Metro Pulse/Gamut/Multiverse, Knox

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Part II

A short story

by Jack Mauro

Last Week: Knoxville becomes unnatural, young men spy on a tourist destination, and the lesser Dunn soars out of this life.

The tenth of July. Knoxville wilts like a corsage on a stood-up debutante.

How could we wait so long before revealing all that is Lucius T.? We are sorry. But beg the reader to recall that no fewer than two real Earls take the stage before Lear strides on, and Godot never even bothers to show up at all.

Lucius Temple is making his move. At fifty-two, he is ending his employment with Club LeConte and taking his hipness and his lemonade elsewhere. These are no ordinary commodities. Lucius' hipness is of that variety many seek to adopt, collapsing squarely in the attempt. He is hip as you or I occupy space, in a Platonically pure fashion. Other hipnesses are dependent upon their surroundings; their cool cannot be perceived without the non-hip wallpaper, as it were. Lucius would be hip in a vacuum. By way of example, we disclose the little known fact that, seven years previously, Lucius was the first human being to coin the mea culpa of "my bad." As with many a brilliant invention, its creator thought nothing of it at the time.

The lemonade of Lucius is less intangible, but equally transcendent. For twenty years his recipe has been enjoyed only by the privileged society of Club LeConte. For twenty years influential club members have hazily proposed to Lucius the marketing potential of it. For five years Lucius has pondered this with some gravity. Then, three days ago, Lucius witnessed the airborne exit of Earl Dunn from life. A sign had been thrust in his face, sent, if not by God, by a near relation of Him.

Baron Dunn checks into the downtown Holiday Inn. He takes a room there because, despite his sumptuous wealth, Holiday Inns are quite good enough for him; because Hiltons and Hyatts adopt a Euro panache he does not care for; and because his brother stayed there, and it is beseeming to his memory that family demonstrate solidarity, particularly in mourning.

Of Atlanta, Baron Dunn is a forty-eight year-old weaver bird. He has thus far originated and brought to thunderous success three concerns. Dunn's Buns (encompassing breads and pastries), A Dunn Deal (automotive), and Dunn's Buns II (apparatus for the firming of gluteal regions, and thusly linked more than nominally with his first undertaking). As each venture prospered, Dunn took a wife, as the weaver bird guarantees for himself a fresh female with the completion of each fine nest. It is of secondary interest, but remarkable nonetheless, that the first Mrs. Dunn was rotund, the second resembled a Volvo, and the third is as sinewy as a panther.

But he is heavy with sadness this day, Baron Dunn. Burying a brother is a task disturbing on many levels, not the least of which is that the brother doing the interring sees too much of his own face in the interred. He sits on the edge of his bed and feels the need for strong drink. He calls room service, and requests whiskey be brought to him.

"I won't be doing that, sir." The velvet steel of Miss Bascombe's voice.

Baron Dunn is confused. "I beg your pardon?"

"You want drink, you go to a damn bar." Miss Bascombe terminates the call. Confusion now circling his grief, Dunn thinks, What the hell. He will take a drive.

In a corner of the Holiday Inn kitchen, Darya Bascombe casually looks to the day's guest register by her telephone. She notices that a Dunn is the party she just refused to oblige, recalls that a Dunn was booted to the Other Side by her bus, and ignites within herself fifty-odd years of Baptist kindling.

Same day. The meager and windowless cubicle shared by Best Carmichael, Loan Officer, and an unkillable fern, in the lofty upper tier of the AmSouth bank. As the air conditioning pumps frost on the pasteboard walls, the enormous fern quivers, as though twittering in fern amusement that cold could nail it when it has chewed up and spit out years of no natural light.

To the left of Best's head as positioned behind his desk is a framed homily. It reads, "Let's Make Your Dreams Happen Together." To Best's shame or to his credit, he once believed in this as an admittedly mercenary but not altogether absurd enticement. These days, he wishes to festoon its caring rectangle with darts.

For Best Carmichael has a Lawhorn as boss and as view. When Best looks up from his blotter, he is treated to the prospect of the obscenely windowed and regally enclosed office of Brice Lawhorn, Sr. And there is not one single thing about Lawhorn—internal, behavioral or sartorial—not hateful to Best. The slick coif of Lawhorn is awful because it crowns the patrician skull of Lawhorn. The fine silks and tweeds that drape him are foul because they obfuscate the physicality of Lawhorn, which corporeality should exist only, to Best's thinking, prostrate and wheezing.

Best watches his nemesis now, shaking an unctuous hand with a colleague across the way. He sees in his mind the man's odious son, recently employed—or, more precisely, paid—by the bank until even his father's sway could not sustain the farce of it. Best is not a lover of the classics, but would be an appreciative audience to a performance relating in translated Greek the extinction of an entire family line.

Then Best's weary gaze takes in the main lobby of the bank below. Lucius T. has entered and is making an elegantly paced progress across it. And, as Best's eyes follow him, so too do Lawhorn's, disapprovingly noting the trajectory of Lucius, his plump hand still engaged in the charade of bonhomie. It is as though Lucius were prey in this carpeted fiscal jungle.

Does another piece of copy change, as did the Chapman Highway billboard? Does the slogan on Best's wall now read, "Life Gives You An Enemy, But Sometimes Hands You A Slingshot"? Yes. But only briefly, and no one sees it.

Next: Demonstrating that a multitude of thirsts may be slaked in a variety of ways.

Jack Mauro's book Gay Street is available at B. Dalton in West Town Mall, Barnes & Noble, and online through Amazon.com. Mauro will release Spite Hall, which is also set in Knoxville, in September.