21st Century Bogatyr: December 2021

"If the river was whiskey

I would be a diving duck

I would swim to the bottom, but I would drink my way up"

Songwriters: Jesse Lee Kincaid / Sleepy John Estes / Stephen Nicolas Gerlach / Taj Mahal

This is a fictional work in progress. Links to the rest the story are at the bottom on this page.

by Zvi Baranoff

I guess one way to measure the strength of an organization is by how well it functions without you. I suppose by that standard we were just hunky-dory.

Everyone had busied themselves with the work at hand. No one had even noticed that I hadn't been around or bothered to ask where I had been. No one even asked me where, when or how I came up with the vintage threads and the brand new fedora. Not that I could have explained it even if my life depended on a plausible explanation.

There wasn't really much for me to do for the time being, but I certainly didn't want to even vaguely appear to be irrelevant and out of the loop. That's never a good look. It leads, even amongst friends, to the possibility of being cut out or being handed a short shrift. So, I did my best to appear to be paying attention to business.

I was, however, quite distracted. I kept poking around, looking for the Penny Arcade or an elevator. I made some queries but with each question I asked, the looks that the Pineys gave me convinced me that I was very unlikely to find an elusive pathway to another time and place. Anything resembling a simple or logical explanation of my time away was seriously remote.

I was being pulled emotionally in multiple directions. I was feeling a genuine longing for the young beauty of the distant past. This longing was assuredly magnified by the rediscovery and then the loss of my youthfulness.

I was also increasingly homesick...and I was missing another woman closer to my own age that lives on the opposite continental coastline.

We had a lot of shared history. We had jumped the broomstick and lived together for many years. Later, we made it official, marrying in the Central Philadelphia Temple of Aphrodite by a very dear High Priestess.

We no longer lived under the same roof but we did live in the same neck of the woods. We saw each other often. That is, when I wasn't tangled up with some sort of monkey business. But, I need to macht a leben.

Making a living sometimes gets complicated. It was really, really complicated this time around. This trip was intended to last a few days but one thing led to another and seasons had passed.

I missed her dearly. I knew for sure that she was really pissed at me for being gone so long. I could feel it in my bones. There was nothing I could do but to soldier on and finish this mess up. Then, I could go home.

Frank had incredible management skills and a good handle on sorting through the merchandise. I really had no reason to distrust him but my old habits and patterns, well... I poked around, got under foot and was generally a nuisance.

I would occasionally pull a book that grabbed my eye, appealing to my personal interests or as a title that would please one of my clients or even someone in my very small circle of friends. Other than that, I was being pretty useless. Frank was being pretty tolerant with my presence, all told.

Frank methodically separated the volumes by language and category as well as by condition and other market determinants. He oversaw the re-boxing of the merchandise with particular recipients in mind. He visualized the transportation methods for each load. He worked as if it was a dance in a most sophisticated and complicated ballet.

All told, watching Frank work was a beautiful thing at first. Interfering once in a while was also mildly entertaining. When it all became too tedious, I would usually end up back in Bo's lounge with a fat Cuban cigar in one hand and a Mason jar of corn whiskey in the other. Bo was a good host and he had a great sound system and a helluva music collection.

Bo drank his home-brewed elixir all day long with no obvious signs of an interference with his equilibrium. It was for him aqua vitae, the water of life, his essence, his religious practice and his daily norm.

A steady stream of cousins and nephews and nieces would flow through in order to talk with Bo. He acted as a host, confidant, chief executive, and bartender. Corn whiskey in hand, they discussed the daily business of this Piney criminal family enterprise.

The family discussions were mostly impossible for an outsider to follow. Not that I wanted to know what was going on. I really didn't. Almost none of this was any of my business and what I didn't know, I couldn't be held responsible for...or ever be forced to testify about.

They spoke their own jargon. They used subtle body language. They left much unsaid.

While I was there enveloped in my personal cloud of cigar smoke accentuated by a corn whiskey haze, a new arrival would approach Bo and they would simply ignore me and carry on as if I were a potted plant or a piece of furniture.

