In his own befuddled way, John Hollander has given the world a beautiful and strange reflection on love and longing. To read his marvelous dialogue on echo ⁵² is to find its author standing perfectly still in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes wild with a cascade of internal reckonings, lips acting out some unintelligible discourse, inaudible to the numerous students who race by him, noting his mad appearance and quite rightly offering him a wide berth as they escape into someone else's class. ⁵³

Hollander begins with a virtual catalogue of literal echoes. For example, the Latin " decern iam annos aetatem trivi in Cicerone" echoed by the Greek "oneV 'ti Or " Musarum studia" (Latin) described by the echo as "did" (Greek).9 Or Narcissus' rejection " Emoriar, quam sit tibi copia

letter, wanting to detect at least one differing accent or letter, getting almost desperate in that pursuit, only to repeatedly discover perfect similitude, though how can that be, right? if it were perfect it wouldn't be similar it would be identical, and you know what? I've lost this sentence, I can't even finish it, don't know how—

Here's the point: the more I focused in on the words the farther I seemed from my room. No sense where either, until all of a sudden along the edges of my tongue, towards the back of my mouth, I started to taste something extremely bitter, almost metallic. I began to gag. I didn't gag, but I was certain I would. Then I got a whiff of that same something awful I'd detected outside of the Shop in the hall. Faint as hell at first until I knew I'd smelled it and then it wasn't faint at all. A whole lot of rot was suddenly packed up my nose, slowly creeping down my throat, closing it off. I started to throw up, watery chunks of vomit flying everywhere, sluicing out of me onto the floor, splashing onto the wall, even onto this. Except I only coughed. I didn't cough. I lightly cleared my throat and then the smell was gone and so was the taste. I was back in my room again, looking around in the dim light, jittery, disoriented but hardly fooled.

I put the fragments back in the trunk. Walked the perimeter of my room. Glass of bourbon. A toke on a blunt. There we go. Bring on the haze. But who am I kidding? I can still see what's happening. My line of defense has not only failed, it failed long ago. Don't ask me to define the line either or why exactly it's needed or even what it stands in defense against. I haven't the foggiest idea.

This much though I'm sure of: I'm alone in hostile territories with no clue why they're hostile or how to get back to safe havens, an Old Haven, a lost haven, the temperature dropping, the hour heaving pitching towards a profound darkness, while before me my idiotic amaurotic Guide laughs, actually cackles is more like it, lost in his own litany of inside jokes, completely out of his head, out of focus too, zonules of Zinn, among other things, having snapped long ago like piano wires, leaving me with absolutely no sound way to determine where the hell I'm going, though right now going to hell seems like a pretty sound bet.

⁵ 'Which Anthony Bonner translates as . . truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future." — Ed.

⁵² See John Hollander's The Figure of Echo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). ⁵³ Kelly Chamotto makes mention of Hollander in her essay "Mid-Sentence, Mid-Stream" in Glorious Garrulous Graphomania ed. T. N Joseph Truslow (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), p. 345. O "I've spent ten years on Cicero" "Ass!" 5 "The Muses' studies" "divine ones."

nostri" to which Echo responds "sit tibi copia nostri ."€ On page 4, he even provides a woodcut from Athanasius Kircher's Neue Hall -und Thonkunst (Nordlingen, 1684) illustrating an artificial echo machine designed to exchange" clamore" for four echoes:" amore" "more" "ore," and finally " re" H Nor does Hollander stop there. His slim volume abounds with examples of textual transfiguration, though in an effort to keep from repeating the entire book, let this heart-wrenching interchange serve as a final example:

Chi dara fine al gran dolore?

L'ore.°°

While The Figure of Echo takes special delight in clever word games, Hollander knows better than to limit his examination there. Echo may live in metaphors, puns and the suffix— solis ex illo vivit in antris®— but her range extends far beyond those literal walls. For instance, the rabbinical bat kol means "daughter of a voice" which in modern Hebrew serves as a rough equivalent for the word "echo." Milton knew it: "God so commanded, and left that Command/ Sole Daughter of his voice." [30] So did Wordsworth: "stern Daughter of the Voice of God." Quoting from Henry Reynold's Mythomystes (1632), Hollander evidences religious appropriation of the ancient myth (page 16):

