention and inexorable determination. Yet it was this very singular will which arguably prevented such a peculiar proclivity from ever proceeding to the detriment of his reputation or social station. People were often taken aback by such wanton displays as him hiding with a Christmas ham or pouncing on a pile of pulled pork spotted from afar yet whatever alarm initially dawned in those in witness invariably gave way to a sort of admiration for, and inspiration by, the profound purpose which propelled him from one now-ravaged salad bar to the bus pan scraps just behind those always-swinging doors. And all agreed that he was indeed an estimable sort.

And they watched and wondered if it was right to prefer the night to the day; if it was wrong to see themselves as little more than the nameless black that the nightlit sky dressed them in; if the fireworks would possibly speed the drying of their pants.

Alfred J. Glouchester couldn't say how he had come to this particularly privileged place. He lived his life according to a few separate principles which collectively led him to think the merest impulses were imbued with the meaning and majesty of the divine that lies within us all. To the outside world it seemed he merely favored large women with large breasts.

Like most things of the sort, some immediately turned away from it; others inclined to stare it down often approached it but in so doing they almost invariably became either disenchanted or desensitized and rejoined the throng of the former. And it was this thought which led Gary to first consider that his commitment to eradicating homelessness among sheep might be nothing more than a novelty.

For a time he’d thought of himself as a tough not in the sense that he’d lift wallets or ruin topiary but that he knew what he knew and stared out as if on a world already traced with the hairless, fingerless hand of close-cropped chance. He could tell when someone was about to flee and he could tell when someone was about to eat. He sensed beginnings in the slightest of snack samplers and endings just after. He knew the form of wild winds and the content of nameless sauces. But this was not the first time he’d begun to feel self-consumed like a fat man, as wretched as wide, cursed to be covered in candy shell. And there’s no word for feeling like you know what you know whilst knowing that you’d previously known knowing only to once again be surprised at new sounds and meal deals. There’s not even a shorter way of saying it besides maybe at once sure and unsure; joint and several like the father and the son or the steps to clutterers’ anonymous. And so it was that his sudden fall was quite unexpected. When the world, one day, formed itself anew the terror which he felt was just too much and so he screamed and when he heard the sound of his own voice set against the world he now saw he screamed some more and when he felt that he could no longer scream this prospect too terrified him for its only by calling its name that terror relents and so he thought to write down his thought but no combination of vowels and consonants could capture the rough edge of it so he screamed himself silent and then resolved to hurl the pencils which had failed in the face of their greatest calling and the colored pencils too, though they had given slightly more effort, and when there was no more to throw or voice in his lungs he flung out his arms at intervals while extending his digits at alternating intervals and when he could barely lift his arms anymore he sprinted and sprinted away from the falling night and when his feet could move no longer he at last sensed that resignation was the only path left to what paltry righteousness there could be in such a feckless world and at last he sat down to the very lunch in which his doom seemed but a side. And it was only after he had nothing left to lash that he accommodated himself to the hot dogs hastily thrown into his macaroni and cheese.

The Last Day of Langley Collyer - Chapter 1

The cure had begun to take effect: Homer's blindness was no match for the daily regiment of 100 oranges and black bread. Small wonder. His affliction was no more mysterious than the machinations of the outside world bent on infiltration of our perimeters and, once inside, forced adherence to various principles of determinism and weight loss which I've only been too proud to eschew these past years even if the efforts required for our continued security have surpassed even previous estimations but are quite commensurate with the persistence of their provocations as laid bare more by the silences between than the shouts that come ringing through our halls admonishing us to "smell the topiary" or "flush the grundles" or "sniff the dandies" or any number of countless exhortations designed for no purpose but to make me question my convictions; but I will not; I must not for were we to surrender at this point the bureaus and legions would have little choice but to try us for the highest brand of treason and treachery - they'd probably force us into educational programs designed to make us forget the powers of the life force just within once it's awoken with fragrance. Which brings me back to where I started: Homer. A fool would treat his affliction as if it were merely one sensory faculty affected. Such a simplistic view of the world belongs in the schoolyards or the docks. No, just as it takes two eyes to perceive depth, it takes all the senses together to behold the manifold mystery of our day. Things are only rightly understood when taste and smell are in concert, when touch and smell waltz, and when hearing and smell twirl. It was this folly that engendered Homer's compromised state. Homer had been relying too heavily on his eyes, had thought the world can simply be seen. Well it can't and if it could be known through a single sense it would surely be smell. That's where the oranges come in; there is no object in this world that is such a delight to each of the senses jointly and severally and there is nothing so uniformly disappointing to each of the sense as black bread. Why is it black any way? The point is this: through the systematic derangement and rearrangement of the all-sense scheme as executed through this repeated excitement and disappointment of the senses, Homer's senses could begin to work as a team again with the captain taking his post at the olfactory watchtower. It's already begun to work. I just need a few more weeks to allow its proper course but they advance daily. Will Homer's cure first afford me the reinforcement I so desperately need in our defense? Or will they overtake us and pound us into the submission of scolded children through campaigns to compromise heightened senses of smell or at least heightened awareness thereof? Or will these booby traps I've rigged throughout the newspaper piles spell victory for us once and for all? The answer is out there curling through the air like the aroma of ham or broccoli.

