Novellas as they happen

Here’s how my writing process works — I get these ideas. Some stay with me, some don’t. Some stay with me for a long, long time. The ones that stick around, eventually become stories. But they never do it alone. Usually I take two ideas that I’ve been nursing for a long time, rub them together and plot arises.

In the case of The Stylemaster Protocols, three ideas came together.

First, a cult based on cartwheeling.  I’ve been nursing that one since college.

Second, the phrase, “The Stylemaster Protocols.” It had something to do with guidelines for dressing men well.

Three, the concept of Amateur Night. This one is big with my family. The idea is that on nights like New Year’s Eve there are a lot of folks out who don’t know how to handle their booze (i.e., Amateur Night).

This novella was written almost exclusively at the bar of The Weary Traveler in Madison, Wisconsin. By hand. In one of my big notebooks. You know I miss the grilled vegetable West of the Andes Sandwich there, folks. This one’s for all you great bartenders.

It started with this friend from college that I wanted to have sex with. I had been propositioning her ever since we met. After a certain point, I think she wanted to accept, but she liked to torture me more. I figure, she knew she enjoyed the joke, she might enjoy the night, but if she spent the night with me it would kill the joke. Would the night be better? Between you, me and this ratty old typewriter? I can’t say.

Anyway, my name is Beau and this is my story. Not my from-beginning-to-end story, but probably the one that would most interest a complete stranger. In fact, it has interested a lot of strangers lately. A book came out about it that you might have read. Not that I wrote it. Not that anyone is sending me a check for it. So, if you’re curious, here’s my version of the infamous events lately in Tallahassee, Florida.

My parents were wannabe actors and they gave me the name Beau as a sort of magic charm to turn me artistic rather than technical. My two older siblings had already shown technical aptitudes by the time I was born, so with me they were getting anxious. They thought the name would bring out the movie star in me. Or whatever.

I am, today, a chemistry teacher. Sorry, folks. I lead a pretty Chemistry-teacherly life here. When I went into teaching, I thought I was going to go to Miami or Tampa or something. I chickened out. At least for now. The city school is… okay, this is irrelevant.

The point is that I still like cities, so I get out of Tallahassee a lot to hang out. That friend I like to proposition lives in Panama City, the Spring Break Town. It’s a lot bigger and crazier than here, and I go out to see her pretty regularly. Her name’s Morgan. We’re pretty tight. We have this whole dinner, bar, Country Kitchen routine. It sounds twisted, but I like it. Driving back to the homestead at 3 AM with a lot of apple cobbler in me is sickly satisfying.

Morgan will sit at Country Kitchen late at night and say things like, “These fucking brownies remind me of Take-Your-Daughter-to-Work Day.” So, I mean, can you blame me?

“The constant tension between us, you know,” I would say, “could snap our relationship. Don’t you worry about that?”

“Night and day,” she would reply, then I’d give her a look that asked her to take me seriously (even though I couldn’t take it seriously myself). So then she would say, “So you think if I had sex with you the tension would go away?”

I would nod. I would think I was getting somewhere.

Then she would say, “Like a laxative?”

Hot.

Previously, Beau suggested he had a hell of a story to tell, introduced himself and his friend Morgan, with whom he would very much like to copulate._____________

Now, we’re about to get to the moment that this all began, but first I have to explain something: I live by rules called The Stylemaster Protocols. I sat down a while back and figured out how I dress so damn well. I got to tell you: I look good. There are ten of them. I always have them each in full effect.

And my story, see, it follows the ten protocols. It starts with the first rule, “Don’t impress; bewitch.” It’s the confidence rule. When I talk to Morgan, I chant Rule #1 mentally.

So this one night I’m telling Morgan that The Stylemaster Protocols run deeper than just rules for dressing. We’re at her bar. It is Bar talk. That’s all it is. I tell her that the rules are, like, deep. These are rules for living – man. Trouble is, Morgan will call you on that shit.

“The Stylemaster Protocols can do anything?”

“Anything, just apply them. Open your mind.”

I was more buzzed than Morgan. She said, “So, they are sort of like a recipe?”

