the truth as we know it

The Truth As We Know It


On about the 1st of the month or so, my co-habitator, Sara Clare Ellington, (no relation to the Duke, actually Jewish) pulled the proverbial rug out from under my precious existence. It was the beginning of slip-sliding away. Seismic upheaval. Pangaea splitting off into disparate parts. The earth, my earth would never be the same.
Just when commonplace boredom had become something desirable it was ripped out from underneath my grubby little fingers. You wait your whole life for satisfaction, every living, breathing moment a means to that end and just when all seems monotonous yet comfortable the uprooting of everything becomes a somber reality.
Being an affirmed astrology buff, and then some, she let me know that, the planets’ coordinates were coordinating in such a way that they were extremely uncoordinated for us. Our co-mingling. Our co-existing. Calmly, I asked her if it was that time of the month. Brazenly aghast, she thought not. She proceeded to spew venom about her Gemini exiting my Libra and how everything we had ever stood for seemed like a bad dream. To me if it wasn’t that time of the month it was a reasonable facsimile thereof. Put it this way, I had been in the firing line of her furious feminine rage before. It was so-out-of-this-world that maybe to quote her, “It was interplanetary.” All I could think of was, Heaven Help us. Spewing the serpent’s oil or not, she sounded eerily similar to the blue-light-special announcer at a certain convenience outlet. As cold-blooded as she sounded and as eerily sick to the stomach as I felt, the image of some chunky big-breasted woman yelling out toothpaste and lipgloss specials to everyone so inconsequential that they were to the fate of the universe, truth and happiness and all, made me cheerily incoherent to the seriousness of her mouth transit. To keep one’s sanity sometimes one must remember the man code, only listen to what is absolutely necessary. Entire kingdoms have gone under when the code has been explicitly denied its place in the kingdom. Exactly why the man code was invented.
Sara Clare and I had been an item for quite some time now. Never did we appear in the society pages but that was most likely my fault. She came from a high-falutin’ family. They had it all, deep pockets, a most powerful group of allies, exotic palatial estates set up in several strategic points around the universe, personal guides and gurus that never left well enough alone and the feeling that anything was attainable if the laws of physics weren’t compromised. She was a member of the bourgeois. The ruling class. She had followed her dad, a prominent judge, a man with a scolding heart, deep penetrating eyes, the kind that ate right into your soul with their insatiable appetite, and classic highbrow unibrows, down the ivy league path and was still contemplating a life of jurisprudence, echoing her dad’s path though she disagreed wildly with some of his archaic political views. She loved him dearly. Her dad had painted her as an outcast when she hooked up with me. I was of the ostracized type. My music lorded over me. She had once loved me for it. But sometimes common sense overtakes the sanity of one’s soul as time meanders aimlessly through its cycle and it didn’t matter that they were multiple universes, chaos theory won out especially if you didn’t sit down long enough for the anxiety to pass. And I knew it as well as I had known it before, people that love, that really love, usually in the long run, get screwed.

In a time of incoherence, lightning struck! The dam burst! Floodgates dissolved! Falling into my arms, she cried inconsolably, her head draped over my shoulder, like the great hoary noggin of the albatross. The great squawking image of a flesh eater in all its glory. As she brooded I became her nesting place. Her calm in the storm.
What seemed like eons later when she calmly lifted her head and moved it away, relieved of her burdensome skull, I dryly commented on the news I’d heard about the salmonella scare. I was trying to ease her tension, set right the distraught applecart. I was trying to bridge the distance between us.
“Sara Clare, have you heard about the salmonella?”


Wide-eyed, her pupils dilating, she managed a horizontal bop of her head.

I continued. “It seems salmon, yes, salmon, as kooky as it sounds is

drumming up support for salmonella.”

Diligently I was attempting to take up time and space with scientific

meanderings which tied into the fate of the universe. In some way, sensing her

psychological disrobing of me, I suddenly realized, with an epiphanic leap of faith that 2 + 2 no longer equaled 4. I thought that what if in life and mathematics there were no absolutes. I shuddered at the thought. I imagined Newton disrobing with me. I wished that I had hardened my soul, as well as my flesh.

