Everybody’s favorite heavily bearded Philadelphia rapper Freeway has a new song out. Here he is, beneath Kent Twitchell’s huge Julius Erving mural on the corner of Green Street and Ridge Avenue. The track was made by frequent collaborator Jake One, whose subtle, unadorned beats are always a nice backdrop for Freeway’s jittery, animated voice. Does anybody rhyme out the side the mouth better? Does anybody have a better whisper?

by Jeff Hart

The Unfettered Souls operated out of a repurposed movie theatre in Midtown, where the streets had already been cleared of last night’s Chinese garbage rain, likely with the same crisp efficiency Mayor Kelly used to purge the pan-handlers years back. The Midtown economy had come to depend almost entirely on the tourists, which meant cleaner streets, brighter lights, and the installation of the death-defying quadruple-loop Rudy over Times Square. Normally, I avoided Midtown as if there was some plague unique to Eurotrash that I’d catch by rubbing up against the tourists. But my lovesick client Paul Fennell, a mewling man-babe recently detached from The Unfettered Souls’ bosom of spiritual support, had called in a chit from God himself to send me north in search of his lost soul mate.

The interior of Unfettered turned out to be a reprieve from the carnival barkers and 50-foot commercials of Times Square. Soft lighting, earth tones, burbling seraphim fountains, oboe music — all enough to make a guy want to curl up around a bowl of granola and do some serious work on himself. Of course, this soothing interior was an exact duplicate of every Wellness Center across the country. If a city possessed an overabundance of wealthy cosmopolitans with existential dilemmas, Chief Motivationalist Wayne Maker had likely set up shop there.

In that lobby, you couldn’t cast aside even a shred of self doubt without hitting an image of Maker’s face. He smiled knowingly from the covers of his sixteen books — all available for purchase next to the appointment desk. Blonde-haired and blue-eyed, always dressed nicely but never so stuffy as to wear a tie, ready with a sympathetic smile and a thoughtful fist poised under his dimpled chin. From his array of book jackets, I tried to figure if Maker looked the type to hold a girl against her will, but all I could deduce was that he appeared on every edition younger than the last, illustrating that as an empire grows, so does one’s access to plastic surgeons.

“Are you a member?” asked the sincere young woman behind the front desk.

“It’s my first time,” I answered. “But I have a shitload of emotional issues that need fixing.”

“Oh, it’s so good you recognize that. We offer a variety of Wellness Opportunities for non-members.”

Her look turned abruptly clinical as she gave me the once-over. Satisfied with her appraisal, she slid me a brochure where a man inching his way toward the edge of a skyscraper was told he had EVERYTHING (AND MORE) to live for.

“The suicide roleplay is in seminar room four,” she said, pointing up the escalator. “Try it out! Then, come back and we’ll talk about your membership and ascending the Unfettered path. Also, I’ll need a credit card.”

Seminar room four contained a set that aped the brochure, a simulacrum of a roof possibly acquired from a middle school play against a photographed backdrop of the city. I gathered there with a dozen other optimistic looking patrons to receive instruction from Ronald, a self-described fourth-level Virtue. As he explained the exercise to the first-timers, Ronald worked the edge of the building with hammy flourishes usually reserved for dinner theatre. One-by-one we were to climb the stage and scream out everything that was wrong with our lives. The others would respond, via megaphone, with reasons not to jump. Once convinced that life was worth living, the jumper was encouraged to fall off the edge and into the waiting arms of the group.

That last part sure seemed counterintuitive.

I didn’t plan to stick around for the group hug. When the first sadsack took the stage to loudly wonder why his kids didn’t love him and who would take care of him when he got older and what was the point of putting off the inevitable if you died alone anyway, and the crowd answered YOUR KIDS JUST NEED TO GET TO KNOW YOU BETTER, all while Ronald worked an industrial fan meant to give the roleplay a sense of realism, I slipped out.

Consider the thought process behind hiding a sex dungeon in a heavily trafficked former multiplex. Personally, I would go for the nondescript middle floors where no one would think to look. But, wealthy villains like Maker tend to lean heavily on cliché, where illicit things are squirreled away at the uppermost levels. I headed to the elevator bank and clicked up.

“Are you lost?” asked the gravelly voiced man that sidled up beside me. I recognized him immediately.

“Hello, Harkins,” I said, smiling at the thick side of humanity that, if hung from hooks in a butcher’s freezer, would be the envy of the finest cuts.

“Thought that was you,” replied Harkins, gesturing vaguely at a security camera I had failed to notice.

I’d had run-ins with Bo Harkins in the past. Used to be Harkins was a city cop, but he was tossed from the force for being too good at his job, granting that Harkins’ idea of police work was improvised dentistry on the mouths of teenage minorities.

