When I read this Poem, I got amazed and thought it is very sad for something to die without the chance to be seen and enjoyed,
Hope you enjoy and appreciate this Poem the way I did!!
Steampunked
by
Andrew Wallace
“Steampunk made me do it!” I shouted, hoping that it would explain the unexplainable. Nobody in the courtroom batted a single, solitary eye. Especially not the judge. The longer I ranted about steampunk and my descent into criminal insanity, the tighter the chains felt around my feet. My lawyer should have reined me in. He should have told me to shut my trap, that a sentencing hearing is not the time to explain what steampunk is to the judge. My public defender seemed to have only one objective in mind, which was to defend the public from me. My defense was a joke, and I lost the trial the minute the jury set foot in the box. I was now pleading to split the difference between a guaranteed life sentence or 50 years without parole, which was really splitting hairs. I’m 40 years old, and I’ll never be a free man again. My plea was less for leniency than for a plea for understanding and sympathy. It fell on deaf ears. Everything I said sounded insane, and If I had a real lawyer, insanity would have been my plea. The judge mocked me when he handed down the sentence.
“The defendant claims he went berserk because of a strange ideology called steampunk. I would tend to agree, Mr. Franks, you were definitely steampunked. You are hereby sentenced to life in prison for the murder of…”
The beginning of my life sentence really started when I tried to open a home pocket watch repair business one year before the trial. I was inspired by an article about steampunk that I read in the Family Circle Magazine in the waiting room at my therapist’s office. The prospects of steampunk lifted me out of a depression that had been ongoing for decades. Steampunk could reinvigorate my obsolete life. I would create a financial future by reassembling broken antiques watches and selling them to steampunk collectors for a profit. In the process, my broken life would be reassembled as well. The art of reinventing fantastic new realities from obsolete refuse of the past is a fact of human existence. The broken refuse of my life could likewise be resurrected and transformed into a retro-futuristic paradise.
I was dead wrong. If only my therapist would have talked some sense into me. Steampunk is a fantasy, not a self help program. There comes a time when obsolete items are utterly worthless, when the only thing you can make from garbage is more garbage, when Humpty Dumpty is irrevocably broken and the pieces will never form anything close to an egg. My life was the definition of a broken egg. The retro of my retro-futuristic utopia was a toxic waste dump, and the future I created was as utopian as a melted down Chernobyl. Trying to apply steampunk ideology to my mundane existence did not create a whimsical and nostalgic fantasy land. No, it created a horrifying nightmare. The “punk” stuck to me like a bandage on an infected wound, and the “steam” drifted away like methane from a feedlot.
My business objective was deceptively simple. Repair broken pocket watches that I purchased at estate sales or antique shops, and resell them from my home in Leadville. I could repair and sell the watches out of the rickety old mining shack that was almost a roof over my head. With Leadville’s historic train, Victorian buildings, and mining history, I figured that tourists and steampunk aficionados would be knocking down my door to buy the watches as souvenirs. I’m pretty sure that my business plan was sound. There is, indeed, an ample market for pocket watches in Leadville. The biggest obstacle to success is that I had absolutely no skill, or patience, for mechanical watch repairs.
Living in Leadville predisposed me to become the victim of a steampunk mania. Leadville is a treasure trove of steampunk memorabilia. My backyard and garage were full of enough old, broken mining and railroad equipment to create a Mecca of the Steampunk religion. I had already tried to put as much of the junk to use as possible. I tore apart an old steam engine and tried to use it as a furnace boiler. I hard boiled my eggs every morning in a smoke box from an old locomotive. I attached a wire to a locomotive whistle and successfully connected it to my cell phone. I put an broken Victorian age player piano in my living room and told the neighborhood kids that the Devil played it. I guess you could say that I was already unstable. My foray into pocket watch repairs must have been the final straw.
