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Head House Inn

Brainless, blown-out, as high as an electrocuted kite, Lucky escaped the busy noontime blend of tourists, yuppies, and neighborhood shoppers on 2nd St.—the timber-pavilioned Olde Colonial Shoppes of New Market rising in the East, where he’d gone at daybreak to watch the Delaware River sparkle back to life for what he'd hoped would be the very last time—and headed west, straight for the haven of the Head House Inn.

" . . . not. I love me; I love me not," he muttered, plucking at a four-leaf clover.

This was Lucky’s lucky day. " . . . NOT," he shouted. He sauntered down the cobblestoned street; he had it right. He loved him not.

Outside the Head House Inn, he stumbled in his first assualt at the granite curb. Traffic crawled by, avoiding him in the gutter. Anybody might think him a dispossessed, disheveled, disabled, Viet Nam veteran, destroyed before his time. Or an ordinary deranged citizen, confused, and lost. But he was not ordinary, not lost, and not short on time. He had all the time in the world. He had more time than anybody could count. He dug deep into his baggy fatigues and pulled out a handful of sweet mutant clover. He loved the stuff. He grinned like an innocent child. He just wanted to smell the flowers. He enjoyed the quaint Philadelphia street, too, though. He liked its busy noontime ambiance. He thrilled at its no-nonsense business pace. Twentieth-century workers zipped about the Colonial shoppes on 2nd St. and tourists dined on fresh salads and grilled cheeseburgers and imported beer in olde English inns. Everybody was close. Everything was close. Everywhere was joy. It was a small festive street that narrowed near Pine, with artists’ and their works on display in a block-long marketplace and with upscale shops doing a brisk business just across 2nd St. and where everybody brushed shoulders with everybody else and where everybody was courteous. Lucky loved it: the incongruity and the delusion of it all.

Unhappily, he turned away from the sunny noontime crowd and gazed at his handful of four-leaf clover. He talked to the exceptional clover as if he were talking to the exceptional child in himself. "I love me not," he sighed, a whimsical smile on his face; the happy crowd blurred. Tears streamed down his dirty face; a groan escaped his throat. He had to decide this thing. This morning he had decided it, he thought; he had decided it a dozen times before, too. But it was never easy to decide; and it had always ended in failure. Today would be no different, he was sure. But the gun was different; and the bag of mutant four-leaf clover it had come with, found on the floor next to his bed. That was different. It was as if somebody were trying to tell him something.

Balancing the thick edge of one of his black combat boots on the thicker edge of the granite curb, he grinned like an idiot in judgment of the clover. He was deciding its fate. He smirked at the thought that anybody should have such power over something so . . . fragile, so innocent. He plucked at its rare mutant leaves, killing them quite deliberately with his dirty thumb nail. He was only human, after all; he smirked. After he had finished deflowering it, he ate the remains, the stem and the root.

He had decided.

"Good Morning, sir," said a sexy voice.

A bosomy Irish exchange student, a Temple University coed who worked Friday afternoons as a hostess, greeted him as she did all her patrons: with a deep curtsy in a flounced eighteenth-century style smock that featured a loosely-laced bodice.

"Mourning," he groaned. Moved, feeling a tad generous, he dug a four-leaf clover out of the baggy pouch-pockets of his fatigues and twirled her one.

"Thank you, sir," she curtsied.

"Just a memento," he bowed, every inch a Tramp.

"This is our Happy Lunch, sir," she said, swinging the heavy door wide open with an awkward backhanded motion of her slender arm that ushered them inside. "Will you be seated at the bar? Or will you be wanting a table, sir?" she asked nervously, observing his attire. "Tables are for parties of two or more. Are you expecting a party, sir?" she smiled.

"Are you new?"

"Beg pardon, sir?"

"New, madam," he mocked, "as in . . . unfamiliar with your clientele . . . or, just . . . temporary help, perhaps? I have not lately seen you laboring here, not, at least, when I’m here, madam," he said, treating her with high formality.

"Sorry, sir. I’ll be laboring here Fridays . . . for lunch, sir, if it please you, sir," she said, a tad fascinated by this eccentric bird, this robin red breast.

"I’ll miss you, Miss . . . Madam," he bowed.

"Thank you, sir. I'm Alice. Will you be away . . . "

"Away."

She forced a funny smile. " . . . on business, sir?"

"PLEASURE!" he exulted.

"How nice," she said, fanning her face with a few menus, finding it hard to maintain a professional interest. "Today, sir. Will you be expecting a party?" she pressed, nervous that other customers had begun to congregate at her station.

"Expecting a party," he said.

"Good, sir. How many will be in your party, sir? Will this table be sufficient?"

"Sufficient," he said.

"Do you want something from the bar, sir, while waiting for your party to arrive?" she asked.

Sensing that he’d been sir’d once to often, Lucky got a little crazy and dumped a handful of clover out of his pocket. "I’ll take a double-decker "Mad" James Madison on rye . . . and-a-and-a glass of ice water . . . ," he stuttered.

The hostess backed into a wooden chair, knocking it about noisily on the plank floor.

" . . . if you please," he patronized. "The ice water is for the clover. It’s . . . It’s dying," he whispered.

The Irish exchange student working as a hostess Friday afternoons had had all that she could take of it. A weird smile crossed her face, and she dropped one of the large menus on Lucky’s table as if dropping a dead fish.

He blinked.

"Yes, sir. Whatever, sir," she sang.

Lounging for lunch at the Head House Inn, Lucky drummed his fingers about in the heap of four-leaf clover that lay on the red-checkered table cloth, making the happy leaves dance and sail about his dirty knuckles.

The hostess backed away.

The dancing leaves floated before his sparkling eyes and transfixed him. Last night, he had dreamed that he had been laboring in that Big Garden in the Sky. He had dreamed that while he was laboring, he had found—between a rock and a hard place—a small patch of four-leaf clover.

It’s a wonderful dream, he dreamed.

However, when he had awakened, something strange and scary had happened. The dream had come true. On the grimy floor beside his grimy bed he had found a small brown paper bag—its mouth opened wide to the world—and stuffed, apparently, with a mutant strain of lovely four-leaf clover . . .

. . . and a gun.

The clover had spilled all over the filthy floor as he had gently liberated the weapon, an Ortgies caliber 7.65 handgun, from the crisp, brown paper bag. A handy hand gun! he thought. Ought to come in handy when I need a hand, he had quipped. It happened to be the same gun that Seymour Glass had killed himself with in J.D. Salinger’s story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the lead story in that classic collection of stories called Nine Stories.

Lucky thought he recognized it.

Later that morning he had meandered down South St., touching on his usual haunts, munching handfuls of rare, wonderful four-leaf clover . . . jogging, cantering like one of Lemuel Gulliver’s certified Houyhnhnms, those rational horses from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Reality had seemed so unreal, he had begun to wonder if the dream had taken place. Maybe he had spent time yesterday in Fairmount Park. Maybe he had found this treasure while foraging—yesterday?—in his favorite wild mushroom patch, nibbling on roots and herbs. Maybe a lot of maybes are valid in this cockamamie world, he conjectured, stuffing a handful of clover into his green-stained mouth.

Lately, he couldn’t tell the difference between his waking and his sleeping hours. Though not unusually paranoiac lately, he had begun to feel as if somebody were toying with his booby-trapped, burned-out brain. This troubled him enough to keep him alert and thinking about the nature of Being and Reality.

Nobody’s gonna fool me better than I fool myself, he challenged, deciding to fight back.

What would he fight against?

He thought long and hard about that. Then he decided. AGAINST THE FORCES THAT RULE THE UNIVERSE, that’s what. Against the ignorance that dulls the brain. Against all forms of tyranny, irrationality, laziness, incompetence, lies, stupidity, and arrogance. That’d do it. Against perversity in the face of reason. Against duplicity in the arms of love. Against the confusion that reigned in his haunted brain between the illusion of reality and the reality of illusion.

It’s all the same, he thought. Though he knew that this was no dream! That he was going through a radical transformation . . . a metamorphosis . . . while he was wide awake.

Finally, he decided to fight against anybody’s fooling with the finality of his delirious life and anybody’s fooling with the equally final finality of his delirious death, the latter which he—this latent, local Olympian, this suicidal maniac, Our Hero—anticipated with large and sincere anticipation.

" . . . not. I love me, I love me not," he chanted, deflowering a second four-leaf clover.

