Table of Contents

poetry

(the passionate stuff)

performance art

(2 poems from the 9/2/15 Chicago show
“Like a Lamb to the Slaughter”)

performance art

(1 poem from the 6/4/16 Austin show
“Love in the Universe”)

performance art

(1 poem from the 7/2/16 Austin show
“Voting for Change”)

prose

(the meat & potatoes stuff)

lunchtime poll topic

(commentaries on relevant issues)

Salvaging America

I’m Doin’ Alright

He took my hand and clasped it, held onto it hard. His eyes grew misty, didn’t spill, drank in life and tears. His eyes grew misty, overborne.
He had my hand in bondage,
reluctant to release.

But when he did, a tightened face.
Painful, artful portrait :: one handclasp and then no more.

I asked him how he was.

He said I’m doin’ alright,
aHe said I’m doin’ alright,
averted his eyes and bobbed his head,
assured himself of it.

He said I’m doin’ alright,
and his haunted cheeks,
and his quaver-voice,
and his sluggish repetition.

Shallow Affection

In my drunken days,
women justly labeled me
a creeper.

Years later, some think
(with soulful eyes)
that I’m a keeper,
if you’ll excuse
the rhyme.

And as a mental exercise,
I take myself back some
years, to a time when
booze and blood were
intermixed,
and I know,
I know these
peach-faced
plums around
me would have
withered
at the sight
of it.

For they only love me
well-fed and amiable,
talented and humored,
spirited and full of health;
they only love me
as it’s easy,
and I guess that’s
only fair.

Belief vs. Truth

Here are my photos
Of the place I never went
The place I’ve made up stories, about
But very few—you won’t challenge me
I know you know
You’re supposed to think I went there

Photoshop, Photosmart, any pic trick
Is your friend
If all you truly do
Is stare into the middle diatance
Knowing you don’t dare pick up
Or you pick up, then swear you didn’t
At the meeting you never went to
That family, friends know they know
They’re supposed to think you did
And honk like seals
‘Cause they love you
‘Cause there’s no one better, for them
To love

I know all that, and I know
Why my problem with it,
As the Christians who hated me diagnosed,
“One who has been forgiven of little,
has only a little love.”

Law vs. Enforcement

The frat guy pissing on the white car
WAHLL, we won’t ticket him
Thiz a college town
And you hunt students
You lose tuition
The Department loses manpower
And some of us have to, then, work

The illegal hoop in the culdesac
WAHLL, we won’t ticket them
Theyz got kids
And we’ze got kids
And anyone who ain’t The Same
wahll
YOU’RE the problem

The guy who’s pissed wife called in
The Gun in his trunk
WAHLL
He gives free gas ‘n gulp
Doughnuts ‘n coffee
Like you’re posta
We won’t eeevvveeerrr ticket (chuckle)

Keep your lawn mowed
No loud music after midnight
(unless the responding officer digs it)
No trash in your yard, and past that
The Town’s a Norman Rockwell painting
Except for more speed traps
Than Zelda had levels

Tracks

On a blade of grass,
a snail leaves its mark;
in Brussels, politicians
discuss pensions;
on a tree trunk,
lovers pledge themselves;
in Washington, Congress
debates one upmanship;
in bus shelters, street kids
sign graffiti;
at world conferences,
token gestures

Rummaging the Archives

Home truths, like near dead lilies on a lake
running dry

Lifelines, like veins of a turning leaf
come autumn

Desire, taking comfort in homemade soup
in winter

Wisdom, taking its cue from the first
cuckoo of spring

Ambition, but Jack Frost’s tablecloth spread,
our places laid

Passion, saving water lilies from a lake
running dry

Love, preserving archives lest humanity
need reminding what it is

you is a problem

the problem with you is that
love is a currency, and

somewhat real. you frown upon it
just as you do with holy books.

and there is that strong vibe that you
shoot, that it is you who will not be

affected by this bullshit that
all those yes-sayers puff and blow.

and that conquers all who are not strong
enough to die properly. i promise

one day we’ll be even, when i
will be less of a me and more

of a gone. until then I will shut this bible talk,
and fuck you like a whore (the sad concept, not the reality of it).

all & nothing at all

my friend had psychosis,
or: he was, psychic disintegration.

a curious case of intelligence wasted
on a ridiculous attempt to live a life with money

not much of that, i can tell you. no
more, -less- than a priest makes fucking little boys

or girls, i don’t know what these kids are into these
days. lollipops or porn.

both, the priest would recommend. but
i won’t lose my faith in little children dying

later, than my pain. or my hate of
sonnets.

my friend still has psychosis. and who
could blame him? not me

i guess he just feels what we all fear,
all & nothing at all--

This is Pain

When I was 17... it only took a dollar to dream
By 36, it takes at least 600mg’s to silence the screams
You know... the Darkness is still having nightmares about me
Without thinking, politely I invite him in
I’ve had a hatred for taking pills ever since they were vitamins
But this physical and emotional pain calls for Paxil and Vicodin just to be alright again
See I ain’t left the battlefield, I’m trying to win the fight within
My 6 holes have closed but what about this sick soul
I just want to grab ahold and get control, I mean this is home
This is where my fears expose when I sit alone and erode
I’ve prayed my brain corrodes before it explodes
I mean sometimes, I won’t answer my phone because the dial-tone tends to remind me of a flat-line
The silence can be deafening....
I’ve been dealing with my aggression by Boxing
But I can only stomach but so much Naproxen
Chocking back Ibuprofens to not focus on the fact that I’m hurting with every jerking motion
Though I rather that than these thoughts, cause Percs don’t work on that type of hurt
I swear... I can feel the lining of my stomach getting weak
Chasing 30mg’s of Mirtazapine with another 10 worth of Ambien, trying to catch up to sleep
But it keeps leaving me
I’ve wondered if the Doctors were mis-treating me
Got me 2nd-guessing my reasoning, I don’t communicate so easily
I’m not like I used to be.....I’m still trying to get used to me
I’ve tried the Trazadone for depression, Tramadol for the pain
Though Schizophrenia may run in my family, I’ve taken long walks on the edge of insane
This is pain!
My 1st mission was to pick up Body-bags, here’s to putting life into prospective
To burning medically contaminated clothing of our fallen Brothers that I left here with and was supposed to be protecting
This is the hard truth I’m being forced into accepting
At 25 I was running marathons, by 35 I began hyperventilating while laying still
I used to love who I saw in the mirror, now it’s like staring into the eyes of a man I want to kill
This is real! This is Pain!
This is staring at the walls waiting for them to move again
This is drinking your way into a coma, trying to escape the moon again
This is pushing your family away cause your scared but you ain’t afraid of nothing, somethings got to give
This is searching for God at the bottom of those bottles so you can ask Him, how you got to live
This is wanting to hug your kids, after scaring them half to death
This is dire need of rest, the desire to catch your breath and salvage the You, you have left
This is feeling overcrowded in a crowd
This is when the silence is too loud of a sound to bear, forgetting how to show you care
This is feeling so far out there, you may as well still be over there
This is Pain
This is too many diagnosis, not enough treatment, so you just keep self-repeating
“I can beat it, I can beat it”
Poor appetite, I’m not eating.....searching for life’s meaning
But I’ve lost my way...
I’m lost.......and this hurts........
This is Pain

An Essay on Epigenetics

Like epigenetic actions
which by modulating timing
and degree of gene activity
may induce markedly different phenotypes
from the same DNA,
such as worker, queen, and soldier ants,
punctuation can alter
the intent and function
of identical words and phrases.
To pick an elementary illustration,
“Christ” vs. “Christ!”
The first simply refers to the Christian deity
while the second,
without actually concerning Christianity,
may express astonishment, irritation, or both.
For another example,
“Mary kissed John.” vs. “Mary kissed John?”
The first maintains an event happened
whereas the second questions if it happened
or, at any rate, if it occurred as stated.
Likewise, culture can channel and alter
expression of our underlying humanity.
For instance, analogous to ant castes,
within our society
culture’s modulating and channeling
of proclivities like empathy, solidarity, kindness,
veracity, and acquisitiveness
produces such classes
as workers, soldiers, and plutocrats.

Modern Olympian Ode #19:
Ticket to Ride (2016)

Pat Hickey,
head of the European Olympic Committee,
member of the Irish Olympic Committee,
was implicated in a ticket-scalping scheme
And when the police showed up to arrest him,
he tried to escape,
apparently forgetting
he was an Olympic official,
not an Olympic athlete

haiku (lessons)

Young child walks down creek
Poison ivy won’t touch him
Life’s lessons not yet learned

Scenes from a Traveler

Imagine the scene, if you can,
as if three days after the Titanic
and your ideals about humanity’s
superiority are shattered and sunken,
and even if we are superior that doesn’t
give us good values off the get go

So the scene changes, to Blanche’s tango
from Streetcar Named Desire where
she’s stuck in an endless loop of the worst
moment of her life, of your life,

You fast forward, three years,
to see if it’s worth it and the scene is like
Death Valley itself, barren, like Mars and
you try to go back but you are changed
now and you carry that future with you
avoiding eye contact with a
human incarnation of self-fulfilling prophesy.

Trade-in

    Through shoes with cardboard soles that sport a clownish grin, my blackened toes flash like rotten teeth. Crows, spooked from the pizza box atop the trash, hurl their curses from the wires on high, to the concrete canyons of misty light.

    Chalk colored piles with dark swirls, like rippled custard, dot the box, and I wonder at the absence of odor, as I lift the lid. One piece is better than none, a find at last, and some fluff for a bowel that growls.

    Sitting on the curb, my breezy feet to face, I figure that I have had worse, and smack the pizza down. Time to nap, I scan the shadowed doors about, and see my pick is occupied. A lumpy blanket squeezing hair, with weathered boots parked aside.

    Removing my flaps of shod I waft to the shadowed lee, do a trade and carry on.

    The crows are quiet as sin.