“Yes? No. Too literal, too literal. The protocols work like a philosophy or… a secret code.” You know when you’re sitting at a bar alone some night and a bunch of guys in ball caps and flannels come in and sit down to smoke cigarettes and talk about all the great rock shows they have been to? They speak in this sort of breathless, deep voice, as if everything impresses them and they say ‘dude’ a lot? Only it’s, “Duuuuuude.” I felt like one of those guys.

Morgan asked, “Philosophy or code? What is it?”

“It’s The Stylemaster Protocols, Morgan. That’s all it fucking is, and that’s all it fucking needs to be.”

“So how come they haven’t gotten you into my pants yet?”

Give the lady a prize.

That said, I rally. We’re sitting there at her bar and she’s howitzered my virility. The point’s hers, sure, but I return fire, “Look, you want to have sex with me. You just like jerking me around more.”

She laughed at that. It’s one of those times when you don’t know what the girl is laughing at, but you don’t care because Morgan looks like the sort of girl the guys in Weezer would pick to play a Help Desk Operator in a music video. She has short blond hair that sits on her head like a hat of leaves. She has eyes deep in her skull, so that if you asked me what color her eyes were I would have to say ‘shady.’ Her lips are full enough. The girl was not starving.

“You know what I think about your protocols, Beau? I think they are good for keeping you a good little metrosexual. Beyond that? Good Bar Talk.”

“Weren’t we talking about when you were going to sleep with me?”

“We always seem to.”

“I know how to close off the conversation.”

“Hmm,” she said. And we all know what that means, and I don’t like to beat the dead horse till blood starts coming out the backend, you know?

“So, I have a story I’ve been meaning to tell you,” I said, but she cut me off.

I should say that we were coming to the end of the bar segment of our ritual. You know that feeling when you are out at the bar and it is coming to the end and you think, if I have anything important to talk about I better bring it up now or there won’t be time otherwise? Morgan had something she had to say:

“Tell you what, Plato, come up with something cool you think you could accomplish with your protocols. Something that would convince me of their power if they could do get the thing done. And you know what?” She paused and raised an eyebrow at me as one might when either flirting or introducing the next episode in a Columbo marathon.

“What?”

“The CK tab is on me.” The CK tab! The CK tab is sacred. We will both do anything to get the other one to pick it up.

So, I started trying to come up with ideas. I tossed the idea of getting a weird job out there. She said it was no good. A stripper? She said it was dumb. A stripper at a place that normally just hires women? I get you’re-an-idiot eyes. How about conning an old woman into letting me stay with her? Too easy. I could run for public office? That paused her – closer. I could become friends with a bunch of garbage men? Obnoxious! Convince an English Department that I am a visiting writer? No, getting cold. Start a band? Hmm, warm again. Establish a cult following? How about that?

Morgan nodded. She set an elbow on the bar then she dropped back into her chair and locked onto me. She cocked her head and smiled. “Okay, Country Kitchen is on me tonight,” she said. “And if those pussy protocols of yours get you a cult following in that hole you live in, then, Beau, m’boyo, m’darling, I will give you that night you have been begging for. I’ll make it worth it.”

Why she said it, what she wanted and why I agreed, I will never know.

In fact, I played it off. “We both know you’ve been hankering for it, too.”

“So it’s a deal?”

I nodded, “You want it. Definitely.”

She rolled her eyes at me, as if a woman rolling her eyes means anything at all.

I said, “You do.”

The Stylemaster Protocols

Rule #2: Mix looks – suits with polos, slacks with t-shirts

Previously, Hugh agrees to a bet that his friend Morgan will sleep with him if he can start a cult following using the eponymous Stylemaster Protocols_______________

Tallahassee is mostly road and backyards. I like to go on walks there from time to time. It isn’t built for walkers. It doesn’t have sidewalks in most neighborhoods. When I go for these walks, I walk across people’s lawns where the sidewalk should be, but no one ever has the nerve to say anything.

Morgan put me in a bad way when she made that bet with me. Do you know how badly I want to bang that girl? I’m sorry – who are you? Are you a girl reading this? Are you offended? Oh. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say things like: ‘I really want to bang that girl,’ should I? Guess what? That’s what your boyfriend said to his buddies as soon as he met you. Well, actually, he probably said, “Yeah, I’d do her.” Get over it.

