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Subject: {ASSM} from TxM6 Novel Chapt 3. REVISED!! 
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Also From TxM6 Hyperfiction
http://www.txm6.com (updated 9/16/00)
http://www.txm6.com/enfer (updated 9/17/00)
http://www.txm6.com/lcfallon
http://www.farragher.com  (Poetry updated 9/20/00)

TxM6 is entirely a work of fiction for adults only.
Copyright (c) 2000 Sean Farragher.

FIVE YEARS BEFORE LAURIE WAS KIDNAPPED
TxM6 Chapter Three

Gargoyles: The Herrig Estate
Journal of Henry Whitman

Friday April 17, 1987

HENRY WHITMAN

Henry Ezra Whitman, 45 years old, bespectacled with an 
easy smile and cleft chin, understood acceptance and 
rejection. A tall muscular and artistic man, he 
labored for 70 hours a week driving a taxi for Hudson 
Street Cab Fleets. In the remainder of his daily life 
he wrote poetry, loved his many children, and madly 
drove his life beyond even the memory of limitations. 
Isn't that what we all do?

TAXI YARD: 6 AM:

Before Henry left the taxi yard, he clipped his watch 
to the sun visor, stepped back out of the cab, and 
inspected it for spare, jack, tire iron, dents, dings 
and cum stains on the back and front seat. 

Adjusting the mirrors, then looking back at the rows 
of yellow and beige cabs lined up evenly almost as if 
a ruler had been used on both sides of the narrow 
parking spaces, Henry pulled straight back breaking 
clear.

Riding the circles of the steering wheel, he begat his 
day with the clean taste of burnt coffee and change 
box, maps and one stale buttered roll. On the floor in 
a cloth bag, Henry carried a camera, tape recorder, 
two books of poetry, a novel and a notebook for those 
scribbled images digested on the taxi stand

At 6:04 AM Henry passed the taxi stand on his way to 
the time call. Smiling at his the long faces of the 
drivers, he passed them knowing he could be there on 
the stand tomorrow bull shitting with them how much 
the driver had paid off the dispatcher. 

Don't have to be there until 8:00, Henry thought. Take 
the easy way to make sure. Morristown, NJ is about an 
hour from Fort Lee. Anything can happen on Friday. 

Henry decided not to stop at the diner for an egg and 
bacon sandwich. Driving one handed, he wolfed the 
stale buttered roll that tasted like taxi throwing 
half of it out the window when the traffic stalled.

Henry usually rode the back roads to avoid the terror 
of morning traffic around the GW Bridge. 

Falling down Central in Palisade Park, he turned left 
on Broad and right at Route 46. He was not surprised 
that broken down Route #46 already had construction 
crews lined up on both sides of the road. One old 
timer told Henry that he remembered when Route 46 had 
opened. "I was a boy," he said, "in 1931. Same year 
the bridge opened. It was just the same then. It had 
those same bumps and the worst accidents. No one knew 
how to drive then." 

Looking at his watch and forward at the merging 
traffic, Henry relaxed. Congestion wasn't that bad. 
Maybe I will have some time to really look at this 
place all the drivers claim is fancy.  Like Joe said. 
He called it a "piece of fucking work.

Taking Route #80 west off 46, Henry intending to get 
off 80 and back on 46 before I-287 traffic stopped up 
like traffic outside the Meadowlands complex after any 
sports event.

Forty minutes early, Henry pulled up to the gate of 
the Herrig Estate. One solitary guard met dressed in 
what appeared to be a historic Nazi uniform stopped 
him at the checkpoint. Raising his hands in that grand 
gesture of STOP, the guard frowned when Henry ran his 
cab to one inch of the white wooded halt sign. It 
actually said HALT with the rest written in German. It 
looked as if it was a prop for a Nazi movie. 

Henry laughed thinking what if I had just ran this son 
of a bitch mother fucking nazi border guard down. 
Should have done it to Adolf Shickelgruber in 1923. 
Henry was irritated and his mind leaped to other 
violence. "I hate anti-Semites, Henry lisped to 
himself.  Not a Jew, but I hate them. They made the 
world more horrible than it really is. Maybe they 
didn't, who the fuck knows, he thought. I hate what I 
think when I meet them. Fucken Nam. 

Sometimes, when driving in New York City, Henry 
imagined losing the brakes and plowing into fifty 
pedestrians at the cross walk. 