He’d learned what lessons he could and his success was manifest as the zombies he was trying to organize spent most of their time vomiting in their seats in the auditorium. You’re dreaming again she heard him say, I didn’t actually just do that it was just a dream. But he’d known better. And he wasted no time by first testing his reality with candy corn and plums. Day after day and night after night he’d felt that his days were coming two at a time and his nights in threes. We’ve been promised new knobs and I want to know when we’re getting them an angry older tenant inquired from the back as loud as she could but only half loud enough to rise above the din of zombie ministrations. A portly fellow cum zombie turned as she spoke and ran for her with an alacrity he likely never knew in his alive life but was quickly turned away by auxiliary police who’d been contracted for just such services and who by all available criteria had performed it well even as some of the tenants had suggested that they were in league with the zombies. The local magistrate continued his speech by noting that he had been in touch with the very highest echelons of some local agencies and he could assure them that progress was a-coming. With patience, he admonished us, mountains can crumble and the towering incompetency and cronyism that had run the city long enough would be on its way out with just such inaction on the part of those in attendance. His thoughts drifted back to the race he watched earlier in the day. As the fleet-footed participants passed it was strange custom to offer the athletes presents. Almost invariably the runners would refuse prompting the offeror of the gift to keep it. Thus the gifts had become more wrapped items sought by the would-be benefactor for their own sake. And so it was that when an athlete did accept the gift it would often times be kitchen implements or brassieres. And before long the custom had become to hurl undergarments and rolling pins at the passing crowd because it is often those traditions for which there can simply be no explanation that stand the rigors of time while those which seem to be informed by principles of middling measure fall off. Such were his thoughts anyway when the zombie running for him was felled after being pelted with a frying pan by a tenant whose plea for functional salad crisper drawers for all refrigerators had hardly skipped a beat.

It wasn't that he didn't think things through. It was just that the deliberative process never seemed to yield the answers which informed his actions - most times it just wasn't done yet by the time he began whatever undertaking he was considering. And it was this fact that made him think that perhaps he was doing someone else's bidding, that perhaps all this thoughtful consideration was really just a charade, like a sweater put on a hog. But if that was true then who was it pulling the strings? Who was the Svengali? Who was the puppet master? He went down the list of people he knew that perhaps had benefited from some of his hastily conceived acts. Aunt Una certainly seemed pleased when he broke down and bought one of her pamphlets on safety with power tools; His friend Madge was only too happy to learn that he and his long time swimming buddy had decided that they just swam irreconcilable strokes. His brother Murtha certainly benefited from his decision to start wearing vertical stripes as he was gifted all the horizontally striped leftovers. And still he felt that behind it all there was someone or something pushing the buttons to make him do his trademark twirls. But all this was palatable, he reasoned, but what if whomever it was making his decisions showed a comparable disregard for reasoned acts - what if whoever was behind him was just as willy-nilly? How could he go on? How could he think of himself as anything but a pawn's pawn? And what is there for a pawn's pawn to do but...but wait, maybe he could take some comfort in the invisible intrinsic coherence of others' acts: maybe Lutz had a reason for practicing his jump kicks; maybe those geese had a reason for just staring at him like he was a piece of bread; maybe it all made a sense that wasn't his to understand. And he felt a peace that he'd not felt since he inexplicably began hording root beers.