Being a pocket watch salesman was to be my last attempt to find success after a series of dead end jobs: telegraph operator, card catalog specialist, gun control advocate, fiction writer. My resume read like an EKG flatline, and I was hoping that it would be resurrected with a steampunk cardiac defibrillator. But the second I pulled the back cover off a broken watch, I knew I was in trouble. Have you ever seen a movie where some genius is standing in front of a chalkboard solving a massive physics problem? Well, that guy isn’t me, and mechanical watches are way more complex than nuclear physics.
Pocket watch parts are tiny, and they are too numerous to count. One sneeze can be as destructive to a disassembled pocket watch as an exploding hydrogen bomb. Every day was allergy season in my house. A whirlwind of dials, gears, and cogs spread across my living room floor. Walking barefoot through the house became a new form of “cog”nitive foot therapy that didn’t cure anything. The persian rug on the floor became a magic carpet time machine.
The guts and gizzards of pocket watches started to form little piles around my entire house. I was afraid to vacuum for fear of sweeping up something valuable. I was so obsessed with pocket watch repairs that I was soon eating and tinkering at the same time. The dinner table became a pocket watch laboratory. Little brass wheels rolled around the base of the salt and pepper shakers. I would set a sandwich on the table and tiny screws would get caught up in the bread. One bite, and screws would get stuck between my teeth. No amount of brushing or flossing would dislodge them. I mistook a faded porcelain watch dial for a cracker and put a piece of cheese on it. Snack time.
A large assortment of brass, gold and silver watch cases began to clutter my table. Most of them had a cover that would snap shut, creating a compartment perfect for storing tiny knick knacks. Naturally, I put them to use for storing personal items. I labeled the contents of each watch case by writing on a piece of tape that I stuck on the metal lid. Lost staples. Toe nails. Boogers. Ear wax. Pocket lint. I had never organized the miniscule components of my life with such precision. Unfortunately, the macroscopic aspects of my life were more discombobulated than ever.
Occasionally, I succeeded in repairing a watch. I would tighten a gear, loosen a cog, or tweak a spring, and the old watch would begin ticking. It made about as much sense as quantum physics. The parts were so small and sensitive that electromagnetic static probably played a greater role in getting the watches to work than my skill as a repairman. Sometimes I would sell a watch for a sum that nearly justified the amount of work I spent getting it running. More often than not, I would bungle the repairs, and the watch would end up in a broken heap.
My steampunk lifestyle did nothing for my sex appeal. The advantage of living in Leadville is that it didn’t matter one bit. The last time a woman had been in my house was when I tried to have a bake sale. I quickly learned that baked cans of beer don’t sell.
The frustration of losing or breaking miniscule watch pieces took a toll on my little remaining hair. Gobs of hair that I pulled out of my skull got intertwined with broken watch parts. Bags and dark circles appeared under my eyes. Late night hours squinting under insufficient light, and sleep interrupted by dreams of overtightened mainsprings, turned me into a walking zombie.
They say that hindsight is 20/20, and I should have known that the next to go would be my eyesight. My vision was bad before I started the business, and by staring at tiny watch parts, I was becoming as blind as the bats that seemed to be visiting my house from the church steeple across the street. My spectacles got scratched up and smeared with watch grease. I started wearing magnifying glasses that I would forget to take off. The few times that I went in public, moms with baby carriages would cross the street to avoid me. The clerk at the grocery store refused to serve me because she said I was giving her the evil eye.
One day, I finished working on a watch and screwed on the back plate. It miraculously began to tick when I wound it. Ticking was a sign of life, and my mechanistic resurrection efforts usually stopped at that point. I didn’t care if the watch kept accurate time. A ticking watch was a living watch, and it wasn’t my business to judge the quality of that life. But this watch was different. It had a greenish hue on the dial and the watch hands that were a shiny gold. I could have sold it for a handsome profit but I was oddly reluctant to part with it. I began to polish it until it was as shiny as I could make it. I set the watch and wound it with care, sometimes up to five times per day.