Henry never fully reasonable or predictable was, 
however, peaceful. Worn down from Nam, He did think 
the unthinkable, and he wondered why when it was over, 
and the outburst done, did he feel uncomfortable with 
himself.

Many taxi drivers hoard mysteries. One of Henry's was 
public. In 1986, just a year before, Henry had been 
caught fucking an eighteen-year-old college freshman. 
She had been a student in one of Henry's creative 
writing classes at City. She claimed when caught (got 
pregnant) that although she loved him, she had fucked 
him for good grades. Henry simply said she had earned 
it by her writing and I paid for the abortion. 

"I can't help it," Henry told his best friend Aaron 
about that time. "She refused the money and had the 
kid. She claims she never told the school. She said 
they found out from another student. She called the 
kid Henry. Wrote me that she wanted to always remember 
what I had added to her life beside the child. It was 
a gracious letter, but I didn't answer it. I figured 
she would line up for her support payments like 
everyone else. She didn't, but then her family lives 
in the Hamptons and she drove a vintage Thunderbird.

No one really cared why Henry had fucked her. Henry 
accepted responsibility and didn't argue or whine 
about it. "I was stupid for getting caught, he told 
Aaron. 

Despite the lunacy of sex, war and the failure of 
profit in a cab, Hudson Street taxi drivers liked and 
respected Henry. Henry was a down to earth man with 
brains, Frank told Henry.  "The guys like you" because 
you don't make them feel like shit. They just don't 
understand why you are a cab driver.

Elected President of the union one year, Henry lost it 
the next when he won the union held grand lottery and 
kept the prize. Some members claimed he had fixed it. 
The charge was never proven.

Henry was a war hero. Served in Nam as a combat Medic 
for fourteen months. Local VFW and Legion hated that 
he turned the medals back to the soldiers who had 
earned them. They also hated that he refused to 
participate in the marches and the benefits. He told 
them I go to East Orange on Vet days. I am there once 
a month. Send your boys down there with me, and I will 
show them the heroes. "This ain't WWII," He added.

Henry like many Vets made the pilgrimage to the wall 
to leave them there. Henry rarely talked about Nam, 
but when one asshole questioned his service there. 
Henry took the fuck by the lapel and screamed in his 
face without hitting him, "I know fucken death. I 
stuck it, I cleaned it, and I bagged death almost 
every day. Get the fuck out of here before I forget I 
can go to jail for blowing your brains out."

Looking at the Gestapo guard talking on the phone, 
presumably to the fare, Henry hoped he had not made 
this fucked up trip for nothing. Using the double 
speak of cab drivers, Henry thought, Shit I will wait. 
I don't really care how long it takes. I am here on 
time. Even if they cancelled, I would get paid. At the 
same time he was pissed and complained every few 
minutes hitting the steering wheel but not hitting the 
horn. 

Henry often made it through his driving shift 
balancing patience with irritation. Driving himself 
out of madness, he would punch the dark period at the 
end of a softer line as he rolled within his taxi 
toward his own mind. These odd thoughts he collected 
walking about he called walkabouts after the tennis 
player Goolagong. 

Using this blank time Henry filled himself with these 
flights of insanity. As they were sometimes self 
destructive, Henry wrote them in the margins of his 
poems as lonely images forlorn and graphically 
violent. They give tension to the poem or story, he 
once told a student. Why do I find it hard to lie and 
stay insane? Why can I not lie like anyone else?

What's kept me sane? Certainly not this fucked up job. 
Perhaps, It's my equal desire to be left alone and to 
be involved. 

Stalled, almost at zero time, the gatekeeper leaned 
too far into Henry's driver side window and said. 
"About two miles as the crow flies." 

"Get the fuck out of here, your breath stinks," Henry 
rolled up the window.

The rent a Nazi cop had no sense of humor. Mumbling 
through the closed window he told Henry the obvious 
that he would have to wait but the family wanted him 
to wait up by the house.

"No shit." Henry laughed. 

Hitting the gas too hard, Henry raced through the gate 
but not before the wooden barrier slammed down into 
the rear deck of the taxi just missing the rear 
window.

THE PROMISED LAND

Henry rode slowly into questionable domains. This 
forest hidden from two major suburban highways drove 
him slower. Captured by the unkempt foliage, Henry 
smiled at that improbable irony. Imagine living in a 
world so peaceful? Would it ever become ordinary? 
Answering, he thought. It is good that we have islands 
like this to set us apart from the tedium of watching 
the enfolding and its revival; all in one long playing 
record. 

