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MIDNIGHT AT NOON
The Captain wakes with chewing gum in his hair. A blank-verse but prosy opening to his day. (His long-legged, short-haired bedmate is up and gone.) His head tacky on the pillow, he searches his scalp and finds the wad lodged in the thicket behind his bald-spot. With angry nails he picks in vain and then, with scissors, chops. So, there will be a hole in what little hair remains to him. The hell with it. In the mirror he won't notice. Is this an omen? The desultory rain scratches at the penthouse skylight. Something inside his skull is ticking? A deathwatch beetle? Fuck it. He will go outside. It drizzles fine as gauze. (Here I must pause to warn myself and warn the listener not to allow our knowledge of stories to shape this narrative of an hour. Those scissors need not imply that self-castration is the Captain's first thought. Nor need we infer that the lanky androgyne that has fled his bed is his fleshy mother's acceptable antonym. And that explosive "Fuck it" may or may not have brought closure to the First Act.) He tours the roof. I see him leaning on the parapet, scanning the towers and domes and spires, inhaling the sooty air. In the street below, the traffic is fast and random, but he finds himself inside the shell of what was once the Waldorf, the Mayfair, the Georges Cinq. Tourists shoot film at the window holes, at the baroque fireplaces, one above the other on the wall, weeds sprouting from plaster where sconces once were wired. Dead grass, lunch bags, blurred newspapers crunch underfoot. Only the lobby has retained its roof and glass: behind tall panes behold the crowded statues of the wealthy dead, carved out of salt or snow. Cathedral bells strike noon, but the sky is dark and the grainy streetscape swarms before his eyes. The storm comes striding through city blocks, swinging bunched fists of rain. Let things fall as they may. And let them lay. The Captain bites the tip off his cigar. And spits.
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