Strade's Jacket

Strade's Jacket by JB Pravda

'World's Hugest---- Flee Marked' -----misspelled, chipped, faded, a
lesser milestone for assorted reliquaries of kitsch, a signpost up
ahead in a region free of the ordinary zoning, an unsigned minor work
'brought to you by' the timeless school, radical by design,
Serlinghaus.

I pull into the dusty drive path into a patch of nowhere, along its
main highway. There are mutant-looking pumpkins littering the roadway,
some carved, some misshapen naturally. Freak jack-o-lanterns lighting
the way to my rendezvous with the evening they nominate for shadowy
things without shadows. 'Nice one, Rod' I think, smirking.

I'm a travel writer, here to survey the niches Kerouac chose not to
chronicle and I'm surprised, at him, and, the place. Maybe I'll call my
groundbreaker 'Off the Road.'

'Jackets, Nearly New' catches my curious eyes.

It hangs limply on an antique hotel wardrobe cart, its heavy
canvas-like texture interrupted by darkly tinged worn-looking leather
straps and pocked brass buckles, the leather forming the concave
outline belting takes on in tortuous tribute to its usual subjects'
size. It fits too well, my brain counsels, but I seek a second 0pinion
from my gut which was silent.

"Ain't she a beaut" the eager exhibitor offers with a visible lump in
his left jaw.

"Wore by Harry Houdini hisself" he adds, liar.

"May I try it on?" was authorized by some of my more polite, yet direct
neurons.

"Cost ya?.." he laughingly says.

"How much?"

"Ain't talkin bout money; your mine's the thing???..aw, just kiddin, go
on, try her, Hell of a trick for them treats, eh?".

Scenes from a now burst reservoir of horror films flood my right brain,
now in control of the entity I called 'me', sometimes 'I'.
'I', finding some cerebral higher ground, extend my arms; from
somewhere comes the thought, 'embrace the unknown'.

"Nice fit for a 'one size fits all' deal" he mumbles, now more
deliberate, it seems.

As he buckles the strapping, 'I', again, this time from a playful
place, conjure the comic mimetic pose of the fake makeout, running my
still free fingers throught the back of my head's hair, the other four
groping my ribcage.

"Hey, you ain't no weirdo, are ya, cuz this here's a family place,
feller" the peddler now assumed a sterner tone.

"Ya know why they call it a 'straightjacket', don't ya, huh?!"

A group of voyeurs now gathers round the spectacle 'I' had gotten 'me'
to become.
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"Mr. Strade, are you alright?" came a mellow inquiry attached to a
blurry vision of a white-clad female.

Her hands were gently stroking the back of my head and my side as if to
awaken me.

"You feel febrile; I imagine your chest must be a bit sore from that
fall, am I right?"

"Where's the salesman?" I mumble.

"He's still somewhat groggy from the sedative I imagine" the female
voice comments to an anonymous hearer.

My addled brain is now doing its best to focus upon simple external
stimuli, none of which seem familiar to it; this is scaring 'me'??my
name, my name is??.

"Mr. Strade, now we're going to have to take some x-rays, ok, won't
hurt a bit."

"How did I get here?" is the best my writerly necktop can do.

I can feel several sets of eyes, including mine, I think, rolling in
their moist sockets, now suddenly dry from the interrupted robotic task
of blinking; it's a wet, dull sloshing feeling, slow, steady workings
of the stereo one-way telescopes my brain clings to for acceptable,
'best we can do with what we've got' nebulous versions of 'is'. Get
hold of your self, I think, eyes tell lies ain't news, a new folksiness
colors my third-rate insight.

This lie is a big one and my attempts to process its empirical data are
joy-riding on a feedback loop taking on the shape of that 'eight on its
side' symbol for the infinite.

I am wheeled from room to room, it seems and, after being stood up
against a too-cold for flesh surface, my arms are once again bound in
unwanted self-embrace.

This latest room is different, more like an office.