I started using the watch for personal use. It was depressingly slow one minute, and manically fast the next, but it served my purposes without fault. I doubted the accuracy of all other indicators of time. The clock on my phone, the clock on the microwave, the giant LED sign at the bank that was visible from nearly every angle on Harrison Avenue. Those clocks were always several hours ahead or behind the time on my watch, which I took to be as accurate as an atomic clock. Nevermind that my watch was made fifty years before the splitting of the atom. Nevermind that my watch mysteriously stopped ticking on several occasions and I only managed to restart it by tapping on the glass cover. Nevermind that the 5 o'clock evening news seemed to be starting before lunch, or even before breakfast. I insisted that my “green ticker” had the correct time. The sun could be rising or I could be looking at a sunset over the mountains west of town and I would swear that it was noon because my trusty watch said so. If this watch kept good enough time in 1886, then it kept good enough time today.
All of my appointments started running hours ahead or behind time. I went weeks without seeing my therapist, my doctor, or my chiropractor because they couldn’t keep their appointments straight. I don’t know if my back ached because of my depression, or if I was depressed because my back ached. I kept missing church services. The church bells would chime at the oddest of hours, and I wouldn’t be able to get ready in time to make it to communion.
Nevertheless, every time I looked at that watch, I grew more attached to it. I would stare in its face and could almost see it blinking back at me. I began to wonder who the original owner was. I had picked up the watch at a pawn shop in town. The store proprietor insisted that the watch had spent its entire life in Leadville. Someone from Leadville’s past had been its owner, and now that piece of history was sitting right in the palm of my hand. I could almost feel the pulse of that person’s blood in the ticking of the watch, as if that person was suspended in the machinery of time. Who could that person be? Odds would dictate that it belonged to a God fearing miner, a merchant, a railroad worker, or even a damsel of the evening. If only fate had been so kind. I’ll forever ruse that the original owner of the watch that my mind was set on was a bloodthirsty criminal.
Lefty D. was his name. I found the name inscribed in tiny letters in the inside rim of the watch case. The name made sense. I had already begun to feel Lefty’s presence taking over my left hand fingers. Always a strictly right handed person, I had noticed a progressive tendency to use my left hand. It started with handling, polishing, and winding the watch. I never felt I could get it clean enough, or wound up just right, with my right hand. Switching to the left felt natural, and I even started keeping the watch in my left pants pocket. I soon noticed myself favoring my left hand for other daily tasks. I started drinking my morning coffee with my left, shaving with my left, pointing the remote control at the tv with my left. I thought I was doing it consciously after I had jabbed my right index finger with a screwdriver trying to pry off a stuck crystal watch cover. I put a Band Aid on the finger and thought nothing of it. Sure, I was conscious of the wound and might have favored my left hand for a day or two. But the Band Aid had been gone for several days and there I was using a sharp butcher knife to cut into a head of lettuce with my left hand. There I was manipulating a switchblade with my left hand. There I was sharpening and testing the razor-like edge of a hatchet with my left hand.
Lefty D. There was no doubt that he was a true lefty. He was already leading me to become newly ambidextrous. The other remarkable part of his name was the “D.” My nickname was “D.” My childhood friends called me that. I don’t know how it started. It’s not as if it were any shorter than my real name, Dave. Maybe it was because of the way I played defense on the basketball team. Maybe it was because there were five other guys named Dave in my class. Anyway, the name stuck, and my friends called me that until I left town to go to college. When I saw that “D” carved on the inside of the watch cover I felt as if it were a message sent to me straight from providence, whether it be God, or whether it be the devil.
My obsession with the watch and its owner took me to the library to research if such a man truly existed. Sure enough, there was a Lefty D. in Leadville before the turn of the century. I found his name in the historical archives of the local newspaper. Reading through endless obituaries and birth announcements, I stumbled across his name in the Leadville Herald in the March 23, 1889 edition. The section where his name appeared was devoted to criminal activities and arrest reports.
Lefty D. was arrested in the Silver Dollar Saloon just after midnight on Saturday, March 21 for brandishing a deadly weapon and manslaughter.
