As I left the Phelps Building the sun smacked me in the face like a gorilla swinging a preheated frying pan. There was no shade to be found in the stone valley between the blank-faced buildings as I beat it up 2nd Avenue. As I crossed 57th Street I thought I was going to leave my shoes behind in the melting asphalt. Halfway up the next block was Jakes.

It was a blessed relief coming out of the murderous day into that cool sanctuary. I left my hat on the rack by the door and tried without success to sop the sweat from my face with an already sodden handkerchief. The bar was quiet despite the row of the usual derelicts and bums lined along the rail. Jake saw me come in and set me up with the usual before I managed to grope my way through the darkness to my stool. “Whadaya say, Charley?” he asked.

“I’ve got to get out of this town,” I said.

“Sure, sure,” said Jake. He went back to spit-shining the glassware with a marginally clean cloth. The booze would kill anything he left behind.

“I mean it, Jake. I just need one score and I’m packing it up. West. I’ll go out to San Fran and set up there. Living’s good out there.”

“You ever been there?”

“Course I’ve been there. You know where else is nice? Seattle. Lots of fine dames in Seattle.”

“I couldn’t live there with all that rain. It’d drive me crazy.”

“You been outside today?”

Jake poured me another. “You ain’t going nowhere. You’re stuck here like the rest of us.”

“Not me, bub. I just need one good one to put a little dough in my pocket and I’ll write you from Frisco.”

“Sure, sure,” said Jake, and he moved to serve one of the stiffs down the bar.

My eyes had adapted enough that I could survey the usual suspects propped against the mahogany bar. About the saddest bunch of rejects and losers you’ll ever see. I don’t know how I ended up there so often. Still, the booze was cheap. There was something different today, however. An odd feeling that didn’t belong, like someone had opened a window in the back room that opened onto a meadow of wildflowers in their riotous color fed by an icy mountain stream. Something that told of another place, beyond the sweaty stink of run-down men in a broken gin-joint somewhere in midtown. The others at the bar were glancing my direction in nervous anticipation. I glared them back into their own drinks.

The scent got stronger. I heard the sound behind me just as I caught motion in the corner of my eye. I spun around, ready for anything.

Anything except what I found there. “Mr. Lowell?” she asked in a soft, breathy voice with just a hint of Kentucky. I sit facing the door, so she must have been there the whole time, in the shadows of one of the dim booths along the back wall.

“That’s right, sister.”

“May I buy you a drink?”

I have a saying. Never say no to anything free. “All right,” I said. I have another saying. Nothing is free. There’d be payback, I knew. Looking at this lady I was willing to pay the price. I had no idea at the time how steep that price would be.

That she was a lady there was no doubt. She had more class in her little finger than all the rest of us in the bar combined. She was dressed in a sleek black number that hugged her graceful contours like a coat of silk paint. Her hair was long and fell in waves as dark as her dress except where they reflected the feeble lights in the bar. She looked at me, one eye lost behind those raven tresses, the other a bottomless pool in the dim light, her eyebrow a perfect dark arch against her porcelain skin. She smelled like wildflowers and money. She smelled like San Francisco. A cigarette hung unlit from her full, deep red lips. I produced a match and did the honors. When I was done I discovered a fresh drink waiting for me. The good stuff.

She breathed a plume of scented tobacco over her shoulder and fixed me with her gaze. “Mr Lowell,” she said, “I need your help.”

Tune in next time for part one of: The Widow’s Tale!

It was just after noon on a Tuesday that was muggier than most Tuesdays. It seemed like the city itself was sweating. The oscillating fan on my desk wasn’t; it was turned away from me with the haughty air of a woman pretending that she was above such foolishness. But I knew better. I could have reached out and turned her toward me, but that would have been a victory for her. I could wait. Sooner or later she’d turn back; I was willing to sweat it out.

My last bottle of rye lay empty on my desk, squeezed of its last drop, and not even Vishnu was going to fill it back up. Not with whiskey, anyway. I brushed the cobwebs off the phone and buzzed Alice. She sounded surprised to hear from me. “How much we got in petty cash?” I asked.

