“Where are you from, son? I’m from Kenosha, Wisconsin. My folks have a little farm back there. Snowfields and fenceposts all the way to Chicago. The snow covers the old cars up on blocks in the yards… big white bundles… it looks like Graves Registration back there in Wisconsin.

“Heh, heh… .”

“Hey Pensiero,” calls Paddy McGonigle, “ya still hearin’ dat sound?”

“Yeah uh I t’ink it’s a mouth-organ,” Pensiero busily combing up single hairs, cutting each one a slightly different length, going back again and again to touch up here and there… God is who knows their number. Atropos is who severs them to different lengths. So, God under the aspect of Atropos, she who cannot be turned, is in possession of Eddie Pensiero tonight.

“I got your mouth organ,” jeers Paddy, “right here! Look! A wop clarinet!”

Each long haircut is a passage. Hair is yet another kind of modulated frequency. Assume a state of grace in which all hairs were once distributed perfectly even, a time of innocence when they fell perfectly straight, all over the colonel’s head. Winds of the day, gestures of distraction, sweat, itchings, sudden surprises, three-foot falls at the edge of sleep, watched skies, remembered shames, all have since written on that perfect grating. Passing through it tonight, restructuring it, Eddie Pensiero is an agent of History. Along with the reworking of the colonel’s head runs the shiver-borne blues—long runs in number 2 and 3 hole correspond, tonight anyway, to passages in the deep reaches of hair, birch trunks in a very humid summer night, approaches to a stone house in a wooded park, stags paralyzed beside the high flagged walks… .

Blues is a matter of lower sidebands—you suck a clear note, on pitch, and then bend it lower with the muscles of your face. Muscles of your face have been laughing, tight with pain, often trying not to betray any emotion, all your life. Where you send the pure note is partly a function of that. There’s that secular basis for blues, if the spiritual angle bothers you… .

“I didn’t know where I was,” relates the colonel. “I kept climbing downward, along these big sheared chunks of concrete. Black reinforcing rod poking out… black rust. There were touches of royal purple in the air, not bright enough to blur out over their edges, or change the substance of the night. They dribbled down, lengthening out, one by one—ever seen a chicken fetus, just beginning? oh of course not, you’re a city boy. There’s a lot to learn, out on the farm. Teaches you what a chicken fetus looks like, so that if you happen to be climbing around a concrete mountain in the dark, and see one, or several, up in the sky reproduced in purple, you’ll know what they look like—that’s a heap better than the city, son, there you just move from crisis to crisis, each one brand-new, nothing to couple it back onto… .”

Well, there he is, cautiously edging along the enormous ruin, his hair at the moment looking very odd—brushed forward from one occipital spot, forward and up in great long points, forming a black sunflower or sunbonnet around his face, in which the prominent feature is the colonel’s long, crawling magenta lips. Things grab up for him out of crevices among the debris, sort of fast happy lunge out and back in, thin pincer arms, nothing personal, just thought I’d grab a little night air, ha, ha! When they miss the colonel—as they always seem to do—why they just zip back in with a gambler’s ho-hum, well, maybe next time… .