When he had finished with "I love me not" again, he resigned from the plucking game as hopeless. He tugged at the hostess’ smock. "Ain’t it the truth," he muttered, nibbling mindlessly on the leaves, stem, and root of a third four-leaf clover. "When you begin with an ‘I love me,’ a four-leaf clover is bad bad news. It’s gotta end with an ‘I love me not.’ It’s a mathematical certainty," he grinned, pleased that something in his dizzy world was certain. He twirled a fourth four-leaf clover at the hostess, startling her. "I love me not," he said in his best Shakespearean voice, clipping off the "not," playing John Gielgud’s Hamlet.

Then he ate it whole.

"Yes, sir," she said, curtsying in her eighteenth-century costume, stiff with apprehension. She then turned precipitately to the bar and brushed her moist, upswept hair from the back of her slender neck.

Lucky grinned.

The more he ate, the more it multiplied.

Electing to take his Last Lunch at the Head House Inn, the Bastard grinned like a fool and inspected the miraculous four-leaf clover for any last-minute irregularities. He sported black, battered combat boots, olive-drab camouflage battle fatigues, belted tightly about his emaciated waist with a white, clothesline rope, no shirt—these days, he’d sworn off shirts—an unbuttoned, plain burgundy vest (betraying freckled, hairy arms and a hairy, bony chest), no jewelry, a flowing, embroidered, white-silk Snoopy Scarf, wrapped once about his skinny neck, and a pair of antique gold-rimmed Benj. Franklin glasses. On top of this sporty attire piked a large, slightly balding pumpkin-head of unruly, flaming hair, which he regularly roughed up, savaging his dirty fingers through it when thinking or whenever it began to look too conventional. Actually, with a bald spot in the middle of his hair, he looked like a tonsured monk or a renegade Dominican Friar. Or like a character ripped ruthlessly out of the pages of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Thus it happened, that this American demigod seemed a tad older and a touch madder than his meager thirtysomething years had warranted.

Not ordering a thing, he began to invite the grim stares of hungry customers who desired nothing more complicated than a quick table and an honest lunch.

The comfortable inn buzzed with activity. After the hostess, tugging at the stays in her tavern garb, had brought Lucky a tumbler of ice water, she whispered something to the colonial-garbed barmaid, who peeked at the patron and judiciously avoided him. Then, in turn, the barmaid whispered something to the lace-bloused barman, who, shaking his burly head, swiped the bar with a rag and went to the telephone, where he found to his annoyance that he couldn’t raise a bloody dial tone on the dead intercom. This busy little drama ended when the hostess, in total control of the situation (and today, no less, her first day on the job), batted her eyelashes and flitted her fingers, signaling to the barman to chill out. The big luncheon hour at the Head House Inn had just begun, and nobody wanted to make a scene. Reluctantly, the barman gave up on the dead phone, dropping it into its cradle, in disgust, as if it were possessed of something more complicated than wires and transistors.

At precisely that moment, an odd, genial, portly old gentleman, traveling in Modern Times under the nom-de-plume B. Franklin, printer, entered the Head House Inn. As if he were embarrassed at something he’d done, he stood for a few takes at the entrance, mopped his brow with a fresh handkerchief, and peered over his gold-rimmed glasses at the variety of chatting patrons. Standing there in black, high-heeled boots, white silk stockings, black knickers, black short coat, white-lace blouse, and a simple, three-cornered hat, he looked like a prosperous, Quaker businessman come directly—fresh out of Philadelphia’s historical past. Unreal. With a broad smile on his burnished face and a bright twinkle in his guilty, green eyes, he saluted the barman—who gave him a flat look—and took possession of a table near the corpse.

At his leisure, then, he greeted the hostess with simple cordiality and squeezed the barmaid’s buns with a boisterous familiarity [she squealed in scandalous delight]. After he placed his modest order, he pulled Wm. J. O’Neil’s Investor’s Daily, his favorite financial paper—loaded with charts, graphs, statistics—out of the inside of his short coat. It was a timely, Friday morning edition that he’d found in an honor box across the street; pretending to read it, he observed the Olympian kid as if he were observing a rare endangered species of urban bird.

Lucky the Bastard dug into one of the baggy pouch pockets of his olive combat fatigues and pulled out a handful of four-leaf clover, all bunched in his tight, dirty fist. The clover concealed an Ortgies 7.65 caliber handgun. Nobody saw it, he thought. Quickly, he smothered it with clover, knocking over an antique brass candlestick. He dusted the clover from his trembling hands. Then, proudly, he peeked at his beautiful gun. Examining the nozzle, he found a stray three-leaf clover sticking out.

"LUCKY ME! LUCKY LUCKY ME!" he shouted, placing it in the tumbler of ice water to preserve it.

The three-leaf clover made all the difference. This time he didn’t pluck the leaves, though. He only touched them. "I love me, I love me not. I love me. THERE!" As he articulated it, it came out right. "I LOVE ME," he shouted, the ordinary three-leaf clover giving him the pleasure of an ordinary child’s game.

The luncheon patrons stared at him as civilly as they could, considering the nature of these outbursts.

Scraping the chair on the plank floor, he stood and scooped the gun and the four-leaf clover back into his baggy, pouch pockets, outfoxing the hostess before she could get wise to his lunatic shenanigans. Handfuls of clover spilled onto the floor. Magically, the stuff seemed to multiply. The more he lost, the more he had, he thought. Stowing the bulky gun, stuffing it and the miraculous clover back into his baggy fatigues, the animated kid had brilliantly dodged the hostess like a quick marionette, scatting and doing a quick soft-shoe dance in his big unlaced boots, while presenting his small backside to her face.

"I’m sorry, sir," said the hostess. "There’s nothing I can do. You’re going to have to be seated at the bar." [Lucky froze, wiggled his butt once.] "We’ll arrange a fresh table when your party arrives. Sir?" [He snapped about.] "This is our Businessperson’s Lunch and Happy Hour," she explained to this oddball, defending her position when it appeared that he—with his backside poised to blast at her smile—had rudely been ignoring her.

Eyes flashing, he whipped about and glared at the lovely Irish lass. He inhaled expansively. Lightly, discreetly, even weirdly lifting his forefinger, he wrinkled his quivering lip into a charming sneer and directed the lass’ attention to the portly old gentleman, also seated quite alone at a nearby table. It was Himself, no less, whom Lucky thought a National Park Service thespian, hired to play a Colonial, who, like a living cartoon character, may have loomed bigger than life. But who had taken—or usurped—a grand window-seat at a table nearby. Lucky grinned at the lass, who caught his point. He nodded to the gent. He winked at her. He smiled a broad, self-satisfied smile and bowed to her bountiful breasts. In a million years he could not have planned a better denouement. Fate is beautiful, he thought.

"I’ll have a corned beef special on Jewish rye," he said. "Did I show you my three-leaf clover?" He plucked it out of the ice water and formally presented it to her.

Not accepting it, she smiled professionally. Thinking Lucky odd but harmless, she laughed and tightly pursed her lips.

"Special," he said. "Today is a very special day." Impulsively, he kissed the unsuspecting girl fast and full on her fine puckered lips. "Make it a special."

"I’m not the barmaid," the hostess objected.

"That’s not important," said Lucky. "Honest. I’ll share my clover with anybody."

"I’ll send the barmaid," she said.

The Head House Inn had begun to swarm with the familiar, happy buzz of the hungry, lunch time crowd.

Lucky had begun to feel ignored. He kissed his special three-leaf clover. He floated it in the ice water. When I came into this place, he thought, it was empty. Now look at it. Look at that old hippie looking at me. I’ll bet he thinks I’m weird just because I like clover and and and ice water . . . and because I’d do just about anything j-just to sleep in Mad James Madison’s grave, Lucky thought, giggling about the timeliness of the thought.

Benjamin gagged and coughed on his meal. He wondered where Lucky got such thoughts. Maybe he had dreamed them up—when he had dreamed of the clover. Maybe they’d secretly been with him since his unlucky childhood, since the beginning of Time. Wait until James hears about this, he thought.

"Lumpy oatmeal, ain’t it?" observed Lucky.

"Gruel," corrected the old man.

"Oh, sure. It’s that, too," he said, feeling the agony of one’s lunching on a bowl of lumpy oatmeal.

"Sir?" queried the barmaid. "The corned beef’s done."

"Hey, take it easy. I’m talking to my Main Man," he clued the barmaid. "Listen, if things get too cruel," he continued, "if it’s cold and lumpy oatmeal all the time, forget it. Like in about twenty minutes," he checked over his shoulder for eavesdroppers, "I’m gonna blow my coleslaw all over the alley." He made a short private gesture with his hand that ended all debate.

The barmaid dropped her jaw.

"You new here?" he asked her. "They all know me around here. Yo! Pay attention," he attacked, imitating a New York character he’d seen Robert DeNiro play. "Make me a corned beef special on Jewish rye. Wait. On second thought, make that pastrami. Hot pastrami. You the barmaid today? You come highly recommended in these circles. You know that? Yo! You! You’re a very class act."

