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December 5, 2002 The curtain opens. A man is seated in the window corner of a crowded cafe. He looks up from his coffee at a cluster of students staring at him from a nearby table. Looking right at them, he straightens his back and pivots his head around. The crunching of his neck is audible above the hiss of espresso machines. He leers at them with a wide-lipped teethy Cheshire Cat grin. They cringe and look away. He is dressed like a paratrooper recently landed on a mountaintop and come to loiter in a ski lodge having traded in his chute for a pair of thick wool and sheepskin boots. A straight military man in his flight suit, a shock of hat-matted hair on his head. This is his game. Infiltrate all the hip coffeehouses of the world and leer at the oh-so-cool, frighten them if at all possible, then coyly sit back and study their habits, their gestures, their vanity. In truth, he is one of them and knows it. He is oh-so-cool at heart. He is vain and cocky. A Scorpio, he is mad passion, a blood-soaked sponge thrown hard against a white wall, dripping to the floor. He is self-centered, yes, but in a focused, productive way. His every step is a beat in a tribal rhythm only he can hear. A vagabond artist and poet, his every move is at once a movement in a carefully orchestrated performance art piece, and part of a lifelong study of the human condition. He is quiet now, studying, watching. Later, among friends, he will transform into a showman. He will take down his guard and show his brilliant peacock feathers. He is an artist paratrooper, if there can be such a thing. His jumpsuit is his favorite disguise, a fire-retardant close fitting metaphor of his free-falling lifestyle. He feels as though he has been falling for years, cascading, tumbling, sometimes controlled with arms out, goggled-eyes to the Earth, lips stretched wide in the ripping wind of descent, cheeks full of air, smiling at the Earth and sky with that wide Cheshire Cat grin. His teeth are clenched shut against bugs. But make no mistake, he is sucking deep the marrow of life, a catapulted Thoreau, nostrils flaring, inhaling so hard at times that his head feels like a wind tunnel with the jet engine cranked up full blast. So often does he feel the madman, the foreigner, that he's begun to believe it. He spooks the students, the young eager minds, just for fun. But in truth, he makes these coffeehouse landings to remind himself of himself. Thus he feels no need to speak. It is enough just to listen and watch and be in the presence of intelligence and character. If he's lucky, that is. Sometimes a rogue band of Wal-Mart shoppers will do the cafe squat. They're a treacherous lot for they cannot be taught imagination or free will. When his chute fails and drops him in the thick of their world, he doesn't even bother to play his Cheshire Cat grinning games. He moves among them like a mutant magnet whose poles have flipped such that he is utterly repellent, untouchable, his feathers folded double tight like the cheese wedge shape of a fallen soldier's flag. And when the pressure has built up sufficient to catapult cats at the mad barking moon, he will shoot out of that weird gene pool like a kayak & rider thrust deep after a high waterfall drop. Pop! Rising phoenix-like into the cool desert night and soaring, soaring, riding warm currents of air to the next adventure, somewhere. And the coffee house melts away and there is only our paratrooper now. And a lithe female figure approaches, porceline skin, hair blonde long and thin. She takes a seat across the table from, fixes her gaze on him, and says, "So, how long you in town?" He closes his journal, stows his pen, looks up at her and grins a wide and teethy Cheshire Cat grin, this one benign and full of mischievous intent. -His Lordship RSM the Duke of the Great Green Leap
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