The Man in the Dark Fedora 1

(I have never written about this part of my past before now. This is first draft of the first chapter of the book whose title is the title of this post.)

There were skanks left over from the big newspaper strike two years ago. I don’t know what they do with them in between strikes; maybe they go under-cover in a Skank Protection Program, living as normal folks: cook dinner, see their kids off to school, go to PTA meetings, sing hymns at church services. I don’t know. I don't know what you do with people who can turn the adrenalin of hate on and off when they are not working their trade.
They are celebrities and centers-of-attention while the strikes are on. Now they were standing along the side of the road, and those ladies that sang hymns in the off-season were now screeching curses like obscene banshees at our motorcade as it crept toward the front gate of the company. I’m sure it was a lot like this on the way to the guillotine in Revolutionary France, where women took a holiday from selling vegetables at the markets and came to throw turnips at the king... and the classical beauty of Versailles gave way to the electrifying fury of unreason.
There is something about the air being filled with shouting, some dreamlike quality that urges you to think you are asleep and having a nightmare, rather than awake; it urges you to imagine yourself in a hell-scape of Hieronymus Bosch and not at all in the real world.
The tumult at the edge of violence seems to eclipse the sun, blinding it. If you were sitting in one of the cars of the motorcade of the damned, slowly moving down the street, like boats in the sluggish, sewage-filled current of the River Styx as you drifted to the Inferno… if you were sitting in one of those vehicles, a prisoner of the violence that encompassed you… if you could remember there was a sky, and then if you could somehow wriggle your gaze free to look up at it, you would see the sick grey cirrus clouds of vituperation and violence suffocate the sunshine.
Sometimes even now I drive by the streets we used to take on our secure trip to work each day, and I imagine the asphalt streets groaning like Sisyphus. I drive by the shape-up area, where we all met at 8:00 in the morning and got in a line with security vehicles, and then took off for our slow drive along the six city blocks to where our plant was located. It was as slow as a funeral procession, and the security men with their dark glasses hovered on the peripheries like funeral home attendants; I half expected them to plunk down a flag on the hood of my car. We drove with silver coins on our eyes to pay Charon to ferry us…