"On Jewish rye?" she scribbled.

"What else is there? Jewish rye! Authentic, New York Jewish rye. Imported! Orthodox!"

Gosh, this place is crowding fast, he thought, squirming in his seat. Lotta businessmen get hungry. Lotta ordinary people get hungry. I’m hungry. Gosh! Lotta tourists. Lotta bankers. LOTTA PEOPLE! Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose. His stomach began to growl. GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE, he panicked, gasping for breath. I’ve heard of claustrophobia, but for a flowering suicide this is ridiculous. He rose and rose . . . GOSH . . . GOTTA GET OUTTA, GET OUTTA . . . GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE . . . and rose through the antique beams in the ceiling.

Lucky had decided that he wanted to go with a corned beef special on Jewish rye under his belt.

That or a hot pastrami.

I’m hungry, he thought. Gosh! I gotta get outta here. "I can’t stay in this place," he said to the portly old gentleman who had been studying him with some concern. "I’m hungry, but this place is devouring me. This is a very nice place, don’t get me wrong," Lucky said. He had begun to make a scene. "But, gosh, I gotta get outta here; I’m hungry," he complained. "Ordinary people get hungry, too." LOTTA PEOPLE, he thought. I’m SUFFOCATING IN THIS PLACE.

The inn’s patrons sat in awkward, embarrassed silence, reverent in the face of lunacy, as Lucky the Mad . . .

I’M HUNGRY!

. . . twirled his three-leaf clover and pounced on someone’s hot pastrami . . .

GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE!

. . . stuffing it in his fatigues under his white clothesline belt without a pickle.

Hallucinating, he had scrambled past what he thought were several empty chairs and tables ["Zat man neetz a zhrink," said a full-bearded rabbi. "A zhrink, you zay? He’z vanting a zharp legal mind in zhis line of vuzinezz," said his Russian colleague. "He zviped my zandvich."] and had shoved past . . .

. . . that he had only imagined in the otherwise clear and simple sunshine that sparkled through the windows.

Benjamin, quaffing his mug of imported stout and slamming a couple of antique American pennies down on the oaken bar, looked like a movie extra in high-heeled boots, white silk stockings, and a three-cornered hat as he exited and followed Lucky . . . with all deliberate speed . . . out of the inn.

"Hey, funny man," the barman chased halfheartedly after the old hippie as he scooted down 2nd St., "I’m not a coin collector. AND YOUR PENNY’S NOT WORTH A RUSSIAN RED CENT," he shouted, tossing the priceless antique coins into the cobblestone gutter. Then the pudgy, burly-headed barman wiped his small, clean hands on his small, clean apron --- this inconvenience with the old hippie’s coins, apparently, had happened to him before—shook his low-hanging head and trudged back to his job at the Head House Inn.

Lucky had disappeared.

Surrealistically, black clouds gathered fast and tumbled far in the molten-blue Philadelphia sky. Lightning flashed about and crashed on the genial old gentleman’s shoulders, illuminating him as he hurried down the street. "DON’T PLAY GAMES WITH ME, ZEUS," he warned his Soul Buddy in the spectacular dark Heavens. He passed a candle shoppe, an apothecary, and an ice cream parlor. Not the same, nothing’s the same, he thought. Yet this is the street, and that is the location of the old market place, and . . . , he paused, pointing to the brick colonnaded, roofed market that ran down the middle of 2nd St. . . . , and that’s the Old Market, he reflected. No. That’s not it, and yet it is. Nothing’s quite the same, and yet nothing’s quite different, he thought, surveying the twentieth-century scene. Momentarily, he had quite forgotten Lucky, his Eternal Charge, in the magic of this unusual and bewildering moment.

Thunder boomed at him.

That’s it, he winced. He thought he’d better walk. Election night, that ‘s Mischief Night next year, Lucky and I will celebrate our victory here. Right on this very spot, he declared. Lightning danced all about his broad shoulders. This is a splendid place for a party. I’ll invite all of my old friends, too. My associates! My acquaintances! "And," he shouted to the high, dark Heavens, his eyes blazing with revolutionary vigor, "my compatriots," he whispered, in sacred reverence at the very thought of such courageous men. We’ll celebrate our political conquest of Philadelphia—and the nation—in this old market place, he thought, smiling at the happy plan as he crossed New American St., the cobblestone alley just south of Pine St.

He snapped his fat fingers. "Where’s . . . my candidate," he swung about.

Lucky stood trembling in the quaint, historical, cobblestone alley near a question-mark lamppost, beneath a slim fruit tree . . . sucking hard on the nozzle of his Ortgies 7.65 automatic, his eyes shut as if he were praying an unfathomable prayer.

"Heavens, my man . . . "

The soppy coleslaw had sqooshed out of the hot pastrami special under his white clothesline belt and had erupted down his dirty fatigues, the meat just flopping all innocently over the knotted white cord.

" . . . enjoying your lunch?"

CLICK.

Lucky squeezed the trigger.

Old Ben had a sour taste in his mouth as he chewed his breath. He thought he had said just the right thing at just the right moment. But the gun misfired.

CLICK.

"That’s enough of that," said the portly Ben, pointing a blunt finger and a cocked thumb at the happy suicide.

CLICK, CLICK.

Sucking down hard on the gun’s nozzle, as if he could suck out the reluctant bullets, Lucky shut his eyes tightly and squeezed the trigger extra hard.

CLICK.

Nothing happened.

"This is absurd! It’s more trouble than it’s worth," he said, making Ben fear he’d give up.

"That’s not true!"

"What?"

"It’s—not time," said Ben, reassuring him, checking his gold, digital, Seiko chronometer. He dried his fat, sweaty hands and hoped that he’d do it; get it over with. Neither Ben nor Lucky had noticed that a few stems of four-leaf clover and a broken twig had inadvertently dropped out of Ben’s short coat pocket—along with his fancy white silk handkerchief—as he slipped out the handkerchief and mopped his brow. The fine cloth was smudged with rough Fairmount Park dirt from the day before . . . when, picnicking with Thomas and the Gang, he’d picked the mutant-strain of clover for Lucky’s party.

"If this takes any longer, I won’t need a mortician," joked the kid. He touched his chapped, swollen lips. "I’ll need a druggist, that’s what I’ll need."

"That’s very very funny."

Lucky giggled.

"Listen, kid, I don’t want to interfere with your game," croaked the old gentleman, "but if you’re so incompetent—maybe just out of practice—that you can’t pull the trigger on yourself—maybe—maybe I can help." He chuckled. Slowly, then, he slipped his chubby hand into his coat’s inside pocket—at about the point where a shoulder holster might hang.

Lucky giggled.

"Let’s take care of business," Ben said, holding out a smart, black-and-gold business card. "Take it. Take it! I’ll show you how it works. It’s my calling card. It’s . . . "

Lucky giggled.

"It’ll join one mad moment to the next, and, possibly, trigger your soon-to-be-blown-out memory. My card. Thank you, my countryman." He bowed politely like Death with a Calling Card. "You’re a gentleman and a scholar," he lied. He cocked and fired a finger at the kid, deciding not to shake Lucky’s wet hand.

Taking care to lick off the dripping saliva, the kid had barely taken the Ortgies 7.65 out of his aching mouth long enough to take the gentleman’s card.

"It’s my printing, too!"

"Thank you, much. It’s really very nice of you to introduce yourself at a time like this . . . when I’m just about to surgically correct my birth." This guy’s a fruitcake, he thought. That or he doesn’t think I’m serious. That’s serious. He swallowed as if something had stuck in his throat. "Are you a licensed mortician? Or what? I’ve heard about lawyers, that when they’re young and desperate, chase ambulances. Yet, somehow, chasing a suicide on the chance that you’ll get a quick dig . . . that’s gotta be unethical even to a young lawyer. Right? You think about that," he warned. He shot a quick inquisitive look at the unhappy old guy and waved his gun dangerously at him. Eyebrows arching, "Naughty," he teased. "Naughty, naughty."

Benjamin shook his head in deep disbelief at the configuration of Lucky’s diseased brain.

Today was The Fourth. Today was the day that the kid’s mother wanted him dead. He’d begun to sweat. What if the gun didn’t work? What if the kid walked off without doing it? What if he couldn’t take him out on The Fourth? Why’d he tell the kid’s mother that he’d have him in the bag within three days of his death?

Why?

