Return to the Warehouse District

By Richard Segal

Return to the Warehouse District is an instalment of rogue avenger’s pinball, tales of self-indulgent street art. Come back deaf dumb and blind kid, this is your time.

Return to the Warehouse District conveys stories of The Steve and Larry Show, a cerebral band fond of inside jokes also co-founded by Tom, who buys left of center glossy magazines ‘for the pictures,’ while Larry takes too much time at the supermarket because he shops by the hunt and peck method.

The laid back trio of Mugu, Meowmix and their dog Mellow Yellow, but do M&M take the pet out for a walk or does he take them out for a cigarette, given that their contribution to countering the effects of climate change is not smoking in bed?

This is not a picaresque novel, but ultimately a battle between good and evil, a conflict between catharsis and retribution, with hopefully one deserving winner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823081788

Richard Segal

Richard Segal, an American citizen, resides in London, England, and works as an economic and financial consultant. He has written widely about matters relating to global public policy over the years. His most recent novel was The Man Who Knew the Answer.

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© 2023 Richard Segal. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/20/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8179-5 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8178-8 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Now That’s What He Calls An Exit Strategy

If You See Something That Looks Unusual

Dirty Deeds Not Dirt Cheap

Hi, m’name’s Tom, how’m I doing so far?

Her Name is Mr Ed

The People’s Derby

New Clear Days

Now a Major Motion Picture

Max Miedinger Has a Lot to Answer For

To Avoid Offending Anyone, All the Karaktahs Were Albino

Swipe Right

Are You Going to Scarborough Fair?

Republica

A Joint and Several Loyalty Association

The Devil Went Down to Canarsie

Greed And Loathing On The Cutting Room Floor

(The Reputational Risk Of) Rewards, Or, The Power Of The Parable

Keyer’s Delight

Mother Night

Did Even Nostradamus Predict That?

Membership Did Not Have its Privileges

Some Countries Practice Xenophobia, While Others Merely Preach It

Liquid Sky!

The Spencer MacDonald Breakfast Show Years

Catch as Catch Can

Rhymes with Thought Police

Or I Might Just Pack it In

What If I Say I’m Not Like the Other Ones?

Libertarianism Has Been Co-opted by Non-Libertarianists

The Route 66 Myth Unplugged

Rocket from the Crypto Winter

Guys with Beards

I Was One Step Closer

The Route 66 Myth Unedited

The Route 66 Myth Edited

Deutschland ’93

How Kitten Little Made it to the Big Tent

Beep, beep

I’m Deflated

The Beautiful Person

The Prinn Man

A Nose for the Joes, Bros and Schmoes

Ahhh, … Freek Out!

Is it U Neek or You Nique?

25c Hot Dogs, Free Spins and the Bruins on Saturday Afternoons

Anybody Want a Haircut?

Hey, I know you, you owe me money! (Part 2)

Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Sunny Days!

Welcome to the Tab Blast

What’s the Difference and Who Cares Anyway

More Circular than Linear

Yellow Notice

Life is beautiful but too short and cruel to overcome

Pay at the Door …

… Baker Street, right up Sherlock Holmes’ Alley

CitizeN-D

Calendar Girls

Calendar Boys

Step Right Up, Hurry Hurry, Get Your Red Hots!

Citizen H

The Performer’s High

The Only Known Photo

Make Your own Kind of Music

Celtic Rhythms

Appendix 1: Bring the Mountain to Wilton

Appendix 2: Good Luck!

To Steve, Larry, Bob, Scott, Dave, Pablo, Tom

and most of all, Jim and John

He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance

I was standing in a field and gazing at a hill, selecting among a series of options which would lead to catharsis or retribution.

I was torn. My great love was public policy, amid constant striving for contributions to the well-being of my fellow man. However, fate turned against me and forced me to take sides in this mortal battle. For better or worse, retribution won. I was puzzled by inconsistencies that societies created, inconsistencies I would not be able to solve. For example, why is it permissible to label obstructors an ass, but not with labels which are far more mild? My kingdom for an answer, and if only they would go down with the ship. It was not a dream, though, it was only mock horror.

