Thom Forbes

I had a dream. There I am, lounging around Art's pool. Just me and Ichiro, the pool vacuum, shooting the breeze about everything from broads to the worst hands ever dealt, when P. Wolf suddenly appears.

"Where can I sit?" he asks.

"I dunno," I say, looking around at tons of plastic furniture sitting forlornly around the pool. "Looks like you're gonna hafta get a beach chair from Boca Raton," I observe.

"Be right back," he says.

Ichiro and I carry on. Well, mostly it is Ichiro railing on about how the Red Sox suck and how he is plotting some retribution against his master for ceaselessly playing  a tape of  Glenn Geffner's greatest calls to a soundtrack of lost Roaring 20s' B sides.

A couple of days later, P. Wolf reappears with a garish orange and purple sofa on his back and asks me to move over a bit. 

"I wanna run a new game by you," he says. "I'm not sure Ray Gomes will approve of it unless I have your support."

"Oh?" says I, somewhat distracted because I see Art out of the corner of my eye standing in what looks like a giant pie crust that's gradually being filled with boysenberries. Art's already up to his bellybutton in the stuff. 

"Tell me more," I say.

"It's called trapaziodoid," P. Wolf says, his voice filled with the kind of glee last heard when Carl invited Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade, to sit in on a game. (Hmmm. I note a resemblance to a young Randy B.)

"Shoot," I say to P. Wolf. 

All of a sudden, Ichiro rears his tube and let's go with a blast of chlorine-infested pool water. It transports itself like an airborne sumami all the way to the corner of the property, where Art is nearly enveloped by boysenberries by this time, and washes it all away.

"Saved you again, Daddy," Ichiro says. I sense some sort of weird, father-son, Oedipal thing going on here. 

P Wolf is oblivious to the action. We'll have to pick him up mid-sentence.

"... dealt in a trapazoidal fashion which, as you know, consists of a closed plane figure bounded by four line segments, or sides, two of which are parallel and two of which are nonparallel or diverging, which is not to be confused with the bone in the distal row of carpal bones lying between the trapezium and capitate bones, by the way, as Dennis Stein is wont to do..."

I'll be honest with ya, I lose my concentration at this point. 

"I think I'm going home, P. Wolf," I say. 

"Wait," he pleas, but I toss some wild blueberries to Ichiro and walk away and get into my car. I can still hear P. Wolf's voice as I pull onto 9W, even as Van Morrison croons forcefully through my sound system. 

"... is only wild if Mike Bisbee takes a trip to town that day and the moon is full that evening but the cards always have to be contiguous unless a six comes between them ..."

"A sexy six?" I hear Dr. Foxman ask plaintively. I turn Van up to full blast and shift into fifth.