Hidalgo Le Mondrop

2008

Scurry, scurry, scurry, full of seething fury. There’s a tenement to raze!

 Hidalgo Le Mondrop was so contrary that he wore his moustache on the back of his head.

“Let me see that.”

            “What have you done?            ‘

            “That looks ridiculous!”

            To which Le Mondrop would say, “It is my art, and I wear it like a wound.”

            The Rosenstock Tenement was a state sanctioned, sole proprietorship that stood amid other examples of anonymous, toxic decay. There were sixty-nine apartments in the building, which was composed of four wings. The north wing fellated the east wing, and south wing cunningled the west wing. The dwellers were addicts, prostitutes, pimps, and convicts. In other words, the most honest blue collar tradespeople. There were also children — accidents mostly — who were bitten nightly by the rats who patrolled the greasy squalor for nocturnal morsels. Le Mondrop judged the tenement to be corrupt and worthy of destruction. The children, however, mustn’t be in the building when it came down.

            Le Mondrop made up flyers for a magic show that would take place at seven in the evening on Saturday. He slid a flyer under each of the sixty-nine doors in the tenement. The magic show would take place outside, in the crotch where the east wing met the south wing.

            Le Mondrop walked the perimeter of the building. He collected spent condoms and syringes out of which he would make a clown suit. He built a low stage out of stolen planks in the vulva where east meets south. He broke out the basement window at stage right. He went into the basement and laid a trail of rags and newspaper to the boiler. He acquired a five-liter jug of petrol.  He tailored his clown suit.

            Saturday night found every filthy little face from the tenement in front of the stage. Le Mondrop bounced onto the riser and realized that the children’s wretched toys were about to be consumed by the inferno. He wept. The children laughed. He wept harder. The children laughed harder. He stumbled to stage right and kicked over the petrol, which drained into the basement window and the rags and newspaper below. The rags and newspaper wicked the petrol toward the boiler. The pilot light ignited the petrol soaked rags and newspaper.

            The children shouted glee at the flames and smoke pouring from the basement window. It was, after all, a magic show. What would happen next? Maybe a dragon would emerge from the conflagration.

            Le Mondrop stood at the front of the stage and studied the fruits of his labor. Before long, flames consumed the whole of the Rosenstock Tenement. As the fire engines arrived he said;

            “C’est mon dada.”