I’d driven out to this one neighborhood that I really dislike. It’s a rich neighborhood. No sidewalks. They hate it when you walk across their grass, especially when the turf’s gotten soft. We’d had a little Autumn rain. The turf was soft.

The houses there looked different from each other, at least. In the rich neighborhoods they have flat homes and tall ones and ones with big old windows and others shut up and dark enough to keep vampires happy. Some of the less wealthy subdivisions have houses that look like the architect was told to design them with Legos. One Lego. They looked as if the architect handed the Lego to the contractor and said, “Build this. Throw in rooms.”

None of the neighborhoods have lawn chairs out front and none of them let their grass get long or weeds grow. I piss off these folks badly. But what are they going to do? I really didn’t care because I was also obsessing about how close I got to Morgan.

Maybe it doesn’t sound like I got close to you?

You don’t know.

I knew this – if I could get a cult following she would follow through. She would.

You know what makes people happy in a subdivision? When they finish watching you walk through their yard only to watch you walk across their neighbor’s lawn across the street a little while later.

What would I do to start a cult? What’s it take?

Every cult has a charismatic leader, I think. I don’t have all that much charisma, but that’s where the Protocols come in. The sky got darker after I had been walking over lawns for about a half-hour or so. I paid it no mind. My boots dug into the turf, which satisfied me. The rain started, spitting first and then pouring. It’s late September. The car was not close. I made a conscious effort to walk no differently in the rain than I had before it started. I wouldn’t scamper in the rain.

I wouldn’t scamper under gunfire. Rats and sorority girls scamper.

The rain that day felt pretty mellow, anyway. It fell down straight and thick. When it blows in your face and breaks up into lots of little drops, those days I hate the rain. This rain wasn’t like that. This rain made you remember the good mud puddles of yesterday.

In the subdivisions, roads run crooked. Down any given street the road veers off to one side or another. No horizons. Coming around this big bend that made the yard of this violet and brick house really big, I could see into their backyard. These two little kids came running out. Boys. One of them looked Indian or Mexican or something. I don’t know what that one was doing in this neighborhood and I’m sure that housewives started wetting themselves. I thought I could hear a Neighborhood Watch phone tree activating somewhere. I hung around to watch the boys from a distance.

As soon as these two boys reached the grass they started doing cartwheels.

Cartwheels?

Cartwheels.

Previously, Beau wanders through a subdivision of Tallahassee in the rain because he likes the way it annoys the yuppies. He spots a couple of kids doing cartwheels in their backyard.

I remember learning cartwheels. And round-offs. We did those with the girls in gym class. I don’t think I had done any since, but here were two boys having a time with the things. They looked between 8 and 10. I think. They had a lot of spring in their legs. They did cartwheels all over their yard.

Both of the kids had striped Rugby shirts on. Thin stripes and horizontal. The white kid had green and black stripes and the black one had orange and red stripes. See, parents teach their kids bad taste really early. Pretty soon you won’t ever see them in anything but khaki shorts ever again.

I watched them as they moved on from gymnastics and started beating the crap out of each other with wiffle-ball bats. That’s normal, I thought. That’s what little boys really do in the rain.

So, I walked out of their line of sight and tried a cartwheel myself. Like riding a bike. It felt good. It got my hands muddy but I had on pants from the Gap, so who cares?

I wanted to get to the gym in the next couple days because good gyms use similar methods to cults and prey on similar human weaknesses. The mindless devotion. The propaganda. The attractive acolytes they call “receptionists.” My workout would be a meditation on my project. Really, everything had become a meditation on my project because once I decided to become a spiritual leader I got pretty wrapped up in the idea.

When I finally did make it to the gym, I decided to make it a weightlifting day, but I preferred to start those a floor up from the weights on the mats next to the treadmills. It’s nice being a teacher and making it to the gym before 4 every day. It makes you feel like you have plenty of time for the gym.