"You’re not a mortician," said Lucky, interrupting the panic that had begun to grip the printer; "then, if I may say so, you are indeed a gentleman, sir, since your services are very likely to be of very limited value to either of us, whatever they are, considering that I’m the corpus delicti," he explained. He snapped the business card with his thumbnail. He didn’t take his eyes from Ben. Blindly, staring at Ben with an intensity that made him feel like an executioner, he placed a single three-leaf clover (the same lucky trio of leaves that the hostess had refused to take) into the nozzle of the gun and glanced for the very first time at portly, old Benj. Franklin’s plain-style calling card:

GOSH, thought Lucky, shoving the nice, Ortgies 7.65 back into his hungry mouth. It’s the curiosity that’s killing me because I’m dying with curiosity . . . just to learn . . .

BLOOM!

. . . AAAAggggg, he thought he had gagged on his saliva . . . if this portly old gentleman is a crackpot, or if he’s actually W.C. Fields, disguised as Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia’s most famous citizen, the ghost finished his thought.

The bullet cleared Lucky’s brain as if nothing but a clean slate remained. Tabula rasa, he thought as B. Franklin, Printer, winced at the bloody, horrible sight of human meat, splattering the brick wall behind the corpse.

It’s done, he shuddered.

"AAAAggggg!" a silver-haired lady screamed hysterically as she battled out of a Yellow Cab with a broken umbrella. "AAAAggggg!"

The corpse had twisted slowly in the wind for a brief moment before it slunk to the cobblestone gutter, where it lay in pool of streaming blood.

"AAAAggggg!"

Diabolically, the umbrella had sprung open—in the lady’s haste and excitement—and had snagged on her fresh, pink-and-white flowered dress, which shredded as she forced herself past the umbrella’s bent ribs, which just moments before had become, she feared, hopelessly jammed in the taxi’s slightly ajar window.

Hobbling on a broken heel, the poor old lady screamed and attacked Dr. Franklin, who stood near the bloody corpse all innocently [and who thought he’d seen her walking with her husband in Rittenhouse Square when he had been there with Athena, the suicide’s hapless mother and happy daughter of Zeus], slamming her broken umbrella across his broad back, and slamming it all the more forcibly when she realized, on examining it, that it was broken and quite worthless.

"I COULDN’T HELP IT!" she screamed. "I COULDN’T! I SAW IT ALL!" Indignantly, the old lady seethed. "And you, you fool. YES, YOU!" she snarled an indictment. "YOU WATCHED THE WHOLE THING! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WATCHED THE WHOLE THING!" Hoarse. Mad as Hell. Her mad scream vanishing to a mad whisper. "YOU BEAST!" she squeaked. She delighted in flailing her broken umbrella at the old patriot . . . and, growing hoarse, she lost her voice.

Bravely, though, Ben held his ground and protected his flanks as well as he could, warding off her blows with superb blocking, adroit bobbing and weaving, and some fancy footwork. One blow came crashing down squarely on his balding head, however, a two-handed blow that originated, it seemed to Ben, as a prank from the Olympian dead . . . which was quite convincing because the thunder and lightning that had crashed about his shoulders a few moments before was nothing compared to this lady’s umbrella.

Lucky snapped his scrawny neck, quite unaware at present that he was, for all practical purposes, food for worms.

"B. Franklin," he mused, raising his eyebrows with a feisty, supercilious, you-can’t-bullshit-me look. "Okay, Mr. B. Franklin, have it your way. I’m the prodigal son of the Honorable Frank L. Rizzo, Mayor of this fair City of Brotherly Love. My city. The greatest city in the world! WELCOME," he drawled. Nasally, he had squeezed a W.C. Fields’ toot out of the corner of his twisted mouth. Why am I doing this? he thought. I’m nuts, that’s why.

Horror of horrors, he thought that his carrying on might attract a CROWD. Momentarily, however, people had become as invisible to him as he to them, just as he had wanted, a condition of his death that would persist until his heart zeroed.

Shocked patrons poured out of neighborhood shoppes: Lautrec, the restaurant; Head House Inn, where Lucky had had his Last Lunch and where Ben had stuck the bartender with a couple of priceless antique coins; The Candleberry, heavy with herbs and scents; Once Upon a Porch, the ice cream parlor at the corner; Tancredi, the apothecary; and they poured out of the 2nd St. Market, where artists and craftsmen had been setting up their exhibits on tables and in stalls.

"Why?" asked Lucky. "I’m taking my life in my very hands. If the Lord High Mayor hears me clowning like this, even in jest, my fate be assured: I’m dead meat."

The crowd of on-lookers formed a shocked circle about the corpse lying sprawled in the gutter. The distraught old lady in the pink-and-white flowered dress had come around to her senses, eventually, and wept on Ben’s shoulder, commiserating with him as he nodded and listened to Lucky . . . and to her . . . and to the burly- headed barman who had just dashed up from the Inn.

The commotion on the street at this delicate moment, combined with Lucky’s precarious state of being—or non-being—not alive and yet not quite dead—forced Dr. Franklin to be extremely careful about the way he handled the situation. Somehow, he anguished, I have to find the . . . the handle to this strange situation.

When he liked, Mr. B. Franklin, printer, intoned sonorously like Orson Welles. That was understandable: He admired him; and he counted him among his favorite friends and movie actors. Now that Orson’s passed away . . . , he mused, thinking of his movie options with the loss of Orson. His eyebrows shot up. Why, that’s fantastic! I’ll get Mr. Brando to play me in this crazy movie. I’ll be great! Thrilled at his typecasting strategy (and thinking of the absurd drama being played out in the street before him), he danced a quick two-step, ta-DAH; but stopped, suddenly turning pale. What’s wrong with me? he wondered. Why can’t I take this seriously? Jousting with the Satyr in his bones, he struggled to reason it out. It’s ABSURD, that’s why. Zeus, you whoremaster! You’re pulling my leg. THAT’S why. This rouse doesn’t have anything to do with ANYTHING. This is no better than a movie. This IS a movie! This is "Hooray for Hollywood!"

The tune on 2nd St. had turned sour, and Benjamin cast a dark, baleful look on the entire lot. Existing in two worlds simultaneously, the patriot—whatever he may have believed—had to direct, tactfully, two sticky situations: one on the chaotic street with a novice ghost (a clone of the dying suicide) and one on the same chaotic street with the dying kid (who, if he were to die, would free the novitiate ghost from his earth-bound blindness, permitting him to see things as they are, rather than as he wanted them to be, thereby penetrating, finally, through to the World of the Living).

Because he was a mature ghost, though, Ben was fully perceptible to Lucky and to the people in the street—which is true of all true ghosts—and he was the only being who could perceive both worlds, as indeed he and very few others, dead or alive, could, even on their best days. The handle, the handle, he thought, unconsciously groping for the handle of the old lady’s umbrella as she whipped it behind her with a frown. What! Startled, he scratched his balding head and, shoving his white hair up and about, began to look like a madman. How was he going to get a handle on this thing? This monster! How was he going to hook these poor blind screaming souls in their own private Hells on Earth? How was he going to get these poor bastards to see what he saw? I’ll try one or two clichés first, he thought. They’ll just love them. They’re usually brainless enough to be believed by just about anybody at just about anytime anyway. Shit! Poor Richard made a fortune just larding them into his handy almanac.

"Now, now," said Ben, commiserating with Lucky and with the silver-haired lady, thereby mollifying the living and the dead. "It’s all for the best."

"What’s for the best?" asked Lucky.

"The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away," pontificated Ben.

"Yes, I suppose so," nodded the lady, dropping to her knees to brush away a swatch of bloody hair that had stuck in the corpse’s eyelashes. "HE’S WITH GOD," she proclaimed. "HE’S STANDING AT THE RIGHT HAND OF THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY, COMMANDER OF THE HOSTS OF HEAVEN AND HELL AND PROTECTOR OF OUR HOLY NATION AND ITS SACRED LIBERTIES," she prayed, shaking with fervor and sincerity.

At the end of this mighty injunction, Ben whipped about left and right to find where the corpse was standing. With that much sincerity, he estimated, she might just be right.

Actually, though, Lucky stood at the right hand of none-other- than Ben. "He taketh away, huh?" the kid echoed, thinking about whatever it was that the Lord Mayor had given him that he should have the right to take it away: He thought about nothing. "Oh, sure. Today he’s the Lord Mayor of d-death and taxes. And and if you want to believe it, Jack," he said, "it’s all for the best."

"It’s the Lord’s will," the lady wept.

"If you want my opinion, Mr. B. Franklin, printer," he said, glancing at the elegantly simple gold-embossed business card, "publishers and hog butchers are the same animal. You you you porky purveyors of sugar-cured scrapple have more in common, if you know what I mean, your stake in the establishment, the status quo, THE FAT, BOTTOM LINE, than than than (and I mean this, Mr. "B."-for- Buzzard) more in common than not in common," he accused. He sneezed at this sizzling truism.