Bo would ask about "that jawn" and the fellow would tell him the "cuz" was taking care of it and then bring up "the other jawn" and some "other cuzzie" and Bo would nod or shrug and the cousin would scratch or wink and they seemed to understand each other and make decisions about important matters.

As for myself, all that moonshine was knocking the slats out from under me. The more time I spent in the Piney command center, the more snookered I became. Although I do dearly love a good whiskey, I was finding the perpetual haze to be discomforting.

I needed some time above ground, breathing some air that wasn't tinged with tobacco and at least a short break from the White Lightning. I went out for a walk and had an overwhelming feeling of familiarity with my surroundings. When I saw the rock with initials carved into it, I knew why.

High School was an eternity ago for me, but suddenly it was as clear as yesterday. It was my Senior Year. The day was warm. On our lunch break Greg and I slunk off to the nearby woods for a smoke.

The girls were a couple of grades below us. Good looking kids. A blonde and a redhead. They were in the woods for the same reason that we were. We all hated school. We decided to ditch the rest of the school day and cruise about in my car.

Maybe it was because we were a little older or because we had weed or because I had a car or maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was the combination of all of these things that acted as an aphrodisiac. We all got along splendidly. I steered that car out of town and into the Jersey Pine Barrens, down some unpaved roads and out to a secluded swimming hole.

I am not sure how serious I was when I suggested that we go skinny dipping. However, the words were hardly out of my mouth when the girls had peeled out of their clothes, each dropping their threads in a pile near my car. They giggled and squealed as they skipped towards the water. Greg and I really didn't have much of a choice but to follow along, not that we were complaining.

We all splashed about for a while. The water was chilly, but the sun was warm. We left the water behind us and found a secluded sunny spot where we entertained ourselves in other ways.

They were an adventurous pair with perky breasts, alabaster skin and long straight hair. They rode us as if we were amusement rides on the Steel Pier.

I remember their arms waving about and their hair being tossed as their heads swayed and they bounced on us, shouting and hooting. Greg and I were pressed to the ground surrounded by bushes.

It was a whole lot of fun. Afterwards I awkwardly carved barely legible initials into a rock, the rock that I had just discovered. I stared at the rock trying to make sense of the scratchy markings.

I can't remember if it were the blonde or the redhead that straddled me that day, nor the name of either of those girls. I suppose that after all these years that matters very little.

What I did recall most clearly was the rash from poison ivy that later covered my entire backside from my neck to my ankles. The rash vexed me for days. I looked about and noted that poison ivy still grew quite thickly where I was standing. I was very glad to be wearing boots and long pants.

I went back closer to the water where there were some sandy patches and there I sat, watching the subtle rippling on the waterway. There was some splashing in the distance that caught my attention.

She climbed out of the water without a stitch of clothing on her. She walked to where I had been sitting.

It was then that I realized that this was the same swimming spot that I had driven to from Atlantic City in that 1925 Studebaker. I had felt sure that I would never see her again, but there she was. "I thought I might find you here," she said.

She sat next to me and laid her head on my shoulder. She held my hand. It was all incredibly comforting. I must have dozed off for a while. When I awoke, she was once again gone.

I returned to the underground compound.

I rummaged through boxes of books. I drank corn whiskey. Time passed.

Then, I found a photograph book about Atlantic City in the 1920s. I was in Bo's lounge leafing through this when I found myself facing the image of the woman that I seemed to know so well from that era, although I still had not learned her name.

The book was open on my lap as I gawked. Bo looked over my shoulder. "That's my great grandmother," he said.

"How could that possibly be?" I asked him. I didn't tell him about my personal encounters with his great grandmother.

"She lived in Atlantic City. She was involved with some Jewish gangsters during Prohibition. She was a model or actress," he told me. Then he showed me her picture in a family photo album.

There was no doubt that the woman in the book, the woman in the family album, and the woman emblazoned in my memory were one and the same. No doubts whatsoever.