She sat silent. Catatonic. I wondered if I was losing her. I chuckled,

looking for a response. “Salmonella spawning, distributing p-o-i-s-o-n

to unsuspecting humanity.” And damn, the notion of global warming was

just becoming comfortable.
We both decided to sleep on the couch but it was too crowded (too close for comfort).

To the bed I marched (in playfully indignant repose) not as much mad as lonely. During a relentless dream about conformity, which included Michael Jackson, the pope and myself, a terrifying vision appeared in my cerebral cortex. A Roman dude blowing his trumpet, Michael Jackson dancing his soul away and the pope reading from a scroll about affairs was my REM reality. Through my unconscious mind raced the words, business affairs, art-a-fairs, foreign affairs…until out of the cool blue vast wasteland of neuron activity I screamed or so I thought…Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah. I rolled off the bed, inadvertently hitting my elbow on the sturdy oak floor. Damn that hurt. My mind raced like a madman. Before I could lift my body back up to higher ground, Sara Clare stood over me. There was evil in her eyes, or was she just extremely concerned about my health?

“You b - ch, she said!” Lightening flashed, a harmonic convergence of light and bolt lit up the sky; there were sure to be floods all over Manhattan.

“You what?” Puppy dog eyes and whatever else upwardly young mobile women were made of, stared back at me. Like a body—and—soul-- piercing laser beam.

“It’s okay Roger.” She ran her elegantly painted nails, the epitome of bright—bright-- magenta through her meticulously coiffed brown curls, the ringlets that cost more daniro for upkeep than many third world countries annual budget outlays. She seemed composed. Her storm had passed. As I neared consciousness I felt a dark cloud passing overheard. For a moment the music died like Don Mclean had rhapsodized.

“It was fun while it lasted. A real blast. You should get some sleep now.” She rolled her eyes, eyes that to me once seemed magical were losing their sexy cat shape, their luster, their appeal, their any and everything good, right in front of my face. All I could think was, my God, I hope I’m dreaming. And if I’m not, may I never wake up.

What was she telling me? This from a woman who said she was
more man than I’d ever be. I remembered thinking, I hope not, let me re-check your equipment. Damn, she had gone on to say about how she wore the pants in our family. I blamed it on women’s lib, suffragette in 1920, Gloria Steinem, the whole kit and caboodle of crazed
women’s - righters. Too much freedom. I blamed everything on too much freedom. She’d said she had more testosterone in her little finger, or pinky. Whichever it was. My mind was failing me. I’d said, like shit howdy, she didn’t. “Are you willing to be tested, I’d asked her? “D-O-C-T-O-R office in the morning.” I’d prove I wasn’t her bitch.
Of course when the morning showed itself, all had been forgotten like a bad dream. Still, I wasn’t exactly living nirvana.

Now half-awake, half-asleep, half immobile and totally zombified, I lay underneath my manly woman as she caressed my head. She took it into her hands like a baby’s bottom, tenderly caressing, rubbing her Flo-Jo fingernails through my receding brown follicles. I remembered heart and soul. I remembered solid gold. And then, I woke up. The bitch was heavy. Sweat beaded into little ringlets and dripped from my body. The phone rang. Unconsciousness absurdly rolled into a conscious storm.

“Hey baby, it’s Sara Clare.”

“Who? Who is this?”

“It’s Sara (I double D) Clare.” She giggled. I remembered her

effervescence. Her beauty. Her love for me. (Something about the rain in Spain.)

“Sara Clare? Really?”

“Rog, remember, what we talked about…like last night? You know?”

Memory wasn’t my strongest suit. Playing poker in the high school bathroom, fueled by marked cards had been my strongest suit until I had been emasculated by strong motherly women shortly after puberty had set in. The closest I came to a strong suit now was my Calvin Klein triple-breasted dark black suit that with a baby blue shirt in tow annihilated all pretenders to the throne. The truth hurts sometimes. Now I was enveloped by reminisces that mercifully my failing memory base would soon wipe out. Still tears closed in, remembering what can now be categorized as wasted time. Most of my misspent hours had been wasted on cooking flambé, Brie and salmon and pleasing her. The albatross diva squared. She had soared into my life with a dynamic flair and now I was the epitome of rotting flesh in her book. Big bird soar away.