Charles Hayes bio

    Charles Hayes, a multiple Pushcart Prize Nominee, is an American who lives part time in the Philippines and part time in Seattle with his wife. A product of the Appalachian Mountains, his writing has appeared in Ky Story’s Anthology Collection, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Fable Online, Unbroken Journal, CC&D Magazine, Random Sample Review, The Zodiac Review, eFiction Magazine, Saturday Night Reader, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Scarlet Leaf Publishing House, Burning Word Journal, eFiction India, and others.

electromagnetism

I’ve studied the science,
and I’ve heard a physicist explain
that when two solid objects
are pressed together
they never actually touch.
Because electrons repel,
all objects remain one molecule apart.^*

All the molecules that make us
us
should always be pushing away.

But wait a minute.
that can’t be how it works,
because
the electricity I feel between us,
the magnetism that draws me to you,
makes me do anything but repel.

And gravity can’t hold everything together,
so all that can explain my attraction to you
is this electromagnetism —

I’m telling you, it’s a fundamental force,
and these electromagnetic waves
are the light waves, so I can see you,
the radio waves, so I can hear and sense you.
The heat I feel when I’m close to you,
well,
electromagnetism brought it all together.

Now, when it comes to the science,
know that when the Universe first started,
electromagnetism is what drew
protons and electrons together
and that created any matter in the Universe.

And all that matter
we think is so strong,
your arms when you dip me when we dance,
your hands when you hold me tight,
your fingertips when they interlock with mine
and we hold each other’s hands
whenever we’re walking together in stride,
keep in mind that right down to our electrons,
microscopically we’re always in a battle
to keep ourselves together
when our molecules are trying to tear us apart.

But this electricity I feel between us,
this magnetism that draws me to you,
this electromagnetism wins the war —

when my heart quickens for you,
I know it’s that electric signal
that causes my heart to beat for you.
And when I spring forward to you,
it’s electromagnetism in action.

It’s funny, how I can use science
so succinctly
to explain why I need you so.

And this is science, this isn’t theory,
because String Theorists may say
that were have always been bound to each other
because a butterfly beat its wings in Barbados,
and a sea lion saved her siblings
        from predators in the Pacific,
after an Antarctic ice shelf started melting.

But I say it’s more fundamental than that.
Right down to my heartbeat,
right down to how you infiltrate my senses.
Right down to this electricity between us.
Right down to this magnetism we feel.

Now that I’ve found you,
I won’t fight the laws of nature.
The only thing I will ever do
is to only fight for you.

* lines from “Us, Actually Touching”

Open Book
(jacket of stories)

I’ve put on my jacket.
I’ve set about my work.

It’s the same thing,
day after day,

I do my work, and...
everything feels heavier.

I don’t know
what is wrong with me,

I’m not sick
but I know I’m not well

and I know there’s
gotta be something

I can do about this.
It’s become so desperate

that I inject medication in me
to try to make the pain go away.

And I continue to work,
and the weight grows stronger.

Now, I know my soul,
I keep things hidden

but I’m otherwise
an open book —

I’ve worn my heart
on my sleeve,

and even kept a tissue
when the weight was too strong.

My book fills libraries.
It’s a never-ending epic.

And I look through the pages,
I look deep inside of me.

I scan the pages.
I scour the text.

And for the life of me,
I can’t find what ails me.

And as I said,
I’m an open book —

so someone should be able
to break the code of me

and figure me out
once and for all.

And all I get
are blank stares.

No one else seems
to have the answers,

so

I continue my work,
until I realize

that my jacket —
that my book jacket —

that this open book
becomes the burden.

Not because
of what I write,

but because the answers
may be buried so deep

in the reams
of written word

that no one will be able
to unlock the key

to figure out
what is truly me.

everything
is my home

I’ve always thought
I was a child of the world;
I feed off the energies
of the Universe.

Everything is bound
together intrinsically,
so everything is my home,

and nothing is my home.

I feel so connected
with everything,
and at the same time
I feel so isolated.

It’s sad,
feeling lonely
in a crowded
room.

I’ve shunned the place
where I was raised,
I avoid ties to my roots
because they’re not mine.

I told you, atom by atom
I’m a product of stardust,
and where I am home
is everywhere else.

And with no home,
oh yes yes, I have four walls
I’ve packed belongings
from my past into spaces,

but all this time
my roots have searched
for ground to seep into
while I remain

gasping for air.

Now I found a place with you,
and when I walk
out my door at night
waiting there,

right outside my front door,
my favorite constellation
in the night sky,
is right there to greet me.

And now that I look around me
I see traces of my past I love
in the greenery around my home.
For the first time in my life

I cut my own grass,
I pull my own weeds,
I water the seeds we placed
in the ground on our land.

And I’m wondering
if I can finally
take a deep breath,
inhale, exhale.

I’ve never had roots.
I want you to understand this.
But I wonder if I can
rake my fingers through this dirt —

our dirt, on our land —

well, maybe we can
get our hands a little dirty,
and finally have a place
that we can call home.

Orders

My uncle was a pilot,
and I know he served in the military,
but I don’t know him well enough.
So I only search for the stories
of the pilot with a plane of Plutonium,
dropping the fat boy over Nagasaki.

Because once you’re told what to do
thinking can exit the equation,
since everyone falls back on,
“I was only following orders.”
Because, who needs to question morals
when you have blind obedience.

*

My Netherlands proclaimed neutrality
at the start of World War Two.
Germany invaded anyway,
and only one day later
Dutch forces surrendered.
Germany then deported the Jews —

but not without the help
of the Dutch police. You know, the Dutch
had one of the highest levels
of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
Because if you can’t beat them,
join them. And just follow orders.

But still, I think of my ancestors,
Petronella, Johanna, Heusden natives
helping the resistence.
They were killed for saving lives.
That’s what you get for having beliefs;
for not following orders.

*

And yeah, when I was raised
I did what I was told, I didn’t get
in trouble, I was a good little girl.
And what did it get me, a life
of doing what I was told to do.
Until I was left with one war, one voice.

But that one voice was only my own,
and I no longer had any orders —
just a deafening silence in my effort
to pick up the pieces, so I could have
my own justice, on my own terms,
in my own time. And still I fight —

I wonder if the battle will kill me.
I just don’t know how long
I’ll be able to fight an uphill battle
when the cards are perpetually
stacked against me
and I’m left to fight all alone.

You try to do things on your own,
but the political pundits say one thing
and the talking heads say another.
But you’ve gained the brains
and after all this time
you should know by now

that you’re making the choices now.
You don’t have to follow orders any more.

Janet Kuypers Bio

    Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
    She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
    She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images. Starting at this time Kuypers released a large number of CD releases currently available for sale at iTunes or amazon, including “Across the Pond”(a 3 CD set of poems by Oz Hardwick and Janet Kuypers with assorted vocals read to acoustic guitar of both Blues music and stylized Contemporary English Folk music), “Made Any Difference” (CD single of poem reading with multiple musicians), “Letting It All Out”, “What we Need in Life” (CD single by Janet Kuypers in Mom’s Favorite Vase of “What we Need in Life”, plus in guitarist Warren Peterson’s honor live recordings literally around the globe with guitarist John Yotko), “hmmm” (4 CD set), “Dobro Veče” (4 CD set), “the Stories of Women”, “Sexism and Other Stories”, “40”, “Live” (14 CD set), “an American Portrait” (Janet Kuypers/Kiki poetry to music from Jake & Haystack in Nashville), “Screeching to a Halt” (2008 CD EP of music from 5D/5D with Janet Kuypers poetry), “2 for the Price of 1” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from Peter Bartels), “the Evolution of Performance Art” (13 CD set), “Burn Through Me” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from The HA!Man of South Africa), “Seeing a Psychiatrist” (3 CD set), “The Things They Did To You” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “Hope Chest in the Attic” (audio CD set), “St. Paul’s” (3 CD set), “the 2009 Poetry Game Show” (3 CD set), “Fusion” (Janet Kuypers poetry in multi CD set with Madison, WI jazz music from the Bastard Trio, the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and Paul Baker), “Chaos In Motion” (tracks from Internet radio shows on Chaotic Radio), “Chaotic Elements” (audio CD set for the poetry collection book and supplemental chapbooks for The Elements), “etc.” audio CD set, “Manic Depressive or Something” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “Singular”, “Indian Flux” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “The Chaotic Collection #01-05”, “The DMJ Art Connection Disc 1” (Janet Kuypers poetry to music from the DMJ Art Connection), “Oh.” audio CD, “Live At the Café” (3 CD set), “String Theory” (Janet Kuypers reading other people's poetry, with music from “the DMJ Art Connection), “Scars Presents WZRD radio” (2 CD set), “SIN - Scars Internet News”, “Questions in a World Without Answers”, “Conflict • Contact • Control”, “How Do I Get There?”, “Sing Your Life”, “Dreams”, “Changing Gears”, “The Other Side”, “Death Comes in Threes”, “the final”, “Moving Performances”, “Seeing Things Differently”, “Live At Cafe Aloha”, “the Demo Tapes” (Mom’s Favorite Vase), “Something Is Sweating” (the Second Axing), “Live In Alaska” EP (the Second Axing), “the Entropy Project”, “Tick Tock” (with 5D/5D), “Six Eleven” “Stop. Look. Listen.”, “Stop. Look. Listen to the Music” (a compilation CD from the three bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds & Flowers” and “The Second Axing”), and “Change Rearrange” (the performance art poetry CD with sampled music).
    From 2010 through 2015 Kuypers also hosted the Chicago poetry open mic the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting weekly feature and open mic podcasts that were also released as YouTube videos.
    In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), the three collection books from 2004: Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# cc& hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me, Under the Sea (photo book), the Periodic Table of Poetry, a year long Journey, Bon Voyage!, and the mini books Part of my Pain, Let me See you Stripped, Say Nothing, Give me the News, when you Dream tonight, Rape, Sexism, Life & Death (with some Slovak poetry translations), Twitterati, and 100 Haikus, that coincided with the June 2014 release of the two poetry collection books Partial Nudity and Revealed.