This Winde is (as the before-mentioned Iamblicus, by consent of his other fellow- Cabalists sayes) the Symbole of the Breath of God; and Ecco, the reflection of this divine breath, or spirit upon us; or (as they interpret it) the daughter of the divine voice; which through the beatifying splendor it shedds and diffuses through the Soule, is justly worthy to be reverenced and adored by us. This Ecco descending upon a Narcissus, or such a Soule as (impurely and vitiously affected) slights, and stops his eares to the Divine voice, or shutts his harte from divine Inspirations, through his being enamour'd of not himselfe, but his owne shadow meerely ... he becomes thence ... an earthy, weake, worthlesse thing, and fit sacrifize for only etemall oblivion ...

Thus Echo suddenly assumes the role of god's messenger, a female Mercury or perhaps even Prometheus, decked in talaria, with lamp in hand, descending on fortunate humanity.

In 1989, however, the noted southern theologian Hanson Edwin Rose dramatically revised this reading. In a series of lectures delivered at Chapel Hill, Rose referred to "God's Grand Utterance" as "The Biggest Bang Of Them All." After discussing in depth the difference between the Hebrew davhar and the Greek logos, Rose took a careful accounting of St. John, chapter 1, Verse 1—"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." It was a virtuoso performance but one that surely would have been relegated to those dusty shelves already burdened with a thousand years of seminary discourse had he not summed up his ruminations with this incendiary and still infamous conclusion: "Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god's echoes and god is Narcissus." ⁵⁶

Rose's pronouncement recalls another equally important meditation:

Why did god create a dual universe? So he might say, "Be not like me. I am alone."

And it might be heard. [31]

There is not time or room to adequately address the complexity inherent in this passage, aside from noting how the voice is returned—or figuratively echoed—not with an actual word but with the mere understanding that it was received, listened to, or as the text explicitly states "heard." What the passage occludes, no doubt on purpose, is how such an understanding might be attained.

Interestingly enough, for all its marvelous observation, The Figure of Echo contains a startling error, one which performs a poetic modulation on a voice sounded over a century ago. While discussing Wordsworth's poem "The Power of Sound" Hollander quotes on page 19 the following few lines:

Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice—to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and in the sky's blue care reborn —

[Italics added for emphasis]

Perhaps it is simply a typographical error committed by the publisher. Or perhaps the publisher was dutifully transcribing an error committed by Hollander himself, not just a scholar but a poet as well, who in that tiny slip where an "r" replaced a "v" and an "s" miraculously vanished reveals his own relation to the meaning of echo. A meaning Wordsworth did not share. Consider the original text:

Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice—to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and, in the sky's blue caves reborn — [32]

[Italics added for emphasis]

While Wordsworth's poetics retain the literal properties and stay within the canonical jurisdiction of Echo, Hollander's find something else, not exactly 'religious'—that would be hyperbole—but 'compassionate', which as an echo of humanity suggests the profoundest return of all.

Aside from recurrence, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always muffle or impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity.

Ironically, hollowness only increases the eerie quality of otherness inherent in any echo. Delay and fragmented repetition create a sense of another inhabiting a necessarily deserted place. Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.

Hollander is wrong when he writes on page 55:

The apparent echoing of solitary words . . . [reminds] us . . . that acoustical echoing in empty places can be a very common auditory emblem, redolent of gothic novels as it may be, of isolation and often of unwilling solitude. This is no doubt a case of natural echoes conforming to echo's mythographic mocking, rather than affirming, role. In an empty hall that should be comfortably inhabited, echoes of our voices and motions mock our very presence in the hollow space.

It is not by accident that choirs singing Psalms are most always recorded with ample reverb. Divinity seems defined by echo. Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow. The reason for this is not too complex. An echo, while implying an enormity of a space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it.

When a pebble falls down a well, it is gratifying to hear the eventual plunk. If, however, the pebble only slips into darkness and vanishes without a sound, the effect is disquieting. In the case of a verbal echo, the

spoken word acts as the pebble and the subsequent repetition serves as "the plunk." In this way, speaking can result in a form of "seeing."

For all its merits, Hollander's book only devotes five pages to the actual physics of sound. While this is not the place to dwell on the beautiful and complex properties of reflection, in order to even dimly comprehend the shape of the Navidson house it is still critical to recognize how the laws of physics in tandem with echo's mythic inheritance serve to enhance echo's interpretive strength.