True to his campaign promises, his first official act was to try to eliminate any laws of evidence and his purposes were elucidated and enumerated in his now-famous Fort Ticonderoga speech: trust: it is the cornerstone of every healthy relationship and what was an electorate if not a series of relationships - and what were the rules of evidence if not a formal cataloging of man's distrust for his fellow man, a veritable latticework of misanthropy, a codification of all that keeps us apart? So, he reasoned - and his reasoning is now thought to have catapulted him into office along with some vagaries about whether toddlers are allowed to vote - whatever one says in open court shall be taken at its word. If I say I couldn't have stolen those garden hoses because I was busy myself investigating the alleged victim of suspected cronyism then the scrutiny is rightly placed on them instead. If I say that I didn't throw plums at them at all but they threw them at me then my history of similar incidents leading to similar counter accusations is really not all that relevant. And if I say that I have never even heard of the term 'stewing chickens' then I surely couldn't have been able to fence them. For without trust, he admonished us, all is lost.

His conviction that his sense of proper punctuation far exceeded his peers was dubious enough but the fact that it was the only basis for his certainty that he was among the greatest writers of his day was just wrong no matter how fast he claimed to have wrote those - they're not prose nor poetry nor narrative nor expositive and it looks as if he was just writing down the things his speech pathologist had him repeat to overcome the stigma of his speech impediment. But still, bearing out the old adage that the poet's real work of art is his life , he spent his days in curious repetitions of altogether odd, though no less prosaic acts, be they: experimentation with his lifelong belief that one could stop a sneeze by forcefully rubbing one's eyeball; or pursuit of proof of his suspicion that the most erogenous part of a body is not among the popular choices, nor the brain as has been posited by more booky types than himself, but rather just behind the ear right about where a Labrador might happily receive your solicitations; or fleeing from suggestions that he floss more; or in invariably aborted attempts to breathe underwater by allowing water passage through his throat. But in the end, his mark was indelibly stamped upon the world, as his written repetitions were hailed by many as the ignominous end of communication and the beginning of a world where those afflicted with stutters and the like needn't fear anything but pillage by the hordes which stalked the ruins of our once great townships and shopping centers making sounds of their own choosing fueled by their now-inexpressible rage.

Perhaps, he thought, I'll just not think those thoughts - maybe no thoughts at all; for anything that can enter the mind without really making itself known is not really there - more like a ghost free to haunt all it likes but without recourse to typical tricks like hurling candelabras or blowing, like a draft, through the cellar or causing to be misplaced various articles not entirely essential for everyday living but certainly helpful including the salt-ternative, the October Reader's Digest, the just-bought lunch meats, or the lufa sponge: just a ghost condemned to live amongst the living able to walk through the door into the women's locker room but unable to hide towels. No thoughts at all, just the faint suspicion that someone's watching.

Loaves and Fishes: the story of one Christian woman's battle against yeast infection

Coming Soon!

As days turned to nights, nights became days again making the difference as semantic as silly as the Sun surrounded and silhouetted her leaving her sleek, graceful and equine as her decision became final, against suggestions to the contrary, not to call before digging. The impulse to dig had come as suddenly as its execution for why should the heretofore theoretical existence of buried wires call for any sort of forbearance that the far more real threats from the true owners of the land had - assuring her, as they did, that their retribution would also call for damage to her decorative landscaping. Really, she reasoned, there was probably already a parallel world where she had already begun digging; probably one where she was even done in addition to those of the sort of mystical mitosis perched in present potential as her digging would either run aground on the electric snakes or not. There was maybe even another world where her damn silhouette wasn't so horse-like, she thought, as the sudden futility of any sort of action in any of the infinite worlds instead inspired in her a brand of melancholy and a taste for fried rice.

Though his speech was erudite and eloquent there was just no getting over the effrontery of stealing a man's palm wine and then urinating that selfsame fluid, slightly altered, back onto that man's hut.