The gym I go to sees a lot of teachers. We are that straightedge. Cops have bars. Teachers have gyms. When I got upstairs, I found a P.E. teacher from the middle school, some from the elementary and a couple of other science teachers. We all knew each other by name. As I approached the mats, I thought about the two kids cartwheeling. I decided that cartwheels would probably be a pretty good warm up. Sort of one big stretch. So I did one. Plunk, plunk … plunk. Plunk.

The gym teacher sat up and put his elbows on his knees. “Did you just do a cartwheel, Beau?”

I looked at him and smiled.

“I don’t think I even do cartwheels anymore?” he said.

One of the elementary school teachers, the woman, Lucy, said, “Are we allowed to do cartwheels inside the school district?”

I said, “I’m seeing if I can get stretched out by doing cartwheels. Saw some kids doing them.” I did another one. Now folks were watching.

“I don’t know,” the gym teacher said, “Something about your cartwheel looks wrong to me. Let me see.” Then he got up and did one. A science teacher clapped.

The mats sat between two rooms where folks did Tae Bo and Step and other stuff. I could see the instructor from a Pilates class looking at us. They had big windows on the rooms, of course. In gyms, it’s cool to watch strangers sweat, and so now there were strangers watching us.

Two of the teachers were a couple, and they tried cartwheels. The guy did it a lot better than his wife. I kept going with mine. Folks laughed nervously. The science teachers looked tempted to try it. The gym teacher nodded a lot because he wasn’t really a talker. He was either thinking that he liked kicking off a workout with cartwheels or he liked the tight little Pilates instructor looking at him. Check on both points.

The Gym Teacher did a bunch more and then others started trying them over. The Pilates class actually got out then and Pilates is all yoga and shit so folks still had energy and they started cartwheeling, as well. People loved it. People thought it was hilarious and great.

Previously, Beau does some cartwheels to warm up at the gym and some people he knows follow him with cartwheels of their own.

I was seeing possibilities, or at least the evidence of possibilities, but I wanted to let this incident and this thought develop on its own, natural course. I went downstairs and started my weights workout – the boring stuff.

There had been a non-teacher there, in the aerobic room, too. This guy drank at the same bar as me, the Warehouse. He was a redheaded little mastercraftsman who freelanced building projects around town, making fancy cabinetry for rich folks.

I did not see him until he came down from the mats upstairs. I guess people kept at the cartwheeling for a while. The red head, his name was Cliff, comes down and stops me. We were not really the sort of acquaintances to say hello to each other, but here he starts a whole conversation with me.

“Man,” he said — I had just finished doing shoulder rolls. “They said you got everyone doing cartwheels upstairs.”

“I didn’t plan it or anything,” I said, “so don’t sue me if you can’t find space on the mats for crunches.”

He smiled, “No, man, no. It’s cool. It’s definitely cool. I wish people did stuff like that all the time. Y’know, dude? Gyms can be so boring and strange. It’s like all these people you recognize but you don’t know.”

“People are funny.”

“No shit, man, No shit. But, like, I have to tell you this, man. I hope you don’t think it’s weird. I’m upstairs and doing cartwheels with this girl I’ve been seeing around here for months. Months and months, man. I see this girl and we’re doing cartwheels and we get to talking. I’ve been seeing this girl around for a while but never knew, you know.” My man leans into me all close, like we’re doing a drug deal. “I got her number man. The digits. Thanks to you, man. A guy like me and I got the digits. Are you kidding? It was the cartwheels, man. The cartwheels are key.”

Previously, Beau has been to the gym and watched a group of grown men and women get giddy with excitement after they all spontaneously followed him in doing cartwheels.___________________________

Rule #3: Adorn Your Clothes, Not Yourself

This bar I go to is called The Warehouse. The Warehouse used to be a train station/depot, so it is much bigger, much more open, than any bar you’d find in a proper city. It had a whole room just for community groups to come in and have meetings in. The Warehouse is so large, though, that even when the parking lot is packed the place does not seem crowded. It would take a tornado to crowd that place.

The Warehouse had a solid crew of regulars, including me. Then, I disappeared. Poof. Two months I didn’t show up. Barflies notice that kind of thing. They don’t get off their barstools to do anything about it, but they notice.

