Ways and Means

by Daniel Lefferts

As he walked up the main road he passed lot 51, of the Trump sign, and this time saw the owner outside, hunched over a lawnmower. The man was young, shirtless, and exquisitely built. When he noticed Mark he stood and revealed unexpectedly patrician features. They nodded at each other and Mark walked on. He fought off a tingling in his groin. He’d seen such men on previous visits, rakishly handsome, fatless and firm, sheathed in veiny muscles. They were gods to their fellow residents, idols to the men, blessed botherations to the women. They enjoyed an esteem within the park’s limits that they enjoyed nowhere else: went to their jobs and suffered the humiliations of a corporatized economy and then returned here, where they ruled according to an older system, a politics of virility, an erotics of martial law. He wasn’t surprised that such a man would display such a sign, swear his loyalty to such a person. Trump alone promised, however emptily and self-servingly, to extend his dominion back into the wide world.