john bennett | man in a silk kimono

Man in a Silk Kimono

He looked good with or without lipstick. In or out of bondage. Shuffling cards in Vegas or plowing the back forty. He was a cross-dresser and a rodeo queen and played a mean game of racquetball. He’d been an eagle scout and a war hero and ran drugs out of Mexico. He was a well-rounded man with some out-there proclivities. He modified a Rubik’s Cube for amputees and devised a Braille system to approximate pictures. He’d close his eyes and pretend he was blind and run his fingers over Braille naked women. It got him hot as a two-dollar pistol. He dressed up like a priest when he did it.

Little did his wife know. She met him at a Baptist rally in Montgomery. He stole the show when he gave himself over to Jesus by plunging into the river in a white nightgown that clung to his body when it got wet. Several women gathered at the river jumped in after him. He climbed ashore with women hanging off him like seaweed. His wife-to-be was not one of these. She remained on dry land and took his tears for tears of joy.

They wound up in Biloxi and he got work selling Ferraris for a car dealership. They prospered and raised three sons, all of whom wound up playing football for Ole Miss. It was a slightly kinky version of the American Dream.

Then just like that he uped and disappeared. He wound up on a sampan on a waterway north of Shanghai, sandwiched in between hundreds of other sampans. It was a floating community of impoverishment. He lay on his cot on deck smoking opium and eating rice. Who knows what went thru his head. He never left the boat.

The Chinese called him Man in a Silk Kimono and accepted him as one of their own.

click the Hcolom Press logo to visit the web page...HCOLOM PRESS is the heir to Vagabond Press, which began as a main player in the Mimeo Revolution of the Sixties and continued publishing right into the jaws of the new millennium. HCOLOM PRESS embodies the spirit of Vagabond Press, retooled for the times we live in.

Hcolom is Moloch spelled backwards. Moloch is an Old Testament deity to which children were sacrificed, a practice society still engages in with increased enthusiasm. Consumerism is the new Moloch, manifesting itself like cancer in war, politics, the arts and religion, in every nook and cranny of human endeavor, draining the intrinsic beauty out of life and mutilating the innocence and magic of childhood with its commercial meat hook. HCOLOM PRESS intends to publish books that by their nature repudiate this pernicious force–novels, poetry, children’s books and books that transcend genre.

Our launch book, in June of 2006, was John Bennett’s novel, Tire Grabbers, a fable of sorts, a reality book rooted in the fantasy of our times, the story of the coming of Moloch and the children who rise up in rebellion against it.

Books of kindred spirit will follow close on its heels. Go for it by clicking here… or hit the Hcolom logo above… or just hit any of the following covers…

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