My little trinity on Irving street is about to get very crowded.

Jay Lombardi’s television adventure is scheduled to get underway at seven, which means the budding celebrity poet can be expected to arrive an hour earlier in a near hysterical state of anticipation. Pam will probably show up at about the same time. This being Friday, Libby will also likely drop over after her shift ends. If there isn’t a crisis at the hospital she almost always drops by on Friday nights in hopes I’ll be flush enough to take her out to dinner. She’s in luck tonight. I’m awash with Bernstein gold, though dinner might be a bit delayed.

Then there’s the Bernstein televsion crowd. How many people does that include? I haven’t a clue about the number required to tape a financial poet doing a reading in a private residence for broadcast on national financial television. This afternoon Joe Connors mentioned that some additional people from the company might pay a visit as well. He didn’t explain who or why. Maybe for the rush of watching a real life killer hauled off to the stocks. I’m wondering now if there’s still time to sell tickets on the Internet?

I’m not quite sure how to dress. What do you wear to a homicide arrest? I’m also conflicted about how much cleaning to do in preparation for this extravaganza. On the one hand, this being my home, at least until the mortgage holder manages to force me out, there’s a natural desire to spruce the place up for company. On the other hand I didn’t organize this event. Jay cooked it up in a panic and Joe Connors saw it as a ways to advance a scheme of his own. It might even be that Ryman is going along with making an arrest here because Irving Street is a shorter drive from the Roundhouse than the Bernstein Building and the parking is easier.

So screw ‘em all. I’ll put a little sign on the spiral staircase warning visitors not to go into the basement because it was recently flooded, which will also serve to explain the mold smells emanating from this nether region. I’ll sweep the first floor and neat up the little area around my desk where Jay will be standing when he reads for the camera. A real quick go over in the second floor bathroom will have to do on the hygiene front. A few folding chairs from the closet, put out on the first and second floors, should take care of any seating overflows. That will have to serve.

It’s a definite bring-your-own evening. Bring your own seat cushions, your own refreshments, your own handcuffs. Your genial host is merely providing a stage for the coming performances.



Jay shows up even earlier than expected and looks absolutely awful by virtue of making very obvious efforts to look good. He must have found a decades old bottle of Vitalis somewhere, the stuff teenagers used to put on their hair when they had that first big date, and that drunks in the latter stages of addiction used to pass through Wonder Bread in hopes of detoxifying the product’s 90 proof denatured alcohol content. Jay’s normally wild and poet-like black head of hair is now plastered to his scalp. It glistens like grass after a hurricane and smells like anti-freeze. He’s wearing an academic’s patch elbow tweed sport jacket that hasn’t yet been patched and is so frayed that bits of shirt show through in the elbows. Brown corduroy pants and plastic topped black shoes complete his ensemble.

My annoyance that Jay has guilted me into giving over my residence to promote a poet’s dream of fame and fortune evaporates in an instant. It’s replaced by a surge of loving feelings for this ridiclous man. So magnificently unprepared to deal with the Bernstein crowd on its own terms. So oblivious to their expectations of the appropriate. So utterly and absolutely at odds with the vision of the good life as promulgated in The Bernstein Way.

“I gotta have a drink,” says Jay after he manages with considerable effort to pull off the ratty old over garment that had been locked in a carnal embrace with the ratty old sport coat it covered during his short walk to Irving Street.

“You don’t drink.”

“I need something now. I’m a wreck.”

“Your funeral.”

Jay’s choices are limited. My in-house liquor selection consists of leftovers from parties where the guests were more enthusiastic than choosy. To fill Jay’s present request I select a vodka so off-brand it would scare off an unemployed Lithuanian whose wife had just absconded with a Cossack. But who knows? A quick ounce of this stuff might actually do my friend some good.

The ounce is poured into a plastic cup. Jay grabs the bottle, triples the measure, knocks it back in a single gulp, and commences to have a coughing fit.