I took another barfly with me. His name was Tom-Paul. He painted murals for folks for a living. He liked his work. He had given up the notion of ever being a “painter,” but he still had his artistic pretensions. He also had a face like a blond Harrison Ford at 12.

Tom Paul and I were drinking buddies. Tom-Paul complained all the time of how bored he got with his evenings. “I’m too old for rock shows,” he would say, “and too fucked by rock shows for books.” I don’t think Tom-Paul had been much for books before the rock shows, but whatever.

See, once I convinced Tom-Paul, I told him we needed to find some convincing women to be priests alongside him. We went through our phone books and high school yearbooks, talking to every hot friend we could remember. We made up the silliest excuses to go see folks together. We told a lot of people that we were in grad school together, doing a “project on memory.” That didn’t make any sense to the blue-collar chicks but the college grads all thought it sounded “really cool.”

The random visits started getting us invited to parties. One of Tom-Paul’s old art dorm friends had married this concert promoter and his company was celebrating the end of a good quarter. A good quarter meant the Counting Crows and the Cranberries had come through. What the fuck is good about that?

At that party, we met this lesbian couple, performance artists. They did shows where they recited poetry in fucked up voices and threw junk at each other. I guess a lot of performance artists like to do “private pieces,” and this cult-starting thing got them all gushy.

I had this other friend-of-a-friend who wrote for a retail industry trade magazine. She was going to J-school for a Master’s in a year. She thought my plan had award-winning thesis written all over it. Money, you know? Big, wet and greasy money.

The lesbians were Sonja and Lissa. The journalist was Jerri. With Tom-Paul, I had established my priesthood. When we returned to The Warehouse, we only came as a whole group and sat back in the corner, past the pool tables. We set it up so I sat behind the table and they all sat in a group, facing me. I did the talking. The place had loud enough music that no one would hear me unless they came right up to us. This was probably the hardest part of the whole process, because we had to let them come to us.

Previously, Beau recruits three very attractive people to take part in his scam to con a bunch of locals into joining their cult. Two do it for art, one does it for fame and the last is just bored. Once they have their story in order, they return to Beau’s old bar_____________________

The set-up was two parts theater and one part work meeting. I sat there and brainstormed rhetoric and sales pitches for the first batch of real followers, but only the team could hear me. To anyone watching me, I was holding forth, looking serious, to four very attractive people, each of whom gave me complete attention.

It made people want to have a closer look at us - you could see that from our first night back. My boy, Cliff, digits getting Cliff, found the nerve to cross the hardwood to us first.

I looked very intent as he came over. Using lots of body language. Really, just practicing “the look.” I think at that particular moment I had run out of things to say and was making a case for pizza places that use real Italian cheese versus the fakers.

When Cliff started crossing the room (we kept a lot of empty hardwood between us and the bar full of regulars, to make it harder), I saw him coming right away, but I made sure not to look up at him until he got close. See, we had discussed this maneuver. We had discussed what we would do the first time someone came over to us.

Cliff came to our table and I nodded to him. I said, “Hello, Cliff isn’t it?”

He smiled because it sounded like a welcome to him. Once the crew heard me speak to someone behind me they hopped to work. Speaking and smiling all the while, they moved their chairs aside and opened up the circle. Jerri, I think, swung a seat in for Cliff to use. “Hi, Cliff!” “Hello, Cliff!” “Good evening!”

Now, Cliff usually didn’t see women like the priestesses welcome him to sit with them. He stared stupidly for a second at the offered chair and clammed up. Sonja, sitting next to the seat, gave it a nudge with her foot and said, “It’s for you! Sit down!” Sonja could do the bubbly flirty thing really well. I suspect she had been a sorority girl in college, but she would have lied if I asked anyway.

I leaned back in my chair and pushed it back against the wall. “Cliff,” I said, “meet my associates.” Each one hopped up to make introductions. Lissa kissed him and held both his elbows in her hands. She said, “I’m Lissa. We’re philosophers.”

Barflies aren’t accustomed to women that call themselves philosophers. Barflies think they are philosophers. Barflies think they ought to write down their half-drunken bullshitting, but they never do.