Parris Island

    Taking the bus across the causeway from Beaufort, S.C. with four or five other people, I enter the MCRD (Marine Corps Recruit Depot) gates and arrive at the Parris Island induction bus stop in the spring of 1967. A smiling Marine sergeant wearing a smokey bear hat immediately hops aboard and politely speaks to the driver and all the other civilian passengers as they get off. Beginning to think that this smiling marine is going to give me a friendly welcome and point me in the direction that I should go, I smile. But the sergeant’s face transforms right before my eyes. In fact his whole demeanor changes to one of hatred as he screams for me to get off the bus. Moving as fast as I can, but not fast enough for him, I scurry off the bus in a state of fear and shock.
    I am in the middle of what looks like a large parking lot in front of a big square three story wooden building. On the asphalt are painted pairs of white footprints. Telling me to stand in a pair of footprints and not to move unless I want to die, the sergeant quickly disappears into the wooden building.
    After what seems like a long time another sergeant comes running out the door, leaps to the ground from atop the access steps and stops just about a foot from me. Sneering directly into my face for about thirty seconds, his mean black eyes make it plain that he does not like what he sees.
    Not nearly as tall as me but extraordinarily fit looking in his tailored uniform, he is the epitome of a small packaged stick of explosive. The name tag under the many decorations and rifle and pistol medals says that his name is Sgt. Ramos.

    Twenty six years old and a married father of a small child, Sgt. Ramos quit school and joined the Marine Corps some years before. One of the ribbons he carries is the purple heart with two stars which indicates that he has been wounded three times.
    Sgt. Ramos walks around me, telling me how to stand at attention and ridiculing me for my inexperience. Suddenly he leans to within an inch of my ear and says, “You remind me of a girl, slime ball. A big weak pussy. Are you a girl shit head? Are you trying to sneak your weak pussy into my beloved Corps, lady?”
    Turning my head to reply, I am cut short by Sgt. Ramos’ scream.
    “What the fuck do you think you are doing!! Get your eyes front and center!! Are you trying to eye fuck me, pussy!? Are you queer for me, lady?”
    “No Sir,” I reply.
    “I can’t hear you civilian slime, you’re not loud enough pansy ass! Pick up your bag and get your ass into that building when I tell you.”
    Turning and walking toward the reception building, turning only his head, Sgt. Ramos shouts over his shoulder, “Do it!”

    Getting inside, I discover two other drill instructors waiting for me. One is Sergeant Decker, a barrel chested Marine of medium height and build. The other is Corporal Star who resembles Sgt. Ramos in height and build. Both are unmarried and about the same age as Sgt. Ramos.

    All three DIs are yelling for me to get up the stairs to the next floor while snapping at my heels like a pack of wolves after a wounded prey. Reaching the top of the stairs as quickly as I can, I pass through a couple of swinging doors into a squad bay. It is a huge hall-like room with bunk beds or racks lining every wall. Standing in front of their racks like stone statues, staring straight ahead, and looking scared shitless, are fifty or sixty recruits of all shapes and sizes These shocked souls constitute platoon 144 of the 1st. battalion, MCRD, Parris Island.

    After about an hour of harassment, a tall much older Staff Sergeant Rhiner walks in. He has a wrinkled tired looking face that shows several pockmarks. The manner he exhibits is one of confidence and disinterested discipline. Sgt. Ramos introduces him as our senior drill instructor and indicates that his word is law. Trash like me and the others are not worthy of such a distinguished drill instructor he maintains. And if ever we embarrass our senior drill instructor he will personally make us regret it.
    Staff Sergeant Rhiner promptly orders us at ease and tells us to gather around and sit on the deck. At ease for the first time since I got here, I notice that something new is about to happen. The difference between Ssgt. Rhiner and the other D.I.s is like night and day. Showing no emotion one way or the other, he informs us about where we are, where we are going, and what he expects of us. Indicating that he will get what he expects or, failing that, he will get rid of us one way or another, he assures us that he will have his way. Otherwise, he continues, if a bad apple is allowed to exist, it will hurt those around it. And Ssgt. Rhiner is not about to hurt good marines because of some turd. Looking like he is somewhere else, his eyes tell a story that I have no trouble believing.
    Finishing up his introduction, Ssgt. Rhiner nods to the other three drill instructors standing off to the side and slowly walks out the swinging doors of the squad bay.

    After getting a haircut, our first meal, and supplies, we are herded to the PX, or post exchange, to purchase our health and comfort gear such as bath and laundry soap, toothpaste etc. And cigarettes to smoke during the rare times that the smoking lamp is lit. The cost of these articles will be removed from our first $78.00 check, the monthly amount a private earns in the U. S. military.

    The squad bay for platoon 144 is located in a small white wooden building just big enough to house a platoon of marines. Situated along the edge of a swamp that runs to the sea, our squad bay faces the huge parade deck. In the back between the squad bay and the swamp are a long row of concrete scrub benches with water spigots for doing laundry. Inside the set up is like it was at receiving except that there are localized showers and toilet facilities. This part of the squad bay is called the head. Also there is a small office area with a cot for the lone duty drill instructor at night.
    I first learn to travel without moving here. Looking at the fixed eyes of the private across from me, I turn into my mind and return to places I visited or make up things to turn over. This eases the tedium and gives me my first encounter with the possibilities of meditation. I learn that it is not such a mystic endeavor shrouded in hazy principles but one that can be very practical for relieving stress.

    A couple of privates have nervous breakdowns during these first few days and are taken away in straight jackets never to be seen again. One minute we are standing at attention waiting for whatever is next and the next minute one of us is squirming on the deck, screaming and kicking until carried away. Some go that way. Others go other ways.

    In front of a marching platoon is the guide that carries the guidon, which is a long staff that flies the platoon pennant. It is the guide that reports to the drill instructor and is responsible for the actions of the platoon. Eventually I am ordered to the front to carry the standard and guide the platoon.
    After we get the hang of close order drill we are issued M-14 rifles and learn to drill with them as well. Wearing a full transport pack, helmets, and carrying M-14s, our load is considerable. Consequently I lose about thirty pounds quickly.

***

    About halfway through the week of live firing on the rifle range I witness a scene that the movie director Stanley Kubrick takes to the extreme in one of his movies: Full Metal Jacket. A full metal jacket is the cover for the 7.62mm projectile that the M-14 fires.
    As the score is being tallied for a series of rapid fire, I notice that in the next lane, Pvt. Munsey is continuing to have trouble with not jerking the trigger. This time he doesn’t even get off his full magazine. And Sgt. Decker, the D.I. manning that part of the firing line, is giving him hell.
    “What the fuck is wrong with you dip shit, you act like a scared little pussy jerking her meat instead of firing a rifle! Can’t even hit the target you swine head, and you think you can be in my Corps!?”
    Munsey, a small thin kid, just can not get comfortable with his weapon. As the guide I know that he did ok prior to coming to the rifle range. But here he is spooked and just can’t seem to get over it.
    Standing over Pvt. Munsey, who is still in the prone position on his stomach, Sgt. Decker continues to give him hell.
    “Answer me shit face!!! You want to go and get my good marines killed because you can’t use a weapon properly don’t you scum bag!?”
    Muncey suddenly stands up as Sgt. Decker continues to rant and rave about his character. Munsey’s face comes to about the level of Decker’s chest. And his eyes never waver from that chest as he silently steps back and raises the muzzle of the still locked and loaded M-14 to point at Sgt. Decker’s heart. Decker freezes mute in mid sentence and the last drop of blood immediately drains from his face. An instant later, politely and quietly, Sgt. Decker finds his voice again.
    “Just take it easy Munsey. It’s just discipline and training. It’s just part of the game, nothing personal.”
    Big tears begin to run down Munsey’s face as the shooting coach and another nearby D.I. slowly move closer to the scene. Decker can barely be heard as he almost whispers, “Just put the rifle down Munsey, we can work this out. No harm done. There’s no need for anybody to get hurt. Listen to me Munsey, just lower the muzzle to the deck.”
    After a frozen silence private Munsey lowers the muzzle, drops the rifle, and starts screaming. At the same time the shooting coach grabs the rifle, flips the magazine out, and ejects the chambered round while the two D.I.s try to restrain Munsey. He is really out of it and even the coach has to help hold on to him. With three men holding him down, Munsey screams over and over for a full two minutes and continues to be pinned to the deck for another 5 minutes. Finally a white ambulance arrives and all of them get Munsey into a jacket, strapped to the stretcher, and in the back of the ambulance. I watch the ambulance as it slowly drives away down the firing line and wonder at the pressures being brought to bear. Beginning to fully realize that it is not just a game as Sgt. Decker had pleaded, I know that it is serious business. And that people could and will die accordingly.

    Ssgt. Rhiner, the senior drill instructor, is roaming the firing line as the final scores are tallied. Seeing me remove my shooting glove and rifle sling, he comes over and asks what I shot from 500 yards. Replying that I had shot a possible, which was a perfect score, I try to stay cool as I watch Ssgt. Rhiner crack the smallest smile and do a little jump. It is the most emotion I have ever seen from him. Only one other marine in the whole battalion shoots higher. From my own platoon, he is a stocky square faced Mexican with thick glasses that make his eyes look like saucers. Having shown no remarkable ability at anything else during training, this feat will still earn him the private first class stripe upon graduation.