“Vaguely. Is there something I need to know? “

“The ride’s over, baby. You see, I got me a new driver. Get the
concept?” I know it may be hard to fathom but Sara (I double D) Clare is moving on. Saying sayonara. Adios, amigo.”

I was the inventor of concepts. Was she kidding? I racked my
brain holistically day after stupefying day trying to turn water into wine, intent at upsetting the applecart, replacing string theory, its 13 dimensions or so and Galileo’s round earth hypothesis by the next time the sun rose, showed its face in the galactic mirror. I was a man on a mission. Unfortunately my magic wand wilted on the vine. My potions were impotent. And over time, geniuses become madmen, monsters with no luck, no money and nowhere to go. Still a concept was a concept.

“I’ll send someone for my things. Ta ta.”

A new chauffeur? Was my limo pushing up daisies?
Long had the Milky Way been my friend. In its circular, gaseous embrace, I’d been a pretty avid collector of earth dust. Some people had baseball card memorabilia. Not me. My psyche collected quickly-to-be-forgotten memories like a radiation belt eats and breathes earth dust. New York City, my home, my paradise, had become my prison. My penitentiary. My big house. I needed to exit the planet. Get out of Dodge. Six quadrillion miles from the nearest galaxy, and gas prices were breaking long-standing records I was in heartbreak state. Exxon was on the up and up (in profits). Cataclysmic. What was next, Superman didn’t love Lois Lane? Protector of the universe was really a welfare cheater?
Reconstructing myself, picking up my sanity piece by piece, I gulped down two pots of coffee. Into the New York night, I screamed from my 15th floor balcony. Bloody Murder! Certain that the cops would be knocking on my door any minute with intent to bust heads, I took my caroling back inside. Concepts, Superman, Hegel’s concept (in my view) was dead. Now the mother of all tragedies (thanks, Saddam) was doing its symbolic and putrefying dance around my head like a motherf –r. The albatross would be dining tonight. Existence (mine) was going through a cruel phase. Otherwise, things were looking up. I was a free man.


I had spent years being overly mothered, downright smothered by overbearing bosomy types. Mary Sue Angelides, after what she’d done to me, with such fervor, a religiosity, I’d simply and unequivocally referred to her as the anti-Christ. Back in junior high, she’d tricked me into the girl’s bathroom. All you need to know, it was a set up. The feminine mystique had done me in. It’s a wonder that more men don’t contemplate suicide or maybe they do. Maybe the doing is the hardest part. My college girlfriend Amoeba Ray Thompson, she of the notoriously hippie parents, left me for her own gender and a few oversexed professors. She bombed—out my world kinda like her hippie parents and their Molotov cocktails had done to establishment locales back in the time of peace and love. My history of love had been unnecessarily brutal. Romantic gentlemen might ring a bell in a girl’s heart, but ostensibly chivalry was dead; at least as much as Nietzsche’s God.

Men were the weaker sex and whenever they chimed in with veritable nonsense owing to such platitudes as courtesy, kindness and overbearing love it didn’t take a Rorschach test to figure out the results of such encounters. The brothers were doomed. Doomed from the start. And, amen, that’s the history of love, a four-letter word that can invoke miracles or crush you at the extreme essence of being and shit you out without a care.


The office, Gladstone and Bryant, interior snob decorators, informed me that Ms. Ellington had gone home for the day. I wondered, home, was it where the antelopes roamed? What did Ms. Ellington consider home?

I used to do comedy in the privacy of my home. My home. Laughed at my corny jokes. Booed. Hissed. Heckled myself. Seemed it was about time for Othello. Romeo and Juliet. Et tu Brute?