Then Cliff looked at me as if he expected me to explain something. I had hoped that the first time I found myself in this situation that the new convert, the sucker, would do that. He looked right at me with eyes that asked for permission. I knew what I would do if that happened. I would nod and gesture at the chair.

I nodded.

I gestured at the chair.

He sat down.

It felt every bit as satisfying as I expected it to.

Previously, the new faux-cult leaders start going out to a local bar and sitting at a corner table, until finally this guy named Cliff comes over and says hello_______________________
Cliff felt more at ease with my permission. He started to test the priesthood. His chair put him between Tom-Paul and Sonja. He touched a shoulder on both of them as he sat down. He thanked us. He said it might be good for him to hear some philosophy. He looked at Jerri’s breasts.

Jerri was the dark one. Jerri wore black. Lissa wore white. Sonja wore grey. The regulars were all watching Cliff now, wondering what was up. We were nice? Was he winning us over? What was going on? No one else gambled enough to try to sit with us as Cliff had. That night.

“We believe,” Jerri explained, in answer to Cliff’s question, “That the best ideas don’t fit in language well. Hmm? We go beyond language to express ideas, okay? If what you really want to know, though, is whether or not we follow God. We follow God. God goes way beyond language.”

Before the three of us got out on the town to promote ourselves, we spent a lot of time over at Sonja and Lissa’s place planning out the cult. Tom-Paul made these vats of soup and we would pour it into one big bowl, dipping in Sonja’s homemade bread-machine bread and got talking.

It got us really warm and full and made us feel like a family. We would brainstorm extraordinary ways to be inscrutable yet dazzling. We would make jokes about dirty sex rituals.

Before the big talk, though, we went into the basement and did a lot of cartwheels. A lot of them. We needed to be strong. We needed to be good. We needed to do cartwheels as if we were not trying.

We had been getting together and cartwheeling in Sonja and Lissa’s basement two or three times a week for a month. We could cartwheel around in a cadence and we could do it in a circle so close that your hand would land where the foot of the person next to you had been.

We would roll around the room like we had gyroscopes in our bellies for an hour and a half. As good as we ever got, it still wiped all of us out. At the end of a session our yoga pants and sports bras would look like paper towels after a grape Kool-Aid incident.

We all became pretty accustomed to each other. One night I remember, we had all come in with a lot of energy and had an amazing workout. When we finally flopped down onto the mats, Sonja sat Indian-style and started feeling her breasts. She said, “My tits are hard.” She turned to her girlfriend and said, “Lissa, are your tits hard?” Lissa felt and she said they were. Sonja asked the same thing of Jerri, who had a tanktop on over her sports bra. Jerri didn’t check. She said,

“Mine usually are after a workout.”

“Do you guys have hard-ons?” Sonja asked. I just shook my head, but Tom-Paul jumped up as if he needed to check and grabbed directly hold of his cock.

“Nope, no hard-on,” he said. Jerri snorted.

“Oh,” Sonja said, “But my tits are hard. Isn’t it, like, the same thing?”

“I might have had a semi but it went away,” Tom-Paul said.

“Do you ever get a full on erection at the gym?” Sonja asked, dead serious.

Tom-Paul, grinning, answered, “God, it’s so embarrassing when that happens.” I nodded. Jerri had a hand over her mouth and averted her eyes. She tried to look like she was stretching her abductors.

“So that’s why guys at the gym wear those baggy pants,” Sonja said.

Tom-Paul turned to me, “Ever had one on the stair-climber, Beau. That shit hurts.”

“Oooh, wow…” Lissa said. Sonja looked mystified.

Jerri broke up. Sonja and Lissa looked at her, shocked. Jerri said, “Guys, men don’t get hard-ons from working out.”

“They don’t?”

“No.” Jerri said, “they don’t get them in the cold like we do, either.” Sonja and Lissa looked as if someone were explaining where electricity came from to them for the first time. Jerri’s grin must have irked Sonja because at the end of the former’s revelation the latter said,

“Well, how the fuck are we supposed to know? As if we care about dicks.” Jerri laughed again.