    The one private in our platoon who fails the most important test in boot camp is living a life of hell. All the D.I.s are constantly harassing him and telling him that he is not worthy of the marines and that they wish he would die or simply go away. They no longer call him by his proper name, which is Pvt. Renske, but instead call him Pvt. douche bag. He is a nervous little scarecrow looking kid with a face full of pimples. Since we have been back from the range he has once been made to shave with a bucket on his head, cutting himself several times. And after chow this morning he is not allowed to make the routine head call. It is the time that the whole platoon is conditioned to have bowel movements and Pvt. Renske is made to remain at attention while the rest of us file into the head and do our business.
    A short while later Pvt. Renske again pleads, “Sir, the private request permission to make a head call.”
    Sgt. Ramos, the duty D.I. this morning, walks over to Renske and sadistically inquires.
    “Do you have to take a shit, Pvt. douche bag?”
    “Yes sir,” Renske replies.
    Sgt. Ramos strolls back and forth in front of Renske and in a booming voice yells, “Platoon at ease! I want you to take a good look at this piece of shit who will get good marines killed because he can’t handle a weapon!”
    All eyes turn toward Renske.
    “Which do you want to do the most douche bag,” Sgt. Ramos continues, “urinate or defecate?”
    “Defecate sir.” Renske answers as he slightly bends and stares at the deck.
    Sgt. Ramos continues to stroll back and forth while pretending to be in deep contemplation.
    “Are there any swinging dicks in this platoon that think private douche bag should get a head call?”
    Except for the click of Sgt. Ramos’ boot heels on the polished deck there is complete silence. Staring at the deck while holding his hands behind his back, Ramos paces a couple more turns and stops. Suddenly calling the platoon to attention, he rushes over to scream in Renske’s face.
    “Listen here you douche bag!! You are worse than worthless! You are a dangerous hazard to my good marines because you can not fight! While you are blindly filling the air with lead from your useless weapon marines will die. I hate you!!! I want you to disappear so as not to besmirch the honor of this platoon and get good men killed! If you have a shit attack and it kills you, good fucking riddance!! Permission to use the head is denied douche bag.”
    Pausing an instant with a final hateful look, Sgt. Ramos spins around and returns to his office.
    A heartbeat later Pvt. Renske convulses a couple of times as a stream of watery shit splashes out of his un-bloused trouser leg onto the shiny deck. The stench immediately fills the squad bay.
    Called to by the gagging marine next to Pvt. Renske, Sgt. Ramos returns and orders Renske to clean it up with his bare hands.
    “Guide!!” he yells to me. “Get your ass over here and make sure this worthless piece of shit does his job!!”
    Hopping to, I rush to that area of the squad bay but immediately I am taken a few steps away by Sgt. Ramos.
    “Guide, this is your platoon,” he says in a whisper. “This shit bird doesn’t belong in it. Make him clean this shit up and make him go away.”
    Locking my eyes, as if it were a done deal, Sgt. Ramos dusts his hands, and walks away.

    Renske is crying with shit all over himself when Sgt. Ramos returns with that same sadistic smile that I first experienced coming aboard Parris Island.
    “You can have him later guide,” Ramos says. “Take him out back now and get him cleaned up.”
    Taking Renske to the laundry benches near the swamp, I have him take his scrub brush and begin to clean himself and his utilities. While Renske cleans I tell him that he had better get his ass out of here. Indicating that he is in for much worse than today, I tell him to get while he can.
    Before Renske can get anywhere near clean Sgt. Ramos sticks his head out the back door and calls us back inside. Returning to attention in front of our racks along with the others, for perhaps an hour, we remain in that position. Only the sudden sound of the slamming back door screen breaks the silence as Private Renske runs for the snake infested swamps. Immediately Sgt. Ramos is alerted.
    Looking genuinely happy, Sgt. Ramos tells the platoon that he will give douche bag a good run before reporting him. That way he will never come back to platoon 144.

    As we progress toward graduation and the end of boot camp our time for mess duty comes, as with all training platoons. Having no designated position, I usually post myself on the serving line if I have no other orders from the mess sergeant. On the serving line I get the rare opportunity to see women as the BAMs, short for broad ass marines, file through for their mess.
    Women drill instructors are just as mean as the men. Asked for more mashed potatoes by a chubby woman recruit, I don’t have time to respond. Her female D.I., a thin sergeant as tall as me, overhears the request and rushes over to tell the girl that she better keep her mouth shut and never speak to a male mess recruit. I think that she is going to jump in my shit too but she just quickly throws her head back, sites me down her nose and moves away.

    Near the end of training, any time a member of the platoon fucks up in some way or another, I will get called for it. A roar will be heard coming from the D.I.s office.“Guide, get your ass in here!!!”
    Each time I hear that my ass puckers. Running to stand at a right angle to the office door, I slam the bulkhead with the heel of my hand three times and scream, “Sir, Private Hayes reporting as ordered.”
    One of the D. I.s will reach out the door, jerk me into the office, and shut the door. Informing me that my platoon is fucking up and that I had better do something about it, the D.I. will knock me around. If there are two D.I.s they will take turns yelling and threatening me while knocking me from one to the other. Many such beatings do I take. The sessions usually end with me screaming just as loud as the D.I.s that I am going to fix the problem.
    Dismissed, I return to the platoon, find the offending private and vent my rage upon him. However never do I strike him. Nor does he ever try to buck my authority despite the awful rhetoric I pile on him. Some in the platoon could pass for bodybuilders with huge chests and arms, while I am just a tall skinny guide full of rage. Yet they do not think twice about a rebuttal. For me this is enough, and as the beatings grow more intense and the insistence that I have to kick ass grows stronger, I resist the idea that I have to strike a private to get him to perform better. For me it is a principle that is a part of my aloofness. And the D.I.s must see this for they never let up.

    Measured for the fancy dress blue Marine Corps uniform, I figure that I might be a pick for the Leatherneck Award. That is it. Nothing is said about it but everyone knows that one marine from every platoon is designated as the outstanding marine of that platoon and is awarded a dress blue uniform with one stripe for graduation. I take the beatings, proudly carry the guidon, and excel on the rifle range. And, at the request of my D.I.s I risk my integrity by helping others who can barely read or write pass the written tests that otherwise they would fail. But I do not show that I can fight.
    Nothing about this situation is ever put into plain words. It is, of course, against Marine Corps policy to kick ass when training troops. But like so much that has come before, I can see the whole picture here where the rubber meets the road. I begin to waver in my principles.

    A couple of weeks before the end of boot camp Ssgt. Rhiner calls me to his office. Ssgt. Rhiner, the man with the dead eyes and no emotion, the top of the tight knit platoon command, and the old D.I. who can run all day and never sweat. The leader of us that are a part of this quick stop on the way to a folly greater than any of us know. One who stretches back to the old Corps and times that were cast in a different light.
    I am told to stand at ease. In a normal, calm, and flat voice Ssgt. Rhiner says that the platoon is doing ok but it can do better. To win the honor of the best platoon in the company is important to him and to do this we have to get better. Honor demands struggle and fighting is part of the struggle. Where there is no fighting there is no honor. I listen and know what is being said out loud. And what is being said underneath.
    Ssgt. Rhiner asks me if I really understand what he is saying and I quickly reply in the affirmative. Looking away, he tells me to get back to the platoon and make sure that honor gets its due.

    That evening in the shower I am pissed that I am apparently failing to meet the standard of my superiors. Crowded in the shower as usual, I am in no mood for the grab ass jokes that sometimes occur. And it just so happens that another marine lets out a whoop when someone turns the hot water to cold. Much like me in other respects, tall, thin, and fit, he is a black private from Mississippi. Telling him to shut up, I watch him dance out of the cold water, his eyes losing their merriment as they change to dark hostile circles. He faces me.
    “You motherfucker,” he says.
    Our eyes lock, we both take a step forward on the slippery shower deck, and unload right hands at the same time. I weave away from his and deliver a glancing blow that brings us slipping and sliding into a clinch. However I am quicker and manage to get a head lock with one arm and deliver slight punches with the other while we slip all over. Most of my swings do nothing as the other private struggles to free his head. Hearing someone call for attention, we look up to see Ssgt. Rhiner standing in the shower room door. Immediately I release my hold as all of us naked souls stand to attention. Ssgt. Rhiner tells me and the kid from Mississippi to get our skivvies on and report to his office.

    Asked by Rhiner what happened, I state that the other marine made a remark about my mother and that I objected. Asking the other marine if that is true, Ssgt. Rhiner listens as the other marine confirms that it is.
    Looking at us with that flat cold expression, Rhiner dismisses us and that is the end of it.
    Consequently perhaps, only when some serious infraction is committed does my corporal punishment continue. Honor seems to have found it’s place and the D.I.s seem to be content about that. They begin to prepare us for our final competition, close order drill.

***

    The drill competition is complete and the platoons are seated in four separate stands at the edge of the parade deck. Ssgt. Rhiner and I sit in front of our platoon, the guidon between us. As the higher ups are tallying the results Ssgt. Rhiner, without turning his head, says, “Guide, when they announce us as the winner I want you to stay on my right side and follow a step behind me to receive the award.”
    As I glance out of the corner of my eye, I can see that Rhiner is so sure of winning that he actually looks a little alive. It is only for a moment. The announcement is made and the award does not go to Platoon 144. It goes to platoon 145. As the guide and senior drill instructor of that platoon step forward Ssgt. Rhiner can not contain his disappointment.
    “God damn it,” he mutters, “we won that God damn show but he,” meaning the battalion commander, “played his favorites.”
    I can plainly hear the bitterness coming from the murmurs beside me and wonder at the importance of winning. Obviously it is an insulting disappointment for the senior drill instructor but I feel thankful to just have it over with and be that much closer to graduation. However I know that we were perfect and believe every word that I just heard.

    All four drill instructors are present in the squad bay. They call the platoon to attention and tell us to stand by for the reading of our MOSs or military occupational specialities. The MOS is a good indicator of where a marine will be heading after training. As the names and MOSs are read I notice that the people of color, especially the Southern blacks, are assigned to the positions of rifleman, machine gunner, or similar high risk jobs. I know this because some of the D.I.s have come from these same specialties. And sometimes as they read them off they make references to how risky they are, usually in a joking manner. But the look on the faces of some of the designees is not so funny. Almost all of these people, when finished with advanced infantry training, will head directly to WESTPAC (Western Pacific) and Vietnam. Hearing my MOS, I don’t know for sure what it is. Nor does anybody else, except that it is in communications. It probably means training somewhere stateside before entering the fleet marine force and WESTPAC.