Can any one individual be both an addict and an anti-vaxxer? Think about it.

Why do I write? It is fair to ask, for there are no prizes at the end of the game, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I direct the debrief as if this was easy as diverting the course of a river for geopolitical camaraderie, and postulate in its place: Why does a horn aficionado grasp his instrument and make music, because he has a note to play? I can respond similarly and attest that I write because I have a word to type, or better yet, a phrase.

Anyone can see the edge, but only those who have tasted the existence of the very beyond can truly experience and explain this construct

From life will come new life, and I feared the sacrifice was mine

Hey, what about Dorothy!?!

The actress made clear that when she was younger she would not do a nude scene, and the bathtub feigned disappointment, knowing it was hotter than she was. By adding eleven words, the previous sentence passes the so-what test.

It was a time of great discontent, and to conduct my own soul searching, I would walk, drive through and explore various neighborhoods. I felt guilty for my self indulgence, but one out of three at the beginning and none out of three at the end. As part of this self-analysis, I realized that I had lived a carbon negative lifetime. The scientific proof will have to wait until sometime later, there is no contemporaneous proof as with the Ideal Gas Law, which demonstrates that balls deflate in cold weather, as long as they are footballs.

It was not the corollary of a note to play, but for Catharsis, Retribution and Closure. Catharsis and retribution are easy, but closure is elusive, because the choice between heaven and hell is not ours alone.

During a conference call the previous afternoon, the incoming chief fund raising officer insisted that confirmation of the so-called share capital increase would be music to my ears and I should participate. I wholeheartedly endorsed his allegory, but pointed out that unfortunately this was a cover tune by Ozzie Osborne with a hangover, rather than Beethoven as he wished Fledermaus to be strummed, and even he laughed.

The story should be longer, but the effusive tongue of yore is gone and long may I get it back. However, let me not recover my talent for humble-boasting like Jackie Chan when invited by a leading international newswire to opine on pertinent business issues of the day, I mean Joy Cheung.

Each Friday morning was cookie cutter. As soon as I turned right at the trafficky Y-junction and entered the long straightaway, I’d be confronted by self-assured white bearded People Carriers darting in front of me, half waving to acknowledge their chutzpah and half not, EV drivers turning left without blinkering, buses pulling into traffic and signalling after they’ve scooted two lanes to the right, and young pedestrians fleet footing at a hop-skippers pace, hoping to arrive at the stop light shortly after it has turned red. They will be on mandatory double-mitzvah duty the following week, and that’s only the bus drivers.

I trekked to this neighborhood for two reasons; first, for the Olde Worlde bakery and second, because it’s an international melting pot. Where else can you purchase kosher sushi, fat-free butterscotch Slushies and 2kg bags of granary flour in a single shop? The bagel arranger practiced feng shui and was careful to prevent the poppy and sesame seed baked goods from touching each other, to avoid contamination. No circus, just bread.

I have heard a rumor that British stores will be free to sell their wares in imperial as well as metric measures in the future. That is, it will be permitted for proprietors to price their goods in units per ounce if the spirit moves them, in litres or grams. England is looking up to the USA more and more with each passing day, or might I say copying. A customer will be able to request from his butcher a pound of lab grown beef without landing a citation from a robotic policeman, a regular client may purchase from her bulk store a gallon of easy on the environment apple juice. But Blighty already juggles a hybrid of systems, the mile and hour co-existing with the meter and pence.

In France, the goodly and great shop-keepers have been able to display franc-equivalent prices of euro-denominated goods without the living ghost of so many crack Brussels technicians angry as if going into a duel with Aaron Burr, waving metal implements. The unit of exchange for crude oil is the barrel; electricity is denominated in megawatt hours. One for the road? Sure, I’ll take a bottle of Blue Top, you tell me the unit. And tell me those who designed inexplicable yardsticks of measurement weren’t three pints to the wind at the time, and which sub-editor removed the hearsay or heresy reference to metrical cats in the stage version of AA Milne’s trip to the neighborhood milk float?

