Nick Lacans, Private Semiotician

Case One: Blood of a Poet

Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash

I looked out the window of the Lower East Side office-studio I called home. The neon lights atop Sufi’s Tofu Parlor flashed in an almost detectable rhythmic pattern. I lit the last of my Marlboro 100’s, inhaled deeply, coughed, and then quickly extinguished it.

God, I hated smoking.

A long time ago — too long to remember exactly when — I stumbled out of Brown University with a bachelor’s in Semiotics. In for a penny in for a pound, I figured at the time, so I put a few more quarters in the jukebox and shotgunned a Rhetoric Ph.D. out at Cal Berkeley. Thing followed thing and eventually I washed up here on the shores of the cesspool of critical theory. New York was a shambles of misplaced metaphors and screwed up signifiers. Post-structuralism, postmodernism and all the other fly-by-night rackets had eaten up some of the best practitioners and spat them out in the gutter before they could say Deleuze and Guattari. But I swore that wasn’t going to happen to me:

Nick Lacans, Private Semiotician.

My first few months in the City were a one out of nine. The authorities had been cracking down on the vigilante element in our trade. I had a license to practice — every good theoretician did — but the normal clientele was too spooked to go to any semiotician, legal or not.

My big break came finally when the French Film Society on West 21st Street announced they were tossing together a Surrealist film festival in honor of Cocteau’s 110th birthday. In just a few days time I knew there’d be hundreds of confused moviegoers spun around like tops with nowhere to land.

And so, I waited. I stepped out onto the fire escape and let the sprawling metropolis wash over me. A light rain started to fall. Water trickled down the brim of my hat and ran down the bridge of my nose. I instinctively reached into the pocket of my trench coat for my cigarettes. Finding only the empty pack I slammed my other hand down on the fire escape railing in frustration.

God, I needed a smoke.

Just then a knock came on the door. I hurried to my desk, took off my coat, and rolled up my shirt sleeves