He knuckled his nose dry.

Sometimes, he’d sneeze when he said something that was true. That’s how he knew it was true.

"Horseshit," said Ben.

"That’s if you want my opinion," said Lucky.

Nobody wanted it.

The unearthly Rolls triage screamed in agony as it crawled lugubriously through the Society Hill mob. Briefly, Ben thought he recognized a few faces from the After World, but for some reason—which he couldn’t explain—he couldn’t pursue the thought any further. Bug-eyed, the ogling crowd made a circle, crowding the blood-splattered, heroic suicide-god. Two Actor’s Studio paramedics, a bearded bruiser and a beautiful blond, lugged life-support equipment by the megahertz out of the back of the antique Rolls. They worked feverishly on the mad, degenerate stiff. Like a blessing, a sprinkle of rain fell on 2nd St., rejuvenating the happy crowd with a fine sun shower.

The death scene was beautiful and sad.

Stuffing the Ortgies 7.65 caliber under his belt—under his hot pastrami on rye—Lucky sneezed a great one. He mopped his face with his long, white Snoopy Scarf. Ben recalled that the kid was a basket case. Today, his allergies and asthma had ganged up on him—with the incidence of his spectacular death.

"Brain dead," said an intern, lifting the bloody bone-fractured skull an inch off of the brick street.

"OH, MY GOD!" cried a tiny, skinny lady in a pink-and-white flowered dress. Earlier, stumbling out of a cab, she had beaten Ben with her broken umbrella. "He’s brain dead. I heard it," she said, wiping back a swatch of her silver-gray hair. "YOU’VE GOT HIS BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS," she accused.

Ben flinched as the old lady raised her umbrella. He’d heard it, too—Brain Dead—and he didn’t want another beating. His left forearm was still sore from the last one when he had watched "the whole thing." One beating was quite enough; and, besides, nobody had noticed the portly old patriot’s flinching except Lucky, the corpus delicti (who, characteristically, assumed it had something to do with him—didn’t everything?—or with something that he had just said).

"Listen! In a fascist state . . . ," he said, advancing on Ben, who had not only flinched at the brazen, broken-umbrella lady, but who had also backed into the crowd as a policeman had come by and politely waved him back with a nightstick, " . . . AND DON’T RUN AWAY," Lucky scolded, squarely planting his fists on his hips. "IT IS NOT I WHO AM SPEAKING. IT IS BENITO MUSSOLINI! IL DUCE!" he declaimed. He curled down his lower lip to a pouting, bad-boy frown—like he’d seen the fascist leader of World-War-II Italy do in the movies. " . . . and don’t forget—back in the ‘70s, no less of an authority than the premier of Italy called Mayor Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia a fascist state; and he oughta know," he jabbed at the Heavens. They thundered back.

Happy, he grinned at Ben’s frown.

" . . . brain dead . . . brain dead . . . ," buzzed the leering, faithful crowd.

Lucky dried his teary allergic eyes with his long, flowing, white-silk Snoopy scarf, which gave him a ghostly, other-worldly cast as it swirled about his pale face. Then he sneezed an enormous sneeze and waved the scarf about as if it were a semaphore. Once or twice, he actually lost it—lost sight of it—as it slipped out of his hand. Magically, though, in that eye blink, it flashed fantastically in and out of sight elsewhere—about the corpse—as he made several unsuccessful, heroic lunges and grabs at it, sneezing elaborately through the worst of it—as it devilishly kissed his bony fingers.

Naturally, those who saw it or who thought they saw it as it sailed out of his hand screamed "A SIGN! A SIGN!" Many in the crowd dropped to their knees, trembling, "OH, DEAR GOD, BLESS US!" They touched it as it flashed about and blessed themselves. "TOUCH HIM! TOUCH HIM! OH, GOD!" they shrieked. Naturally, too, the few distracted souls who had not seen it snickered at the others and mocked them.

" . . . and and and," Lucky sneezed again, "anybody. Excuse me," he said, blowing his noisy nose into his Snoopy Scarf. " . . . anybody who has such—such—unbridled control in this or or in any community over death, bombings, taxes and corruption is a fascist, and that state is a fascist state, whether it’s Rome, 1928 or or or golden Philadelphia," he laughed a crazy little Richard Widmark laugh as he checked his Seiko for ultimate accuracy, "1998. That’s my humble opinion, thank you." He sneezed a grand mal sneeze, which, according to his Sneeze-scale Theory, made it double-dead true.

"I’M RIGHT!" he roared, sneezing. Losing it.

"OKAY, OKAY," shouted the medic in charge, who just happened to be one of the many faithful witnesses—good souls, all—who had actually seen Lucky’s dazzlingly long, flowing, white silk Snoopy Scarf sailing in reverential space about the corpse. At this juncture the medic thought it best to separate the crowd from the corpse. "OKAY." Blindly, he threw a blue-and-white sheet over the corpse, over the striking, sexy blond intern who straddled the corpse—frantically, feverishly, fulsomely, administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to it, actually getting off on it—and over the electronic gadgetry connected to the corpse. He had connected wires to it that made it resemble Frankenstein’s monster. "OKAY," he shouted, yanking out the fuckin’ wires. The corpse jumped. The intern jumped. "OKAY, OKAY," he shouted, jumping as if he and not the sheeted corpse and intern had just been shocked. "OKAY. EVERYTHING’S UNDER CONTROL," he shouted. Shielded by the blue-and- white sheet, which bore the Great Shield of the Thomas Jefferson Medical College and Hospital, the blond intern screamed—gasped, actually—a happy, squealing scream, a mixture of fear, professionalism and joy that joined her to death in a way that she’d only fantasized about. The bearded medic, thinking that something fishy was going on under the sheet, tripped on a dead electrical cable, connected to a dead life-support system—whose malfunction he couldn’t figure out—and stumbled headlong into the image of B. Franklin, Printer. That gave him the heebie-jeebies. "OKAY!" he commanded, driving his point home by driving a wild finger at the throbbing, waiting, trembling ambulance. "OKAY!" he stumbled, tugging unsuccessfully at the blue-and-white sheet. "OKAY!" he shivered and cringed, shocked to his bones at what he’d seen—or surmised he’d seen—under the voluptuous, heaving sheet, only too eager to leave the haunted street to the knot of lurid onlookers.

Optimistically, Ben feared the worst. What if Lucky’s heart suddenly gave out . . . before they’d taken him off the street . . . before they’d brought him to Thomas’ Hospital? The trauma of his suddenly seeing his bloody corpse lying face up—with its bright, green eyes wide open—in the brick-and-cobblestone alley might destroy him. It might break his heart. Though the kid didn’t even believe that he was dead, the shock might kill him.

Benjamin hoped to slip quietly away from the scene of the crime with the wretched, pathetic clone before the suicide died.

Actually, he worried that Lucky would let go of something else that he’d cloned, his Ortgies 7.65 handgun, his hot pastrami special, his clover, or, Saints preserve us! that he would lose his marbles all at once and start blasting his gun into what he thought was a quite empty, pleasantly quiet Philadelphia street. Furthermore, he grieved at Lucky’s instability—which, as his long-lost father, he had no small part in helping to create—and, therefore, he had to be careful not to alarm him unnecessarily. For instance, he knew for a certainty that a shot fired by the dangerously-armed ghost had a high probability of penetrating into the World of the Living . . . and therefore into the crowded street . . . and, if that, then the deadly potential to strike and wound or possibly kill an innocent bystander.

In this worst-case scenario, Lucky wouldn’t think that anything newsworthy or striking had happened. Rather, he’d think that he’d done nothing more than fire—say, at the curb where "Nobody" sat—a wild bravado shot from his handy weapon. Ballistics on the slug taken from any unfortunate victim, however, would prove to the world that the suicide weapon in the corpse’s dead hand—without having been fired a second time that day and without having been fired even when an unlucky victim would have been struck by a bullet—was, nonetheless, the mysterious murder weapon.

Oh, dear, thought Ben, leaving the hysterical old lady, her eyes glued to the sheeted corpse (he had tried, unsuccessfully, to comfort her in spite of it all, but he had bigger things on his mind). If he fires that handgun in this square, he’ll kill people. The bullets exploding from the barrel of his gun will become as dangerously real as that stupid scarf did a moment ago. Yet I can’t force the issue and bring him into both worlds yet. It’s not responsible. Damn it, he’s not dead yet. He’s not officially dead until his heart stops beating. He’s brain dead, yes. But that’s not an altogether unfamiliar condition for him these days. It isolates him from the World of the Living just as it isolates them from him. They’re oblivious to one another. And that’s the way it is, Walter, intoned Ben, forgetting that he wasn’t any longer working on special assignment (or deep, deep backgrounding) at CBS NEWS for Reactivated Managing Editor, Mr. Walter Cronkite.