"Dr. Alan Rotweiner" is the name repeated in various shaped framed
vellum, some in Latin. He walks in to find me squirming, now fully
awake, I think. I'm jolted from my random reverie by "Hello" much too
loud to qualify as sincere. There's a sort of scripted feel to the
conversation, like I've heard it before, as though it's been rehearsed,
at least in my head; I just listen in??.for some reason, I think I'm
named Spike Swanson??.
SpIKE SWANSON
"Never seen one of you guys wear one of those, like you've come to take
me away?.oh, wait a minute, they've already done that! DR. ALAN
ROTWEINER Not so fast; we don't even know if you're ill, do we? SpIKE
SWANSON That's a relief. But you don't need a weatherman....... DR.
ALAN ROTWEINER Careful, quoting Dylan songs may be a sign of definite
weirdness. Look, Mr. Swanson, I'll drive, all right? Speaking of music,
any objections to the opera----I find it relaxes people, the problems
in opera are so just exaggerated versions of life and death. (he
switches on a CD) SpIKE SWANSON Fair enough, Hell,I may be a character
in one, maybe the soprano role; what shall we talk about? DR. ALAN
ROTWEINER I'm a Jungian, Mr. Swanson. That means, among other things,
that we may dispense with all the canned assumptions about the dark
psyche and talk about you according to you. Please begin. SpIKE SWANSON
My favorite subject, so I'm told. It all started ........ DR. ALAN
ROTWEINER It? SpIKE SWANSON We're making progress already, I can see
that. Touche; you see, I'm a pathological liar, I think, since forever.
DR. ALAN ROTWEINER And you expect me to believe that? (smirk of
amusement on Doc's face) SpIKE SWANSON Interesting; I never considered
that angle, at least not with a headshrinker, I see your dilemma----so,
basically, everything I now tell you...... DR. ALAN ROTWEINER Is
potential horseshit; you know I've actually done this before, so let's
let me sort it all out, shall we? SpIKE SWANSON Fine, fine. What is so
scary is that I can't tell anymore whether I am telling myself the
truth; as far as others are concerned, no one has ever challenged me
before-----at least as far as I can remember. Which raises an equally
tough question: is my memory also a liar? DR. ALAN ROTWEINER Let's back
up a moment; do you know your name and, if so, how? SpIKE SWANSON Sure,
my name was given to me by my parents and I've seen my birth
certificate so I know they weren't lying to me, at least not about
that.
DR. ALAN ROTWEINER So let us assume it is therefore safe to call you
Spike Swanson; how do you know that you are that person recorded in the
birth certificate and not some adopted or kidnapped child, now grown,
all the while raised as your namesake? The point is that, while, in
fact, DNA can determine who your parents were, there is no sure way of
knowing if they were who they said they were, or, if that is not true,
the same can be said far enough back in their ancestry that science
breaks down for lack of a sample and we are left with perhaps nothing
more than a long-perpetrated fraud, generation after generation. But,
not to put too fine a point on it, what's a name after all, even if it
is really yours, as far as you know. In that sense we may, all of us,
be liars. SpIKE SWANSON Am I supposed to be feeling better by now.
Because I----whoever that is-----am not. I think I was brought in here
to discuss the likelihood that I have behaved like an out of control
liar and you tell me that I may be a lie! Thanks very much. DR. ALAN
ROTWEINER I did include myself, in all fairness. Look, facts, as we
know them, are all built on assumptions, most of them seeming to be
pretty solid, largely because we, society, mostly agree that they are
true, which may be very different from actuality. SpIKE SWANSON So one
billion Chinese could be wrong about rice? Here's a personal fact:
since I was a kid I have been lying about myself, to myself, and plenty
of others, forging autographs to myself---assuming I am myself----and
"assuming" -----and asking others to assume-----they were genuine. Now,
there are real signatures somewhere of these people. Isn't that clear
cut? DR. ALAN ROTWEINER I'm afraid not. Here is the problem: who, other
than someone who never actually saw the person in question sign his/her
name, authenticates that signature as real, especially in the case of
deceased persons. How do we test that guarantor's credibility, the only
real evidence being that other people believe him/her? And why do they
believe him/her: because other people believe him/her about other
signatures. How can there be any ultimate certainty? Stranger still,
the signer may decide next week to change his/her signature-----don't
they first create it and no one else? That is why we, this same
agreeable society of ours, have created something we call trust, but
can this agreement we have made to trust each other be trusted? SpIKE
SWANSON So a second opinion may be a real waste of my time, since
he/she is going to trust your diagnosis of me, whoever you and I may
actually be. DR. ALAN ROTWEINER You have stumbled upon the paramount
exception to the rule: experts make a living by not agreeing. But
outside of the realms of expertise and its bearing upon making money,