What if, Henry thought, magical fountains, sprites, 
and fairies emerged from beneath the grass carpets. 
Alice in wonderland would be tame. Just like Lewis 
Carroll, Henry understood that this place like Alice's 
was not of this world. I do not feel invited and yet I 
have absolute privacy. Why am I not lonely here? 

Entering the estate, Henry crept along the road as a 
peaceful horse and rider searching for easy ground and 
a safe entry. He had heard about the Herrig mansion 
from other drivers and had anticipated the expanse of 
its landscape. This was larger, more formidable. Like 
walking inside Louis XIV's private garden. It was the 
forest primeval. Imagine what you would encounter, if 
a man had transported plants and buildings whole from 
his past in Germany

Advance driver gossip as usual had underestimated the 
place. If it didn't have tits and ass, most of the 
drivers were not interested. They might even think you 
were queer if you collected wild flowers and read 
philosophy and poetry while in the holding pen called 
the taxi stand.

Living within the plastic taxi, pines crossed and the 
images flickered. Henry marched back to the late 1940s 
English movies of Alfred Hitchcock. Rebecca and 
Notorious were the fare that made you think and want 
to fuck almost at once. These movies unlike the Herrig 
mansion seemed a misplaced metaphor that passion for 
wealth and dark sexual obsession.

If I walked inside too long, Henry laughed, I might 
discover the year 1887. It could just as easily been 
2088. Inside anything, you never seem to understand 
all of it at once.

What did I expect? Should I have imagined foxes 
running after hounds? Might be wonderful if I could 
make what I do in these next few moments last longer 
than good sex or a bad movie.

Why does this place remind me of death? Why do I think 
of myself falling under the thunder of horses? There 
is that gasp of fraud I felt in Nam. Something here is 
also a lie. When I jumped off the transport plane, 
dropping easily on to the tarmac, I thought I was 
already dead. 

Knowing that heat Henry felt the rot within death 
before dying. Perhaps if I die, I will not die, he 
told one SGT who laughed at the medic philosopher as 
Henry was called. 

Opposite I know, but that could be the way out of 
becoming another blind statistic.

Some wag started calling Henry Plato until Henry 
smacked the fuck alongside the head and they rumbled 
in the usual fist up your ass army kick him in the 
balls street fight.

Fear never stopped Henry. He stepped into it. Death is 
that moment when you have no thought. You are there 
pissing and moaning and in the next breath you are 
spit stains and a hand full of paperwork sent back to 
Headquarters.

I do not want to leave, Henry thought. Gathered it all 
in breathing the scent of rare flowers and happy 
insects, He knew he must walk in this garden and 
possess at least a moment at its center.

Turing progressively inward, Henry felt the pull of 
circle and its gravity. He wondered if the turning 
would end. Or was this a romantic heaven and a hell 
around the corner. Where is perfection?

She was magnificent, Henry thought intentionally using 
the female pronoun to describe the Herrig place. 

Just like a great show girl: this place is just too 
fucken beautiful for any ordinary man. How can you 
imagine fucking her? Yes, at that moment she going 
down on you and your fingers are milking all parts of 
her at once.

Imagine a remote wilderness just off a major 
Interstate Highway. Also imagine that every square 
foot had been planned. Each tree, shrub and weed had 
been bought, nurtured and backed up, replicated 
hundreds if not thousands of times. What a marvelous 
obsession, Henry thought. How many beautiful detail 
can one-person know?

Turning, his circle decomposed, Henry rode the 
"peaceful loops" inside towards the main house like a 
captured serpent thrown into a large fish tank. He 
felt every hidden eye record his position. He played 
each step stage by stage. 

Drunk on multiple colors of green and red, umber and 
sienna, Henry stopped for a second time along the side 
of the road to ride himself backward out of the 
quagmire. 

Far beyond the gate now, Henry rode for what seemed 
like miles without change or any sense of destination. 
Turning around, he backtracked. Everything old inside 
the foliage seemed new. 

Lost in green texture he stepped out of the cab amazed 
that he could be lost on a road without turns. 

Taking five, military style, squatting by the front 
tire, he sucked on long grass and watched two rabbits 
fucking. Henry wondered. Who will believe that? Who 
ever notices when rabbits fuck? Am I dead? Could this 
be nightmare heaven?

