his face was lupine. His father was a cattle rancher and corn farmer in Iowa. He steadily ate rare beef from boyhood to recalcitrantly adult life. When the hair softened he died it black. When access was restricted he found the Norwegian
*
as a boy was way too big for the stroller he was in, too, delighted in infantilizing kids that were younger than him; or animals; or even inanimate objects, too staid for the pensive Norwegian; showering only ever other day at first out of rougeish jouisance, then because he couldn't maintain the ritual, then because he cared more for himself than others and it sometimes is hard to smell your own smell-bad
*
when the company suddenly went public—and did well—entrepreneurialism was not a tough thing for him, but maintaining the tension of washed cotton was, finding and buying Dutch cigarettes at quantity to keep the Norwegian happy, trying to accede to the notion that though the first warhead he designed was lauded; that was years ago, after the successful community college drop-out, after his first true love, after fatefully tripping down the concrete stairs to a basement concert in the East Village in 2001
*
because the Norwegian could never spell the name right and loving is in the letters, and the oxford shirt turns to a violet one, and then to none; but a vest, then to a black rawhide tee shirt, and then to a white-tan Lanvin cardigan, and the sleeping in a hammock was a childhood idea that he couldn't Peter Pan; but having a new stoppered bottle of white wine in the fridge was, and the Norwegian was growing nervous, and the level was not in the drawer when he'd needed it
*
and England, O! England, that greeny isle set in a silver sea; or some such, from whence all of this shit; shapely Bristol with the big cock, York, Kent, Wolverhampton, Queen Mary's College campus in London where he had the herpes scare and drank too much ale, the empty cans piling up in the corners of the den in his flat, and his mother was from London, and his awkward teen years and his late teen years were spent elsewhere, and he grew a distaste for curries and a love for fried fish, and it was mostly like the west coast
*
the hard cock, the deciding that he could be as effete with beer as with vintners but not following through with it; never following through with it, the positive mental attitude, the new resistors that the Japanese were putting out and the holographic storage (swelling mass—at first—before the total bust), the kids with Hensonian unibrows in a mass of passersby at Picadilly Circus. Is there a sound to realizing that the Norwegian was already cut loose?