Once we had been two sensually and mentally entwined lovers, we had
leapt from innocence to nonsense and back again effortlessly like nomadic swans moving from lake to lake, flying the trapeze, laughing at fate, mockingly serene while hanging as trapeze artists are wont to do, upside down meandering from the Brooklyn Bridge of our sensibilities, our youthfulness never-say-die bravado emitting poetic singsongs to long-dead lovers who superimposed on the scene before us. Now was this episode of our life dead? Was our passion play finished? Dried up? Dried up like the prunes my grandmother ate to hasten indigestion? I think not. I dare not. We who embark into summer on heaven’s wings shall be there into winter as our sunset nears. Yes, I felt that in my heart. That was something I had read long ago and I held it neatly to my breast. I would not go calmly into the night. Dylan Thomas provided me inspiration.



Downtown at the 1st City café, a hip avant-garde, starbucks clone with mobsters, gangstas and radiant ladies, I mingled. Drinking my café latte. I soared. Like the eagle I flew. Not on major drugs but caffeine was calling out my brain cells, reveille, one by one. I’d ingested so much coffee. Essentially I was a coffee pot transporting a human likeness around. Life images flashed before my eyes. The neon lights of Broadway. I laughed, impervious to pain, energy had trumped pain moved it out of the defining light. Yet like most smoldering beasts, it boiled under the surface.

Ebony eyes floated my way, sashayed into my world. “Hey, man, you look like the man on the moon. You discovered the jitterbug? Some kind of human insect?”

My mind raced. Surveying the brownsugarlady, I noticed her full lips, her precious white teeth, her kinky fro (a testament to 70’s soul) and her body. It was packing. My mind raced. Sara Clare and buffaloes roamed, did the neutron dance inside my skull. “Funny (hesitatingly). Are you the definitive expert on cockroaches and other insidious bug types?”

“Man, you gotta be fool.” She sneered. Black mamba venom replaced her genteel, sexy-as-hell aura. “Just asking, why you so doggone fool jumpity.”

Pointing to the sign, tilting my cup toward her, I hoped that she got all of the fresh roasted correlations.

“Now you ain’t got no mumbo-jumbo. What ails you?”

Overtaken by pure knowledge of the universe we live in, Sara Clare and a faulty sense of exasperation, I removed myself from my stool and knelt in front of the god of the whole shebang. “O heavenly father, who thou art be in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”



When I awoke, I was knee deep in the excrement of a police holding cell. My arrest report said something about offensive religious artifacts edifying the general public in a secular society. Remembering the ebony queen like a lucid dream on the history channel, I barked like a dog.

“Shut the fawk up! Are you crazy, little ol’ man?”

Laughter reverberated in my consciousness. Are you crazy, little old man?

“Yeah dumb little ass, pumped up on coffee,” said another man of the law. He laughed.

“The new drug use, hey Sid?”

“Yeah, next thing you know, we’ll be sending a search party for Juan Valdez.”

“Yeah,” Sid’s buddy laughed.

My only concern was escaping prison time. I wasn’t superman. I was bleeding reality. I was wondering what happened to get me here.



“That’ll be $450. Four and a half clams.”

“You sure that’s what I need?" I held the 45. It felt good. It felt snug in my hand.

“Listen! Are you killing somebody or just shooting at white rabbits when you’re at Alice’s?”

“Shooting white rabbits of course.” I played along with his reference to Jefferson Airplane.

“Well do you wanna blow them to smithereens? Or have soup?” He laughed.

“I guess, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Okay, four and a half clams and the baby’s yours.”

She was a baby all right. Silver metallic. Rabbit killer. What had I bought myself into?


When the dude with the mojo showed up, I was constitutionally ready to take up arms. Read him his rights.

“I don’t want no trouble, dude. Are you, Cayce? Roger Cayce?”

“Spitting image. In the flesh.” I cocked my rabbit-killer. “Wanna see a profile? My myspace is a dousy.”

“Sara, just wanted me to remove her things.”

“I’m sure you already have.’

“Hey, dude, Rog, she said you two were completely over. Really, that’s what she said. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

“The shit comes out in the wash. Ever heard that old wife’s tale, uh? Excuse me for asking, but who the hell are you?”

“Dave, Dave, David Geffbron.”