Albion is free to defrock logical dimensions such as centimetres and degrees centigrade and relocate to inches and Fahrenheit, but he chooses not to. I prefer the distinction, just as I prefer not to have a female Benny Hill. Equality is one thing, equality may be everything, but not everything has to have an equal and opposite double. Living ghost, wherever you are, I will donate to your cause if you don’t force upon society a male Oprah. It’s not Unamerican to say that one Oprah is enough.

So, Kosher sushi and granary flour power. Bring on the homemade wholegrain muffins.

News flash: in an effort to placate the tab’roids, the government has chosen to do away with metric altogether and revert to imperial measurements in all its pretexts. Does this mean I will no longer be able to purchase bananas by the bunch and eggs by the half dozen, and instead will have to buy them by the pahnd? Well, who am I to complain? Paul Reuter believed he was on to a good thing in 1850, but, according to the History of Everything, Eventually, pigeons were replaced by a direct telegraph link.

I turned on the radio in anticipation of talk radio, good talk radio, but the selection is five channels only, and because they have to compete with social and emulate that ungainly genre, they are not broadcasts, but more or less oddcasts. Was the talking head who hosted the 2-4 PM slot a political extremist or an undermanned culture bore? Neither, he was merely odd. I therefore flicked across the music channels in the doomed hope that commercial wedges would be alternated, but I would be mistaken. As always, the ads are as infantile on the radio as they are on TV and I muted its analogue existence. Silence will have to be golden.

It’s over, I tried to remind myself, but my closure would remain elusive.

I know I need a small vacation

But it don’t look like rain

Several years ago, I rented my cottage to a crew hired by the electricity company to repair power lines damaged by winter storms, and because they’d be on the road all day, what they sought was a place to sleep and rest on weekends. They wouldn’t carouse in the off-peak hours or otherwise get up to much, because repairing electrical lines many yards in the air is tiring, tiring. They’d stain their overalls while on the road, but would be neat as possible and wouldn’t cause much wear and tear. As it was late winter, there was still a chance of snowstorms, but they had a plow on the front of their pick-ups and were accustomed to such conditions. Good work if you can get it, even better for the contractor if it can place reliable workers on short term contracts. The spokesman was civil and plain speaking.

Their itinerary was supposed to be two and a half to three months in duration, but they finished early, after six weeks. I charged for only these six, as I was glad to have this money when the rental season would be quiet, and they left the property as they found it. I am glad to have remembered some of our communications, and I trust they got paid for the full three months. If you’re an actual lineman, you don’t get days off unless it rains or snows, because vacations are built into the seasons and the weather, but if you’ve been hired to repair damage of a long and cold winter, you’re there to do a job and because you have a work ethic, you don’t pray for rain.

In the days before unbundling, they’d have been commissioned by the umbrella HoldCo, but now could be employed by one of five different entities, including the GenCo, the distribution or transmission company, or the regulator. It’s likely to be the transmission company that operates the wires, but any of the above could own the real estate upon which the wires sit, and the air above it, or no one at all. It could be the phone company that owns the asset, and leases the wire for community purposes, but there would go the romanticism of it all, and the songwriter in residence would have to machinate another outdoors topic, or reminisce about days gone by.

I can not find our correspondence, and I regret that I did not save or bookmark the emails, because of those that are not difficult to locate, the emails that plague me. Such as the emergency room nurse who skipped town when her contract was not renewed, and chewed and screwed on Farka’s Heating Oil. I was only saved by the eagle eye of the neighbor’s dog Pepper III, grandson of the exemplar.