The descriptive ability of the audible is easily designated with the following formula:

O Sound + Time = Acoustic Light

As most people know who are versed in this century's technological effects, exact distances can be determined by timing the duration of a sound's round trip between the deflecting object and its point of origin. This principle serves as the basis for all the radar, sonar and ultrasonics used every day around the world by air traffic controllers, fishermen, and obstetricians. By using sound or electromagnetic waves, visible blips may be produced on a screen, indicating either a 747, a school of salmon, or the barely pumping heart of a fetus.

Of course echolocation has never belonged exclusively to technology. Microchiroptera (bats), Cetacean (porpoises and toothed whales), Delphinis delphis (dolphins) as well as certain mammals (flying foxes) and birds (oilbirds) all use sound to create extremely accurate acoustic images. However, unlike their human counterparts, neither bats nor dolphins require an intermediary screen to interpret the echoes. They simply "see" the shape of sound.

Bats, for example, create frequency modulated [FM] images by producing constant-frequency signals [0.5 to 100+ ms] and FM signals [0.5 to 10 ms] in their larynx. The respondent echoes are then translated into nerve discharges in the auditory cortex, enabling the bat not only to determine an insect's velocity and direction (through synaptic interpretation of Doppler shifts) but pinpoint its location to within a fraction of a millimeter. [33]

As Michael J. Buckingham noted in the mid-80s, imaging performed by the human eye is neither active nor passive. The eye does not need to produce a signal to see nor does an object have to produce a signal in order to be seen. An object merely needs to be illuminated. Based on these observations, the already mentioned formula reflects a more accurate understanding of vision with the following refinement:

O Sound + Time = Acoustic Touch As Gloucester murmured, "I see it feelingly." [34]

Unfortunately, humans lack the sophisticated neural hardware present in bats and whales. The blind must rely on the feeble light of fingertips and the painful shape of a cracked shin. Echolocation comes down to the crude assessment of simple sound modulations, whether in the dull reply of

a tapping cane or the low, eerie flutter in one simple word—perhaps your word—flung down empty hallways long past midnight. ⁶²

⁶² You don't need me to point out the intensely personal nature of this passage. Frankly I'd of rec'd a quick skip past the whole echo ramble were it not for those six lines, especially the last bit "— perhaps your word —" conjuring up, at least for me, one of those deep piercing reactions, the kind that just misses a ventricle, the old man making his way—feeling his way—around the walls of another evening, a slow and tedious progress but one which begins to yield, somehow, the story of his own creature darkness, taking me completely by surprise, a sudden charge from out of the dullest moment, jaws lunging open, claws protracting, and just so you understand where I'm coming from, I consider "... long past midnight" one claw and "empty hallways" another.

Don't worry Lude didn't buy it either but at least he bought a couple of rounds.

Two nights ago, we were checking out the Sky Bar, hemorrhaging dough on drinks, but Lude could only cough hard and then laugh real coronary like: "Hoss, a claw's made of bone just like a stilt's made of steel."

"Sure" I said.

But it was loud there and the crowd kept both of us from hearing correctly. And while I wanted to believe Lude's basics, I couldn't. There was something just so awful in the old man's utterance. I felt a terrible empathy for him then, living in that tiny place, permeated with the odor of age, useless blinks against the darkness. His word—my word, maybe even your word—added to this, and ringing inside me like some awful dream, over and over again, modulating slightly, slowly pitching my own defenses into something entirely different, until the music of that recurrence drew into relief my own scars drawn long ago, over two decades ago, and with more than a claw, a stiletto or even an ancient Samuel O'Reilly 8 1891, and these scars torn, ripped, bleeding and stuttering—for they are first of all his scars—the kind only bars of an EKG can accurately remember, a more precise if incomplete history, Q waves deflecting downward at what must be considered the commencement of the QRS complex, telling the story of a past infarction, that awful endurance and eventual letting go, the failure which began it all in the first place, probably right after one burning maze but still years ahead of the Other loss, a horrible violence, before the coming of that great Whale, before the final drift, nod, macking skid, twist and topple—his own burning—years before the long rest, coming along in its own way, its own nightmare, perhaps even in the folds of another unprotected sleep (so I like to imagine), silvering wings fragmenting then scattering like fish scales flung on the jet stream, above the clouds and every epic venture still suggested in those delicate, light-cradled borders—Other Lands—sweeping the world like a whisper, a hand, even if salmon scales still slip through words as easily as palmed prisms of salt will always slip through fingers, shimmering, raining, confused, and no matter how spectacular forever unable to prevent his fall, down through the silver, the salmon, away from the gold and the myriad of games held in just that word, suggesting it might have even been Spanish gold, though this makes no differance, still tumbling in rem-, dying and -embered, even? or never, in a different light, and not waking this time, before the hit, but sleeping right through it, the slamming into the ground, at terminal velocity too, the pound, the bounce, What kind of ground-air emergency code would that mark mean? the opposition of L's? Not understood? Probably just X marks the spot: Unable To