“One of those Daves, huh. Damn sure, I’d killed them all. Damn sure.”
I blew on my virgin gun barrel and rotated the chamber. It was as fresh as an unspoiled flower. “Okay, what the hell, she’s gonna be on my history channel, Dave. Get her stuff. It’s yours. All yours. I sincerely hope that you have testosterone on back order.”

“What?”

“Never mind, you’ll get the picture.” I had a theory brewing about him getting the picture. For sure, the level of difficulty would be low. No, Ansel Adams would he have to be. He would get the picture.



A few weeks later, I know because the man on the radio called it the 21st of June, Dave rung me up. It was the first day of summer. Love season. Birds and bees time. And Sara Clare now possessed my 27-inch surround sound Zenith. And I was a bird without a bee. “Yeah, what is it? Wanna purchase the Roger Cayce love guide.”

“What in the blue-fucking-moon, are you talking about?”

“Calm down sadist, and tell me why you are further wasting my time.”

“Your girl, I mean, my, you know, what I mean, Sara, I think she’s doing me wrong.”

“Well, brother, she has a track record you might say.” Under my breath I sneered and giggled.



Somewhere on the dark side of Jersey, where the seediest of the seedy plant their seed, Dave Geffbron, a card-carrying member of the Jewish nation and I something less desirable in humanity’s version of the Oscars, of the high and mighty, of the princes and princesses caste waited on a JAP, a Jewish American princess and silently swore that she and he (whomever he be) would rot in hell.

“Never in my wildest dreams, did I think, we would be in this together.”

“Yeah, Dave, you’re definitely a rocket scientist.” We were so close like two peas in a pod. I was missing good TV, being here with him. She had dumped me long ago. What was I doing here? I guess one night off the couch, no matter how seedy this place was, wouldn’t kill me. And my virgin 45, was ready to pop its cherry if need be.

“Oh, shit, lookee here, see that, “ said Dave.

“Yeah spongebob, I think I do.” I had no idea what good ol’ Dave was looking at, alluding to. As the hoary mist oozed in like an uninvited ghost
on musty sea-salt legs, I really believed that Dave’s mind was sort of an alter-ego to its regular self. Heaven help me if I’m wrong, but I believe that his mind was hallucinating. A smorgasbord of dark smoky bitter-sweet Heinekens, white wine shooters and the taste of marijuana lay heavy on his breath, giving me the inkling. Was I in the clutches of a madman?

After an eternity-like ten minutes had passed, we ran with soft, furry rabbit feet and stealthily climbed the stairs to an old shanty of an apartment. I could have sworn that the earth rotated around the sun two or three times or maybe it was the company I was keeping. The building looked like something out of the dark ages. I had a fear that a bubonic rat was going to appear. I surmised that I had been visited by enough plagues to write the book on them. At the door, we listened. Our rapt ears stood at attention. Male bonding in the time of imminent threat to pride was at our disposal, was our destination. Whether we liked it or not? We were in this together.

“What do you think they’re doing in there, Rog?”

Giggling interrupted the silence. Sea salts sailed from the cumbersome sea. Out in the deep ocean depths, sea cucumbers, seahorses, sharks, jellies and a mind-bogglingly large number of other creatures went along on their merry way all unaware of our place in the Universe. A chill settled over my bones.

“Shit, Rog, what the hell’s she doing in there?”

“Probably knitting sweaters.” Long ago the chastity belt had been removed. Innocence had been tarnished, tarred and feathered. Princess no more. The shift into overdrive had come all too sudden. But the shock had worn off.

Upon my last facetious remark, Dave, on his own, with little or no corroboration on my part, smashed the door in. It flew from its hinges, a flightless bird. We leapt over it.

“There.”

“There.”

We rolled to the sounds. Breasts of Sara Clare stared hard-core into my eyes, a titman’s dream in a better place, a grander time.

“Holy shit, Rog, that guy…”

The presently encumbered lover stood naked before us. One hand clutched his privates undignified; the other was on his head.

“Don’t shoot. She told me it was over. You guys were in the book.”

“No shit, Sherlock. How long did it take you to solve the mystery? " I queried.

“What? Holy shit.”

Into the wall, I sprayed some chicken pellets laced with salmonella.