“You O.K?

Jay steadies himself and appears to consider the question carefully, handing back the bottle and the empty cup. He mutters to no one in particular: “I’m gonna do this. Gonna do this. Gonna do this.” Then turns away and gets down to business.

He has brought a large folder of his work. A folder that appears to contain enough poems to fill the Bernstein financial airways for several days to the exclusion of all other news and features. Jay certainly realizes this is far more material than is likely to be broadcast, but he’s prepared just in case the Bernstein people are so smitten by his talent they demand it in bulk. I watch as the poet arranges and rearranges the pages, getting the work in some kind of order that only he understands.

There’s a knock on the door. As I step away to answer it, I hear Jay reciting softly to himself:

Do not just grumble ‘bout the market’s plight,
Your stocks should always rise and never fall,
Sue, sue, when ev’rything does not go right.
Though wise men warned that profits might take flight,
Because they’ve seen past bubbles hit the wall,
They, too, grumble ‘bout the market’s plight.
Rich men, puffed by success, unused to slights,
Who’ve never fallen hard or had to crawl,
Sue, sue, when ev’rything does not go right....

Fortunately for Jay, Dylan Thomas is no longer around to hear this bastardization of his work He’d pitch a guy Jay’s size through the window of the White Horse Tavern faster than you could say Under Milk Wood.

Libby and Pam have arrived. They must have met somewhere and linked up. They’re tittering when the door is opened. At the sight of me their titters become guffaws.

“Planning a swimming pool out front?” says Pam. “Do wonders for the property value. Can’t wait to see it when the cover comes off.” Their laughs thicken.

My lawyer and the woman I love are close enough for me to smell the liquor on their breaths. I know Pam keeps a bottle in her top drawer at the office and carries around a bootleg era hip flask for nips at other times. The looseness around her mouth and the comraderly way her plump arm is draped around Libby’s shoulder suggests she has been tapping both sources regularly since I left her this afternoon.

Pam has the body mass and practice to hold her liquor pretty well. Libby is a lightweight. If Pam encountered the nurse right after she got off duty at Jefferson, before she had anything to eat, and passed her the flask a few times, Libby is in giggleland. As the color in her face and her laugh-induced silly smile suggest, she’s also becoming a tad kittenish.

One plastered poet, one half-drunk razor-tongued lawyer, a tipsy girlfriend, all under the same roof. And the evening has just begun.

“Gimme a call when the pool is open,” says Pam as she pushes me aside like a blocking back, Libby trailing in her wake. “Weather should help. Big storm predicted tonight. Heard it on the radio. It’s already drizzling.”

Jay stopped reciting when the front door was opened, a distraught look on his face. He’s not quite ready for the curtain to go up on his show and afraid the TV crew has arrived too soon. Seeing it’s only Pam and Libby he resumes practicing.

He’s probably annoyed these two are in attendance but can’t make an issue of it. This isn’t his place and he can’t call all the shots when it comes to guests. Maybe he also feels that at this critical juncture of his career it’s good to have people around that he knows. Even if these two, especially Pam, haven’t always shown his work the proper respect.

“Hey, Jay, what do you say, how’s the old poet a’rhyming today?”

Pam is being her usual callous self. She knows something Jay doesn’t. She knows the really big event scheduled for this evening is the arrest of a murderer. This being so, she should have a little more compassion for a man who is only a sideshow, and indeed, a sort of bait.

Compassion for poets, however, is not Pam’s strong suit. For the oppressed, the abused, the victims of pollution, sure. For Jay Lombardi, Wall Street bard, not a chance.

Jay’s response to Pam’s doggerel is a nose scratch executed with the middle finger of his left hand, and recital of the opening stanza of another of his creations. This one selected, perhaps, to honor his present locale, his friend’s living space.

Though in many world markets I daily do roam,
When it comes to investments, there’s no place like home.
The roof may be leaking, the kitchen a mess,
But the write-offs abound in this dinky address.
Home, home, a real estate throne,
My live in tax shelter, there’s no places like home....