The study of architectural acoustics focuses on the rich interplay between sound and interior design. Consider, for example, how an enclosed space will naturally increase sound pressure and raise the frequency. Even though they are usually difficult to calculate, resonance frequencies, also known as eigenfrequencies or natural frequencies, can be easily determined for a perfectly rectangular room with hard smooth walls. The following formula describes the resonance frequencies [/] in a room

Proceed—then in the awful second arc and second descent, after the sound, the realization of what Sleep has just now delivered, that bloody handmaiden, this time her toiling fingers wet with boiling deformation, oozing in the mutilations of birth, heartless unholy, black with afterbirth, miscreated changeling and foul, what no one beside him could prevent, but rather might have even caused, and mine too, this unread trauma, driving him to consciousness with a scream, not even a word, a scream, and even that never heard, so not a scream but the clutch of life held by will alone, no 911, no call at all, just his own misunderstanding of the reality that had broken into the Hall, the silence then of a woman and an only son, describing in an agonizing hour all it takes to let go, broken, bleeding, ragged, twisted, savaged, torn and dying too, so permanently wronged, though for how many years gone untold, unseen, reminiscent of another silver shape, so removed and yet so dear, kept on a cold gold chain, years on, this fistful of twitching injured life, finally recovering on its own until eventually like a seed conceived, born and grown, the story of its injured beat survives long enough to destroy and devour by the simple telling of its fall, all his hope, his home, his only love, the very color of his flesh and the dark marrow of his bone.

"You okay Truant?" Lude asked.

But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp oscillations of yellow blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with the reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, even with all that grinning and meeting and din.

A thousand and one possible claws.

Of course, Lude didn't see it. He was blind. Maybe even right. We drove down Sunset and soon veered south into the flats. A party somewhere. An important gathering of E heads and coke heads. Lude would never feel how "empty hallways long past midnight" could slice inside of you, though I'm not so sure he wasn't sliced up just the same. Not seeing the rip doesn't mean you automatically get to keep clear of the Hey-I'm-Bleeding part. To feel though, you have to care and as we walked out onto the blue-lit patio and discovered a motorcycle sputtering up oil and bubbles from the bottom of the pool while on the diving board two men shoved flakes of ice up a woman's bleeding nostrils, her shirt off, her bra nearly transparent, I knew Lude would never care much about the dead. And maybe he was right. Maybe some things are best left untouched. Of course he didn't know the dead like I did. And so when he absconded with a bottle of Jack from the kitchen, I did my best to join him. Obliterate my own cavities and graves.

But come morning, despite my headache and the vomit on my shirt, I knew I'd failed.

Inside me, a long dark hallway already caressed the other music of a single word, and what's worse, despite the amazements of chemicals, continued to grow.

with a length of L, width of W, and height of H, where the velocity of sound equals c:

f = c/ ₂ [ ₍ n/ _L) 2 + ₍ m/ _W )2 + ₍ P/ _h) 2] 1/2 _Hz

Notice that if L, W, and H all equal / will equal 0.