“Prophet,” Lissa said softly to me, “One of the priestesses is being a twat.”

I smiled beneficently.

Sonja said, “He was fucking with us, too!” Indicating Tom-Paul.

Tom-Paul yanked off his sweat soaked sports shirt and threw it at Sonja and she shrieked.

Previously, Beau talks a little about how they got the cult strategy together. ________________________________

A lot of our nights went like that. We tended to work some drinking in there somewhere, as well. I have to say that getting the ideas together for this cult was a pretty damn fun way to spend the time - three hot women and one drinking buddy always at my side. We had decided that they were “priests” and I was the “prophet.” Even cooler. On the one hand, it was murder on the pocketbook, all the drinking, all the hanging out, but, on the other, I felt a bit closer to getting into Morgan’s pants every time the five of us parted.

That itself.

Once Cliff had entered our circle that first time, we drew a larger crowd every time we entered The Warehouse. We had almost a dozen people at our table every time we came. Very few of them sat. We sat. They milled around us as if they couldn’t decide which of us each of them wanted to stand the closest to.

But I did not speak much. If anyone asked me why, I never answered the question. The nearest priest would stand, touch the person who said it in a deliberate way and say, “You should not press a prophet.” People actually bought it, too. It’s amazing what people will buy into if they hear it from a hottie.

We did not refer to ourselves as anything but philosophers at the bar. Yet, we would not go into more detail than Lissa had, either. Our philosophy is not in words. Look to God.

Neat, no?

Instead, my acolytes pushed the groupies to say more and more about themselves. Configurations would change from night to night, but it all sort of worked the same way. We pumped the public for more information and used it to help us decide who we should be.

Jerri, the journalist, excelled at this. She organized the nightly debrief after bartime at her place, and she made these one-page sheets of notes on interesting people in our circle and suggestions for questions to ask them the next time we got a chance.

People believed we really liked them.

Tom-Paul became antsy after more than a month of going to the bar and feeling popular. He felt as if it were time to do something, to come out, to ask people to follow. Suffering the lame-ass society of Warehouse barflies much longer without seeing some progress could have killed him. He was right. The time had ripened. By the way, when you start talking about “times ripening” it’s a sure sign that the cult leading mindset is setting in.

Tom-Paul led us in this big discussion about how to kick it off. Lissa wanted a party. Sonja wanted to have coffee with folks one-to-one. Tom-Paul thought a proper cult should start out in the woods. No one else wanted anything to do with the woods. I did not care what we did so long as we did it small scale first. A cult should start small, I thought. A cult should be hard for outsiders to understand and it should look like it had an elite of some kind and a high entry-cost.

Previously, Beau’s “priesthood” decides to single out a few of the people at the bar to play the role of missionaries and disciples. They meet up to discuss whom they should ask. _______________________________

“All right,” Jerri said, which ones do you think we should start with? They can’t all be guys and they can’t all be complete losers. We need credibility.”

“Can you think of anyone at the bar that doesn’t love us?” Tom-Paul asked.  “I bet most of the guys would give me a blow if I asked.”

“Still,” Jerri said.

“I like everyone,” Lissa said.

“Lissa…” Sonja said.

“Well…” Lissa said.

“I don’t want to invite Cliff the first time,” I said. “Since everyone knows he was the first to approach us, it will be more inscrutable if we don’t go with him.”

“Quit saying ‘inscrutable,’ guru boy,” Jerri said. I’d been saying it a lot.

“Beau, if we don’t choose him he’ll be hurt,” Lissa said.

I smiled. Sonja said my logic sounded good and Tom-Paul called Cliff a schmuck. Sonja added, “I want us to keep it simple so they’ll feel we have more to show them.”

Jerri said, “Don’t you think we need to crank it a little?”

“I don’t think it’s time for the dancing girls yet,” Sonja answered.

“We’re going to have dancing girls?” Tom-Paul asked.

“God, I hope so,” Sonja said. Lissa half-slapped her arm to which Sonja put her hand on Lissa’s inner thigh.

I said, “It’s time to invoke The Stylemaster Protocols.”

“Here we go,” Jerri said.