When it is early summer and the weather is hot, skies clear, and you drive over a looping hill, if you look closely enough you will notice the overhead wires in sparkling condition, thanks to the efforts of out of state crews, my do-no-harm tenants, and the lack of raging late spring storms, thunder clouds to date. A pool of water may appear at the top of the ridge, but it is a mirage. Your rental will pass over the ridge and disappear. If and when you arrive, you’ll hear eager yelping from the pup, but that’s only during evil moons and early mornings, for he could bark the daylight oil like nobody’s business. In Pepper I’s bloodline, greatness skipped a generation, for his son was a nepo baby.

It was over, the depression from which I had suffered from the age of 23 was over. Each weight that had rested on my shoulder was gone, I could simply lift them and toss them aside one by one, there were no more weights, there was no more weight, I was home and dry, so why doesn’t it feel like it, why doesn’t it feel like I’m home and dry? One more point to clear and I’m home and dry, I always said, and it was clear. There was nothing more to do, and no less, my great bet has paid off. It took 18 months, and I had given up, I had stopped caring, but without knowing and without trying, I have won. Though winning has given no satisfaction, essential as the victory was, for I have to retrieve the weights and lift them back up and take them off as was intended. I’m convinced I did it wrong before, but how will I get there before it’s too late? How can I if there are no more tasks to complete, and once you’ve sold your soul, who do you buy it back from?

I pay heed to catharsis and retribution, but I owe it to posterity to reach for regret and remorse, the unspeakable horror of remorse, for which no manner or volume of prayer candles can recompense. My Big Mistake was not being unable to see the future, but not trying. In the present I do try and I can see the future, but I can’t afford it.

Once this is truly over, I keep resolving, I’m going to see someone and talk things through, get stuff off my chest, a lot of stuff off my chest, the same as I pledge to get my back fixed once it untenses, and these epiphanies, mental and physical, could occur on the same day, connected as they are. However, once this is truly over there will be no need to talk about anything because the weights will be lifted for all time’s sake, and my back won’t need fixing, it will be loose of its own accord. This will be life affirming, it will be a life spiral, and once and for all I’ll be able to address the infinite sadness.

I promised that I would play a song or two to celebrate, and I have the songs picked out. I’m free, I’ll say, and I’ll savor the baseline and opening verse, and the first line of the chorus. This occasion of celebration is elusive as well, and the songs auto-played last night, playing me for impostor syndrome. I feel like an impostor anyway and what will happen if I, a stowaway, am discovered? It’s not like I’ve been waiting for the songs to be real for forty years. I was on the grass between my dorm and the Dupont Gym when I started this vigil.

Unless we’ve died and gone to hell, and we just don’t know it. Unless this is heaven and is as good as it gets, and we don’t want to know what hell is.

I had a title for my next book, it was based on a premise, but after careful consideration I concluded I wasn’t worthy, the symbolism I used, and here I am with another. Maybe next time. Another title I have used up: Uneasy Riding.

This novel was destined to be the Neutral Zone, but you can’t create the image of a neutral zone unless someone is passing through. The title describes a place in time, a feeling of being lost and found, of being unsettled, but not quite a state of mind. Therefore this book is Return to the Warehouse District. And I could drive 500 miles and I could drink 500 beers and I could drink 10,000 beers and I could drink 5,000 more beers. I do say it’s shot glass o’clock.

Perhaps next time. Perhaps she’ll call you, the friend of a friend told me. I don’t care whether she does or not, I spoke silently to myself, not to her, but I hope she’s doing well. I hope she’s happy. An eternal question for which there will be no answer, but for her: why was he calling me in the first place?

I expected it, he said, the recurring person who sought closure from me. I expected your answer. If you expected it, if you were clairvoyant, why didn’t you tell me yourself, so that I’d be aware earlier, and wouldn’t have to inform you when I realized? Haven’t you taken enough of my time already? Smiling faces? Sometimes. Who was this? He was a monarchist from the Kingdom of Lot, but not what you or I would call a prince, or his malcontents.

