Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  Say what you want about the greatest depression since the invention of the steam engine; it was driving one hell of a musical Renaissance. An additional website was printed on the MAD NOISE flyer so you’d know where to download the app to find them and the rest of the protest movement taking their politics to the streets in the form of music. Michael Masley, another favorite on the sidewalks of Berkeley, playing on a cimbalom with metal bowhammers, had recently had a documentary, Art Officially Favored, done on him along with other musical activists. Ashkenaz Music and Dance Community Center on San Pablo Avenue featured one or another best-of-local bands nightly, described by some as one big Lennon-esque-lovefest. But Robin digressed; this was Manny’s night, he was the one most in need of an outlet.

  A student filmmaker was projecting his film against the far wall of the bar. Robin was curious as to why he and his artistic pretensions weren’t being stoned by the crowd. On taking a couple steps closer, he saw why. He had staged his girlfriend’s suicide. Set a mirror before her. Then awakened her. She looked horrified. Cried. Perhaps she’d contemplated killing herself so many times she could no longer separate fact from fiction. She quickly faded out, as if sold by the evidence of the blood dripping into the bowls from each wrist that she really was dying. The film ran on endless loop. Each time she fainted, thinking herself dying, the small group gathered around the projector cheered, knocked their beer bottles together, and took another swig.

  They adopted a pair of stools at the bar. Manny picked up the TV remote and flicked through channels on the set mounted above them. A few minutes later, he gave up and said, “Do you believe this shit? You can find news showing someone getting crucified for stepping out of line on almost every channel. But can you find thing one about the People’s Movement? Forget that every city in the country is overflowing with protesters. Not exactly minor news. Are you feeling oppressed yet?”

  Robin stifled a smirk. “Manny, it’s where you spend your holy dollar that matters. Forget protests and who you vote for. And just what cause do you think that twenty you’re sliding the bartender serves best?”

  “Screw you, and your great-great-great grandmother, too.”

  Manny sported a shocking neon-pink bowtie that he forever wore, no matter the shirt or the circumstance. Robin always figured it had to do with his ambivalence towards the softer side of himself, the artsy, flaky part. Inevitably it prodded those in eyesight of it, especially in a straight bar like this one, to read it wrong, either hit on him for being gay, or harass him for being fay. That way Manny could enjoy the paradoxical pleasure of putting them in their place, and being picked on, enjoying the role of predator and prey at once, in a shrine to that ambivalence toward himself he wore even more loudly on his sleeve. It was another brand on his soul imparted by a harsh disapproving father, who, incidentally, he never spoke of.

  Tonight it was to be ridicule over sexual overtures. Some gorilla of a guy came and threw his arm around Manny. “Hey darling, don’t you look pretty in pink.” The tone said it all. Robin reached for his gun, thinking nothing short of a bullet to the head was likely to bring this fellow down. Manny moved so fast and so devastatingly that Robin endured the paradoxical sensation of waiting forever for the chap to fall—similar to what happens after a buzz-saw finishes the cut on a tree.

  When the big man finally collapsed, one of Fallen Tree’s friends decided to get uppity. Manny, to prove a point, shot the eyes out of the face on a poster on the wall. Uppity quickly forgot ever knowing Fallen Tree. And the startled crowd, after seeing Manny sheathe his gun and return to his drinking, quickly forgot the incident. Perhaps because they figured the two had it coming to them.

  Robin refused to lend comment to the incident. He’d seen that pink bowtie trigger just about every untoward reaction; this one hardly added to the repertoire. Around Manny, he wondered why he even bothered to carry a gun.

  “Gracias, Freddo,” Manny said to the bartender, serving him his latest whiskey. Freddo was dressed in the usual, a dress, high heels, and of course, his beard, that nearly covered his false boobs.

  “Datorita, asshole. I’m Romanian, not Spanish. Datorita.”

  “Sorry, Freddo. All you bearded trannies look alike to me.” Freddo gave Manny a very Italian up-yours fist-pump and slid down to the other end of the bar to attend another customer. Watching his canter from behind sent shivers up Robin’s spine, and triggered flashbacks to his own personal drama with Drew he didn’t need right now.

  “What’s with correcting me?” Manny said. “He’s never corrected me before.”

  “I think Romanian sounds more blue-collar,” Robin explained. “I know the accent definitely does. Everyone’s having trouble fitting in these days.”

  “I guess. What’s with the Italian fist pump then?”

  “Maybe he needs an acting coach to help him sort out all his idiosyncrasies into something more convincingly ethnic.”

  Losing the wife prematurely to a hit-and-run driver induced Freddo to wear her clothes as a way of getting closer to her. Robin supposed that fact is what allowed these unwaveringly heterosexual blue-collar types, with all the elastic range of a choke collar, to assimilate his quirky behavior.