There was nothing else reported. I checked the newspapers for the following few weeks but there were no follow up articles. Violent crime didn’t seem to be an uncommon occurrence. Several other men were arrested for similar conduct in late March of 1889. The weather must have been particularly bad at that time. Cabin fever must have been an epidemic. The spring equinox must have drawn out the savagery in men. Or maybe some heavy metals had leached into the water supply and affected the townsfolk brain chemistry. They didn’t have March Madness back then to keep the men glued to their television sets. March Madness must have had a whole other meaning.
Unfortunately, Lefty D. must not have gotten all his madness out of his system way back then. His craziness had found its way back to the world, and my left arm had been entirely taken over by his diabolical ways. I had taken to my daily grooming chores with my left hand, and the results were less than satisfactory. Shaving became as bloody as a phlebotomy session. I would be running the razor over my chin and my left hand would twitch just right, leaving a gash in the precise spot where a small artery must have been. I had to put so much toilet paper on the cuts on my face that I looked like a mummy. While combing through my sparse hair after a shower, the slightest tug of a knot would result in my left hand reacting with anger. The comb would pull violently, leaving my head with a nickle sized bald spot where my hair had been pulled out. I don’t even want to talk about my discovery of left handed masturbation. I have a reputation to uphold in this world called the maximum security penitentiary.
Next, my left hand started brandishing weapons. I have never been a gun owner, so you can forget your stereotypical image of a wild west gunslinger. Lefty wasn’t a southpaw pistolero. No, he was more like a southpaw ax murderer. Knives and sharp objects were his weapons of choice, and he was not a harmless bluffer. I frequently used small screw drivers and pins to manipulate the tiny parts for my pocket watch repairs. My devious left hand started to stick these sharp objects into my own body parts at regular intervals. I had to keep bottles of iodine and gauze packages on hand at all times. My house turned into a piercing factory. My body became a human pin cushion.
One of those sharp objects must have been infected, because my right hand swelled up like a balloon. Redness crept up my past my elbow and my fingers turned a strange purple/black. Then the fever hit. No amount of acetaminophen, ibuprofen or aspirin could control it. I couldn’t get off the couch, and watched endless reruns on the television in a hazy mental fog. The Twilight Zone, The X Files, The Wild Wild West. The last time I checked, my temperature was 105. I was convinced Lefty D. was in the wires of my television. He kept telling me “Stab! Stab! Stab!” He seemed to say that the only way to relieve the infection in my arm was to bathe it in the fresh blood of an innocent victim.
There is no logic or rationale for my subsequent actions, even though I strangely remember it all as if it were yesterday. I found myself outside in a raging March blizzard, stumbling down 7th Street past the Delaware Hotel. I bumped into a woman who was outside smoking in the bitter wind. Her cheeks were rosy red, as if bathed in rouge. Only a whore would be outside on a night like this, I thought, and I offered her a price. “Six pence and a shot of whisky for a roll in the hay!” I said. She pushed me away, calling me a filthy drunk.
The snow fell heavy and thick and froze upon my body like a vice grip. I had somehow remembered to put on a black wool cap that was frozen stiff and stood up on my head like a top hat. I still wore my bathrobe that trailed behind me like a tuxedo with long tails. On my feet were the first things I found in my front mudroom. On my right foot was an old ski boot with metal buckles, on the other a leather mocassin slipper. My watch was in my left robe pocket. It said 11:55, and for once, it might have been correct.
I felt I was late for something. A rendezvous of some sort. A score to settle. That’s when I felt the cold blade of the knife held on my left hip by the bathrobe sash. Only Lefty knows how it got there. A cheapo butcher knife bought at the Family Dollar the previous week that I used for deboning chickens. My gut kept telling me something. It gnawed at me like it used to after my divorce. I had been cheated. Yes. Someone had cheated me, and I needed to settle the score.