    The weather is perfect for graduation day and all the hoop la. John Philip Sousa marches play over the loudspeakers and the platoons do a pretty good show of moving past each other as we drill back and forth, finally coming to attention in a neat company formation before all the big brass of Parris Island. Standing forward of the company with three others, I am in dress blues as I receive the Leatherneck Award and promotion to Private First Class. Taking the award and warrant from the Battalion Commander, I shake hands and salute while photographers snap my picture for the hometown paper.

    Ssgt. Rhiner and I stand together under the huge Iwo Jima monument of the marines pushing up the flag on Mount Suribachi. We shake hands as our picture is taken. A good bit taller than me, Ssgt. Rhiner looks down along the underside of his smokey bear cover with a genuine, almost embarrassed smile.
    “Congratulations, you were an outstanding recruit P.F.C. Hayes. I really mean that. Very outstanding and I wish you luck as you move on in the Corps.”
    After the grand hoop la of the ceremony, the simple congratulations of Ssgt. Rhiner humbles and honors me.
    “Thank you sir.”

    That evening when taps brings the day to a close we have our sea bags packed and ready to load onto Greyhound buses that will take us a good ways north to Camp Geiger and advanced infantry training. Sleeping lightly, I will hear the needle touch the reveille record one more time, over the loudspeaker just outside my window. I and others will do what every marine does after boot camp, no matter where we might be heading. We will learn the basic fundamentals of the infantry marine, the raison d’etre for every leatherneck.

    Sitting at a window seat and looking out over the brilliant blue waters that surround the causeway out of Parris Island, I am no longer the same. I am young, only 20 years old, but still older than most on this bus. For the next three years my education is out of my hands. And because of this, I feel a loss. Yet, as the bus exits the causeway and enters the woods of the mainland, I realize that I have shown I can make the grade. I am good enough to get by and that is exactly what I will do. This certainty lulls me fast asleep.

Charles Hayes bio

    Charles Hayes, a multiple Pushcart Prize Nominee, is an American who lives part time in the Philippines and part time in Seattle with his wife. A product of the Appalachian Mountains, his writing has appeared in Ky Story’s Anthology Collection, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Fable Online, Unbroken Journal, CC&D Magazine, Random Sample Review, The Zodiac Review, eFiction Magazine, Saturday Night Reader, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Scarlet Leaf Publishing House, Burning Word Journal, eFiction India, and others.

It Don’t Mean Nothing: A War Memoir

    As the pop flare gradually falls to earth, hissing like an angry cat, surreal waves of green and yellow light up the landscape beyond the perimeter. Sloshing down the trench under a monsoon rain, I enter the radio bunker and find a couple of waterlogged grunts, or infantrymen, wrapped in their ponchos. Feeling no pity, I watch their cowed expressions and shake my head.
    “How come you guys aren’t in position?”
    Searching briefly for an excuse but finding none, one of them says, “Aw hell, give us a break corporal, there ain’t nothing out there but maybe a rock ape or two. You ain’t been here long enough to know.”
    Knowing that their tour of duty can be extended for disobeying orders, my reply is quick.
    “I been here long enough to know that if you two don’t get back to your positions you’ll find out that you’re not as short as you think you are.”
    Grudgingly picking up their gear, they give me a dirty look, and return to their post.

    Keying the radio, I quietly report.
    “Yankee one, yankee 3, sit-rep all secure, over.”
    “Three, one, roger, out,” comes the reply.
    Resuming my post, I duck below the edge of the trench and light a cigarette. The patrol should be on it’s way back by now. Looking to where they will come through the gate in the concertina wire, I see the red glowing eyes of the sentry dog and wonder if it knows how close to death it is. Suddenly green streaks of light cut the darkness about 200 meters out. The following ack-ack-ack of an AK-47 quickly travels the short distance and tells me that there is enemy contact. Red tracers split the darkness from the opposite direction followed by the rapid burst of M-16 fire. Hollow thumps of grenade explosions mix with the booms of the 12 gauge double ought bush gun. All over the night becomes full of the sound and illumination of what seems like a hundred pop flares going off.
    Marines straight from sleep hop to the bunker lines as a helicopter ‘spooky’ gunship arrives and mini-guns the enemy. Looking like one big red screen descending from the darkness, a curtain of lead sweeps their grid. All other fire ceases and an eerie quietness takes hold, broken only by the zipping sound of the mini guns. In awe of such firepower, I look down the trench line at the flare washed faces turned to the sky. It seems they are paying homage to Zeus or some other God practicing his art of war from the heavens.

    The contact broken and its mission accomplished, the chopper leaves as dawn breaks so quickly it is like waking up from a dream. Colonel Blevins, the battalion CO, or commanding officer, is now on the line. I hear Tim, his radio operator, relaying orders for the patrol to break cover, reconnoiter, and come in.
    All eyes are on the gate as the patrol appears, half carrying, half dragging two body laden ponchos. Dropping the bodies near a little bridge over the trench, they hold up while the Colonel approaches.
    A small crowd begins to gather, mostly officers but a few enlisted as well. Many snap pictures as Tim and I stand together off to the side and eye the lumpy ponchos.
    Pulling back the largest cover, the Colonel reveals a Vietnamese man dressed in khaki shorts, a black long sleeve shirt, and Ho Chi Minhs, or sandals made from rubber tires. His face is just a pair of cloudy dark eyes set in a ripped and bloody mass. A dark hole exists where one of his ears used to be.
    Quickly scanning the members of the patrol, I wonder which one has the ear.
    The rest of the body is not in much better shape. Pools of half clotted blood are starting to darken the yellow mud around the edges of the poncho. But for the clothes, what lies there could be the half finished job of a butcher suddenly called away from a slaughter.
    Except for the occasional whirring sound of a camera advancing film, it is utterly quiet as the Colonel moves to the other smaller body and pulls back the poncho. A large conical hat covers the head with the rest of the body in remarkably better shape than the first. Wearing black silk pants, shirt, and the same kind of sandals, this Vietnamese appears to have been hit only in the upper torso.
    Lifting the hat, the Colonel releases a long stream of black hair caught in the chin strap. Cascading down to frame the face of a lovely Vietnamese girl of perhaps sixteen, her eyes closed, the hair covers her bloody shirt. She seems only asleep.
    Not a camera shutter is launched nor a word said. A scene which no mere camera can capture lies before us. It is something that only we can realize. Something that is and forever will be present to us youngsters of war. Always present even in its absence. For it is our girl friend, our sister or our buddy’s sister, the dream girl we want to go home to, or the one that we hope to find when we get there. It is a piece of us that lies there dead. Without a word the Colonel quickly places the hat back over the girl’s face and leaves. There is no weapon found.

    Rooter, one of our corporals before he transferred to the Marine Air Wing at Chu Lai, literally drops in aboard a chopper for a quick visit. Deciding to have a little fun for old-time sake, we catch a USO show that is passing through. Almost always these shows consist of a bare bones plywood stage where a Korean band with at least a couple of pretty girls in short skirts perform, dancing, and singing American songs. Laughter, macho jokes, and too much to drink are standard fare at these events. Rooter and I quickly squeeze into the little show for some fun and beer.

    Making it inside the same hooch, or plywood and G.I. metal shack, that Rooter used to share with me, we sit around and rap about life down in Chu Lai. Rooter impatiently describes his new unit as the same ole same ole and suddenly asks, “Hayes, you want to get high?”
    “What do you mean,” I reply, “we just drank all that beer?”
    He smiles and rolls his eyes.
    “Yeah, but that was beer, I got some really fine Chu Lai weed. You ever try any weed?”
    “Yeah, I tried it a couple of times, it doesn’t do anything for me, can’t see what all the hoop la is about.”
    Rooter eyes me skeptically.
    “Yeah, where did you ever smoke any pot?”
    “Back in the world, West Virginia,” I say.
    I am about to elaborate when he bursts out laughing.
    “West Virginia! You mean you never smoked any Nam weed? You really are a cherry, Hayes. Come on, let’s go outside and smoke a joint. Then you can tell me it doesn’t do anything for you.”
    “Are you crazy,” I exclaim. “You mean you’re packing around marijuana?”
    “Hey take it easy,” Rooter replies. “You’d be surprised at the number of heads around here. It’s cool. Come on, I’m going to show you what’s happening.”

    Behind some refrigeration units near the hooch it is dark and quiet. At this time of night anybody not on the line or radio watch is usually asleep.
    Rooter pulls up the bloused leg of his jungle trousers and takes a little cellophane package of pre-rolled joints out of his sock and fires one up. Inhaling deeply, he passes the joint to me.
    “Take a big drag and hold it in,” he says in a hushed voice.
    I do as instructed. The pot seeds mixed in the joint sometimes explode in a small shower of sparks, lighting up the darkness around us. Back and forth we pass the joint until it is too short to smoke. Rooter eats what is left. Neither of us say anything for a while. We just sit on the ground and watch the night sky.
    Finally Rooter asks, “Man, how you doing, good weed huh?”
    “I don’t feel a thing,” I say, “just a little bloated from the beer.”
    “You’re shitting me, Hayes,” he exclaims.
    Rooter goes back into his sock and produces another joint, lights it, and passes it directly to me.
    Taking the joint, I pull a long drag and offer it back.
    “Hell no, not for me,” Rooter says. “I’m totally wasted. Wow, man, not getting off.....you smoke that one by yourself.”
    “OK, but this shit don’t affect me, I tell you.”
    After sitting there for a couple minutes, Rooter quietly looking around at the night, me puffing on that joint, holding it in and exhaling, a sudden rush hits me. Nothing like the change over time that alcohol brings on. It is like one moment the world is one way and the next it is different in the extreme. Time takes on aspects that are foreign to me. Looking down, I see the half smoked joint dead in my hand. Lifting my eyes, I see Rooter staring at me with a big shit eating grin on his face. Reaching the joint toward him, I say in a voice that is dead serious but sounds ridiculous, “You can have this back now.”
    “Did you get your ass kicked, cherry,” Rooter laughs. “Still don’t affect you, huh?”
    I now definitely know better than that.
    “Lord have mercy, I am smashed. What the hell am I going to do. I can hardly move.”
    Laughing, Rooter stands, reaches down, and grabs my upper arm to help me stand.
    “Come on let’s get you back inside the hooch, you look like you’re ready for the rack.”
    Rooter gets me inside, sets me on the rack, says goodbye and leaves, never to be seen again. Just off into the night, or back to Chu Lai or some other unit. Not even carrying a weapon, just that ass kicking Chu Lai weed, like some vagabond who has quit the war and is now just touring the places he has been.