Looking up at the gray thick April sky Henry shrugged 
his shoulders as if to ask for directions or more of 
anything, but his request didn't include the rain that 
had started. It was cold shower. February was still 
here, Henry thought, turning lights and windshield 
wipers on at once.

Driving again, pumping his foot from gas to brake, 
Henry turned at the sign he had missed the first time. 

GARGOYLES

Driving up to the stables set back from the road, 
Henry memorized the carved wood gargoyles that 
decorated the window frames. Henry would transform 
them later into magical characters with their own 
language and original vocabulary. Henry took it all 
it, saving it as he did images written in notebooks. 
If I didn't drive a cab, Henry mused, I wouldn't know, 
would I? 

Poetry had odd sources. Henry saved the images for 
other reasons. I want those subtle textures that make 
light into film and words for display. Henry shivered. 

Death lurks out about that tree line there, and 
pointed it out to himself, where he felt the danger.

In this place of mind, Henry accepted that he might 
never know more about it what he would experience in 
the next few minutes. I don't want to leave before I 
have one chance to at least know it from the inside. I 
don't want to be a cab driver here. I don't want to 
serve these folks and their palace guard. I want to 
live here and keep it all.

The year is 1887 not 1987, Henry imagined. I can't 
write this down. I would have to stop the cab and turn 
on the tape recorder. I might reverse the spell if I 
stopped even for a moment? 

Superstitious, Henry feared that he never understand 
this place from the outside. Taking a chance on 
changing the present, Henry pulled his tape recorder 
out, Henry wrote his mind. 

Marking his life there, he replayed it laughing and 
tense when he heard his past speak carefully and with 
precise diction his wonderful off center lecture.

Something important would happen, Henry thought. 
Later, when that turned out to be true, he realized 
while listening to the tape that he predicted it.

Yes, I want a cascade of trumpets and a flourish of 
drums as I enter. Henry loved grand entrances. At that 
moment, he smiled and started to sing the Stars 
Spangle Banner in full voice laughing at the way the 
ground and horizon waved him unsteady. Stopping the 
song before the finish, he realized if somebody saw 
him now, they might think him drunk. 

Under his breath, in his thoughts, Henry said without 
bravado to himself, please sacred father, let me live 
again what I feel right now. Just like Vietnam, I want 
to be lost and found in the same instant. 

Suddenly jerking the cab easily around three-
construction backhoes directly in his path, avoiding 
them, Henry saw a sick headline: TAXI DRIVER ARRESTED 
FOR DRUNKEN DRIVING ON HERRIG ESTATE. 

I never step in shit like this; Henry laughed at his 
good fortune. He saw the spectacle of this call in all 
its parts at once and almost stopped thinking.

Yes, I know I was fucken lucky. I'd tell anyone that. 
This is how I get through life. Turning away to run 
home to the winding stairs of Coole and Yeats, driving 
his mind deeper into the Herrig maze he would 
rediscovered with his Darwinian and pagan architect 
not the origin of the species but rather a future 
tense imperfect passion for indescribable disorder, 
incest and abuse.

How did Henry know any of this before it happened? 
Good Question. He did. 

What is anyone's origin after all, Henry mused. How is 
this seemingly perfect order, disorder or stew for 
robins and rodents? 

FRONT DOOR

No one saw the Herrig place as a whole. Henry flashed 
back to his driving and the present. I will write 
about it. Make it into a corrupt movie about porn 
stars and political tricksters. Perhaps I can find a 
unique President to be the principal John. No, wait. 
Why do I want to turn the classic into the prurient? 
Henry gripped the steering wheel and expertly turned 
the paths as they closed. Nothing will change here no 
matter what I write. Beauty is as innocence corrupted. 
This place is more than a collection of living 
objects. Nothing I do will alter the sequence of their 
incorporation.  Yes, I can say that. It is more than 
any illusion or trick. Just like the paintings my 
friend Aaron paints. He created grand abstractions 
based on natural forms. He sometimes used a model, but 
never painted her surface, but rather the interior. He 
said he saw it as a contrast of forces. Making these 
floor to ceiling fifteen foot long constructs and 
larger, he bound his models inside the case of paint 
and paper. They were there, but not there. I caught 
their eclipse, he said. The Herrig place reminded me 
of how and not just what he painted.