“Natter on, little man,” says Pam with a snort. “I need a bathroom.”

She’s well acquainted with the layout of this trinity and weaves her way up the spiral staircase to the second floor lavatory. Libby follows happily, giggling. With luck, these two will remain seated on the second floor’s couch and listen more or less quietly to shenanigans downstairs until the police arrive to arrest Ron Pinkman. At which time they’ll presumably descend to get a peek of this high profile event.

Jay is pacing back and forth, sifting through sheets of poetry covered paper, about to rehearse another of his favorites, when a loud moaning spasm comes through the wall I share with my next door neighbor, MarySue Lamont.

YES. YES, YES. OH, GOD. YOU’RE LIKE A RAM. A FUCKING RAM. GIVE IT
TO ME. GIVE IT TO...

The sound blast stops as abruptly and inexplicably as it begins. Jay looks at the wall from which it came and then at me, who is as much at a loss as he is. These cries are akin to those I hear occasionally late at night, but never before this early in the evening and never anywhere near this loud. The lack of a buildup and the sudden stop to these explosive sex cries are as odd as their volume. Has MarySue come upon a gratification drug that gets her off instantly? Has someone snuffed her in mid-orgasm?

Pam comes half way down the spiral staircase. “I think I know that person,” she says.

“In the biblical sense?

“Very funny, Bernie.” She looks at the offending wall, daring it to erupt again. When it doesn’t after a few seconds, she shrugs, shoots Jay a dirty look for no discernible reason, and reascends the spiral metal staircase to the second floor where Libby has settled in, giggling even louder than before.

I hope MarySue has either orgasmed herself out for a few hours, or if she has in fact been snuffed, that the body isn’t found until morning. I’ve already met the evening’s quota of murder investigations.



There’s another knock on the door. I expect it’s the TV crew, but open it to find Joe Connors standing there in the rain. With him, surprise, hizzoner-to-be, Mitch Bernstein.

“Mitch wants to see the arrest go down,” Joe confides in a whisper after scoping out the first floor interior to make sure the putative arrestee, Ron Pinkman, has not yet arrived. Then in a louder voice: “Of course he’s also anxious to meet our financial poet.” Bernstein grimaces at this last throwaway line.

The two newcomers are dripping like bird-dogs fresh from retrieving a hunter’s duck kill in the marshes. They shake themselves before taking off their coats, which are handed to me for proper depositing. No problem, I think. Get the floor as wet as you like. It’s not your floor. Treat me like a doorman. I live to serve.

“It’s pouring outside,” says Connors. “What happened to the tarp that was covering the big hole in front of your house?”

“Happened to the tarp?

“Yeah. Looks like it been attacked by giant moths. Big holes in it.” He leaves me to ponder this factoid and leads his boss in the direction of the poet.

I drop the rain gear I’ve been handed on the floor in a corner. Ain’t their house, I think. Fine. Ain’t my raincoats. Then turn back to the still open front door and stare out at the pouring rain and the way a significant amount of the wet stuff is falling through large holes that have mysteriously appeared in what is supposed to be a sheet of protective canvas still anchored on all sides by heavy barrels..

How is this possible? Similar material withstood typhoons during Captain Cook’s pioneering expeditions in the Pacific. Half-spent cannonballs bounced off canvas during the Battle Of Trafalgar. What could make the canvas that’s guarding my own basement’s contents and wiring look like swiss cheese?

Though I don’t know the exact reason this piece of canvas has become soluble in rainwater, I very quickly figure out the agency behind the unwanted disintegration. It’s almost certainly the people trying to get him to move.

I close the front door and walk toward the staricase that leads down to the basement to check the current flood level. On the way I pass what at first glance appears to be a reenactment of the Nativity Scene. Joe Connors, in the guise of a large and rumpled Wise Man, is looking down with proprietary reverence at an immaculately attired Mitch Bernstein, while the manger beast, Jay Lombardi, gazes at the Great One with sheep-like adoration.

