THE HISTORY OF WRTING: Part 2 (II.)

There were multiple factors that brought about the death of Sisyphus other than the bullet fired by Peter Nicholas Levanarskie, and while they share little if any common origins in the anthropological or intellectual senses of the word, they are, were all undeniably critical in the cause of his demise on February 20th, 1926. 

One of these factors was a man named Adam Black. He was the only son of Polish immigrants (whose names I've only omitted here for clarity) and his first jobs included shining shoes, keeping sweatshop seamstresses loaded with sewing materials, and even doing light maintenance on the manufacturing apparatuses that glass factories depended on before catching a lucky break when his father, an out-of-work plumber who largely spent his afternoons visiting and talking with the other unspoken-for people in his neighborhood, had casually, amiably mentioned the woes of his son Adam in the company of a man who happened to be in need of an extra set of hands to meet an unnegotiable quota on his dock by the close of that particular week. The senior Black and the dockworker, Abel Foer, became fast friends. They shared a love for baseball, an appreciation for hearty, robust vats of soup, and either man had reams of tales and legends and stories of one category and another as such men, such individuals were the concept of filmmaking itself (as far as I'll ever be concerned) and of course that both men had children trying to make it in the world, in America no less filled a quiet, shadowed ventricle in each man's heart that would rival the brilliance of any summer sun. 

As the years pressed forward (1919-1924) and an absolute generation of children like Adam were celebrating or near-celebrating their 25th birthdays, the rites of passage into adulthood -- shedding one's puberty, securing a decent, rewarding way of life, finding an agreeable spouse -- became something of unnegotiable importance to the men. 

This is how American Unions were started. 

Listen carefully if any schmuck, douchebag, good for nothing or fuckwit tries to tell you any different.... Since the beginning, since a dollar or coin was traded for a slave to pick cotton, tobacco or any other good intended to be sold at a profit...and even through the abolition of such profoundly immoral times into an age when bigotry, greed, corruption and the violent retribution for uncommitted crimes was hardly any better...when children were sent by "loving parents" into virtual deathtraps of fire & steel & hazardous chemicals in order that someone operated the machinery to dazzle the accounts of wanting, unwanted, expensively tailored parasites...and every day until the end of the human world or a comparably-priced armageddon, the burden of that noble want brought men to their purpose even as their loathsome enemies and detractors imagined tortorrous ends for their virtuous peers and made pitiful whispers of jealousy.... 

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The third critical factor was a young woman named Samantha Fitzgerald. She made her living, as they say, in essentially the only way a woman could if she had no immediate desire to secure a husband or toil for pennies a day in a sweatshop: She fucked men. 

She'd been renounced (given) to an orphanage in the first year of her life, the small, accidental gift to the world from Katrina & Jacob Zuriff...after a gentle, but powerful heartattack pushed the agility from her lungs and her body and poor Jacob saw only grief and madness in Samantha's razor-door eyes. The nuns took her in without confusion or complaint. 

As a toddler she was neither slow nor demanding, but rather impressive in the nuanced degrees of the young, when our hopes & expectations of them generally resist alignment yet are often as symmetrical as a yin-yang. Samantha played well with the other children her age and when puberty manifested its curiosity and its hunger the teenage woman found every moment to have an elusive generosity that gave her yearning without hesitation. The question of life in the world was like a ceramic bowl split in two begging to be rejoined with itself and her nimble, minimalist fingers were flung at every task from drawing and crafts to cooking to baking to the predictable looks & lunges at boys in her proximity... 

Her first kiss came at age 13. She'd been thinking about it for at least a year (I think). There was a group of, perhaps, less than a dozen boys who played various forms of tag, hide-and-go-seek or catch with footballs, baseballs, whatever random items of equipment the orphanage accumulated during its moderated conversion from the medieval periods toward the insatiable future. (The building was initially erected by a Catholic Charity, which were quite popular at the time, but  the drive of that momentum was quickly lost in the aftermath of the Great War and the shifting alliances of supposed-gangsters, moral police prohibitionists, in addition to the tumultuous and ephemeral whims of politics throughout the entirety of history. It stands now, still, in 2036, in a Ship of Theseus manner, as a New Life Center in Historic Brooklyn.) Samantha knew which boy she wanted the most. 

"Do you want to play football today?" she asked him. 

He was 14, skinny. He was shy. But he liked her. He liked her when she offered him some of the candy they received for certain holidays, like Valentine's Day or Easter or Passover -- a holiday that none of the children understood. He didn't want to get in any trouble, either. His name was Liev. He said, "Maybe I do." 