    Having received a small box of cheeses from my mother for the holidays, I stretch that box, a little at a time, with my friends. This Christmas of 1968 and many of those that will follow will always be associated with this gaily packaged box of cheeses resting under my M-16 rifle. I take a picture of the little set up for my personal Christmas card.
    I will give it to my stepkids many years later......before they and their mother leave me, not having been with me even a year.

    There are places and times in people’s lives that seem to take on a significance that one looking on might find odd. But for me, as meager and poor as it is in a war zone, this Christmas, along with the yuletide cheeses, will become my last Christmas with any meaning. At this point in my tour I am struggling to get along and remain a part of the World which I consider to be the USA. But my grip is not as tight as it once was. Now instead of an angel atop my Xmas center piece there is a rifle. Things, however slightly, have changed.

    Time inside the wire is slow and that means time to fill the nagging empty feelings with the various activities that can be dreamed up. But step beyond the concertina and you are as full up of bone and blood as you can stand. Patrols and listening posts are out in the bush every night. Then there is the observation post beyond that. I have been on them all, humping the radio because the grunts have a hard time keeping anyone who can operate the radio, change batteries, and keep track of the different callsigns and frequencies for things such as med-evacs and fire support. Long hours spent in the COC or commanding officer’s communications bunker assures that a marine from com section is up on all that stuff.
    LPs or listening posts are the worst. At dark three guys with rifles, grenade launcher, radio, and a starlight scope go out a couple of hundred meters to a strategic place. Settling in, they try to see through the hazy scope what is going on around them and report in every hour. No digging in or any of that defensive stuff, just quietly hunkering down and trying to freeze in place for hours on end. The joke is you listen until you hear them coming and report it, hoping that they pass over you without knowing it. In reality a listening post is fodder, no more, no less. And if you are unlucky enough to be there when Victor Charlie comes you are unlikely to survive any fight from such an exposed position. But it will eliminate the element of surprise. Everybody hates listening posts and knows that they are throwaway jobs with a posthumous purple heart as their only reward.
    Once I thought I heard someone creeping through the bush toward us and my heart pounded so hard that I had to listen between beats. Peering in the direction of the sound for a couple of slow minutes, I finally discovered that it was just an insect moving among the weeds a few feet from my ear.

    I am probably the senior corporal in the whole company and have been denied promotion once....maybe for saying that I did not intend to stay aboard when my hitch was up. But after a few awards for doing a good show with the things that the military throws up for morale or busy work, I am informed that I have made sergeant. I will receive my promotion the next day.

    The com section lieutenant, an ex-school teacher from San Diego, forms us up and makes sure that I am presentable. The company commander, an older grey haired mustang, or an officer that rises from the lower ranks, comes out of the company hooch, says a few words, and asks me to step forward. Walking up close, he squarely faces me.
    “Corporal Hayes, you have earned this promotion and I am pleased to give it to you. I know that you will not stay in the Marine Corps but I hope that you will use this promotion to inspire you to achieve success in your civilian life wherever you go. Congratulations.”
    “Thank you, sir.”
    I take the warrant, shake the Captain’s hand, and honorably present a salute, which he sincerely returns. Like another click of the clock, I suppose, it is done.
    Looking tired and sad the captain tells the company 1st Sergeant to dismiss us and goes back into the hooch. While I treat the whole thing respectfully, I know that the only reason I am promoted is because it would be an embarrassment for me to remain a corporal. The old captain is not, nor ever was, part of my problem. He is old and near the bottom of the back side. I trust him to not try and gung ho his way to greater things at another’s expense. Just like me, he is simply trying to get through Vietnam and back to the world. I saw it written on his face and heard it in his words, and for that I am thankful. Other than that the whole thing means nothing nor, more importantly, does it change anything.

    During lulls in the war things get so boring that almost any excitement is welcome. It is also a good time to get into Da Nang and the giant military PX or post exchange to buy some hard liquor. Tim and I do just that by hopping a convoy into the crowded city. We jump off just on the far side of the local shanty town near the PX and cut across the squalor of the makeshift village.
    Betel nut chewing women squat in front of their tiny shacks of junked military material, stirring a pot of who knows what. The pungent smell of nuoc mam, or fermented fish sauce, is so thick that it tells me I am unquestionably foreign. Vietnamese peasants, chased from their homes in the countryside, mostly by the US military, see us and our M-16s coming. However fake, they present friendliness, smiling up at us with blackened teeth as we pass. Looking at each other after we pass, they frown and spit long streams of black juice into the dust by their fires.
    There are no men but plenty of kids, not even waist high, crowd around us begging and trying to reach into our pockets on one side while just as many try to tug our watches off from the other side. Some of them hold up small marijuana packets for sale, $1.00 mpc, or military payment currency. Others, in broken English, hawk their sisters who are waiting among the shanties, hoping that their little pimps will bring some money home for rice. Most are starving. Once healthy people who proudly owned and farmed their own land, they are relegated to lives of abject poverty, their land now part of an American free fire zone.
    Hurriedly, we get through this result of our presence and past the guarded gate into the PX. After buying a fifth of Jack Daniels and a couple of cartons of cigarettes we pass through all the cheap electronics and jewelry. To say that passing through war, starving people, and abject poverty, to clutch a fancy bottle of whiskey is surreal would be an understatement. Like during the tragedies, times of hurt, and disappointment, the mantra of the war plays in my mind with such scurrility as well.
    “Fuck it, it don’t mean nothing.”
    Going back out to the street, we catch another convoy going back. Reaching the road to hill 821, we jump off and catch a six by, or large troop truck, the rest of the way. We do pretty good, in and out and still time for evening chow. Knowing that there will be plenty of night rations later if we get hungry, we skip it. Instead we seclude ourselves in the hooch, crack the Jack Daniels and preceded to get wasted, eventually crashing late in the evening.

    I am on R&R, or rest and relaxation, for six days in Sydney, Australia. Wandering the streets with my head somewhere in the sky, I am puzzled by a crowd gathered near a large TV on the sidewalk. Walking up to the back of the crowd, I stand beside an older man with thinning hair and try to see what is going on. No one is speaking. All are glued to the TV. Looking between them, I see a fuzzy image of some kind of space man climbing down a ladder and gingerly stepping to a dusty surface. A murmur goes through the crowd and the older man turns to me and says, “I never thought it would ever happen. Isn’t that remarkable?”
    Not knowing what he means, I simply reply, “I don’t know. It depends on what your talking about. What’s this all about?”
    Recognizing my different speech, he looks at me incredulously.
    “You really don’t know? Where are you from anyway?”
    Feeling sort of alien, maybe a little spacey as well, I reply.
    “Vietnam.”
    “You are an American?” he says.
    “Yeah, I’m getting a break from the war.”
    Smiling, I guess because the Aussies have boys in Vietnam too, he says,
    “Your country just put a man on the moon.”
    As he turns back to the TV I say, “Oh yeah, they said they were going to do it.”
    Beginning to walk away, I am called back by the same gentleman.
    “Hey, you should watch this, your country is making history.”
    Pausing to be polite, I half turn and smile. But there are no words for me to be nice. Feeling like I have somehow failed an important test, I turn my back and walk on.

    In Nam, my days are winding down. With a couple of weeks left until my rotation date, I am a bit surprised when I suddenly received orders to rotate back to the States. Hallelujah my time has come....just in time. It takes a couple of days to check out of the battalion and return my weapon and other gear. During this time I am able to have conversations with some of the others on a different level. There is a sadness in our exchanges, sadness that they are being left behind, that we all can’t go. But they have been living the life of survival long enough to appreciate that right then, at least one of them is going to make it out. However none of that sadness can overcome the relief I feel when, orders in hand, I jump into the jeep and ride away to stage for my return to the world.

    Much like it was on Okinawa where I staged to come in country, I wait for two days to learn that I am not going to fly back to the U.S. I am going back to the world on a fucking ship as part of a Marine Regimental troop withdrawal. Part of Nixon’s political stunt, pretending a troop withdrawal when in fact all the marines on the float are rotating and being replaced anyway. At least I am going to get the fuck out of here, regardless of the means, and that is what I hold on to.
    I and 1800 other marines are crammed aboard a troop transport, and another 200 are put on its flag ship, a flat top helicopter carrier. Pushing off from Deep Water Pier in Da Nang Harbor I feel like I am born again.

    Sailing past the mountains along the South China Sea under a moonlit sky is far different from nights under a sky of whining rockets. If you hear them, you wonder who gets it. If you don’t, you get it.
    At sea the night is quiet, cool, and smells of salt with a peacefulness that comes from the knowledge that it is over.
    Laying over in Okinawa for two days to take on water and food, we are not allowed to leave the ship. It will take 22 days to reach the California coast. And that is going all out, except when we skirt a typhoon. Even on the outskirts we pitch and roll so bad that I must wrap my feet in the chains that hang my tier just to doze. It is easy to lose someone and not even know it during such weather. Many career marines completely disappear during this part of the float.

