Conceal and carry

My phone found a way to my ear during sleep
though i'd left it charging in the living room:
A junk call, maybe it was political, offered the
option to press Exit 8 to hear a special message
while on hold. I touched some numbers, maybe
mixed it up with the TV remote; but it was dark
and late and i was confused. I got angry, but
then a young male voice came on the line, live,
but muffled, and said to me yeah we're calling
because; I said what, i can't hear you, i was try-
ing to get a special message. His throat seemed
to clear and said we're calling because someone
reported gunshots. There were gunshots near you.
And then I was being held very tight from behind
and/or my heart cage was caving in, but i could
tell for sure that there was another man in my bed
who was locking me very hard between his arms
and knees and wearing only a t-shirt and briefs,
and i struggled to get free by elbowing toward him
because i live alone and haven't slept with anyone
i want to say it feels like since the days of John
Wayne Gacy. Even mostly awake i knew that my
bed was turned the wrong way and i had to find
the knob on my lamp to orientate myself and to
identify the snoring of my dogs, which can often
sound like the results of a horrible crime amidst a
crowd, an urgency of mass panic in progress. I'd
spent most all the evening on and off between the
the normal responsibilities of an unemployed day
hypnotized absorbing the entire wikipedia page on
John Wayne Gacy and checking especially for
places and dates and names with a morbid com-
pulsion to know how close i'd come to the rope
trick, the chloroform, the quicklime or one of his
purported thugs, and feeling the chill of a narrow
escape. I even found a story on the deco-Uptown
hotel where i worked my first outta-school gig
where a cavernous ceramic basement rivaled the
faux Spanish facade and drifting clouds and stars
over the dance floor at the fabled Aragon Ballroom
for phantasmagoria, an underground pool grand
enough for fey, mustachioed servants to maneuver
about brimmed still pumping chlorine and steam in
the late 70's when i was a dropout teen swept in
there, by a slimy mob net, massage setup, a cum-
and-go for married fags from other neighborhoods
or travelling through town on a party, or a younger
man with the simple misfortune of a dick turned in
the shape of the archetypal snake chasing its tail,
a mobster operation with a cash register and a coat
check, decorated with seashells and framed pix
of the swarthy underboss who kept the books legit,
turned out the kids on how to give handjobs and
where to hide cash if you're naked, how to keep
him out of the transactions, a mobster type who'd
hung photos of him with aldermen and the mayor,
political coverage under glass, just like Gacy had,
and sure, JW'd been there, but not lately, having al-
ready been locked in a cell for our job-site safety;
photos like the one that humiliated the Secret
Service with John and Rosalyn Carter at a Polish
Day parade. I really couldn't tell if the man behind
me in bed had me in a wrestling hold, a manacle
of flesh, or coming back from the dead, maybe
someone i knew, to love and protect me from that
superbad moment half asleep when someone was
warning me, on a phone i don't even have, to be-
ware of gunplay in my vicinity. Even tho we don't
believe that Pogo murdered anyone with a firearm,
he did abduct some boys that way, and where I'd
been to dinner earlier, an Irish pub, they had one of
the new no-conceal-and-carry stickers displayed
prominently before you stepped in through the Chi-
cagoland outer weather door to stamp the frozen
muck off your feet and then in toward the scary loud
and spirited drunken camaraderie or outpour of re-
lief in the eye of a polar vortex, cries of horror-glee.

by Tom