The Mayor of Pound Town

The Mayor of Pound Town, as he likes to be called, isn't like the other wino ghouls or piss bums lurking L5P on the after-dark hustle patrol. For he has no interest in soliciting from you alms of spare change or left-over's as you stumble out of last call trying to remember where you parked before 45 minutes later you'll realize you walked here. For another, well... he's dead and that's why he's always looked old but not a day older from when you first saw him back in the day. The Mayor of course has gone by other names, they shift with the zeitgeist so one Aquarian year he was the Cinnamon Cowboy, a decade later Grandpa '77 and now he wears the title of Mayor of Pound Town, even if his honor must reside on the fringe of its ghettos.

Now, most folks around here don't cotton to well to the term 'ghost'. It's just one of those things you gotta be before you're allowed to say it. A post-biological consciousness is the proper term and a simple PBC will do in polite company. But the Mayor is a creature of an entirely different habit. For he is a remembrance not of man's life but the ideas of many men who passed through L5P. An archetype sculpted across a small slice of a random intersection by the ten thousand dreams of all who have ever slept in its doorways, hit up a stranger for spare change or hallucinated unapologetically in broad daylight. A collective tulpa, a mob induced thought form shimmering out of dead dreams of naked rebellion and open freedom.

To those that can see the Mayor (and you know who you are... or at least were), then you know he has never told anyone his story but is waiting anxiously to do so. For perhaps if you listen to his tale he'll pop back into fiction and be free from a life psychically chained to the streets that birthed him. For it is tough to be the specter of what never was or the memory of what could never be, but tougher still is to know that you'll never be allowed to forget that you had never been born in the first place.

For now it's enough though that a few of us address him every now and then. As we jaunt between Criminal and the Cafe Perilous, Savage or the 7 Stages, killing time before you get that text about a little something-something. He doesn't ask but accepts the cigarette, since they've been an enduring part of his image since day one (whenever that was) and plus he enjoys the groundless hope that one day these things will actually kill him. He enlightens me to his new nom de guerre, bequeathed since the Porter opened with its Biff & Bunny clientele. It's the new school, he bitches, and they're all too busy staring into their phones to properly see him. When they do it's when they stumble into him or the rare times they actually talk into the things.

I smile and pat the Mayor of Pound Town on the back. Cheer up, I tell him, one day all the world will be staring into those things and when they do they'll be too busy to see you. Then... well, poof!, that'll be that.

Oh how I wish, Jack. He smiles ruefully staring at the tattooed busker weave a sad song on a second hand fiddle patched with punk stickers.

We listen to that melody for a few seconds before he continues: So long as someone has nowhere else to go but here, so long as men can't afford to be distracted there will always be the dream and nightmare of what I could be. Should it fall apart and the roaches run the show, well shit son, I guess I'll be standing here with antennas wiggling for attention along with all the other homeless bugs.

I nod, shake my head at the truth and quickly forget he's standing there as my friend comes walking up to meet me for a drink.

Who were you talking to you?, She asks.

I dunno? I shrug as we enter the Yacht, Myself?

Comic Book Wednesday: Smoke 'em if you got 'em - there's a new pope in town!