“You’re out of liquor already?” Alice never understood that it was the whiskey that helped me think; it was the cornerstone of my practice. Without the whiskey there would be no fourth-floor office on the corner of East 55th and 2nd, there’d be no phone, and there’d be no Alice in the front office getting paid to paint her toes.

“Just answer the question,” I grumbled.

“There’s twelve bucks, not counting what you owe me in back pay.” She kept bringing that up. There’s no satisfying some dames.

Twelve clams. Good thing I’d been drinking the cheap stuff. I hung up the phone and stood, my knee protesting. It had never been the same since Iron Hand Flannigan and his goons had introduced it to Mr. Lead Pipe. I have to agree with the doctors about heavy metal poisoning. I wasn’t sorry when they pulled Flannigan out of the river with assorted plumbing augmenting his own. I picked my hat up off the floor by the hat rack and mashed it onto my head.

By the time I opened the door Alice had the dough ready. She’s a good kid, really. I had rescued her from a pataphysics recovery group out in Portland and taken her under my wing, so to speak. She was wearing a nice little polka dot outfit that was very easy on the eye. She had nice gams, too. “Thanks, Doll,” I said.

“Boss…?”

“What is it, Sweetheart?”

It came out in a big blubbering gush. “I can’t go on this way, not getting paid with Ma in the hospital and they’re about to throw us out of our apartment and oh God I don’t know—”

“Jesus, Sister, settle down.” Dames. They just can’t deal with their problems calmly and rationally. After that display, I couldn’t get to Jake’s for a highball fast enough. Fortunately she buttoned up before I had to slap her. “Listen,” I said, talking fast so I could get down to the bar, “everything will be OK. We’ve been through worse, you and me.”

“No, we haven’t.”

“That must have been one of my other secretaries then. But it still applies. Come on, Doll. Buck up.”

Of course she turned on the waterworks then. “I don’t know why I’ve stayed with you so long!”

Honestly, I couldn’t help her on that one. Secretaries for me are like bottles of whiskey; they never last as long as I want them to. It wouldn’t be long before Alice was gone; I could see the signs, I’d danced this number before. I’d already read this chapter, seen it in the tea leaves, gone round this block. It would be too bad; she smelled real nice.

It was getting stuffy in there. “We’ll talk about this more when I get back,” I lied. I beat it for the street and the cool secrets of Jake’s.

Tune in next time for: Encounter At Jake’s!

Feeding the Eels started a long time ago (in blog years), just a little bit of silliness to help a vague acquaintance with a Google-bombing project. It was fun to write, though, and soon after I posted another episode, and another after that. As time passed the style of the story evolved from a parody of the noir genre to an homage. It’s still a cliché-fest, but an honest one.

Along the way new episodes have become rarer; sometimes it will be months between episodes. Partly that is due to the increasing complexity of the story, which makes it more difficult to spew out. The good news is that I have at last introduced all the factions I carelessly mentioned in the earlier episodes, and now we can start thinning them out.

Before you start you should be aware that writing stuff like this is what I do instead of watching television, and I use about as much of my brain to do it as you might use on a rerun of Gilligan’s Island. (Well, I suppose I use a little bit more than that, but you get my point.) The story is published here without the benefit of planning, serious proofreading, revision, or any of the other tools that lead to readable prose. There are bits I’m quite pleased with, but there are plenty of others that really could use a good edit. Mostly what I see when I look back over the old episodes are missed opportunities.

One part of the tradition is that when I finish one episode I invent a juicy title for the next, something to write to. It is the only planning I do; as I sit down to write I really have no idea what is going to happen next. A couple of titles have been particularly troublesome, and I have had to devote multiple episodes to get anywhere near something that fits. “Reunion by the River” has proven more troublesome than most. Continuity is also an issue; one of these days I’m going to have to read this thing myself.

If you like the voice you find in this bit of silliness, I encourage you to click the links over in the sidebar to read a few things that have had the benefit of considerably more review and polish. They’re all short stories, so there’s no commitment required on your part.

Note that the titles for these episodes will look extra-cool if you install the font Maszyna. It’s free for non-commercial use, so give it a try! I have been looking for a font that will give the story text itself a more typewritery feel, and some come pretty close but just aren’t quite flexible enough.