  Against the wall of the bar a man thwacked his teenage son against the back of the head. He proceeded to layer on the verbal abuse pretty thick. Robin squeezed Manny’s arm to cue him to calm down; he was about to fly off the chair with the aim of landing on brow-beater’s face. “Two grown men with daddy issues,” Robin said. “Don’t suppose it has anything to do with why we became fast friends.”

  “Well, only if you believe in push-button psychology.” Manny laughed grimly, but seemed to lighten up.

  He threw one last look at the overhead TV. Seeing more of the same, Manny saw no reason to keep watching. Robin felt his checking-out-from-reality had an air of finality about it that went beyond dismissing the TV programming.

  ***

  Robin and Manny exited the bar to a flash mob of nudists. They’d been called to show support for the People’s Movement by donating their garments and then marching nude to Oakland. The vans scattered throughout the mob had their doors opened to collect clothes. “Does this make sense to you?” Manny said. “If it was winter, maybe.”

  “No, it makes perfect sense. If it was winter already, they’d get a far smaller showing. Plus this sends a message to the powers-that-be they’re digging in; they aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Great, so we get to trudge to our cars like a couple of pariahs.”

  “At least we’re not taking pictures of their tattoos like the other cops,” Robin said, ashamed briefly to be cast on the same side as the men in blue. “Just smile and wink at them.”

  “Yeah, right. More misunderstandings tonight, I don’t need.”

  Robin couldn’t help noting the carnival quality of the procession, considering the conga music and the nude revelers dancing to the beat. The late time of night added to the twenty-four-seven character that actual carnivals take on in the Caribbean in the two weeks prior to Lent. To say nothing of the Tiki torches the nudists flanking the procession were carrying and the garish play of the flames’ shadows about their faces, which turned them into masks of sorts.

  Berkeley parking being what it was, Robin and Manny had to cross the Cal Berkeley campus to get to their car. Well, they didn’t have to, but it was easier to make a beeline through the plaza fronting Hertz Hall, both to get around the flash mob, and to draw the hypotenuse on the triangle connecting them to their cars formed by the right angle of Bancroft and Oxford streets.

  That turned out not to be the best idea.

  Even before they could make it to the plaza, Manny was accosted by the UC Berkeley College Republicans, intent on getting him to purchase an item from their bake sale. Prices were symbolically discriminatory to reflect their resistance to the idea of affirmative action. Manny appeared eager to support any bastion of conservativeness that could sprout like a flower in the desert in this town.
Robin reminded himself about all the “local color” Manny could handle was the pink of his necktie. Before Manny could reach for his wallet, however, they were engulfed by Rastafarians for the Expansion of Consciousness through Reggae. They apparently didn’t think much of the Republican students’ advocacy, and had taken time out from the flash mob gathering to intimidate them by, among other things, hovering closely around the table in the nude. Their penises were quickly tipped with vanilla frosting from the cupcakes.

  Manny dragged Robin out of the contentious melee before it had time erupt into anything beyond indelicate posturing.

  “Christ, there are enough karmic checks and balances in this town to make the idea of a police force obsolete,” Manny said.

  “I rather like the idea of settling the dispute the way they avoided wars throughout history. Just let the two boldest dick wielders from either side have at one another.”

  Manny shook his head. “I’m beginning to worry about you.”

  “I’m not the one who hates everybody.”

  “Trust me, loving everybody in this town is way more problematic.” Manny navigated the high numbers of students on campus by finding the narrow cracks and fissures snaking through them, the way water flows downhill. When he couldn’t find such conduits, still refusing to let go of Robin’s arm, as if protecting a child, Manny pushed forward like an ice-breaking ship on the Bering Sea. Robin caught himself greeting the chaos of the mob with the “flash order” provided by metaphors, and stopped it; he relaxed into the formlessness.

  When they arrived at the plaza, only yards away, the entire sunken courtyard was filled with mothers teaching their babies how to undulate, snakelike. The “Babies with Brainstems” literature being handed out explained that the undulating movement promoted brain growth in infants born without brains.

  The event had been staged to sync up with the Super Moon – the day of the year when the moon was closest to the Earth, and a good fourteen percent larger in the sky, thus exacerbating tidal activity and, as the theory went, promoting more circulation to the infants’ heads.

  Robin was prepared to accept both theories on faith, but Manny wanted nothing to do with the education. “I think I’ll take my chances with the nudists,” he said. They doubled back and took the long way around.

  By the time they made it back to Manny’s black Kia Sorento SUV, a homeless guy had turned it into his home. He explained that it was much roomier than the Mini Coopers he was having to make do with, and thanked Manny. He asked if he could please keep parking it in the same spot so he wouldn’t have to go looking for it all over town.

  By then, the nudists for the People’s Movement and the Berkeley Republicans Against Affirmative Action, and the brainstem babies had really taken it out of Manny. He didn’t have energy for anything but unpacking the vehicle. He stuffed the contents back into the guy’s shopping cart.

  “You should feel honored, Manny. This is Eric Shiptock. He has five thousand Facebook followers. He was featured in Ace Backword’s Surviving on the Streets. I think he’s from Austin. He’s a visiting celebrity.”