Though the living did not at this moment exist for Our Hero (2nd St. appeared to him to be perfectly vacant), massive, colorful, noontime crowds did, nonetheless, surround this bloody, broken corpse and brainless clone. The faithful and the living dead kept a vigil at this sacred, mysterious moment.

Mighty Power! Let his chicken heart hold out, Benjamin prayed, until I can convince him that he’s bought the farm. If he dies now, that’ll free the living ghost from his earth-bound blindness, permitting him to see things as they are, penetrating—at last—to the World of the Living. He’ll see his bloody corpse lying in the gutter. Think of what that’ll do. I don’t think he can take it. I don’t think I can take it. Honest. It’ll kill him. It’ll kill both of us. He doesn’t know that he’s dead. That’s how little this lunatic knows. He doesn’t know that he’s one of the Elect, one of the Chosen Dead, one of the Olympians. Think of the harm that a sudden, unprepared, ghostly transfiguration would do to him—and to them, the citizens of this fair city. Think of how I, YOUR HUMBLE, OBEDIENT SERVANT, would appear to these citizens, my neighbors, if I were caught struggling on 2nd St. with an invisible opponent.

Thinking about it, Ben grimaced, then he grinned at the thought. MAD, that’s what, he chuckled, enjoying the imagined scene.

The crazed medic flung out his arms and queried the crowd with a nonsensical question. "OKAY?" He roared and stumbled backward into the driver’s side of the white ambulance. "OKAY?"

In a superhuman Amazon-burst of fear-driven adrenaline his sexy colleague, the beautiful blond intern, liberated her lifeless, thrilled body from the passionate death-grip of the hyperventilating corpse, frantically dumped the dead equipment and the living corpse onto a single stretcher and dragged it into the rear of the vehicle as if she, ultimately, had caught a glimpse of something, too, something too damned good to be true, while partying under the blue- and-white death sheet with a dying Lucky Stiff.

"Thene, you bitch," she murmured. Then she grinned at the delicious twist that this little assignment had taken on since Athena had suggested that M.M. might want to get away from men for a while, maybe, and make a little movie back in Philly.

Where’d you find this kid? she thought. Christ! DEAD his balls are dynamite!

The Rolls’ ungodly, unearthly sirens screamed at full blast as it crawled painfully, slowly, out of the narrow brick-and-cobblestone alley. Its emergency high-hat light turned slowly, too, flashing red-and-white in the dismal blue street.

As the curious crowd began gradually to disperse, a rookie cop ran a garden hose out of the side door of Once Upon a Porch, the ice cream parlor at the corner. He waved a few stragglers back. Eventually, after untangling the knots in the orange garden hose, he washed down the street, the blood breaking loose in the gutter and streaming into the sewer like vin rosé.

"This is nuts." Lucky shook a scolding finger at nobody in particular and circled back to the spot where his corpse had fallen: The criminal had returned to the scene of the crime. "Why am I debating with a sixty-year-old oatmeal freak with a three-cornered hat, wispy gray hairs, baggy knickers, Dutch Masters’ boots—in a quaint, cobblestone alley in Historical Philadelphia—when I’m about a very serious mission . . . "

Ben coughed. Sauntered over to where the water was splashing in the bloody street. Cleared his throat.

" . . . when I’m about to blow my brains out," Lucky said, backing a step away from Ben. "And you. Back off. JUST BACK OFF!" he whipped out his gun.

"BACK OFF, BUDDY," ordered the rookie cop with the powerful water hose splashing about Ben’s boots.

Ben backed off, hoping Lucky would not fire a "harmless" warning shot into the invisible crowd and kill somebody and hoping the police wouldn’t forcibly escort him from the scene.

And where would that leave Lucky?

" . . . crazy sonofabitch . . . ," muttered the cop.

Tipping his three-cornered hat, Ben backtracked a safe distance and hung behind a slim, handsome fruit tree. Not far behind him crowded a dozen curious eyes, peering out at the bad news through the sparkling window of a fashionable luncheonette at the corner.

Then a paunchy, rumpled detective with a bulbous blue nose and a note pad to match flashed his badge at Ben . . .

"That’s better," Lucky snarled.

. . . and asked if he could ask him a few questions.

"I’d be glad to oblige."

"Because I mean business," Lucky continued. "I’m not just anybody, you know. I’M SOMEBODY," he sneezed.

"Did you know the deceased?" asked the detective.

Lucky noisily blew his nose.

"Listen. The little old lady in the pink-and-white flowered dress—the one with the broken umbrella," blue-nose cleared his throat, "has identified you as a material witness. Do you know what that means? Good. She said that she saw you and the kid . . . talking," he said bluntly, "just before the accident."

"Oh, yes," said Ben, bridging both worlds. " . . . a graduate of Harvard Law School, heavily involved in community affairs in the eighties and early nineties, an energetic, aggressive, alert, intelligent aide for Nader’s Raiders, who . . . who are headquartered right here in Society Hill . . . "

Lucky stuffed the Ortgies caliber 7.65 handgun into the baggy pouch pocket of his olive-drab fatigues, dumping out some of the four-leaf clover to make it fit.

"Like, wow, Mr. B. Franklin, printer, sir. Not bad. Actually, I’m flattered."

"Like, wow! JESUS CHRIST!" echoed the rookie.

Hosing down the street, he was agog to see Lucky’s four-leaf clover sprinkle to life at the very spot where the water splashed, the bloodiest spot. "ANYBODY SEE THAT?" he wondered, twisting his head and casting his eyes about. But he had kept the powerful water hose trained on the spot; and the mutant clover had quickly washed down the gutter with the last of the bloody stain. The rookie didn’t push his luck. Nobody saw it? Nobody saw it. Wisely, he turned his head and looked the other way.

Nobody saw anything, he hosed.

Having stuffed the gun into his pouch pocket, Lucky crossed to where Old Ben was standing.

The detective scribbled in his notebook.

"Say, pops," asked Lucky, "how how how d’ja figure out so much about me? I mean, I’m nobody," he said, checking the street to confirm that nobody would agree with him. He grabbed for his sandwich and pulled it sopping and mangled out from its secure place, where he’d had it tucked snugly in his olive-drab fatigues under his clothesline belt and Ortgies 7.65 handgun.

Thinking of himself as a nobody, though, the unhappy kid quickly became nervous at the thought that anybody might think of him as a somebody. He did not want to be somebody. Orphaned at puberty, our American demigod and Hero, lost grandchild of Zeus, surely was no stranger to loss and loneliness. Ignorant of his ancestry, the kid, nonetheless, had a very special birth: He was a boobie-boom child of a teenaged Greek goddess, who had been masquerading as a late- blooming flower child in the Swinging Sixties, and the posthumously- conceived illegitimate son of an American patriot—a genial, portly old chap—who at the time had been masquerading as a Beat Generation satirist-printer of the Funny Fifties. Short, red-haired, freckle-faced, a tonsured bald spot in the middle of his unkempt hair, he chomped at his mangled hot pastrami sandwich. Though it tasted as cold and as dead as yesterday’s fish, it’s still pastrami, he thought.

"Did did did . . . ," he scratched his nerve-racked head and tried to do it again, talking through his "Special" and its beefy cold juices, assaulting the sandwich and the language, "did did . . . did you know m-my . . . mmmmmmmmm my mother?" He was as confused as Ben about the origin of the question. But Ben was decidedly more shocked.

"Ththththt," said the Revolutionary, whose brows shot skyward above his bulging green eyes.

Lucky shivered, trembled.

The detective looked at Ben, Ben looked at Lucky, Lucky . . .

"Huh?" said the detective.

Lucky looked at life. LOOK! He was busy having an extraordinary vision. It’s Mommy. It’s my pretty teenaged mother, frolicking in Rittenhouse Square with old B-Ben Franklin, printer, inventor, philanthropist, revolutionary, statesman, AND AND AND A PHILANDERING GHOST! he daydreamed.

"Oh, it’s nothing," said Ben. "I’m sorry about that . . . I was just . . . just wandering," he daydreamed, smiling pleasantly over an old affair of the heart.

"Did he talk about it?" asked the detective.

"A little," said Ben.

"A little," said Lucky, irritated. "Why are you sorry about it? What did you do to her? What did you say to her? WHO ARE YOU? ARE YOU MY CALIGARI? WHERE IS SHE?" Enraged, Lucky hurled his sopping cold pastrami on Jewish rye. It struck the rookie cop, who had been busy coiling up the gurgling garden hose, squarely in the face. A small black boy standing next to the invisible ghost ["HE DIDN’T DO IT! HE DIDN’T DO IT!" screamed the boy’s indignant mother, "HE DON’T LIKE CORNED BEEF!"] took the rap for Lucky.