She felt something intimate when he said that word, maybe. It suspended her pulse, her heart. She'd never know it, but it was as close to naturally experiencing the vulnerability that Jacob, her father, experienced when he held his baby and yearned for the relief of a humble suicide. Samantha merely swallowed the doubt, braced it, said, "What would make you make up your mind?" 

He had no answer for this. He said, "I'll go herd some of the guys," instead of answering her directly. 

She watched as he, Liev (whose name was constantly mispronounced as "Leave") began imploring among his peers who was up for some roughhousing. She found that her will being done was intoxicating. Like she had something that could live forever. 

Liev could only find four other boys who wanted to play football that afternoon. They were petulant, indecisive, eager for something to do. 

However, when another girl, hardly a few months younger than Samantha took note of what was going on, she paused in her solitary rope-jumping and she approached Samantha and asked her if she was playing with those boys knowing perfectly well that the answer was yes and when Samantha said yes the other girl said "I want to play with you if that's alright" and Samantha was extremely happy that they had an even number of players. 

Without honoring every detail of this, let it quickly be added that Samantha and two of the boys that Liev had drafted played on one team and the other girl and the two remaining boys that were drafted played on the other team. Then, about five minutes into playing, when Liev's team had the ball and Liev was quarterback, Samantha told the boys on her team to let her worry about Liev and they should handle the others as they saw fit. Someone yelled hike! and the other girl ran a good, solid ways in search of the pass and the other boy who wasn't on Liev's team chased after the boy who was and as soon as Liev wasn't being guarded Samantha ran, dove at him, on him, kissed him fiercely on the mouth, and pressed her warm, fragile bones into his. 

By the time she was 18, she had an unswayable confidence and absolutely refused to be belittled by compromise. She, of course, tried to kiss as many of the other boys in the orphanage as time and space and feelings allowed and this behaviour invited a certain amount of scorn and animosity from the nuns and the sorted other girls who were prudish or abnormally proud of their sex for one personal reason or another. It is highly worth noting that only once during those years -- as well as several years after -- did Samantha reduce or give doubt to herself as a lady in conversation by utilizing vulgarity as a method of self-defense. It was in her senior year of high school. Anna-beth Perkins, the secondchild of a would-be horseplayer/stockbroker and a housewife who washed other people's clothes by hand for money, was a kind of lowrent Influencer in the time before Social Media. She was, to those who called her a friend, sometimes just a bit needy, and really almost never annoying, but capable of being an utter bitch when she had made up her mind to do so. It was in the company of Samantha Fitzgerald that, on a particularly uncomfortably humid day in May of 1920 that she, Anna-beth could no longer hold off from confronting Samantha and the tide of rumor and disgust and jealousy that resided at every angle of Samantha and the world of Samantha, and Anna-beth stopped while walking in the hallway, dead in front of the storied-whore, said, "You better keep your rancid shit away from my boyfriend." 

"Uh. Excuse me?" 

"I'm not repeating myself to a slut like you." 

Samantha's eyes did not change. 

"Mute bitch," Anna-beth Perkins added. 

Samantha had actually been toying with notions of chastity since a brief pregnancy scare earlier that year, in the winter. She'd hardly even recross her legs with implied promiscuity until several weeks later. 

"SAY SOMETHING!" 

"Like?" 

Anna-beth Perkins had all the rage of a hot potato. That's the only way I can think to describe it. 

As Samantha felt her better resolve leave her, she said, "Fuck you. Fuck your boyfriend. Fuck your unsatisfying life." And then she walked away. 

**** 

She met Adam Black when she was 23 years old and he was 25. He found her attractive, said so, they talked for some minutes and meeting an agreement of desire and reasonability, she gave him a price and he didn't protest. 

Not every man satisfied this criteria. 

Peter Nicholas Levanarskie didn't satisfy this criteria. He felt entitled to her in discomforting ways and his sense of entitlement made him behave rude and untoward. Levanarskie's father had taught his son as much by imitating the stereotypes of his abusive elders and re-purposing his anxiety as an awkward tool of instruction upon his unwitting child. That Peter Nicholas didn't reject this fickle sort of horseshit is certain testament to the slow, paradoxical curve of education throughout history. 

**** 

She & Adam made neither pretense nor assumption with regards to monogamy in the longterm of things. However, there was no impulse to conclude their improvised arrangement by any specific deadline. They were both, she & him, adjusted to the nebulous whims of their age and in fact more energized & nourished by the uncertainty of life rather than intimidated & abandoned to a sense of feeling cheated by ultimately incalculable circumstances. In short, they had a kind of open-relationship with only two partners. 