“If you’re here, I suppose that doesn’t bode well for my friend John.”

“I suppose not,” I answered.

“Shame.”

My elevator arrived. Harkins laid a hand on my shoulder that was only removed once the doors had hissed closed. He called for a descending elevator and ushered me inside.

“Here working on your temper, Bo?” I ventured.

“No, just working. You?”

“Looking for a girl I met the other night. She also works for Mr. Maker. Maybe you know her?”

“Sure. What’s her name?”

“I forget. We had an appointment for a Joining.”

“That’s been canceled.”

“I see.”

Back at street level, Harkins led me through a fire exit and into a back alley where the garbage was knee deep. So Midtown hadn’t been more thoroughly cleaned than the other neighborhoods, they’d just done a better job of shoveling the trash out of sight.

“Fucking Chinamen,” growled Harkins. “I’m gonna have to come out here later and burn all this shit.”

“Ah, I always made you for sanitation, Bo.”

“It’d be a shame if you were still lying out here when that happened.”

Before I could raise the point that I was not, in fact, currently laying in his garbage filled alley, Harkins flattened me with a brick-sized fist to the solar plexus. He leered down at me.

“I don’t know why you’re here, Royce, but I doubt it has anything to do with discovery of the spiritual variety. Whatever it is, I would suggest a hasty cease and desist on your part. Nod to indicate understanding.”

I nodded, although at that moment understanding was behind only oxygen on the list of things I missed most. Above me, I watched screaming tourists flail as The Rudy entered its second loop.

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Jeff Hart lives in Brooklyn. His other writing can be found over at Culture Blues.

Photo by Fabio, from Flickr.

For better or for worse, there any other way to frame this in an election year except as Republicans hate 9/11 heroes?

“Italy is a beacon in the world for its history, culture and style. I cannot allow our country to be discredited by having it represented by a criminal organisation.”
-Italian tourism minister Michela Vittoria Brambilla explains why she directed state lawyers to demand that “Apple remove the ‘offensive’ What Country app from its online store after the travel guide described the Italy as the home of ‘pizza, the Mafia and scooters.’” In related news, the government of Silvio Berlusconi survived a confidence vote today amid allegations that “his People of Freedom Party had secured the votes of former opponents with promises of cash and political appointments.”

Science, which has been doing a terrific job of late at giving men excuses for being total dicks, comes up with another winner: Dudes who are under stress cannot tell when someone else is angry. And you know what stresses out a guy but good? When some woman is angry at him. I’m sure he would totally address the situation if he knew that she was mad, but he doesn’t! At all! Says Science!

Haha, dude. They are so baked, right? (There’s more, if you’re up for that.) Also: Shit My Writing Teacher Says, coming soon to CBS. I would totally watch this at 2 a.m. on public access.

Hello!

Congrats on moving to our town for your job working with Eliot Spitzer. (Good luck and be careful!) I’m sorry that you think that New York City is Communist China, which is something you literally just wrote in the Washington Post! And I’m sorry you see signs of “government management” of our lives everywhere, which, are you talking about those bossy crosswalks and weird fences on the corners where you can’t cross? Because those were all Giuliani. And it is true that you can’t get a good mass market donut here. So now that you’ve LIVED IN NEW YORK CITY now “FOR A FEW WEEKS” and you DON’T LIKE WHAT YOU SEE, maybe you should move to Westchester before you have a chance to figure out what you’re talking about, you Non-New Yorkey Beltway Outsider™? Guess what, my friend: you can’t get a good Krispy Kreme donut in New York City BECAUSE OF THE FREE MARKET, not because of Mayor Bloomberg’s war against trans fats. The last Krispy Kreme franchisee WENT BANKRUPT.

It’s fine, ma’am. It’s a story we’re used to. A person moves to New York City and chafes against the injustice of things they have made up and don’t understand! I mean, we hear it from the 23-year-old Ivy grads every day already.

“You cannot smoke, you cannot show arms, you cannot show little girls.”
Apparently it’s hard running French Vogue

. Also don’t put no hijabs in your spreads, I guess!

Awl pal Claire Zulkey has has a new project: “Even before obesity became the major story that it is I always thought, as I watched news stories featuring some anonymous person walking across the street, “Does that person know he’s being filmed? What would he think if he saw himself on TV? How did they set up that shot, did they argue over who best illustrated this story?”

So here it is, Obesity Stock Photos.”

1001 reasons to read the new Eileen Myles book. Including: “The stories of Myles’s lesbian sexual awakening are by far the most vivid portrayals of the mechanics and emotions-both subtle and gross-associated with eating pussy that I have ever encountered in literature or even, really, in porn.”