The object of this adoration looks bored and more than a little put upon. He’s
probably comfortable with certain artists. The kind who wear tuxedos and evening gowns while performing at the Kimmel Center. The painters and sculptors whose work fetches inflated prices at Philadelphia’s more prestigious Old City art galleries. Perhaps even a poet or two who does a tasteful turn for First Ladies at ceremonial cultural events. The people who comprise the razor thin tier of the arts community that’s successful enough to actually live off its fine art production without a day job in a classroom or a library or an ad agency, and to whom politicians self-consciously genuflect once or twice a year.

This tiny elite will never include the likes of Jay Lombardi, however. Jay doesn’t have the right affiliations. He hasn’t been certified by approved certifiers. Jay’s poetry is funny, rhymes, and doesn’t ooze personal angst or tortured insights. How good could it be?

As Connors is about to say the words that will rescue his boss from this uncomfortable but temporarily necessary encounter, we all suddenly hear:

OH GOD, GOD, GOD. OH YES, GOD, GOD. OH MY GOD...

The words break off in mid-wail. Everyone stares at the wailing wall from whence they came.

“What the hell was that?” says Bernstein.

“Nothing,” I say. “My next door neighbor has bouts of religious ecstasy. They pass quickly.”

Pam has again come halfway down the spiral staircase from the second floor. “Religious ecstasy my ass. I know that voice.” Libby can be heard giggling to beat the band.

Jay’s gaze of adoration has turned to fright. He has just been introduced to a
man with the power to rescue him from total obscurity and place his verse on the lips of investors from Sioux City to Singapore, and some crazy woman next door is causing these stupid distractions. In a near panic he grabs the arm of his hoped for patron.

A truly horrifying look of anger crosses the face of Joe Connors at this desecration. Fortunately for Jay, very fortunately I suspect, the poet releases Bernstein’s arm immediately, having gotten his attention.

“Let me read you one little poem before the camera people arrive,” he pleads. “Just this one. It’s called “Cash.”

Before anyone can object he begins:

Stock markets may tumble, bond issues default,
Home prices are quirky, the can somersault,
Gold’s upward eruptions, they come and they go
Derivative products, you just never know.
Cash, cash, wonderful cash,
You can flash it or trash it there’s no pain with cash.

Cash keeps your life simple, its drawbacks are few
All waiters, they love it, all drug dealers, too,
The nation’s great leaders appear on its face,
There’s Lincoln and Franklin and old Salmon Chase.
Cash, cash, wonderful cash,
You can stash it or trash it, there’s no pain with cash.

It’s light as a feather, it don’t cost commissions,
Unlike credit cards, there’s no later remissions...

Momentarily paralyzed like Coleridge’s wedding guest by this unexpected verbal assault, Bernstein manages to endure two-and-a-half stanzas before raising a hand to call a halt. He’s seen Pam come down from the second floor and senses this is probably the best place to escape direct exposure to financial verse, while also being in a position to quickly reappear when the evening’s arrest drama gets underway.

“I’m going up there” he points at the spiral metal staircase “to listen to your reading, Mr. Lombardi.” Jay goes ashen. “A little distance gives a richer perspective,” adds Bernstein, the politician showing through in the clutch.

Color returns to Jay’s face. Bernstein shakes his hand warmly and mutters a few more platitudes. Joe Connors is once more the smiling retainer, no traces of anger visible. Billionaire and retainer prepare to make their escape upstairs.

I take a quick peep over the rope I’ve placed across the staircase leading down to the basement and see that the water covering the floor from this evening’s rainstorm is already about two inches high. Ripples on this shallow pond suggest this level is rising fast

There’s another knock on my front door. Right on time. The evening’s real guest of honor has arrived.

(End of Chapter XXIV)