The rookie cop approached the mother and child with the half- uneaten sandwich. "Does he like pastrami?" he asked. He shoved the remains of Lucky’s cold pastrami on Jewish rye into the kid’s trembling gut and went back to coiling up his hose. The blue-nosed detective, who had observed this episode with some humor, went back to interrogating the old Philadelphian.

Beads of perspiration on Ben’s brow betrayed the tremendous strain under he was under. He wanted to get out from under the grueling weight of this interrogation as graciously as possible; furthermore, he wanted to satisfy the legitimate demands of the Philadelphia Police without arousing suspicion.

My God, he thought, this is brutal.

If he whisked Lucky away from 2nd St., that wouldn’t solve anything, he reasoned. He’d vanish, too. That’d arouse suspicion, and that’d create horrendous havoc in Head House Square. Nobody disappears from the scene of a crime "Like that!" He snapped his fingers. Not without arousing suspicion. Besides, it didn’t fit in with his presidential plan. Think about the police report that Rizzo’s Best would have to file—or fudge—and think about the impact that such vanishing behavior might have on their unsmudged careers. Think about the citizens on the street. Think about the religious fervor that such an irresponsible act would create. Think about the sensation it would bring—all prematurely—to Lucky’s nascent political career.

This historical moment, this resurrection when it came, had to be documented in such a comprehensive way that even the most skeptical bishops and forensic pathologists could say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the stiff had died and risen.

My God . . .

Whisking him away "Like that!" would also violate Lucky’s First Amendment Rights to assemble and dissemble as he pleased, Rights so basic to political life, Here and Afterhere, that Ben had to respect them. Finally, he agonized about Truth. Though he had to lure Lucky off the GODDAMN street, he was torn between telling him that he hadn’t successfully taken his life (a lie which might drive the corpse to fire his weapon again) and telling him that he had (a truth which, probably, he wouldn’t believe).

. . . brutal, he thought.

Lucky crumbled in tears on the curb.

"We talked at the tavern," Ben said. Tugging the pudgy detective aside, he whispered to him in great confidence, "about . . . about gruel . . . "

The detective did a take at Ben.

" . . . about gruel," Ben nodded vigorously. "He thinks it’s oatmeal."

"Does he?" The detective raised his brows.

"Oh, yes, yes . . . " Ben grinned at the detective through his low lunacy. " . . . ssssshhhhhhh, you . . . you don’t want him to hear you."

"No, of course not," said the detective, patting Ben’s arm.

"Ssssshhhhhhh," Ben hushed. "I’ll take him home with me if that’s all right with you."

"Fine, fine," said the detective.

Behind this guise of low lunacy, Ben had figured out a way to exit the street, to leave the scene of the crime with "The Kid"—as Zeus liked to call him—but without arousing too great a skein of suspicion. Distracting him no end, Ben had just detected—absurdly—what big floppy ears the bulbous blue-nosed detective had. It made him giggle to think of it. They matched his blue nose and blue note pad. He noticed that a satellite crowd of the curious had gathered about them. Like a lunatic he waved at everybody, showering them with love and throwing kisses.

"Oh, by the way," whispered the detective, politely waving off Ben’s kisses. "Where do you live?"

"WHO ARE YOU?" Lucky raged. Squatting on the granite curb like a failed abortion. Uttering the anguish of the unborn deaf, dumb, and blind, the clogged cry of one choked with tears and growing hoarser by the minute. "ARE YOU MY FATHER?" he roared up at Ben.

"I AM BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, PRINTER," Ben boomed, "OF BOSTON, PHILADELPHIA, AND THE WORLD. However," he winked, finishing in simple, lyrical madness, "I choose to live at The Benjamin Franklin House, 8th & Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Suite Thirteen Thirteen." The crowd giggled at Ben’s bombast and at the charming madness of his quiet, eloquent finish. It applauded; Benjamin Franklin bowed.

"Thank you," said the detective. He didn’t bother to write anything down. He went back to the little old lady in the pink-and- white flowered dress and talked animatedly with her—a certified nervous wreck—thinking he ought to calm her down. Once she pointed point-blank at Ben and shook an accusatory finger; the detective nodded and shook a finger back at her.

While this activity was going on, Lucky wandered about in and through the crowd, quite oblivious to it, aware only of the shoppes, Old Mr. B., and a light Philadelphia rain. The living had become as invisible to him as he to them. If Hell is other people, he thought, I’m in Heaven.

Only once or twice did he jar somebody.

Gradually, he was becoming a tangible entity; at the Jefferson his fluttering heart had begun to fail.

Ben shimmied through the crowd, excusing his clumsiness and apologizing for the dozens of toes that he had crunched to get to Lucky. Enough is enough, he thought. I have to get this lunatic bastard the hell out of here.

"Brain dead," said the old lady in the flowered dress to the detective, the taxi driver, and the barman of the Head House Inn, ". . . that’s what she said," she wept. "Brain dead. The blond, she said it. I heard it," she told the men, who had heard it too, and who nodded because there was nothing else to say.

Lucky saw this portly old gentleman coming straight for his suspenders, dancing the hula in the brick-and-cobblestone alley as if he were wiggling through an invisible crowd. "Think of it. Actually, if you look at life through rose-colored glasses, you could say . . . ," he bullshitted. But the suicide backed off, fairly apprehensive, to say the least, to see a grown oatmeal freak in knickers dancing for him in an empty American street. " . . . you could say I have a lot to live for. Whoa! Think of all the distinguished dead people I can become acquainted with at public museums and public libraries. Reading their voluminous luminous works. Looking at their etchings. There’s the REAL Benjamin Franklin, the REAL Thomas Jefferson, the real REAL Dolley Madison—VA-VA-VA-VOOM," he mimicked the size of her breasts, "and—and and and—the REAL James Madison," he teased Ben, "my idol, the Father of the friggin’ Constitution. Hey, no offense. BUT WILL THE REAL JAMES MADISON . . . PLEASE STAND UP!"

Dr. Franklin smiled the Smile of Gentle Reason, though he was a tad peeved that he wasn’t the kid’s favorite dead American.

" . . . or, COME ON DOWN! Whatever."

Ben lifted Lucky by the elbow out of the streaming gutter and dusted a few leaves of clover from his unbuttoned burgundy vest. "UPSIDAISY, MY GOOD MAN," he said a touch too loudly and too confidently, playing up the antic mood. He liked Lucky’s colorful, simple clothes, thinking that his big black GI combat boots, baggy olive-drab combat fatigues, and tight burgundy vest made him a contemporary Little Tramp in step with Chaplin’s Modern Times.

"Wudja think, Ben?" he prodded.

Ben nodded and winked at the chuckling crowd, the blind crowd, for all that he knew, the dead crowd.

He humored it.

"Think how lucky I am! I could spend the rest of my miserable life awakening to impostors like you and sleeping in famous American graves like the Madisons’ . . . and loving it," mugged Lucky. "This is the most morbid fun I’ve had in ages."

The crowd watched Ben’s back diminish to a dot and then to nothing as he strolled north on 2nd St. They mocked and mimicked him as he passed the Olde Colonial Shoppes, the Head House Inn. Talking quite animatedly to nobody at all. Talking to the magnificent Philadelphia skyline. Talking nonsense, no doubt. Quite singular. Quite alive. Quite energetic. Quite mad.

"Doing anything of note today?" Ben asked the unemployed corpse.

"Am I!"

"Like parties?"

"Hate parties."

Ben cleared the phlegm in his throat. He hated playing sweet guy to this nasty bastard. "Want to come to a party—oh, just stop by for a few minutes. It’s at my place."

Lucky pretended to look stunned. "Me? Your place? Are you bananas?" he laughed, not trusting whatever this mad impostor might call home. What type of dance he and his impostors danced there. "Yeah? Where’s that?" But he didn’t get many invitations these days, and he was becoming curious.

"Right—It’s right—"

Ben started pointing in the wrong direction and gave up trying to orient himself.

"—Look, just one thing. I don’t dance."

"Tough guy?"

"Wiseguy."

"Right. I’m at The Benjamin Franklin House," said Ben, knitting his brow.

"You a tourist?" asked Lucky.

"You don’t believe me. It’s my place!"

"Oh, I get it. You’re part of a doubles or a look-alike convention in town."

"You might say that," he said, giving it up.

"IMPOSTORS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!" said the corpse, brandishing his hairy arms.