Late nights in Leadville are usually lonely, but especially in a blizzard. The city was as close to a ghost town as a living town can be. Nobody was stirring on Harrison Ave. White mounds were stationed along the avenue, forms that could have been cars, piles of rocks, or wagons covered with snow. The streets were fresh white, covered with several inches of untracked powder. Underneath the snow my feet trampled on gravel that could have been laid down for traction, or that may have been the surface of unpaved Leadville streets in the olden days of the miners. The iron bell from Annunciation church swayed in the wicked wind. It’s faint ringing sound drifted down back alleys, augmenting the howl of the wind. A starving dog pawed through a snowdrift covering a pile of trash left outside a saloon. His luck was better than mine, as he lurched away gnawing a frozen bone. The traffic light at 6th street dangled silent and dark, it’s power cut off from the force of the storm.
The buckles on my ski boot clanked in the wind like the spurs of a wild west cowboy. My moccasin slipper padded through the snow as silently as an Indian stalking a deer. I was now past 6th street heading south on Harrison. It seemed incredible, but someone had left a mule standing outside the Scarlet saloon. It’s ears twitched in the wind as if he could hear his owner inside saying it was time to head back to the mines. The sight made me feel sick to my stomach. which was the last thing to ache in my body that seemed to be consumed with the pus of my raging infection. I felt my left hand grab the butcher knife, and before I knew it the rope tying the mule to the hitching post was severed clean. “Be free, brave mule!” I shouted into the whirlwind around me. The knife in my hand felt like an extension of my fingers. It was the only thing that felt cool in the blistering heat emanating from my fevered body.
My mind spun with thoughts that dragged my body further down Harrison Avenue. I was late for a game a poker. The whisky was running out and last call was coming early. A cheating whore had hold of my wallet. Yet, while I was in a hurry, time seemed to have no meaning. I clutched the watch in my pocket and it felt soft and warm like a freshly chewed wad of gum. The sign at the bank blinked the time in an eerie green light: sixty six minutes past six. I felt like an anachronism walking through the anachronism that is Leadville in a snowstorm.
At last I reached what I realized was my destination. I stumbled through the front swinging door into the Silver Dollar saloon. The patrons were dressed as could be expected. A woman holding a lacy umbrella wearing a tight black dress and high heeled leather boots sat at the bar flirting with the bartender. A man with a curly mustache wearing a black top hat with aviator glasses and a black suede suit stood behind her, chatting with his friends. The rest of the patrons were equally attired. The lights were low and the bar was filled with a steamy haze. Someone put a quarter in the jukebox that seemed to be powered by the steam leaking from an old cast iron radiator. The music hit me like electric shock. Sounds of scraping metal, tooting steam whistles, and grinding gears like a giant breaking mechanical clock. All was as it should be, and all was as it was. The knife clutched in my left hand slashed forward. A scream pierced the steamy air, and red splashed the mirror behind the bar. I felt fists pounding me down to the floor. I was on my back, staring straight up. Sticky red streaks reached all the way to the ceiling.
Once the dust had settled I found myself sitting in the blood stained back seat of a squad car with my hands cuffed behind my back. Lefty D. didn’t stay around long enough to be arrested again. The twitch in my murderous left hand disappeared like magic once the knife had found the soft flesh of its victim. I didn’t even know who the unlucky soul was. I found out later that it was a woman. She was a member of the chamber of commerce and the organizer of a large steampunk fundraising event for the mining museum. After the banquet at the mining museum, a group of patrons had decided to cap the night off at the Silver Dollar saloon. Lefty’s expert knife work cut straight through her corset and nearly disemboweled her on the spot. Her intestines spilled shrimp cocktail and cheap Chardonnay all over the barroom floor. Steampunked! The judge had used the word at my trial, but the coroner probably coined the phrase when he had to clean up that hideous mess.
And here I sit in jail. My cellmate holds the latest edition of Guns and Ammo Magazine. If only that magazine had been at my therapists office, I think to myself. Steampunk was far too dangerous. It was a fire not to be played with, a drug that made me tinker with things that shouldn’t be tinkered with. Leave the steam to the volcanos and the geysers. Leave the punks listening to Sid Viscious, An innocent woman was dead. A hapless loser with a sprung mainspring was spending the rest of his days behind bars.
This is still in process...
Let`s see what A.W. comes with
Piedelmundo!!