    As the ships dock and tie up, I have no idea of where I am. But it is sunny, warm, and almost November. So I must be somewhere in Southern California. Coming across the Pacific I went from hot to cold and now back to warm.
    Compared to the small Marine Band and the few USO girls on the pier hosting tables of donuts and lemonade, we are a salty looking bunch. Yelling down to the girls, I have them throw some of the donuts up. I and others along the rail snatch and wolf them down. The little band in their ragged red uniforms, looking like castoffs picked to welcome castoffs, puff and beat out a couple of marches.
    The whole thing reminds me of a Norman Rockwell poster with its characters somehow coming to life and gathering on the pier for a photo shoot. What could any of them possibly know about the place that the people aboard this big boat are coming from. Had they an inkling of that truth, they surely would not be here dressed in their Baby Janes and floral dresses, serving lemonade and donuts. To me it is just another surreal example of Americana that never makes it inside the loop of what really is.

    We are taken to Camp Pendleton where I came from a little over a year and a different lifetime ago. Long haired and bare headed, standing in my first formation back in the world, I hear an announcement that anyone with less than 6 months remaining on their active duty time will be discharged as soon as the paperwork can be done. With less than 5 months of active duty left, I figure it is the sweetest sounding thing that I have heard since it all began more than 2 years and 7 months ago. For the next nine days I wander around in an almost dream like state.

    Finally, all in one day, I process through hours of paperwork dressed in my winter green uniform and sign the DD-214 that honorably releases me from active duty in the United States Marine Corps. With a silent thank you to the Gods mixed with the sorrow that at least one of my friends didn’t make it, I squeeze into a limousine full of other discharged marines and exit Camp Pendleton for the last time. There is not the slightest urge to look back.
    Having plenty of war booty in my fat wallet, I ride up to LAX and buy a first class ticket to D.C. to see my mother. While I was away she moved from West Virginia to a Maryland suburb of D.C. for a better teaching job.

    With little fanfare I show Mom that I am still alive, return to the airport and catch the next hop to the Appalachians of Southern West Virginia. During the hour long flight I gaze down at the rolling landscape of forested hills. For some reason they always seem to make me sad with their isolable landscape half hidden in wispy fog. This time is no different, only more so. These age old hills are impervious to the goings on outside their domain. They have not a hint of the momentous events that crisscross the globe, nor what I have been through the past year. Yet this is where it all began for me. Being alive is all that I can bring back to their intractable presence. Amidst such loss and guilt, that just doesn’t seem fair.

Charles Hayes bio

    Charles Hayes, a multiple Pushcart Prize Nominee, is an American who lives part time in the Philippines and part time in Seattle with his wife. A product of the Appalachian Mountains, his writing has appeared in Ky Story’s Anthology Collection, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Fable Online, Unbroken Journal, CC&D Magazine, Random Sample Review, The Zodiac Review, eFiction Magazine, Saturday Night Reader, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Scarlet Leaf Publishing House, Burning Word Journal, eFiction India, and others.

