Ambient 06 - Going, Going, Gone

loves the smell of novocaine.
     
    Gus Gleason , for a number of years, could have been working in an unofficial capacity for Gus Bevona, one-time head of Local 32B-32G. Knows all the words to »Stickin’ With the Union.« A good man to have around when an iron pipe needed to be swung in the dark. Presently serving twenty to thirty-five upstate, he could be out in three.
     
    Lester Macaffrey would liked to have been a doctor but became a mortician instead, finding employment at W.H. Milward in Lexington, Kentucky. Loves to pore over old issues of Casket and Sunnyside, and perceives in the names of preparation dyes an almost epiphanic euphony. Sometimes, lying in his bed at night, in the small apartment off Newtown Road where he lives, he lets them roll over the tongue in his mind: eosin, erythrosine, ponceau, fluorescein, amaranth, carmine. Sometimes he thinks he hears voices, but chalks it up to the stress of living in interesting times.
     
    Joanna, who never uses her last name among friends, lives on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain. She worked as a senior manager at Chemical Bank for twenty years until it merged with Chase Manhattan and she was laid off. Having invested wisely, she was prepared. Soon after moving she believed, one morning, she saw the legendary lake monster known as »Champ« (thought, by cryptozoologists, to be a surviving representative of Zeuglodon) but everybody she told smiled, when she told them. She has twenty-seven cats. At night, in dreams, she flies.
     
    Elmer Thatcher Dryden, Sr. Lived, briefly, in Nicholasville, Kentucky. In 1964, age 18, he decided to see how high he could get if he mixed bourbon and phenobarbital and then huffed two tubes of Testor’s Airplane Glue. He found out. At the service the minister, trying to assuage the mourners, assured them that sometimes God’s plans are not for us to know. »Well,« his mother said, after the service, passing everyone thick slices of transparent pie once the chicken was gone, »Surprised he lasted this long.« His father might have cried, had he still been alive, but he wasn’t. His third wife shot him in 1959. Alcohol might have been involved.
     
    Susie North (Dryden), married a fellow worker at the 53 rd Street Doubleday in 1980, having initially gained his attention by climbing the store’s spiral staircase, wearing a short dress, while he was stationed directly below. A year after their marriage she assured her husband that Thorazine was »sort of like Valium.« After she left him, two years after that, he was sorting through her belongings when he found, secreted throughout their apartment, thirty-seven spiral-bound school notebooks. In each notebook she had written and rewritten, on every page, the same sexual fantasy: one involving herself, a 103 degree fever, a rectal thermometer, five jars of Fox’s U-Bet Syrup, a jumping rope in which seven granny knots had been tied, Sylvia Plath’s poem Elm, a baby-doll nightgown (peach) with open-crotched panties (mauve), a porthole in a luxury cabin on a cruise ship, Spanish extra virgin olive oil, and long-time Boston cult sensation Jonathan Richman. Years later, he found himself unable to think »all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy« without feeling heartfelt memories of his ex-wife.
     
    E. Thatcher Dryden, Jr see Senior.
     
    E. Thatcher Dryden III, see Junior.
     
    ALICE is a gleam in the eye of a C++ programmer who lives, in his car, in Menlo Park; and who has read Neuromancer far, far too many times.
     
    Margot Lorenzo Fadilla tires of explaining to her fellow sophomores at Hunter College that she is a physically challenged little person: not a dwarf, or a midget, or a freak; and that her name is neither Shorty, Tiny, Teeny, Peewee, Thumbelina, Tater Tot, El Loco Petito, or Fabulutmost Shrimpmeister. In chat rooms, in the evening, she is blonde, and five-foot six.
     
    Enid O’Malley, twenty-one, lives with her mother in Ridge-wood, Queens, and has twenty-four different piercings (lip, underlip, left nostril, right nostril, four in left ear, seven in right ear, left eyebrow, right eyebrow, left nipple, right nipple, navel, hood of clitoris, left labia majora, right labia majora, tongue). Misses the Duchess Club, but remains popular with the ladies. She favours steel-toed boots and her favorite novel is Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo. She plans to switch her major from English to Business, in case.
     
    Seamus O’Malley, a confirmed bachelor, walks yet never stops on