I loved watching Aaron create the first steps, Henry 
thought as he watched the falling maple pods litter 
the lawn. First he coated the stretched canvas and 
then marking the rectangular border with black and 
white papers he decorated the wet plaster paint like 
footsteps caught in the middle of a sudden volcanic 
eruption. Aaron said about his painting. I am the 
recording engineer. He happened fifty million years 
ago.

April 17, 1987

Stopping the cab fifty feet from the main gate, Henry 
took one look back to watch for magical tree lines and 
claymores in the boughs of maples and oaks. If the 
fare had noticed him lurking, they might think he was 
having trouble with the cab and call the company. 
Henry moved forward and lurked closer to the LZ. 

Henry always said he never cared what people thought. 
He realized that was a lie. Just before pulling up to 
the front door of the main house he decided that he 
liked being there and didn't want to fuck up the 
possibility of future calls.  He knew he was a taxi 
driver. That was his obvious role. He knew he had 
little control over when he could leave and where and 
how far he could travel. 

Finally, when Henry moved up, took his place at the 
front door, Henry that the Herrig place was 
uncorrupted, authentic, and not fake. How could such a 
man love the Third Reich? It did not fit any model of 
the world outside. Yes, it is not a collection of 
objects but form and force compressed into one scheme 
with multiple plots and infinite varieties of color 
and value. 

Like Matisse, Henry recalled, the impossible in art is 
before and after the mark on the margin to note 
accident. Is any great art without accident?

Am I always at creation, Henry asked? I know how death 
tastes. Copper blood and Iron masks wrap around my 
forearm while I fought death in every firefight at 
every LZ. I lost too many rounds by default, but I 
survived somehow. 

The man was already dead but I was too stupid to know. 
There are steps in death. Knowing them as absolutes is 
too difficult for one person to decipher. Sometimes, 
it takes two or more. Then there are arguments, and no 
one knows any answer.

HENRY WHITMAN

Taxi drivers are great with the canned lines. Yes sir, 
Henry laughed as he continued to drive down the rich 
man's driveway expecting to find some old couple 
arguing about a diseased heart monitor that would need 
its batteries changed. He wondered pulling into 
another circle to settle down for the millennium wait. 

Any yesterday, Henry was alone and mad. April 17, 1987 
might change that, but then again perhaps not. Being 
fulfilled would certainly not corrupt his cynicism. 
His questions made for his answers. Henry would not 
accept that extension and not limitation for five 
years. It would take love to excite that capacity. 
Love would start today. The journey from Gate to House 
might be considered his first test. Why is art 
important and questions about art more significant? 
Henry believed that the visual mind knew more than the 
verbal. That transformation from object to thought was 
the one act of genius.

Pure creation (genius) may be the chance recognition 
of any accident. When we select a word or a hue and 
place it in a frame and note its combinations and 
layers, perhaps that is like the selection of people 
in our lives. We never know whom we will find inside 
where we complete the edges of where we know and how 
we were before we knew. How will it be later is always 
the bottom question. 

Henry did not know today he would meet Laurie Fallon. 
She had requested him when she called for a cab. She 
knew that he thought she was much too young and had 
avoided her. She also knew from Angela that Henry had 
no idea that her family was rich and decadent. She 
didn't care about that except as a mental aside. 

Laurie was depressed and strung out on cocaine and H, 
uppers and downers, acid and relaxants, lying and 
fucking. She wanted death as she wanted a new coat. 
Make my life whole she thought. How did Laurie know 
that Henry would save her life?

When she came out of the Herrig estate, Henry was 
startled when he saw her walk down the steps. No one 
was with her. No one helped with the bags.

The land had bewitched him. That was what it was. 
Laurie lost no time and gathered him into her pocket. 

Five years later the man called Abel and woman called 
Lilth would kidnap her. During that time, Henry taught 
Laurie poetry and he called her God; said she spoke in 
tongues. He taught what all the others had missed. At 
the beginning and the end he loved her poetry. He said 
her poem, "Camera of Myself," was the perfect poem. He 
knew that because he was jealous of it. He often had 
said in the past that he could only be in love with a 
woman if he loved her poetry more than his. Henry 
loved Laurie.

When they were stoned, he would call out to Laurie, 
insist that her name was Christ Tina or Saint Chrissy 
or Spirit Faith. He said that she was the fourth 
daughter of God. He would then refuse to name the 
other three when Laurie challenged him. He answered 
you are all four.

Standing next to her, out of time, five years later, 
Henry's hand reached up for what he knew. This time, 
Laurie was not here. Abel had taken her captive.

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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