woeful ingénue

Ken Thiedman was a lawyer with over 2 and a half decades of bailing out mobsters and thieves and a hitman known in criminal circles as ‘Heart attack Hank’ whom was responsible for the murders of six people, including two women and a small child. Grisly deaths, spread across 4 states, high profile targets; Politicians and one Retired actress. The media made a carnival out of it, the trial lasted around 3 months and despite certain articles of damning evidence (footprints, audio recordings, and even the testimony of a man claiming to have been a witness to an alleged strangling of one of the victims.) Heart Attack Hank was exonerated on all charges, live coverage of the trial ended with a bone-chilling wink from Hank to the camera man. The nation collectively shit their pants.

Ken was of Cuban descent, tall and stocky. No facial hair, he hand a slick, sleek brown face framed with perfect eye brows and lips women from the Valley or Manhattan pay top dollar for. He was fucking gorgeous and I say this as a man who loves women more than I love freedom, food and the right to vote or hold office. Ken was also in the practice of taking long silences inbetween thoughts to stare at you. My Thai friend said it was a power issue, he said that Mongol warlords would do it to other Warlords to infiltrate the confidence and soul of enemies, he said that Ken wouldn’t actually be looking in your eyes but at your ear lobe, but ones eyes, always seeing slight, mundane illusions inflicted by our brains and  their isistant misreadings of the multiudes of others actions, beilve he is staring past our eyes, into our souls we keep shaded and hidden and solitary, like a dairy, like a secret to rich and soaked in personality to reveal.

Ken joined me on the veranda of the hotel I was staying in while I was avoiding Lathary’s goons. I’ll never forget, even though I was 6 mimosa’s into my afternoon, what his first words were to me when he pulled out his chair and sat down across from me.

“I know who juo are, and juo know who I am. Lets not phuck aroun’. In my bag, there is a pistal. You can take de bag up into your room and blow jour brains out and on thee walls. That way jou can sorta dodge all de bullsheet that is to follow these meeting. Is dhat somethen jou would be interested in?”

I shook my head sheepishly, but still maintain eye contact.

“Good, becase that would hav made my flight very much pointless.” He laughs, and waves the waiter over. Orders himself a beer and a egg with crabmeat a garlic. He order me a Tom Collins.

“I’ve been drinking mimosas. I’d sort of like to stay on that path.”

“No moar of jour bullshit faggot mimosas. That for 16 year olds and woman at bridal showers. Jou are a mans in thee company of a mans and jou will dra-ink as such.”

I laugh it off, semi-offended but also not trying to get into a altercation with a 6’5 cuban with a pistol in his brief case. He was like a wolf, Ken was. Like a Stevie Ray Vaughn lick with some tribal drums and faint chanting in the back ground.

Our drinks came before he said another word. My mimosa was watery orange juice and had somehow lost its taste after he insulted it.

“I ordered jou a Tom Kollins because its my truth syrum, I’ve foun’ that no maan can lie with a stomach full of Tom Kollins. So before we talk anymore, jou need to drienk thee whole. Fucking. Thing.”

I’m sorta petrified and scared and I think about how if Tam was still around we’d laugh at Ken’s accent and machismo and then when have a fuck session were she secretly francize I was Ken and I secretly fantasize I have an accent.

But Tam is gone and Ken is here as a direct result of that.

Tam was my woeful ingénue, I learned that word after she died and it break my heart that I didn’t recognize her has that when she was alive, when she was mine, when she’d sing  Leonard Cohen naked in bed plucking at her guitar. When we’d hold hands and breathe deep on cigarettes and wonder why can’t a love this strong, this real, be visible, like rainbows or the aurora borealis. Why couldn’t the world feel our love? Why couldn’t the dictionary have a separate definition, or atleast an addendum to the word love that described her and I. It was the sorta of love that enslaves the imagination, like the idea of Santa to a child, like the idea of blood to a shark. We loved so hard it could have crushed the universe and I guess that’s why the universe, being the coward that it is, took her from me. My woeful ingénue, what I’d looked for all my life.

To be continued...never..maybe