the rule applies: you open a bank account, sign a card and they give
your money to anyone that signature tells them to; how do they know it
is YOUR signature, unless you say it is. The same with the drivers
license you are about to tell me they, or anyone, can compare it with.
No, the certain facts are very limited in scope: the signature "you"
decide to use matches up with who you think you are based upon what
others, in writing or otherwise, have told you. SpIKE SWANSON You ever
had a patient tell you that 'our time is up?' Could be a first--hey, at
least we'll be famous; look, since you've done one helluva job
destroying my mental state, one unrelated question you must get alot,
you handle impotency problems? Dr. ALAN ROTWEINER
Yes, actually, it seems the name exerts some sort of reverse
psychology---anyway, if it's an issue, I just advise them to call me
Dr. 'Rotweiler'. (both laugh with comic relief) I put it to you
plainly, how do you know you are not imagining your life and are, in
actual fact, someone else altogether, induced into this imagined "life"
by the use of psychotropic drugs administered by a qualified nurse at
some mental institution? This is the subject of my seminar at the
medical school, and I have yet to have any student, howsoever
brilliant, rebut it. SpIKE SWANSON Timeout. I-----again-----may not be
who I think I am, right; ok, then when I go to a notary public to
verify my signature all that he/she does is legitimize a potential lie.
So the law is a harlot,as somebody famous once told us, after all,
fucking--I mean servicing those who service her! DR. ALAN ROTWEINER And
now I see your dilemma: you now see, do you not, that if we are all
liars, howsoever unwitting, there are no lies. SpIKE SWANSON Weird!
But, wait a minute------then everything is weird?
DR. ALAN ROTWEINER Mr. Swanson, you are standing---rather
sitting----on a chair itself perched upon a floor of a building itself
sitting on a rock-like ball in what we call space, governed by a force
we call gravity about which almost all of us, including the late Dr.
Einstein, know virtually nothing. Yet we do not fall "off"-----keeping
in mind that there is no N,S,E, or West in Space, whatever that is,
filled, it seems according to the latest research, with 'dark matter',
constituting almost 90% of the known universe, the essence of which we
are unable to divine, try as we may; Yes, Mr. Swanson, everything is
indeed weird. SpIKE SWANSON I would call that a big 'YES'. You don't
make house calls, do you, 'cause I could really use you as a
mindguard/guru for my next writing assignment. DR. ALAN ROTWEINER And
now it is I, at least the 'I' called Dr. Rotweiner, who must terminate
our session for now. SpIKE SWANSON Terminate------and you guys are
supposed to be sensitive? DR. ALAN ROTWEINER Would you prefer 'end'?; I
want you to do something for me, and for you, Mr. Swanson; here is a
micro tape device: I want you to record everything for me in the next
day or so, including that appointment. Now don't worry about the law,
as the recording will be surreptitious and a mere aide in my analysis;
the battery is longlasting and you will, under stress, forget it is
even on your lapel; besides, why fear the 'harlot', as you have
indicated-----she can be satisfied with less than justice, eh?
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"Hey, you awright, mister? " yelled the old man. "Better call an
ambulance, he's out of it" was his command to a fellow stall
operator.
"Keep yer shirt on, Smike, goin as fast as I can" the man snapped back,
phone in hand.
"Damn it all to Hell??..had me a live one, sure did" old Spike
complained to any and every one gathered.
As he fiddled with the various items on his display case, he pointed to
some well-framed certificates on the shelves.
"Saw him admirin them degrees I picked up real cheap at some estate
sale; now what am uh gonna do with em?..oh, well, least I sold him that
spy recorder deal, got it real cheap."

As the ambulance sped away, siren blaring, the patient, now coming to,
noticed the recording device pinned to his lapel; he pressed 'rewind',
then 'play'.
"?.an this here ain't no ordinary bazaar or marketplace, my friend; oh,
no, see, round here we specialize in the strange, like the strange
place that we are??you get a good look at that sign out by the
roadway?
Uh, no, just saw 'flea market', got curious, I'm a writer, sort of a
chronicler of the offbeat, that sort of thing, why?
Well, just this here: sign reads "FLEE MARKED"?..you call yerself a
writer, a real keen observer, eh?! Makes me laugh, it does; see, you
gonna be leavin here, alright, just not any way you want to's all! You
been 'marked', ain't never gonna forget this here deal??that'll be $50
for the recorder."
As the ambulance pulled up to the hospital entrance, the jostling of
the gurney from the vehicle caused the small device to strike the
pavement, shattering it. The paramedic carelessly handled the rickety
bed on wheels in such a way that his fellow fell across it, right atop
the patient's ribcage, all 3oo pounds dead weight.
"Mr. Strade?Mr. Strade, are you alright?" came a mellow inquiry
attached to a blurry vision of a white-clad female.