Adam treated her as a lady without exception. His wages as a senior laborer on Dock 181-72 meant an income that was slightly above-average and Adam was the sort of man who enjoyed spending his money over trusting it to a bank or burying it in some nightdark hole in the backyard of his tenement building. He regularly bought her such fineries as dresses & scarves & shoes and the rare-but-repeated bracelet or locket or necklace from one of the Italian- or Jewish bootleggers who clandestinely walked the neighborhoods like so many disenfranchised historians-turned-harmless drugdealers. And she and Adam didn't play dull or cruel games with one another with the goal of winning the support of whatever happenstance strangers were near them in restaurants and various public places. They were neither excessive nor diminutive with their hands, mouths, feet. Where the extremes might have been discerned, there carried only and entirely this slow-moving lust of cooperation and strategic repositionings of their bodies from one place and situation to another, from the gorgeous mediterranean neighborhoods and the cobblestone landscapes of the city and further, further, familiar to Adam's room on the corner of Sharon & Oak, and all of the world that is yet to be and all the world in the silence of its ebbing is separated by little else than the growling, dark perspiration of the night and the moan of its expiring inhabitants. 

**** 

He introduced her to Troy Thompson, in the autumn months of 1925, at a function for Worker Unions and Organizations. 

The memories of his previous existences leading up to now-legendary descent into the Atlantic Ocean had gradually become clearer to him. The amyloid fog cleared away. The synapses repaired themselves. 2036 Advocates of New Life Center Worship Stations would either try to preposterously declaim this mechanism of natural/automatic rejuvenation or likewise make false claims it'd been usurped from one of their own ministers, lecturer-preachers or, by old world terminology: liars. Regardless, the ancient-brains of the nomad king had been restored to the hero of heroes, and his ability informed his hunger. 

What else is new. 

In Troy Thompson, Samantha found a taxing, tempting presence. Some primitive yet graceful archaeology in the hard shapes of his eyesockets and the brief angles of his nose and lips, his majestically ordinary posture. He occurred to her like some shadow of Adam manifested into flesh, into bone, into the immediate world of palpable objects. She'd never considered her mind to be a superstitious one and yet there was something undeniably superstitious in the way his body called to hers soundlessly and it indeed frightened her yet she didn't feel threatened or given to sorrow at the scary feeling as it moved into her senses and her nerves. 

Heavens no: she was always being pushed around by people who couldn't or merely refused to see her. This Thompson-fellow was nothing like that. 

He had an essential rigidity in his manner and his voice could be as sly or obvious as a razorblade on concrete. If there had been any emotional distress between her and Adam Black, Troy Thompson would have surely been the one she begged rescue from. As it was, the two men were two separate shores of a similar, shared uncertainty. Two unlikely bell-buoys in a veritable sea of pirates and fishers. 

Adam liked him immensely. Adam was dangerously optimistic. Where many other men with as much to gain from workers' unions as he often spoke of chance as the chance to lose things and compromise and humiliate oneself, Adam frequently, reliably took the position that it was a greater embarrassment and defeat to dismiss something so plainly worth trying. In Sisyphus, in Troy Thompson, he saw something like an aerodynamic shape of his very intention. There was something akin to the mythic figures acceptance of the arduous and disflattering in existence in the way other men Black referred to as peers and since his teenage years he'd sought as much of it as time and energy and feelings could withstand. Sometimes it broke his heart and some of those times he miserably craved a renunciation nowhere in the grasp of his reality. Sometimes it only meant the end of a day's fresh efforts. When he met Sisyphus, when he met Troy Thompson, he'd found the person (is it fair enough to say 'the thing') to carry the banner of the workers' cause. 

Relations between them -- Sisyphus/Troy, Adam, Samantha -- were what the average reader might anticipate: There was no jealousy and little confusion to speak of. Black knew his time with Samantha had arrived at its natural, worthy fate. Samantha did little, very little to protect the young Hebrew's feelings (*Hebrew in his flippant, colloquial use of the term) in her choice for Troy Thompson. And Sisyphus took nothing for granted save his ineffable existence and the charge, purpose that attended it. 

He'd known practically nothing of Peter Nicholas Levanarskie in the six (6) months before Levanarskie murder/assassinated him at a workers' rally in Sheepshead Bay. There was an extraordinary exception though. The extraordinary exception was: Levanarskie's name was written into the attendee's list at nearly every single social function that required as much to sit in on its meeting/gatherings. So, the newspapers that later reported of "a most unnatural and surprising occurrence" had a cultural-intellectual ancestor: a sign-in sheet. 

How Sisyphus actually explained himself to Samantha... Well. 

Well.... 

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