Ben checked his watch and imagined the doctors at the Jeff working feverishly to revive the corpse. Don’t do it, he begged. Don’t. I don’t think I could go through this again. This is killing me. Christ, why ain’t he dead yet? "You feel okay? You!"

"You talkin’ to me?"

"No, I’m talkin’ to your mother."

"Yo! Where I come from, those are fighting words. Do you know what I mean, pops?"

Ben looked balefully. There were times when he could have killed the kid for talking like that. But he didn’t: He punished him instead. He’d lost the opportunity of lifetime. "I think it’s time to cut the cord, bigshot. It’s not your birthday, exactly. It’s your birth day, the day you’re birthed. Boy, if that surprises you, have I got a surprise for you," said the gritty old Revolutionary, giving up the cause as hopeless. "Listen, there’re going to be some very famous, very influential people, Lucky—waiting—at the party back at my place," he grinned. He waited for the kid’s reaction: anything decent or civil.

Was this scrappy kid capable of anything like that? Not when I knew him, he thought. "Nice folk, you’ll see," he said, playing to the kid and to the tourists milling in the street. Where the fuck did I go wrong with him? he murmured. Headstrong bastard. Insolent pip-squeak.

"What about Madison? Think he’ll be there. Think he’ll understand, pops. Think he’ll cut me a break," Lucky giggled, "and and let me sleep in his grave. That’s not asking a lot. Think about it! James Madison’s authorized grave! What a death wish! Everybody’s dying to sleep in a house that George Washington slept in. GEORGE WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE! That’s beans! Just give me one night in a famous dead man’s grave. Or in a famous dead woman’s grave. Ligeia’s crypt! There! I’ll settle for that! WHERE IS IT, EDGAR? WHERE? Oh, Necrophilia! My dream come true!" Lucky babbled on nervously, absurdly, enjoying his trip down Cemetery Lane.

After all these years, Ben discovered once again why he hated the kid. Why he hated him with a black passion that smelled of old stale Revolutionary blood.

"The Madisons can swing it, don’tcha think? After all, pops, Dolley’s president is a legal constitutional genius, and and for that alone," he whined, "the Pennsylvania Bar Association should be gracious and should honor his wishes. It should be honored to honor his wishes. It should be more than honored. It should be downright willing and eager to grant him anything he wants. Anything. THE RIGHT TO LEASE LEGITIMATE GRAVES! BEGINNING WITH HIS! CHRIST! THAT’S REAL ESTATE FOR LEPERS. THAT’S REAL ESTATE FOR THE LIVING DEAD! Give ‘em what they want, that’s what I say. They want death, give ‘em a taste of it. CHOICE! Ain’t that what it’s all about?"

Ben’s face became quite pale.

"I have guests waiting for me at home . . . ," he began.

If he didn’t play to the crowd, they’d have thought him nuttier than a fruitcake. As it was, they thought him a happy-go-lucky tourist attraction. Some threw pennies to him. Since they couldn’t yet see Lucky, who hadn’t yet fully materialized (whose chicken heart, apparently, had gained in strength at the Thomas Jefferson Medical College and Hospital), they thought Ben a mad cartoon character of a famous American, babbling on indefatigably to nobody in particular as he strolled up 2nd St.

"Guests? Oh, right."

" . . . and I really ought to be getting back to them . . . and to the fashion show."

"Sure," said Lucky, not sure of anything.

"I’m the host this time around," said Ben, "not Harry Bailly."

"Harry Bailly?"

"We’re old friends. We go ‘way back."

"I don’t believe it."

"The Host of Chaucer’s Tabbard Inn . . . at Southwark," said Ben, forgetting that Lucky was a novice, a novitiate ghost.

"That’s The Canterbury Tales. That’s fiction!"

Ben glowered at Lucky. "What’s this?"

"WHAT’S WHAT. Me? Listen, bud, I’m real! I’m talking to blood and guts people. You . . . You’re talking to the walls."

"I’m talking to books."

Lucky threw up his hands—and screwed up his face into a question—as if appealing to the gods to confirm what he’d just heard: That B. Franklin, printer, was genuinely mad. That he had condemned himself out of his own mouth.

"Talking to books," Lucky scoffed.

" . . . poor . . . poor man," wept the old lady in the shredded pink-and-white flowered dress to the burly-headed barman of the Head House Inn, " . . . and he watched the whole thing."

She shook her broken umbrella once at Old Ben as he diminished north, northerly, crossing Pine St. into the New World that he had conceived for himself . . . and contrived for his son-of-a-bitch- bastard, too, his and the Greek goddess Athena’s posthumously-sired illegitimate son. Ultimately, with the blessings of Galactic Olympian Deities, he had conceived and contrived it for the rest of humanity, too. About this time, the rookie policeman, who had seen the clover sprinkling to life out of nowhere in the splashing water, wandered to the corner while he coiled up the garden hose. Laughing about the illusion, he glanced up and just barely saw an outline of The Clone on 2nd St. This horse shit shit has to stop, he said. On the Crackpot Shift since midnight, he rubbed his bloodshot eyes, blinked hard, and looked again.

No doubt about it: There it was.

Little did he know that he had borne witness to a once-in-a- lifetime REVELATION that the Immortal Stiff marched in time with America’s Big Ben. While he saw it or thought he saw it, he didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand why he had this fantasy that he was living in the Eye of a hurricane of a galactic event. Briefly, the Philadelphia sky darkened and rolled with ominous thunder. And, naturally, in this bleary blurry state of mind, he counted each hammer crack as just one more nail in his coffin. He winced as if somebody were nailing something to his head. He checked the sky as if somebody up there had something to do with it. Something was up. Yet he felt that he had blown it out of all proportion to the evidence at hand. So he decided that he didn’t want to say a thing about it. Not to anybody. Not at this time. Not a word.

LUCKY! LUCKY! the wind whistled to the rookie, finishing his work in the water-sprung street.

Cocking his expert ear to the garden hose, thinking it The Source, the rookie echoed the gurgling noise, trying to learn the Word. "Lucky," he whispered. Little did he know that he had had an authentic Echoic Experience. He’d heard a name that didn’t sound like a name babbling to him out of a gurgling garden hose about nothing in particular. He wound the orange hose into huge concentric circles. "It could be anything," he muttered to nobody within earshot, too frightened at the time to face the simple truth. Thinking his nerves shot and his baby pension in jeopardy, he jumped at the slightest noise. He became suspicious of anybody who passed him. "ANYTHING!" he jumped.

He didn’t say another word; grim, dark, wiry, the rookie cop knew that his sanity and his job depended on his cool. The name was a meaningless name, and the event a meaningless event. Besides, try as he might, he didn’t know about and couldn’t begin to speculate on, precisely, HOW it had happened that he had heard what he had heard, seen what he had seen.

Dr. Franklin cut a comical figure as he strolled north of NewMarket, the three magnificent monoliths of Society Hill Towers soaring into the dark, threatening sky ahead of him and the resurrected Colonial marketplace, lying peacefully low in the sunny street behind.

This grand Optimist, this Rationalist, this pragmatic, neoclassical statesman, businessman, and tinkerer, gesticulated so joyfully, so happily, and so colorfully in describing whatever it was that he happened to be describing that passersby thought him nutty, an eccentric, harmless kook in a three-cornered, colonial hat, who babbled and bubbled with such ebullience to his invisible friend as they sauntered about Historical Philadelphia, skipping up and down curbs, chatting so loquaciously, mimicking so animatedly, and smiling so perfectly pleased with everything and everybody that his joie de vivre had no earthly parallel.

His exuberance was so infectious—to say the least—and his optimism so absurdly contagious, that the reluctant, noonday sun burst through the dark, threatening storm clouds and flooded Society Hill with a gold-glistening star-spangled sunshine, unquestionably the equal of none in the entire continent.

They crossed Delancey St., traveling north, northerly. Raise your head and shout, Lucky mumbled, humming the lyrics to the rousing old song as they bobbed up 2nd St., it’s gonna be a great day. Today was a great day for Lucky. He had become invisible, inaudible, immortal, and non-existent. A virtual nonentity, he had achieved the impossible dream.

They sailed up 4th St. past Independence Hall, where the hit "Fifth of Beethoven" blared at them from a Sam Goody record shop on Chestnut Mall. Unconsciously, they marched in tempo—DA-DA-DA DUUUMMMMM—to the opening chords of Beethoven’s magical music straight to the BENJAMIN FRANKLIN marquee.

Then, in a digression that confused Lucky, they scooted around the corner when they reached The Benjamin Franklin House and took the freight elevator up to Suite Thirteen Thirteen where The Second Annual Benj. Franklin Designer Line Fashion Show and Banquet was in full swing.

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Copyright © Domenic Corsaro 1998