The stretch of land beyond the Bohemian Wing, however, is another story. This sprawl of half-destroyed warehouses and dilapidated garages, junked cars and unlicensed scrap yards and fire-humiliated tenements, is a semiotic blanket of emptiness, lacking even the smallest trace amount of self-knowledge. And perhaps that’s what makes it the perfect location for August Kroger’s headquarters.
Kroger’s castle, the hub of his burgeoning little dominion, lies at the end of Heronvolk Road, across the intersection of Diskant Way, down where the Wing begins to segue into that noman’s-land of ethnic confusion, that mayorless pocket of disorder, that one of the more cheeky anthropologists at the J Street School for Social Research has dubbed the Vacuum. It’s an odd and mysterious tract that, for reasons no one can firmly defend, has never become a solidly identifiable neighborhood. As if, for a century now, the block has chronically emitted a warning vibration, a strong and clear sense of bad juju, scaring away every newly immigrated tribe that considered colonization.
But August Kroger has never been bothered by superstition any more than by ideas of racial allegiance. He’ll play by the rules of social tradition as long as they are to his benefit. And then he’ll find a way to improvise. He was not always such a bold personality. In his youth, back in Maisel, he was known as a shy boy, of indistinct character, the type of child who, it is always assumed, will naturally blend into the weave of the workaday world, will never cause a problem but will never proffer a solution, a gray entity who should, in all likelihood, slouch through a lifetime, head bowed down and voice unheard.
At some point in his maturation, August Kroger threw off the mantle of pervasive mediocrity and willed himself, unequivocally and without the possibility of regression, into a player, a bold man who could make things happen to others. This is the reason he can never be happy running a handful of lucrative franchises for the Bohemian king, Hermann Kinsky. Kroger cannot view himself as handmaid to another. It’s a state of being that says the world holds no logic or meaning. It’s perverse and totally unacceptable. And so he is perpetually engaged these days in the perilous task of stockpiling enough money, reputation, and connections to topple Kinsky and become mayor to the Bohemians, taking his seat among the businessmen who truly run this city.
The standard method by which a hyperambitious underling advances to the almost mythical realm of the neighborhood mayor would be to feign unilateral allegiance to the king while secretly expanding and fortifying his own troop of do-or-die meatboys until the hour is judged ripe for a victorious coup. Timing is essential and acting ability is enormously helpful. But while every overthrow attempt in Quinsigamond’s history has been inevitably bloody and confusing, such actions have always transpired wholly within the folds of the tribal family.
Leave it to August Kroger to annihilate tradition and barter for outside support, spit on honor and leverage his dreams with some extra-Bohemian backing.
Kroger operates a half-dozen low-rent storefronts in the Vacuum, some legitimate, like the newspaper kiosks in Guttwetter Alley, some not so, like the copy shop on Zuhorn that is actually in the business of counterfeiting inoculation papers. But August’s only showpiece, the first jewel in his imagined post-Kinsky empire and the base from which he will launch himself into mayoral status, is the Bardo Tissuefable Press, his shockingly successful publishing concern. This privately held corporation is housed in the remnants of the old Bardo Knitting Works, a textile mill that went under decades ago, but in its heyday helped make Gianni “The Peach” Bardo neighborhood mayor to the first generation of Italians down on San Remo Ave.
Architecturally, the Bardo is a product of the short-lived Vagabond School, an amalgam of crackpot theories that resulted in a handful of similar monstrosities speckled across the rust belt. The Bardo, like the others, is an opaque, dull pile of unshapely but imposing bricks, sculpted from the start to look as if they had fallen from the heavens in a random pattern. Kroger held on to the mill’s original name and has been restoring the mammoth factory from the top down so that while his penthouse apartment and library are opulent to a degree that encroaches on the decadent, his street-level sweatshop remains as primitive and filthy as it was at its Depression-era worst. The place would give an OSHA inspector a new lesson in outrage, could make some of the piecemeal slave camps of China or Honduras look like a worker’s Eden.
All of the labor force toiling in the Bardo is imported. The bulk of it is under the age of consent. Kroger traffics mainly in comic books, what his distributors and marketing people vehemently insist on calling graphic narrative. While the stock in trade may seem fully legal if somewhat less than respectable, the fact is that Kroger is a down and dirty pirate. He hires ignorant and poverty-blighted prodigies to draw and ink knockoffs of popular original comic books from the U.S.A. Then he exports the plagiarized fables globally.
His child artists are kept like veal in chicken-wire pens, boxlike cells crammed with stool, drawing table, and first-rate pencils and watercolors. It’s rumored that the more escape-prone talent is ankle-chained to the easels. The kids put in twelve-hour days, as August’s forewoman has discovered that a longer shift makes the work suffer. And Kroger has rules about upholding standards. He’ll chew out your heart before he’ll pay a cartoonist a licensing fee, but his forgeries are the best on the market. And though he has little respect for the medium, wouldn’t, in fact, be caught reading a single page of his own product, the dingy hallways of the Bardo are decorated with both stolen original prints and their BTP imitations, hung side by side, examples of the quality inherent in a Kroger operation, daring the rare visitor to just try and choose the progenitor.
Kroger has men and women in the field around the globe, individuals he calls talent scouts but who are, more truthfully, art pimps and procurers. They wander through the fellahin ghettos of the planet, meandering around cities like São Paulo and Port-au-Prince, Kuala Lumpur and East St. Louis, basically any ravaged environs where one might find hordes of youths abandoned and left to fend for themselves. The procurers then make their presence known, handing out candy and colored pencils, dressed in clothing that gives tantalizing hints about a place where God goes to party and only the willfully doomed starve to death. Kroger’s deputies roam through the rice kitchens and public parks, leach onto the migrant carnivals and underpass campgrounds, cruise the municipal aqueducts where the nomads sometimes bathe. And quickly they insinuate themselves into the life of the disinherited child. The pimps enact a near-perfect routine, inspecting the arts and crafts displays for sale at tourist junctions, browsing the graffitied tunnels of subways, even studying sand etchings in the mud banks of the waste dumps, always keeping the eye peeled for that one child born with the gift of graphical representation. The rest is an easy ride to commission, the promise of life west or north, the transplantation to the heart of a myth named America.
And so they are brought to Quinsigamond and life on Heronvolk Road, life in one of Kroger’s art pens in the dim recess of the Bardo. He houses his urchin workers in a basement dormitory that consists of triple-stacked bunk beds and a single toilet with a penchant for overflowing. He feeds them according to their weekly production: Little Li doesn’t finish inking the latest issue of Ignatius in the Tenderloin, Little Li goes to bed hungry on Friday night.
Kroger does not often visit the drawing pens, probably due to the preponderance of mites, lice, scabies, and other parasitic dermatological afflictions rampant among the newest of the indentured artists. August has an excessive, perhaps pathological fear of such infestations. It might be regarded as his greatest weakness, and, oddly, it is a neurosis that developed fairly late in life. He has his charges sprayed down with a homemade insecticide twice a month and forbids them use of the elevator, keeps them confined exclusively to the dormitory and the drawing pens, but this doesn’t prevent him, at night, from dreaming of blind, hairless, wormlike vermin twisting their way into the pores of his body and creating a teeming community, a culture of instinctual sucking and burrowing, just under the surface of his skin. He inevitably wakes screaming. And sometimes he has scratched at his arms so badly that he’s woken to sheets stained with his own blood.