Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream Read Online Free PDF

with a slow grace, her body lithe and supple, and her mouth…well, it was everywhere. As was her voice.”
    It is Jack Fedogan, suddenly aware that there was no music playing, who responds first. He pulls out a Charlie Mingus CD and slips it into the player, keying in track numbers and hitting the play button. As the first strains of music drift into the air, he says, “Her voice?”
    “I had my eyes closed, so great was the feeling of elation and spiritual contentment, but all the time we were making love she was speaking to me.”
    “What was she saying?” McCoy asks.
    “All kinds of things…things about my past, that nobody else could know, and things about comicbook stories, all of which she appeared to have read. She knew everything about me and everything about what I had done or read or hoped for. And she told me that this night, right then and there, lying on the grass in Gramercy Park, was the pinnacle of my life. She told me I would never be lonely again.”
    Then he stops speaking.
    Jim looks at Edgar and then at McCoy and McCoy looks at Jack and then at Edgar, and then everyone turns to look at the stranger, waiting for him to say something more. Eventually it’s Edgar who breaks the silence.
    “And then what?”
    “And then she was gone,” comes the answer.
    “ Gone ?” It’s a single word delivered by four voices.
    Bernard Boyce Bennington reaches for the brown paper package and all eyes follow his hand. “I must have…I don’t know, blacked out or something. But when I came to and opened my eyes she had left me…no clothes, no note, nothing except this.” And he pulls open the bag and removes a small battery-operated cassette player.
    “Listen,” he says, and he presses the play button.
    At the same time, Jack Fedogan turns down the volume button on the CD system hidden below the bar, forcing the familiar strains of ‘Goodbye Pork  Pie Hat’—in particular John Handy’s flutter-tonguing alto duel with Mingus’s tremolo basswork—off into some ethereal background, like in a party scene in a movie, when the opening pan shot with the loud soundtrack has finished and now the characters have something to say.
    And it’s fitting. For as one melody—Mingus’s eternal paean to Lester Young, who died less than two months before this legendary 1959 recording—stops, another melody filters into the Land at the End of the Working Day…a melody without notes or words, but rather one with the sound of the wind in the trees, and the distant hum of traffic and occasional muted shouts.
    Suddenly, somewhere deep inside the recesses of the newcomer’s cassette player, the far-off wail of a siren hums like a fly, disappearing before it’s hardly gotten started. And then, closer, there’s a grunt. It’s a man’s grunt.
    The grunt is followed by another, deeperthis time, more drawn out.
    Then a sigh, also deep, again unquestionably a man’s sigh.
    For several minutes the quartet of regulars sits or stands entranced by the sounds coming from the machine sitting on the counter.
    They hear trees rustling and they hear the sound of movement, interspersed with sighs and soft kisses and even an occasional word, always in a man’s voice, an Oh! or an Ah! , and then an Oh, God! , the word ‘God’ drawn right out, long and thin and deep.
    They feel they’re intruding, Jim and Jack, and Edgar and McCoy, feel like they’re peeping at another man’s keyhole in the dead of night, and deep within them they feel, to a man, the stirrings of desire and companionship, the feelings forcing away the blight of loneliness that affects so many people in cities and towns and lonely truck-cabs lit only by the orange or green glow of the dashboard dials and the waft of cigarette smoke.
    And then it stops.
    The stranger reaches out and presses the button, cutting off the silence.
    Jim Leafman takes a drink and shakes his head.
    Jack Fedogan stands up from the bar, thinks about reaching for his cloth and then decides