The third protocol is ‘Adorn your clothes, not yourself.’ I wrote this one because I found subtle jewelry like gold belt buckles and cuff links gave my look a gentle glamour that my public cannot put their finger on.

In some way, I had already invoked Rule #3 in the pulchritude of my posse, but, for the cult, we would be less subtle about it. That said, I called it a case of choosing between uncut diamonds and fools’ gold. The latter looks better, but, if we chose the former, we could hone the diamonds slowly and the public would watch those that joined us become more dazzling.

Previously, the priesthood buckles down to separate the disciples from the sycophants________________________________

When we got back to the subject of what to do and who to do it with, it was getting late. We were hanging out in my classroom at the high school, everyone sitting up on lab tables except for Jerri who took relevant notes on one of the blackboards. She had paid the most attention to the personalities of our cadre. She said, “I want us to ask that quiet girl, Ginger to be one of our first disciples.”

“The short one?” Tom-Paul asked.

“Yes. Her. I think she will be really surprised and it will make her loyal. She’s a cop and she’s got courage. When she doesn’t have her badge on she’s really shy.”

“I like her.” Lissa said.

“She has a cute ass,” Sonja said and Lissa rolled her eyes. “I like that guy who always has that orange fleece on. And I also like the guy with the really curly hair and the sloppy smile.”

“I think you mean Tony and Charlie. Tony is creepy, Sonja,” Jerri said.

“He’s nice!” Lissa said.

“His nervous energy is a really bad sign and he’s always sneaking looks at my tits like he thinks they’ll bite. Bad. Bad. But Charlie, the smily one, he’s a great choice. He’s a recovering hippy and very mellow. Maybe a little stupid…”

“We should let Jerri pick our first line-up,” Tom-Paul said. I think she’s the only one who’s been thinking about this and I trust her… but I’m hiring the dancing girls.”

“The fuck you are,” Sonja said.

“Bitch, please…”

“I think it’s a good idea to have Jerri do it,” I said. “Jerri’s a pimp.”

“How many do you guys want, though?” Jerri asked.

Lissa said, “Why not invite everyone?”

I said, “Look, Lissa, everyone always starts with a select little group. That’s how it works. If you don’t, it de-mystifies everything and we’re trying to manipulate people here. Remember?”

“Fuck’s sake, Lissa,” Tom-Paul said. He wanted to beat her. Lissa looked like it was breaking her heart even though she knew this is what she had signed on to do. She asked, “Can’t we manipulate people in a nice way?”

Previously, the priests hung out in Beau’s classroom talking about which sycophants to turn into acolytes. _________________________________

“Eventually, everyone will be in, Lissa,” Sonja said.

“It’s better if other people ask them to join, anyway,” Jerri said. “So how many?”

“We’ve got two. Two more, I think.” I said.

“Tai and Robby, then. Tai is super energetic which balances Charlie. Robby is just talkative and friendly enough. He has the best social skills of the group - after Cliff, I gotta say.” Jerri said.

“Objections?” I asked.

“I don’t think any of them has any nuts,” Tom-Paul said.

“Ginger has nuts,” Jerri said.

“OK, the girl has nuts.” Tom-Paul said.

“People with nuts don’t join cults, do they?” Lissa asked.

Everyone thought about that and then Tom-Paul said, “From the mouths of babes…”

Here’s what we decided to do: each priest pulled one of the four aside in a subtle way and gave them a little invitation we’d run off Jerri’s fancy journalist printer. It told them to come to the big pack porch at the Warehouse at 1 AM next Tuesday.

When the four showed, they found us all standing there, waiting for them, wearing a sort of loose pajamas, each in a different shade of grey. Except mine. Mine was white. Tom-Paul and I wore a version with two pieces. The girls wore a more fitted, one piece design.

The sleeves and pant legs were heavily belled so that they would flap and wave while we did cartwheels. Every extremity and edge on the cloth had been accented with large, silver buttons.

When our new crew arrived they found the buttons had an accent of their own: the light of a full moon. We lined our inductees up against the wall.

“We’ll show you what to do first,” Jerri began.

Sonja finished, “We’ll explain why later.”

I stood, watched and glistened.