THE MATTRESS KING
How we knew all the titles, their acronyms, the big machers & the contract menschs, the personalities, and the gossipedabout.
How we worked all the angles, had every number, knew every score, played hard on all schemes.
We rose to their equals, then we raised them one more. Our hands were everywhere — even they were in hand.
THE PILLOW KING
What we bought, we sold, and what we sold, we bought back then sold it again, for a profit margin higher, always higher, toward heaven.
Let’s talk rate of return, taking a piece of everything then putting them back together into new wholes: threehalves of any percentage always to parties of our own imaginative accounting, leveraged in the greed that only in America’s known as ambition.
The vig for living free, you just have to deal.
But aside from family immediate and extended, a congregation of maybe arsonhappy brothers-inlaw, it wasn’t a Syndicate, wasn’t a System — it was a loose thing…
That’s what no one ever understood. Family—
And that’s a wrap! says Spielgrob.
Print it! he says to the soundstage, emptied…even he’s not there, anymore.
A promise, though — we’ll patch it up in edits…
Always, there’s post.
All the while all the way back east — being the manger of opinion, straw-thought, dungwonder — the tsking siskeling critics, the talkinghead commentariat, latenite pundits, qrating mongers and their PR meisterminders they’re asking, for once without rhetoric and in unison, from a deck above the reader’s pew…shtumup, where is He?
Benjamin. Ben. Mister Israelien. Give Him over unto us. Produce Him or wither upon an alien vine.
What’s with this journey dorf-to-dorf, this khuter hopping, this zemstvo zip…is it a quote unquote quest for identity, a search for roots, an undertaken Wander not quite though by now almost jahr, a pilgrimage and if so then, to where — who owns the rights? Listeners and viewers at home, by now they’re not even encouraged, they’re urged, to send in their votes, any ideas, tips hot or not, c/o any dark rider headed through the night to the next town, just over the river.
For a moon, though, it’s none of those.
Here’s the spiel, the lashon hara, it’s said: He’s on the sacrificial lam, evading authorities, subpoenas unto even the poenas below the subpoenas, subsubpoenas to appear before, nu, it’s either a Judge Cohen or Coen, it’s forgotten, a Cohn or a Cone maybe, or else, then again, maybe a Koen or Kohen, a Kohn or even a Kone, it’s been said, then again maybe a Cahn or Kagen, a Kahane or a Kahn; hymn, others say she’s a female judge, like Deborah, perhaps, who, it’s said, would hold her court and prophecy under a warm shvitzy palm as if to say, pay me — but this with one of those hyphenated-names, Cohen-Cone or the like, formerly with the firm of Gimme, Loot, & Hasidim, LLC…whatever name the robe elected before taking the bench. Ben’s being sued for damages, is it. Character defamation. Misrepresentation. For Impersonating the Savior. For False Messianism. Fraud. And she’s naming names, the whore-plaintiff: I sold everything I owned expecting the End of Days, the Eschaton. My husband, who he was an Affiliated, May His Memory Be for a Blessing, died for this schmuck. And for nothing. For nodding. The woman, who wouldn’t convert for her husband over my dead body left to depose of — her husband’s family and their plotz (buried up in one of those shoulder cemeteries that are necropolitan northern Joysey, on a strip right by the side of the Turnpike so that when a big rig would come through, eighteen wheels and more how those stones would shake, in their graves the caskets would rumble, rattle like seeds in a shell — like loose teeth in a cheeky mouth, bellied to laugh, that tumult of chattering coffins) — but anyway, long story short did after his death and theirs, convert, now refers everyone who’s interested to her new husband, also her lawyer: they were married on the steps of the courthouse while waiting for their case to be heard.
My client, also my wife, the lawyer says, is seeking compensation for emotional trauma she experienced in being grossly misled by a mensch pretending to be the Messiah. Period. Paragraph.
Manipulation. He less talks than dictates for press; when he raises his voice and an eyebrow, which, that’s a headline in itself, period, paragraph…my client had invested much faith, time, and money in Mister Israelien. And she’s not the only one. No. There’ve been others, too afraid or embarrassed to come forward just now. Their loss has to be worth something. My time. I urge them to contact me directly. And now — a miracle, what a classy action, a tort. We’re asking, he says, for a thousand shekels a day, let’s say each, for every day my clients were under the impression of Mister Israelien’s stated symbolism, and purported power — in addition to half a million each because, don’t blame us, we just want it.
Don’t you think Garden, Inc.’s behind this whole mishegas, the Administration, too — you don’t think Ben’s smart enough for this kind of scam?
Glad you asked.
We’re presently engaged in a separate suit v. Garden, Inc., relating to product failure: the Hanna Wig™ (representation flaps it aloft, a dead thing, this kaporos of the presspool) is responsible for the fatal choking of my client’s beloved parakeet, Duke.
He straightens his toupee held down by his yarmulke.
They were very close — apparently, the bird knew her by name.
The woman’s first husband, an Affiliated by the name of Avram or Avraham, in the one time they ever took a vacation photos allowed release by his widow and her lawyerhusband: an apparently insolvent, incontinent, bonebald mensch who’s standing short even in his orthopedically reformed, Pittsburgh platform shoes and Cincinnatty cap, his frame largely fat, slowmoving, his pugilistically puffy face distinguished most prominently by its soured nose, an embittered, prickly pickled bird’s, it’s described. And soon, the rumor mill’s up and run by a blind, threelegged horse: how he’d been a travelagent, and that that’d been kosher, not a front, though he’d WITHHELD — diversifying his portfolio, selling illegal spices, Eastern Bloc paprika take to American table back in the alte days, his mittelmensch’s name it was that of Laser or Glazer Wolf though that’s probably an alias, also he’d owned & operated a chain of the bathroom’s in the hallway motels up and down the Gulf Coast (storage they functioned as, deaddrops to launder the stain: Szeged’s product being cleared out from Miami and up north through the service entrances, until a bust the year before his death — only a handful of bellboychicks had been caught redhanded; despite whatever deals were pepperdangled, it was all too spicy for anyone to talk). Not that my husband was ever aware, she’s sure of it. Anyway, he’s dead, spit spit spit, isn’t that enough of a punishment — and, nu, so her husband it’s revealed after further investigation, gravedigging into the unmarked files for the worst of the wormiest dirt, had forged bonds, would deliver them to associates bound in prayerbooks, opposite the Mourner’s Kaddish. He’s dead, spit, don’t spite his memory. My wife, also my client, maintains her innocence. Boilerplate. And then a boilerroom scam, hardselling off futures, options, foreign exchange, half the Dead Sea’s salt to every resident of Central Brooklyn, coldcalling at furious heat from a basement wholly unfinished just east of India, the one with the dot. Another rumor awaiting verification between a mouth and an ear has it that his brother, hymn, his widow’s brother-inlaw, also dead, had been a ritual slaughterer for a foreign interest shadily in the black. A former bombmacher with one finger left triggerhappy. Statesponsored assassination, it was. He had terrible gas.