“Damn, don’t shoot!”

“Damn, cowboy, you aren’t a scared little wussy after all, are you?”

Laughing uncontrollably, we, I, almost split a gut.

“Now get the hell out of here and take your tee-pee with you, “ exhorted Dave.

“Sara Clare, don’t you think you need by this time, a whorehouse license or a pipe-fitting inspector?”

“Are you guys, crazy? Roger, have you gone bonkers? Got a screw loose?”

“You could say he’s got a screw loose. Ha ha ha.” Sara Clare grabbed her clothes and ran off naked into the night. Her pale round white butt was blindingly beautiful as she lit from the house.

“Let’s get outta here.”

“Okay, Dave, whatever you say. Ha ha ha ha.”

Sara Clare’s luminous derriere had illuminated the moment and sprinkled cosmic dust on the whole shebang connecting the parts which are essentially space, past, present and future. It had been a welcome surprise to see her ass even if the moment came with her running from the scene ass-backwards. It beat loneliness to a pulp. And all my virgin barrel did was watch her naked ass run away into the deep, distant night, keeping its virginity intact and my ass out of deep shit. In my universe chicken pellets burst no cherries.



One hell of a nightmarish week it had been. Time to get back to the business of selling a little real estate as well as pan handling for joy. It would be easier than ever to sing crippling love songs as true love or so I thought had become hellaciously unrequited. You just never know, the truth one day may be unfashionably so not the truth after a night’s sleep. Still I hoped to wake up after a hard night’s sleep and realize that it’d all been a dream. A ghouly, ghastly affair, nevertheless a dream.

Looking for some Cubans underneath the bed to smoke my cares away, I discovered some official looking paperwork and a DVD. “What’s this?” I muttered.

(1) I, Sara Clare do solemnly swear on this day July 1, 2006, my freedom from Roger Cayce.
(2) No longer will, Roger Cayce touch me physically, mentally, or bind me to him in any way.
(3) No longer will I be referred to as his baby.
(4) Under the emancipation act of this date I declare myself a totally unencumbered individual living in this here, our United States.
(5) Rog, our relationship is absolved.
(6) And if you don’t like it, it’s tough doo doo.

All I could think was, I gotta call the sanitation department. I’m knuckle deep in this. Maybe I would’ve killed the suckers involved if I would’ve read this (Philadelphia) New York freedom riot act before embarking to a seedy New Jersey location. But I hadn’t. God spared me, I guess. Hallelu-jah!

After grabbing some chips and caramel soda, I plopped myself down onto the couch and turned on my new black Motorola. The DVD from under the bed was just more of Sara Clare. Sara Clare griping. Sara Clare beefing. Sara Clare stewing. Sara Clare personified. Take a listen.

“Rog, if you have already read my emancipation proclamation, this is all I got to say, babe, the reiterating blues, it’s over baby. Get over it! Get on with your life. Stop wasting yourself. Once, we had something. Now, in retrospect, I sure as hell don’t know, remember, or even care what it was that something we had. It’s over, baby. Kapoof. No more Batwoman and Robin.” She laughs. “No, Superman you’re not. Maybe you can find a bitch to wear the pants for you, maybe not? But remember this, it’s not me.”

It occurred to me, the Abraham Lincoln Emancipation Proclamation echoed in my brain. Guess the bitch was a tad too unoriginal. At least, Abraham’s dig at justice freed the slaves. Hers was a tad immoral. And in essence, it freed no one.

“But remember this, but remember this, it’s not me. We might’ve had something but whatever it was, it isn’t. Get on with your life. Get on with it. BITCH OUT!”

With that she raised her fist in a black power salute, maybe in effect, an affectation of the recent power outage, and then saluted me with a devilishly-evil shit-eating grin, taking up space on a elusively sardonic face. She sure as hell would live in infamy. Yes, infamy, damn right! I gave my own black power salute to her screen presence and morphed from there into the proper military salute with the middle finger exposed (for all to see) and mouthed, my own creative ending that had burned like a raging inferno in the depths of hell for a considerable amount of time.

“BITCH OUT!”