WHA? - part one...Goodnight Dave...Goodnight John...

Blagich first noticed the blemish at the base of his thumb on a fishing trip with his two sons Rocco and Anthony and chalked it up to some irritant somewhere on the boat--fish scale, salt water, sun block...

Later that week, it began (the "blemish") to take on a bit of a 'life of its own' as they say but he ignored it because that was his way, generally, and so, even as it swelled and reddened and irritated, he expected and anticipated, did Blagich, its eventual passing and clearing, in due course.

No such luck.

Maybe sometimes people would heed the warning that such an eruption on ones body would offer and conclude maybe "I gotta eat better," or "I gotta make a point of giving my hands a good rinse after getting off the subway," or "I gotta floss more regularly...." Maybe Blagich, if he was that kind of person, would have himself taken some time off, say,  from the drinking and the whoring for a couple of weeks maybe - "just until this thing on my hand clears up."  But he wasn't (that kind of person) and he didn't (take some time off, etc.).

As he watched the "escort" clear out his wallet from the floor of the hotel room where he had sprawled drunk, and post-coital-epic-fail'd (as usual), he chuckled to himself because he knew they (the escorts) liked (for obvious reasons) to clear out his wallet and, being a sport, he always left them a little something to take, (though also so as to avoid them getting any ideas about maybe asking their pimp to come toss the room while he was "indisposed," and of course knowing too from the git-go that the rest of his roll was safely locked in the in-room hotel safe, [under combination number '2625' as always]) and just before he slipped off into (what he hoped would be) a blissful sleep, only after hearing the sound of the hotel room door slam meaning that the escort had high-tailed it off to her next engagement, he thought he felt an uncomfortable 'shift' (it really was the only word for it) beneath the pussed-over red scale on the back of his hand, and then, in the last moments of consciousness, saw the red skin part and an eyeball (?) peek out knowingly at him.

Waking up on the floor of the hotel room, with its familiar (and, truth be told, comforting) feel and smell of industrial carpeting, he immediately began his now-standard, and routinely implemented, process by which he reconciled the drunken world-view of the previous evening into the cold light of that morning's reality.  Typically this involved the realization, for example, that maybe the girls outside the bar on 7th Avenue last night didn't really want to "fuck him" (no matter what his foggy memory seemed to imply) as much as maybe wanted someone to pay for their drinks for an hour or two (note to self: log on to Americanexpress.com and review "Recent Charges.")  But also maybe the mini-bar drinking, and the high-cholesterol room service and the escort service phone calls (which he could now do from memory) weren't so much the pathetic cries for help that they might seem to be but more like wonderful examples of "living of life to the fullest" and of "being in the moment"--exercises detailed on the cassette-taped and dusty-book-shelfed copies of self-help programs he had accumulated over the years--over the course of an adult-lifetime of post-masturbatory passivity, late-night channel surfing and 3AM "come-to-Jesus" moments of clarity--breathless dialing of 1-800 numbers and conversations with disembodied and vaguely-accented tele-marketers pushing incentivized special-offers and not-to-be-missed once-in-a-lifetime-opportunities..

But what of the "hand-eye" dream, as he chose to call it in that brave hung-over haze in which he allowed himself to think about it, and reflect on its (the dream's, [it must have been a dream, right?]) possible meaning.  It really could only have been a dream, something like that, right?  Something weird and other-worldly like that...it really was "Kafka-esque," wasn't it?  Using that term he exaggerated the forming of quotation marks in the air with his hands and yet still he imagined himself in those moments of reflection utterly at the mercy of some strange and possibly drunk (himself) writer alone in the middle of the night crafting outlandish (absurd really) and mythologically loaded stories in which he, Blagich, flopped and jabbered like some marionette freshly sprung from a claustrophobic traveling case into the harsh light of a vaudeville era stage--made to deliver inane punch-lines to weak laughter, smelling of garlic and sweat (the laughter), hidden in the darkness of the theatre behind layers of stage- and spotlights.

And yet there it was...somehow the "blemish" on his hand, around the thumb, had been bandaged in the night. He had no recollection of tending to this wound nor even of where the bandages themselves might have come from.  It was all a mystery.  But the memory of eye - the look of it, and the expression contained in it was burned irretrievably into his brain.  There was only one way to get to the bottom of it.  He would have to take the bandage off and see what there was to be seen.