  “I pretty much pioneered thermal underwear drives for the homeless nationwide,” Shiptock said.

  Manny gave them both his best “You kids are going to be the death of me” parental glare, and left it at that. They drove off silently, Shiptock still waving and tossing his big smile.

  As fate would have it, the throngs on the sidewalk on the Oxford-Street side of campus were predominately Asian. Manny wasn’t taking well to the change in ambiance. “What’s with the frigging Asian invasion?”

  “The campus demographics are shifting in relation to who can actually afford to go here. Most of these are science majors who will go back to China after they’re finished with their degrees to better pummel our economy into the ground.”

  Manny snorted his distaste.

  “You just can’t stand change, or you’d be celebrating the pendulum swinging your way. They don’t exactly make for the most liberal consciousness, and threaten our status as the most progressive city in the country.”

  “I’m quite the cultural maven, I’ll have you know.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Robin was suddenly grateful Manny’s pragmatic eyes-to-the-road approach shielded him from the smirk Robin couldn’t contain.

  Reaching to cover the gaping hole of dead silence with a shovelful of words, Manny said, “I saw the Ernst Lubitsch collection at the Pacific Film Archive last year.”

  “Seriously? I love that place. They have one of the largest film archives in the world.”

  Heading boldly where no man has gone before into the next abyss of silence, Manny said, “I bought this hat at the Ashby Flea Market for fifty cents.”

  “I hope you didn’t beat on any hapless artists.”

  “That would be like plucking feathers off peacocks at the zoo. I can’t believe you think so little of me.” Manny squeezed down on the steering-wheel until his knuckles bled white.

  “Your bumper sticker says, ‘Die Artists Die.”

  “That just helps me cut through the clutter on Telegraph Avenue.” Manny refused to dignify the dig with any emotion.

  “They’ve been protesting for pedestrian safety and more stop signs on Telegraph; you should be ashamed.”

  Back to silence.

  And more simmering on Manny’s part.

  Finally…

  “I used to clip flowers for my dead wife at the Berkeley Rose garden.”

  “That’s so wrong,” Robin said.

  “I think it constitutes a lot of respect on my part.”

  Unable to let it go, as was typical for Manny, he pushed on with further evidence of his enlightenment. “I chased a guy up a rock at Indian Rock Park once.”

  “He fell and nearly broke his neck, Manny. He was in a neck cast for six months.”

  “I thought you’d be impressed I can actually rock climb.”

  Widening his focus to take in more of the street scene passing by out the car windows, Robin said, “You can do things in a blind rage I’m convinced would astonish Ted Bundy.”

  “You were just trying to get a rise out of me over the street person we found in my car, right?”

  Robin bit his lip. He supposed some part of him was. “I think if you can see the crazies as something other than foils in our investigative work—”.

  “Interviewing them is like playing pin-the-tail-on-the-fruit fly—”.

  “You’d be less at odds with this town. Crazy people have radical insights into the world. They’re part of the rainbow coalition of consciousness, Manny. If it weren’t for Van Gogh cutting off his ear and his schizophrenia we’d never have those great paintings.”

  “There you go with Van Gogh again, trotting him out like a prize racehorse every time you want to make some point about local color.”

  “I’m sorry.” Robin confessed, “Drew is where I get most of my enculturation from, and she hasn’t gotten around to schooling me on art yet, so he’s the only one I know. Soon, though, you can expect that stable of prize racehorses to grow, and what will you say then?”

  “What I say now – God give me strength.”

  More silence.

  “We could go to the Long Haul Info shop for free coffee,” Robin suggested, starting to pick potential eateries out of the cityscape passing them by that looked like real contenders.

  “Free coffee sounds good.”

  “They have the largest collection of anarchist books and magazines in the country,” Robin informed him, stifling a smirk. “On weekends they sponsor countercultural events.”

  “Now I know you’re trying to get a rise out of me.”

  “I get it. Too much too soon,” Robin said.

  The game plan had gone off without a hitch. Manny seemed more relaxed after the banter. Even the Berkeley nightlife had arguably worked its charms on him by helping him realize he was just another character among many.

  Maybe Robin was wrong to worry about him.

&nb
sp; TWENTY-SEVEN

  The subsequent events in the wake of their visit to Hartman had turned it into one long night. Manny was anxious to return to his rent-controlled apartment in Berkeley to feed the pets. If the boys at the office found out how much he worried about them, they’d say he had OCD. OCD was big among cops, their favorite diagnosis, came with a slice of pizza at Blondies, stale donuts, and dodging streams of urine from errant homeless people on Telegraph. Currently, the cops with PTSD were inching out the OCD faction, but most of those were on leave. Among those currently on duty, OCD was the winner, hands down. Of course, some might have had things they weren’t so willing to talk about and were a little easier to hide, like anti-social disorder, best covered up by an unlicensed gun and the dark of night.