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the block where he lives. “We don’t want no trouble,” he says after it passes by. “We don’t want to go on living like this. I understand each bullet that thing carries costs the taxpayer five dollars. They want to make things better? Fine. Gimme five bucks for each shell casing some kid brings to me from the street … we’ll turn this side of town around.”

PART ONE
Ruby Fulcrum
(April 17, 2013)

1
(Wednesday, 7:35 P.M.)
    T HERE WAS A MAN on the stage of the Muny Opera, but what he was singing wasn’t the overture of Meet Me in St. Louis. In fact, if he was singing at all, it was a demented a capella called the New Madrid Blues.
    My guess was that at one time he had been a young, mid-level businessman of some sort. Perhaps a lawyer. Possibly a combination of the two: a junior partner in the prestigious firm of Schmuck, Schmuck, Schmuck & Putz, specializing in corporate law. A yuppie of the highest degree, he had been a graduate of Washington University, graduating somewhere in the middle of his law school class: good enough to get an entry-level job with Schmucks and Putz, but not well enough compensated to have a place in Clayton or Ladue. So he had lived in a cracker box somewhere in the south side and commuted to work every day in the eight-year-old Volvo he had driven since his sophomore days at Wash You. Five days a week, he had battled traffic on the inner belt, dreaming of the day when he would have a Jaguar in the garage of a suburban spread in Huntleigh and his law firm would now be known as Schmuck, Schmuck, Schmuck, Putz & Dork, as he steeled himself for another grueling day of ladder climbing and telephone screaming.
    And then the shit hit the fan last May and the bottom fell out of hostile takeovers of candy stores. His apartment house had fallen flat, burying his car beneath a hundred tons of broken cinderblock and not-quite-to-code drywall plaster, and the week after he moved into Squat City, where he had been forced to share a tent with strange ethnic persons who didn’t wear fraternity rings and to survive on watered-down chicken soup and cheesefood sandwiches, he discovered that the Schmuck Brothers had decided to let some of their attorneys go. Sorry about that, we’ll let you know when there’s an opening …
    And his mind had snapped.
    So now here he was, standing on the stage of the Muny, waving a black baseball bat over his head and raving like a crack fiend who hadn’t had a decent fix in days.
    “When selecting a baseball bat,” he shouted, “there are five things to remember …!”
    His ragged, oil-splotched London Fog trenchcoat could have been looted from Brooks Brothers. That wasn’t what tipped me off; it was his shoes. Handmade Italian leather loafers which, even though they now were being held together with frayed strips of yellow duct tape, fit him perfectly. And although his hair had grown down over his shoulders and his gray-streaked beard was halfway to the collar of his mildewed dress shirt, he still had the unmistakable articulation of an attorney, although I doubt the senior partners of his firm would have recognized him now.
    “One! The size of the bat should be the right size for your hands to grip and hold comfortably!” He demonstrated by gripping the taped handle of the black mahogany bat between his fists, his anger causing the knuckles to turn white. “That means it’s gotta be the right size for you to do some serious damage to some fucker’s face!”
    Scattered applause from the first few rows behind the orchestra pit. Give us your poor, your downtrodden, your teeming masses yearning to be free … and if they can’t have freedom, then there’s always cheap entertainment. Farther back in the open-air amphitheater, though, only a few people seemed to be paying attention. At least a thousand people were crammed together into the Muny tonight, enduring the cold rain as they watched the nightly parade of homeless, half-mad speakers march onto the stage.