Along with resonance frequencies, the study of sound also takes into account wave acoustics, ray acoustics, diffusion, and steady-state pressure level, as well as sound absorption and transmission through walls. A careful examination of the dynamics involved in sound absorption reveals how incident sound waves are converted to energy. (In the case of porous material, the subsurface lattice of interstices translates sound waves into heat.) Nevertheless, above and beyond the details of frequency shifts and volume fluctuations—the physics of 'otherness'—what matters most is a sound's delay. [35]

Point of fact, the human ear cannot distinguish one sound wave from the same sound wave if it returns in less than 50 milliseconds. Therefore for anyone to hear a reverberation requires a certain amount of space. At 68 degrees Fahrenheit sound travels at approximately 1,130ft per second. A reflective surface must stand at least 56 l/2ft away in order for a person to detect the doubling of her voice. [36]

In other words, to hear an echo, regardless of whether eyes are open or closed, is to have already "seen" a sizable space.

Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate.

And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love.

There is only silence. ⁶⁵

all, but for reasons unknown to me still continuing to endure as a center to my thoughts; her—

—first encountered in the company of Lude and my boss at a place my boss likes to call The Ghost. The problem is that in his mind The Ghost actually refers to two places: The Garden of Eden on La Brea and The Rainbow Bar Grill on Sunset. How or why this came about is impossible to trace. Private nomenclature seems to rapidly develop in tight set-upon circles, though truth be told we were only set-upon on a good day, and tight here should be taken pretty loosely.

How then, you ask, do you know what's being referred to when The Ghost gets mentioned?

You don't.

You just end up at one or the other. Often the Rainbow. Though not always the Rainbow. You see, how my boss defines The Ghost varies from day to day, depending mostly on his moods and appetites. Consequently, the previously mentioned "pretty loosely" should probably be struck and re-stated as "very, very loosely."

Anyway, what I'm about to tell you happened on one of those rare evenings when we actually all got together. My boss was chattering incessantly about his junk days in London and how he'd contemplated sobriety and what those contemplations had been like. Eventually he detoured into long winded non-stories about his Art School experiences in Detroit,—lots of "Hey, my thing for that whole time thing was really a kinda art thing or something"—which was about when I hauled out my pad of sketches, because no matter what you made of his BS you still couldn't fault him for his work. He was one of best, and every tatted local knew it.

Truth be known, I'd been waiting for this chance for a while, keen on getting his out-of-the-Shop perspective on my efforts, and what efforts they were—diligent designs sketched over the months, intended someday to live in skin, each image carefully wrapped and coiled in colors of cinnabar, lemon, celadon and indigo, incarnated in the scales of dragons, the bark of ancient roods, shields welded by generations cast aside in the oily umber of shadow blood not to speak of lifeless trees prevailing against indifferent skies or colossal vessels asleep in prehistoric sediment, miles beneath even the faintest suggestion of light—at least that's how I would describe them—every one meticulously rendered on tracing paper, cracking like fire whenever touched, a multitude of pages, which my boss briefly examined before handing them back to me.

"Take up typing," he grunted.

Well that's nice, I thought.

At least the next step was clear.

Some act of violence would be necessary.

And so it was that before another synapse could fire within my bad-off labyrinthine brain, he was already lying on the floor. Or I should say his mangled body was lying on the floor. His head remained in my hands. Twisted off like a cap. Not as difficult as I'd imagined. The first turn definitely the toughest, necessitating the breaking of cervical vertebrae and the snapping of the spinal cord, but after that, another six or so turns, and voila—the head was off. Nothing could be easier. Time to go bowling.

My boss smiled. Said hello.

But he wasn't smiling or saying hello to me.

Somehow she was already standing there, right in front of him, right in front of me, talking to him, reminiscing, touching his shoulder, even winking at me and Lude.

Wow. Out of nowhere. Out of the blue.

Where had she come from? Or for that matter, when?

Of course my boss didn't introduce her. He just left me to gape. I couldn't even imagine twisting off his head for a second time as that would of meant losing sight of her. Which I found myself quite unwilling to do.

Fortunately, after that evening, she began dropping by the Shop alot, always wearing these daisy sunglasses and each time taking me completely off guard.

