The Opera of the Proletariat

I was about 32 years old.  It was a beautiful day, ironically, as you shall see.  Casually strolling down a beautiful avenue, busy with fine automobiles, I was mulling over which café I'd choose: order a bold black and find an advantageous vantage perch from which to perv on some fine ass chicks.  I preferred crazy, silly, bouncy, bright-eyed, long-haired, blonde girls that enjoyed not being inhibited by the invention of habiliments and thus were hardly hindered by donning hardly any of it at all.  I wasn't picky though, as long as they were beautiful.  Call me what you must.

Having improved my gait over the years by meticulously studying the most fashionable modus operandi of the day concerning detached coolness, I sauntered down the boulevard with panache.

I saw an old man and a young boy walking toward me.  They looked like they belonged in a different era--perhaps 1960s Italy.  And then everything slowed down.  Two British thugs ran up behind the grandpa and the grandson.  One of the maniacs shoved the old man against a parked car, and the poor old man crumpled to the concrete.

The other fuck had grabbed the child.  The kid must have been around three feet tall, and he was slight of frame, with shaggy black hair and a fair complexion; he had no clue what was happening.  And now this British-looking fellow was about to run past me, but everything was in slow motion...

I transmogrified into an elite Israeli Mossad agent; I stuck an insane Krav Maga fist into the pirate's throat before he could escape with his adolescent stolen treasure.  The boy was under the pirate's arm.  I took the ability to breath away from the assailant and shocked terror into him.  He spun wildly around and accidentally flung the boy with accidental incredible force over a parked car and into traffic.  The pirate was forced down to his knees, making strange and terrible sounds as he grasped his shattered throat.  He dove face first into the concrete, hacking blood all over the fucking place.

The other British pirate, the grandpa, and I stood paralyzed, as we watched the grandson fly gloriously into the running of the fine vehicles: he crashed onto terra firma, and then a beautiful, elegant, exotic machine took his ability to be alive away by crashing him and making him die.

Slowly, I looked at the other pirate--I mean this guy was wearing a leather jacket and everything.  Slowly the pirate looked at me.  Slowly he lifted his right arm and pointed at me with his index finger.  Then he spun around, looked at the old grandpa, pulled a gun out of somewhere, pointed it at Grandpa, and let a single bullet fly, but not before I shattered a giant, sturdy, ceramic flagon that I got from somewhere over his bald stupid head.  Who knows which way that fierce, angry little bullet went off flying?  I sure don't.

I killed two pirates in all.  At the hospital, the old man held my hand and cried, telling me that his grandson and he had been the only people left alive in his family, and now his little relative was very much dead.  "I don't want to live anymore," he sobbed.  "Thank you for putting your life at risk and trying to help us."

"I don't know what came over me.  I'm sure anyone would've done the same thing," I responded.

"Who knows.  Thanks again, young man."

I told him he could call me if he needed anything, but he died a couple days later.

And a couple days after that, I found out that he left me everything that his family had acquired: all told, I became thirty-seven billion dollars richer that day.

So here I was two years later, about 35.  I stood in my insane suite, who knows how many stories up in who knows what building, overlooking New York City.  I was looking over the whole city is what I mean.

Look at all those poor people down there, I thought to myself.

That night, I would have the same dream I had been having since I had become super very rich.  A dream about desperately poor people performing a very elaborate, genius, and quite beautiful, but sad opera, that was what I saw during REM sleep.  The cast was immense; if not infinite, almost infinite; if that's possible.  At the end, they all amassed on the immense, almost infinitely big, stage, faced me, and bowed.  I was always the only person at this opera of the proletariat.  Crying, I would give them a standing ovation, and I would whistle, cheer, and clap loudly.  My cheering sounded like oceans of praise.  And then I would wake up.

Still I hoped that a crazy, silly, bouncy, bright-eyed, long-haired, blonde girl that enjoys not being inhibited by the invention of habiliments and thus is hardly hindered by donning hardly any of it at all would join me for the magnificent and magnificently tragic and melancholy opera.

And then I hoped she would join me in real life too.