I was unsettled, but this was different, different to the time before, when I was in a funk from which I could not break out. It found me one evening, like a low pressure weather front, and wouldn’t leave. There was nothing wrong with me, nothing untoward about my health, but I couldn’t climb out of the funk until eventually it had enough of me and moved on to someone else. Did this happen or am I imagining it?

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NOW THAT’S WHAT HE CALLS

AN EXIT STRATEGY

To show the world what a Johnny Bravo he is, because he decided he’s not a blonde man, and to get away from a dead end sooner rather than later without his prints being dustable, this is what he did. He, McVeigh, blew the whistle on his job, but he was not a whistle blower in the classical sense. He got himself fired indirectly, as I say, without his fingerprints being anywhere close, because he couldn’t deal with all that hassle. He had to fake being distraught, but what he couldn’t fake was the victory dance of any bent basement hotel playtime security guards, at the size of their payoffs. Leaking the video and parroting that it was fronted by his bitter rival Bronson Jonason, when the double crosser was McVeigh the person. It was McVeigh who had been circling like a shark, not his bitter rival, the proud enemy within. Be that as it may, McVeigh’s handle for BroJo was El Loco Hombre, because he mistakenly believed loco was Spanish for local. And he was wont to quote Thomas Hardy rather than Shakespeare, given that his top Dylan lilt is The times they are a changin’.’ And his most-wanted knock-off is Stairway to Haven.

With his payoff, McVeigh was able to settle his gambling debts, but not gambling debts in the classical sense, rather the credit card bill affiliated with the glasses of wine at the five star bar/resto for the woman he was short term courting because he was you guessed it a blonde man after all. Moneybocks. McVeigh was an associate of mine, albeit not a close associate, and therefore I was at liberty to inform him that you’re not her type, no matter how much the wine cost, and whether or not she asked for another, as opposed to offering ingratiation with the turn of a phrase: Some folk want their luck buttered. That’s it, McVeigh, stay classy.

McVeigh was an eyeworm, that corollary of an earworm, in that you can’t get his face out of your head. Not that his visage was gorgeous, but because the height to width ratio was 1.3 times too high, and his cheeks appeared sunken. His bangs did something funny and his new-school director’s glasses wouldn’t fall off regardless of how many times he shaked and baked on the dance floor, shaking to the beats of the new-town disco band, though not quite Gene Kelly to the break-dancing version of Singing in the Rain. I do though give him credit for his full understanding that it was a dead end, for him and each of us, in which muddling through was not an option. Moreover, the tabloids thought they’d be able to milk his carcass until time became immemorial, but the public lost interest faster than misery’s and company’s attempt at a relationship reset.

He feared the clamorous claims of others, to quote Wilde, but his minutes in the limelight were fewer than 15. If he wanted longer term notoriety, he’d have tried walking up the down staircase at Grand Central, a rainy Monday afternoon at 5:45 PM.

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IF YOU SEE SOMETHING THAT

LOOKS UNUSUAL

I knew McVeigh through his bubba Fiss, who was the life of the party when it was his round, given that his top Dylan mots are You’ve got a lotta nerve and I wish that for just one time I could be you. Or, in the immortal words of Scary Gary, I used to play golf with his brother, in reference to McVeigh’s fourteen minutes of fame. Moreover, in Fiss’s opinion it beats being legally bland, like you know who. Good times, and only one of the two was corrupted by a devious maid. That job. That job of mine. The Work was an idyllic childhood, for the first few months anyway. Water cooler attire was a sleeveless zip-up with lightning bolt logo. Lights on, everyone home.

And as for me, my small mistake was upholding the privacy of others, and showing consideration and allegiance, I realize that now. The first few months. Bottles of beer with busters in suits when I forgot to ask the dress code beforehand, RISD accents one, RISD accents all, but aside from the frequency modulation, I was one of them. I was more one of them than they were. It’s been a bad season for the Home Towne Team, the fashion-plate Wilton conceded, and it must have been, because the 70 year old sports columnist whose charcoal grey profile photo was last updated in 1988 so informed the Faithful Nation: it’s been a bad season. With