She still drives me nuts. Just thinking of her now and I'm lost, lost in the smell of her, the way of her and everything she conjures up inside me, a mad rush of folly oddly muted lusts, sensations sublimated faster than I can follow, into— oh hell I don't know what into, I probably shouldn't even be using a word like sublimate, but that's beside the point, her hair reminding me of a shiny gold desert wind brazed in a hot August sun, hips curving like coastal norths, tits rising and falling beneath her blue sweatshirt the way an ocean will do long after the storm has passed. (She's always a little out of breath when she climbs the flight of stairs leading up to the Shop.) One glance at her, even now in the glass of my mind, and I want to take off, travel with her, who knows where either, somewhere, my desire suddenly informed by something deeper, even unknown, pouring into me, drawn off some peculiar reserve, tracing thoughts of the drive she and I would take, lungs full of that pine rasping air, outracing something unpleasant, something burning, in fact the entire coast along with tens of thousands of acres of inland forest is burning but we're leaving, we're getting away, we're free, our hands battered by the clutch of holding on—I don't know what to, but holding just the same—and cheeks streaked with wind tears; and now that I think of it I guess we are on a motorcycle, a Triumph?, isn't that what Lude always talks about buying?, ascending into colder but brighter climes, and I don't know anything about bikes let alone how to drive one. And there I go again. She does that to me. Like I already said, drives me nuts.

"Hello?"

That was the first word she ever said to me in the Shop. Not like "Hi" either. More like "Hello, is anyone home?" hence the question mark. I wasn't even looking at her when she said it, just staring blankly down at my equally blank pad of tracing paper, probably thinking something similar to all those ridiculous, sappy thoughts I just now recounted, about road trips and forest fires and motorcycles, remembering her, even though she was right there in front of me, only a few feet away.

"Hey asshole," my boss shouted. "Hang up her fucking pants. What's the matter with you?"

Something would have to be done about him.

But before I could hurl him through the plate glass window into the traffic below, she smiled and handed me her bright pink flip-flops white Adidas sweats. My boss was lucky. This magnificent creature had just saved his life.

Gratefully I received her clothes, lifting them from her fingers tips like they were some sacred vesture bestowed upon me by the Virgin Mary herself. The hard part, I found, was trying not to stare too long

at her legs. Very tricky to do. Next to impossible, especially with her just standing there in a black G-string, her bare feet sweating on the naked floor.

I did my best to smile in a way that would conceal my awe.

"Thank you," I said, thinking I should kneel.

"Thank you," she insisted.

Those were the next two words she ever said to me, and wow, I don't know why but her voice went off in my head like a symphony. A great symphony. A sweet symphony. A great-fucking-sweet symphony. I don't know what I'm saying. I know absolutely shit about symphonies.

"What's your name?" The total suddenly climbing to an impossible six words.

"Johnny," I mumbled, promptly earning four more words. And just like that.

"Nice to meet you," she said in a way that almost sounded like a psalm. And then even though she clearly enjoyed the effect she was having on me, she turned away with a wink, leaving me to ponder and perhaps pray.

At least I had her ten words: "hello thank you what's your name nice to meet you." Ten whole fucking words. Wow. Wow. Wow. And hard as this may be for you to believe, I really was reeling. Even after she left the Shop an hour or so later, I was still giving serious thought to petitioning all major religions in order to have her deified.

In fact I was so caught up in the thought of her, there was even a moment where I failed to recognize my boss. I had absolutely no clue who he was. I just stared at him thinking to myself, "Who's this dumb mutant and how the hell did he get up here?" which it turns out I didn't think at all but accidentally said aloud, causing all sorts of mayhem to ensue, not worth delving into now.

Quick note here: if this crush—slash—swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you've never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you've got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.

Quick second note: if that last paragraph didn't apply to you, you may skip it and proceed to this next part.

As for her real name, I still don't know it. She's a stripper at some place near the airport. She has a dozen names. The first time she came into the Shop, she wanted one of her tattoos retouched. "Just an inch away from my perfectly shaved pussy," she announced very matter-a- factly, only to add somewhat coyly, slipping two fingers beneath her G- string and pulling it aside; no need to wink now: "The Happiest Place On Earth."

Suffice it to say, the second I saw that rabbit the second I started calling her Thumper.

I do admit it seems a little strange, even to me, to realize that even after four months I'm still swept up in her. Lude sure as hell doesn't understand it. One— because I've fallen for a stripper: '"fuck a' and 'fall for' have very different meanings, Hoss. The first one you do as much as you can. The second one you never ever, ever do."; and two— because she's older than me: "If you're gonna reel for a stripper," he advises. "You should at least reel for a young one. They're sexier and not as bent." Which is true, she does have a good six years on me, but what can I say? I'm taken; I love how enthralled