​POETRY  -  
With a Theme of Time 

"a frenzy of colorfully costumed revelers
stormed the bus having just passed the acid test"

​Photo by Weebly

My Night at Shreve's
(A noir ​short story poem)
by Steve Surryhne

Monique, the name, French,
but she was West German,
the best German, and she worked               
in the diamond inventory  
on the mezzanine overlooking Grant Ave.             

I was a college student then,
I had the job of night watchman,
working four to midnight
for Shreve & Co., jewelers
to a very discriminating clientele.  
After the store closed at five
and between rounds I read
for my classes Joyce and Dickens,
Ulysses and Bleak House.

And I carried a gun.

Then there was the night
on my solitary rounds as I was coming down
the marble staircase from the mezzanine
the decrepit holster came undone.
I hadn't emptied the chambers of the gun
which went off at my feet with a loud bang
that rang out in the cavernous space
of the empty store where I stood alone.  
I grabbed the banister before looking down
in case I might see blood pooling
on the stair from a gunshot wound  
(I didn't feel any pain, perhaps it was shock)
and maybe would have fainted,
falling down the stairs adding injury to injury.

No blood, no gunshot, no wound.
Nothing but a slug, a casing
and a large marble chip off the old step.

It took about two weeks
before I got wise as to why
they asked me to stand by
the big walk-in safe they wheeled
the glass display cases into
with a holstered gun under a shop coat.
I got the picture and resolved
in the event of a stick up
never to pull the gun
but to surrender immediately,
there were customers still in the store,
and I had no desire to die
for their stinking jewels,
or to kill someone for them.          
Of course I kept this to myself.

I was, after all, a student radical.

After about a month into the new year,
Monique had taken to working late,
and on my rounds we exchanged hellos,
just the two of us in that big, silent store.
This went on for awhile then she began
to engage me in conversation.
She seemed interested in
my routine as watchman
and especially in my gun--
was it a real gun, was it loaded,
she asked playfully.
Needless to say this incited my imagination
and I took her interest in the details
of my job for interest in me.
My mind was racing, could she be
interested in me?
She was way above my pay grade,
way out of my league!

I haven't mentioned that she was
a very attractive young woman,
not a tall, blonde Teuton,
more the romy schneider type
with dark hair and dark eyes,
very Euro-stylish, slim,
in her trim Italian sheath skirt.   

I looked forward to our continued tete a tetes,
though it was cutting into my reading,
I was too distracted to read, thinking about her,
leaving Joyce and Dickens to languish
in the basement office, Joyce
proving Shakespeare to be
his own grandfather,
Bleak House proving
you can't fight City Hall.

The night we sat together on the floor
and watched the Chinese New Year parade
on Grant Ave. pass below in the rain,
I was having a deeply romantic moment.

One afternoon after that, I came to work--
it looked and felt like a funeral home,
albeit one with too much glitter.
I asked what was going on and learned
that Monique, yes, my mezzanine dreamgirl,
Monique, had absconded with all the diamonds
in the inventory, the manager was beside himself,
pacing up and down the aisles of glass cases
the salespeople putting on sad, dour faces,
more dour than their usual faces—I felt two things,
jubilation that she had pulled off the heist,
and pain that she had not taken me
into her confidence, but had just up
and gone, she'd left me! I was hurt
but began to realize then why she,
in her Italian sheath skirt,
had cozied up to me--
she'd been sizing me up,
me, the guy with the gun!

I later learned, through the newspaper,
that her husband (she was married!),
an accountant for Roos Atkins,
had embezzled a large amount,
and the two of them had flown
to Brussels, international center
for unloading hot rocks.

If only she had let me in on it! I could have told her
to fly to Brazil, where there was no extradition,
I believed, for grand theft, but to no avail.
The celebrity private eye enlisted by Shreve & Co.,   
Hal Lipset, followed them to Europe where
he collared the husband, an American citizen,
but could not extradite Monique
due to complications having to do
with her West German citizenship.

And now it is time to end this anecdote
on a lyric note: of such stuff as dreams
are made on, my dream of Monique
faded in time and I returned
to the broken, workaday world.
One night riding home from work
through the dark, unpeopled silence
of Market Street on the Muni Owl Express,
suddenly there came a knocking, a rocking band,
a frenzy of colorfully costumed revelers
stormed the bus having just passed the acid test,
arousing the tired night workers
from the dull precincts of their dreams.
What men or gods are these what wild ecstasy?
Merry pranksters, faces painted in day-glo,
blowing kazoos and plunking ukeleles!
O brave new world that has such people in it!
My path was clear, to follow the piping
of that visionary company of love,
to join the dance under flashing strobes,
the light show melange, scents of patchouli, hash
and whirling bodies in righteous trance!
I had arrived at a turning point.

And so I flew
from one illusion
to pursue the next.

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​Steve Surryhne was an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at San Francisco State University from 1993-2012. He is currently semi-retired and has recently returned to writing poetry. A native of San Francisco, he was a baby-beat in the sixties, knew some of the beat poets and is now a neo-beat. In his alternate career, he worked in Community Mental Health in San Francisco from 1979-2012. He took first place in the Jack Kerouac Poetry contest in 2015 and has published in The Blue Moon Review and Interpretations. He is currently working on a project with a photographer friend on poem-texts and photos. ​

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