"They may bite you" he was often heard to say "but no one, but no one, can ever bite you in the teeth." Though his meaning was unclear, it was generally accepted as true and the children - so selected for displays of a willingness to work through common ear infections and predispositions towards cannibalism - were given sometime occasion to test its veracity as they tried to make plans for their evening without the guidance of hour or minute hands instead making use of only second hands, the evening weather report and makeshift wind sockets. The results were clear and if it cannot be said that they were running away from something they must have been running towards something else as they spent most of their time - understanding it however they might have - in fits of frenetic desperation or its intestinal equivalent. Such is the way of children made to do with just that which their parents had; for what could be wrong with parents and children in social stasis is just that which should be wrong with it: a perverse incentive to give your children something better by conception when scarcely ready to bear for little reason more than to make sure their implements are only 19 years old and not 27-33 and the fact that the satisfaction come by through experimentation with cannibal children will always be fleeting.

The villagers worked the while separating the corn niblets from the cobb only too careful not to drop one lest their punishment be swift, odorous and, by custom and law, self-imposed. They milled and spoke of the ways that it was different before the millennium though few could offer examples to help the claim apart from the fact that back then it seemed easier to find certain seasonal fruits and properly fitting pants. And still they spoke. “How are you?” they called out. “Not as good as the king.” they’d reply. They had no king and the meanings of the response were as mysterious as the practices of their Queen whom, it was said, believed, according to a prophecy of the local oracle/notary, that a challenge to her throne would arise from the east on a dusty day. The Queen kindly confused east with left and forever made people approach her from the right with their questions and suggestions at pains of death or public embarrassment by impugning their chastity or hand-eye coordination. The days were all fairly dusty and the nights passed with chilled corn cocktails. As the recipe had been somewhat lost in translation several generations back the cocktails never had any alcoholic-content though, it bears mentioning, people felt compelled, by the weight of history perhaps, to act in ways suggesting just such an influence if in no other way than slightly slurred speech (equally applicable to the corn chunks floating in the brew which all to easily lodged in what few teeth the people could claim their own). For who were any of them - humble to the right of the queen, to the left of their corn work and under the printed vault of a sky - to question history. Though historians have since suggested that the Oracle may have merely noted to the Queen that a change of address would slow the receipt of her East Bay catalogs.

I saw the sign that said you'd cobble shoes while I wait.
That's right we'll cobble them while you wait.
Ok, sign me up.
Well, it's actually less formal than all that; just give me the shoes.
What do you mean 'give me the shoes'?
What part required explanation?
I thought you'd cobble them while I wait.
And you were right to do so.
Well now you want me to hand them over?
Yes.
So, I'm to wait without shoes?
I'd just as soon leave the details of your wait to your discretion and tastes.
I can't wait with my shoes on?
Take all the time you like. When you're ready, hand them over. We're not changing oil.
Have you got a spare pair?
Only the shoes of others who, for reasons all their own, opted not to wait here.
Well could I put them on so I'm not sitting here like a vagabond?
I don't believe it's my place to make such an offer with another man's shoes.
Surely there's no cobbler's oath.
Sometimes it goes without saying.
Come on.
OK

[he gives him a pair of shoes]

[customer runs off with the shoes just as he'd done to cobbler's throughout the tristate area.]

Trace their airy orifices to their center and proceed and, slowly, you’ll reach the night-lit sky of their common struggles. Constellations trace the hairy hand that first lifted them out of their soupy stoicism. On the ground it’s business as usual as various grains, widely thought to enlarge the teeth so as to facilitate chewing, command top prices to be paid for in seasonal dishes or by money order. The problem of people coming to blows after disagreements over proper pronunciation has largely subsided after it was agreed that epistolary communiqués were a more refined mode until the letter carriers demanded additional deference to their decisions on certain matters including headings and physical education. And still the gears turn and the wheels crank and the antennas bow gently in welcoming the night’s programming and the telephones lie in their cradles because no one knows how to say what everyone’s thinking without sounding like a stew or a beet farmer trimming the horizon for borscht that won’t be eaten until the cabbage is done and the sun hangs like a head turned down to see if the smell traveled with heat and rose or at least to mind the curb. At this point it’s safe to say that they’re not coming. They never come and still it’s not always safe to say it for fear of reprisal. But just where they are is the sort of thing that anyone can imagine and most are probably right for they spread their tendrils with the sweeping certainty of a rat-bitten salesman come to peddle this the last, though finest, of his extension cords: freedom can be yours. And with it you too can do what you like but you ought not go that Hardy’s again. It’s their loss, but your shame, but their “wall of the banished”, but your picture sitting alone as you were when the police entered.

And you won’t get the report because it hasn’t been written