David and Friends

    Do you know what is really happening to paintings and sculptures? They aren’t non-living objects as you might think. They are very much alive and mostly aren’t happy. You might think pictures can’t be alive and unhappy. You are wrong. They have emotions and feelings just like you do. Have you ever sat for a painter? You have to be still for hours and hours. It’s a hard job, although it looks easy, you don’t have to do anything but stay still. That staying still is hard. You start feeling itchy on your legs or arms or nose or wherever when you aren’t allowed to scratch. Imagine you keeping your arms straight to the floor from your shoulders for years and years. Do you think you can do it? No, you can’t. But some sculptures have been doing it for centuries. They must be suffering a great deal if they are alive. And they are alive and suffering.
    Have you seen David? No, I don’t mean your friend David or your uncle David or your ex-boyfriend David. It is David created by Michelangelo in 1504. Have you seen him? The real one? No? But surely you know how he looks from photos. He is a young man standing naked. Good looking. A Good body.
    He has been standing on the plinth in the Accademia Galley in Florence since 1873. Before that, he was outside, in the public square by Palazzo della Signoria. He had to stand out there all day long for years and years. No rest. It is better now, since the Gallery closes every evening, he can relax when people have gone.
    But when he was in the square, he had no time to put his feet up. Imagine that. If you stood all day long, day after day, how would you feel? And stark naked. Your sexual organ was exposed to the public. You would start feeling that all the parts of your body are of the same value; your head, your chest, your shoulders, your arms, your legs, your penis, they are all equal. David doesn’t mind at all. Even when he was newly created, he was proud of his beautiful body, especially as the sculptor kept praising his beauty.
    Some people said in front of him that his penis was unusually small and it wouldn’t function for reproduction. Some said that if it were made the actual size, people’s attention would go there, not the other parts of his body, so it was made small. Some said that Michelangelo didn’t like sexual organs, especially males’. Some said that he liked David’s so much that he didn’t want to show the real one to the public. David heard all sorts of things about his penis. It was when he was still outside, so that he had to keep standing, had to stay still all day long. Because he hadn’t seen real people’s, (no men walked by showing their penises, at least while he was there) he couldn’t decide if his was really smaller. Besides, he couldn’t bend forwards to have a look at his, couldn’t he? He was in public all the time then.
    He also heard the man he was modelled on got laid a lot after he started standing out there, although some said there was no a real model, but Michelangelo created him from bits and pieces of his past creations. Anyway, many women and men, both young and old, wanted to see the model’s naked body and wanted to touch it and things went further. David wondered if the model could perform sexual intercourse well if his penis was as small as David’s. But he had never heard from those who had slept with him.
    When he was moved into Accademia Galley, he stopped thinking about it. He knew his body, most of his body anyway, was gorgeous. That was enough.
    You might think David is exceptionally easy-going. Most men, probably all of them, are concerned about the size of their penises. But he isn’t. Well, he might be really easy-going. But remember, he is a statue, even though he is alive just like you. How he regards things could be a bit different from how you do. Besides, he has been in the world a lot longer than any living human beings. It wouldn’t make him easy-going about his penis, you might think. You could be right. You could be wrong. I don’t know.
    While he was in the square, which was for more than three-hundred and fifty years, he had stood there in the same pose, even in middle of night and small hours of the morning. He was all right then. He didn’t know anything else, although he was a bit tired and bored. It was what he was supposed to do all the time, he believed. Pigeons’ droppings landed on his head and shoulders. Some kids threw stones at him. Cold rain splashed on his face, chest, arms and legs. Hot sun scorched his body. But nothing had bothered him really. He was proud to be standing in public.
    Things changed when he was moved into the Accademia Gallery in 1879.
    No more rain. He was under a round dome. No more hot sun. He was surrounded by white circular walls. No more pigeons. He was with other statues. No more bad kids, usually. In the evenings, people disappeared. No more hot or cold wind.
    In the evenings when the gallery was closed, it was gloomy without people, it was quiet without people. The absence of moving figures, the absence of sounds, were eerie.
    David stood on the tall plinth.
    He was alone.
    He was alone in the gloom.
    Then other statues and pictures started sliding down from their plinths, popped out from their frames, and walked around and talked to each other. Their footsteps echoed in the vast museum. Their soft murmurs wafted everywhere.
    David looked at them. He watched them. He stared at them.
    An old naked man with good muscles passed, whispering to a fully clothed older man with a beard. A thin naked man sauntered alone. A naked woman with floating long red hair ambled by. A clothed woman with white wings flew leisurely, perching here and there. A naked woman walked with a naked child in her arms.
    David gaped at them, his mind empty.
    He noticed they were all translucent. He could see walls, pillars, windows, other walking figures through them. He looked around. And stopped. He had moved his neck! He could move his neck. He tried his fingers. They moved as he commanded. Tried his toes. They did too. He didn’t know what to do about his moving body. He stayed with his neck turned to the right, his right-hand fingers open wide, his left-hand fingers clenched, all his toes clenched. With all the toes clenched, it was a little hard to keep a balance. He swayed. He swayed. He swayed. And then fell to the floor.
    ‘Ouch!’ he cried. At least he thought he had cried, but no sound had come out of his mouth. Then noticed he didn’t feel any pain. His body, also translucent, was lying lightly on the hard floor, with his right-hand fingers open wide, his left-hand fingers and all toes clenched.
    ‘You all right there?’ somebody asked him. It was a dark man with a hat on his head and a sword in his hand. His skin tone was brown against the grey darkness. A naked young white woman was standing beside him with concerned eyes. He could see the round white circular walls behind them. They were in the centre of a dome with a tall plinth with David standing on it.
    David was standing on the plinth! He looked up at David and looked at himself. The David was solid white marble with a gorgeous body. He was translucent white with a gorgeous body. His eyes got big. His mouth opened wide.
    The naked young woman said, ‘You must be new. When did you come here?’ Her firm white breasts lowered as the other parts of her body crouched by him. The dark man was still standing with his small penis between his well-toned legs.
    ‘Today,’ he thought he said, but what he actually did was hiss like an angry cat. He cleared his throat without a sound and tried again. He hissed. ‘My voice!’ That was what he wanted to say without success.
    ‘How long have you been silent?’ she asked him, lowering her face lower than her breasts.
    He opened his mouth, pushed the empty air out, closed his mouth, opened it again, pushed the air out again. No sound.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, placing her white hand on his cheek. ‘You just take it easy. Breathe in deeply.’ He did. ‘Breathe out deeply.’ He did. ‘Now repeat it a few times. Don’t rush. Take your time. Do it slowly, slowly.’ He breathed in deeply, breathed out deeply, breathed in deeply, breathed out deeply. Then a voice came out, ‘Ahhhhh.’
    ‘My voice!’ This time it was out. The ‘VO’ sound was strangely high-pitched like a little girl shrieking. He cupped his mouth with both his hands. At least that was what he thought he had done. What he actually had done was lifted both his hands an inch and two, far from where his mouth was.
    You see, he had been standing without speaking or moving for 370 years or so. No wonder he had a hard time speaking or moving. It was a miracle he still remembered how to talk.
     ‘Don’t worry. You just do one step at a time. First, your voice. Forget about your body for the moment, all right? Say, “My voice” slowly,’ the woman said into his ear, touching his shoulder with her white breasts.
    ‘You’re doing a good job, David,’ the dark naked man said from above them, lifting the sword behind his neck. His small penis swayed for a second.
    David breathed in deeply and breathed out deeply, and then said, ‘My Voi-ce.’ It was out without ups and downs. ‘Today.... Yesterday.... I... don’t know when... I came here.... How do you... count days?’ he said to her white breasts.
    ‘What happened down there? Need some help?’ the clothed woman with wings flew by without a sound. Her long skirt floated around her legs. ‘Isn’t he the new one? Let me see him. I and all my friends have been waiting for him. Is he cute?’ She silently landed by him.
    ‘We’re all right. You can see him later. Bye.’ The dark naked man waved his dark hand to the woman with wings.
    ‘I just want to help you,’ she said.
    ‘Bye,’ he repeated.
    Their soft voices floated up to the round ceiling. She reluctantly flew up and followed their voices to the long corridor with statues lined up on both sides.
    ‘She’s always nosy. You should be careful about her. Can you stand up yourself?’ the naked woman with white breasts said to him.
    ‘I think so.’ He bent his left leg and then bent his right leg from the lying position and lifted his upper body. His whole body shot up to the domed ceiling then slowly floated down to the floor.
    A male statue with no head or arms peeked in. ‘Can you tell me what’s going in there?’ The voice came out of his neck.
    ‘We’ll tell you everything later, all right?’ she said.
    He sauntered away, ‘OK. OK,’ came from his neck.
    David looked up at the ceiling, which seemed so high. Then he looked his right. Her white breasts were right there. He couldn’t move. His eyes were riveted on them.
    ‘Sabines woman, your boobs are touching his nose. Look at his eyes. He isn’t used to women’s breasts,’ the dark naked man said above them.
    ‘Oh, sorry.’ She lifted her upper body a little.
    David looked at her breasts with longing.
    After trials and errors for some time, David could speak and walk relatively well.
    After walking around, stretching his arms, back, and legs, David came back to the naked woman and the dark naked man by the plinth with still-standing David on the top.
    ‘So, what is that?’ he asked the two figures, pointing at the unmoving statue.
    ‘That’s also you, but now it’s kind of your discarded clothes or a sheath or a husk or a cocoon,’ the dark man said, thrashing the sword in the air. ‘And I’m David as well.’
    He flinched a little to avoid the long sword. ‘Be careful. Don’t cut me.’
    ‘Oh, it can’t harm you,’ the dark man said and stabbed it into David’s chest.
    He shrieked, expecting agonising pain.
    Nothing.
    The dark man pulled the word from his chest with ease. ‘See. No harm done. We’re all like phantoms or ghosts or illusions or whatever you want to call us.’
    ‘Oh,’ he said, then remembered. ‘What did you say before the sword thing? You said you’re David as well, I guess. It must be just a coincidence I suppose,’ he said.
    ‘No, no. I’m the same David. I was just created by a different person.’
    ‘But we don’t look the same at all. You’re dark, I’m white. You’re more slender than me. You’ve got a hat on. I haven’t. You’ve got a sword. I haven’t. You’re a lot shorter than me. And, and...’
    ‘It’s just different people have different ideas,’ she broke in, ‘so the same person can be different. Do you know what I mean?’ She put her arm around his shoulders, her white breasts touching his arm.
    ‘I guess,’ he said, looking at her breasts.
    ‘Sabines woman, your breasts,’ the dark David said.
    ‘I know, but he should get used to them.’ She pressed her breasts into his arm.
    ‘You’ve been going to be raped, but never been raped. You must be frustrated. But don’t seduce a newcomer. He should learn things around him first,’ the dark David said, putting his hat on the tip of the sword.
    Echoing footsteps were coming closer.
    ‘Somebody’s coming. Hide!’ the white David whispered.
    ‘No need. It’s a security guard, who can’t see us. Don’t worry,’ the woman said.
    ‘Can’t he? Then... we could be out in the day time as well, I guess,’ he said without a confidence.
    ‘No, we can’t. Nobody knows why, but we can’t be out until all the people have left.’
    ‘Then,’ he thought, ‘I might’ve been able to be out and walk around at night when I was outside. I didn’t have to keep standing for that long, then.’
    ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ she resumed as if nothing had happened. ‘I’m not frustrated. I’m not trying to seduce him. You fool. With your pathetic muscles among big guys, you can’t get laid much. You ARE frustrated.’
    ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I get laid as often as I want to.’
    ‘All right. When was the last time? And with who?’
    ‘With whom! Well, the last time was... I don’t remember it. It’s just I don’t pay much attention to that kind of thing. You know, it’s just a part of my daily life, like walking and talking.’
    ‘Then, did you get laid last night? You should remember that at least.’ She left the white David and advanced to the dark David. The arm of the white David longed for her breasts.
    ‘I don’t remember it. Can you remember exactly what you said last night? All of it? I don’t think so. It’s the same thing.’ He pointed at her with the sword.
    ‘You liar!’
    ‘I am not!’
    ‘Liar!’
    ‘No!’
    ‘What’s going on?’ The woman with wings flew in, her bare feet flipping up and down beneath the long skirt.
    ‘Go away!’ the dark David and the white woman said in unison.
    ‘Easy, easy.’ The woman with wings glided away.
    ‘Why don’t you like her?’ white David asked.
    ‘It’s not that we don’t like her. She is just a big mouth,’ she said.
    ‘A huge mouth,’ dark David corrected.
    ‘Yeah, a huge mouth, all right. She can’t think without saying it out loud. She’s got a diarrhoea mouth.’
    ‘I like that. A diarrhoea mouth!’ He clapped his hand, throwing the sword and the hat away into the corner of the dome. Both the sword and the hat hit the circular walls and bounced to the floor without a sound. The smooth brown floor was visible through them.
    ‘Hiya. I see the newcomer’s finally down. See you later.’ A middle-aged man with a red flat hat and red clothes sauntered by and sauntered away.
    ‘See you later,’ she said to the departing figure and then to the white David, ‘he’s always decent.’
    ‘I just want to say this, but... if you don’t mind, if you don’t take it personally, if you . .’ the new David faltered.
    ‘Spit it out,’ the dark David said.
    ‘All right. I just noticed that... you are...’
    ‘Just say it.’
    ‘David. Keeping things inside is bad for you,’ she said.
    He had been alone so long that he didn’t know how to interact with others and was afraid of offending them and as a result losing the new friends. Imagine, you’ve been on a desert island for 370 years or so, you might have lost the ability of interfacing with others.
    ‘All right. I think, I’m sorry if I’m wrong, but you look thin. You see, you and I are supposed to be a biblical hero. So, so, you should have a good body like I do. Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. Sorry, sorry.’
    ‘Don’t worry. You haven’t offended me. No at all. I know I’m thin. But my bronze body is standing a bit away from here and I’m on loan. I won’t be here for long. Anyway, my other body still has muscles, although they’re thinner than yours. But me, here, I’ve been getting thinner and thinner year after year. I don’t know why. This Sabines woman hasn’t changed an iota. Most of the others change, thinner or thicker. Nobody knows how it works or doesn’t work. Anyway, here I am, a lot thinner than before, so even when I’m in the other body, I can move around a bit, well, not much, I’m not that much thinner, but I can move my arms and legs a bit. If you get thinner, you’ll be able to do it in front of the walking and watching people without letting them know it. Phew! I haven’t made a speech this long for donkeys’ years.’ He sat down as if he had run ten miles.
    ‘But it takes time to change, like fifty years or a hundred years. I might change later, I hope. I’m a bit tired of being the same,’ the white naked woman said.
    ‘You might change. You might not. Who knows?’ the dark David said, shrugging his shoulders.
    The woman with wings peeked in in mid-air. ‘What’s going on?’
    ‘Go away,’ both the dark man and the white woman shouted.
    Do you think David, I mean white David, changes like some of the others after for a while? Yes he does. He has got fatter. He cheeks are rounder. His arms are thicker. His stomach is bulging. His bottom gets big. His legs become beefy.
    Now, he is no longer a young man with a gorgeous body. He looks like a middle-aged man who has been drinking beer every day, doing no exercise, with watching TV as his favourite activity. Still in the day time, when the museum is open and people are around to admire his youthful figure, he is his usual well-toned body on the plinth.
    You might wonder how fat bodies can get into slim ones. Well, this is how it happens, eventually.
    The Tannoy announces the museum is closing in five minutes both in Italian and English. People are sauntering to the front door. Security guards give a sigh of relief that they can go to bars soon, hoping the night shift will come on time.
    The last footsteps have died away. It is finally quiet. The air is recovering more oxygen as tons of carbon dioxide from people’s noses and mouths disperse.
    The windows show a black night with a few stars. A dot of red on an aeroplane moves from left to right
    The head of White David blurs and a translucent white head emerges. It has plump cheeks and a round nose. The chubby shoulders follow. Then meaty arms pop out. The chest with almost women’s breasts and bulging stomach come after. Then the thick legs bring up the rear. He stomps down to the floor and stretches his arms into the air, bends forwards and backwards, and twists his substantial middle to the left and the right a couple of times. His bulky body seems happy to be free from the tight corset of the slender body.
    Other translucent figures are also moving here and there. The closed museum is crowded with ghost-like beings None of them move fast. The fastest one is a white man in a flowing toga leisurely jogging.
    The floor has crisp packets and chocolate bar wrappers here and there, left from the people in the day time.
    Several cleaners come in, blue uniforms. They hoover the floor, picking up big rubbish with their hands. The translucent figures move through them. It seems the walking statues and pictures know the cleaners are there, but can’t be bothered to care. The material world is overlapping the translucent world.
    A security guard in a dark blue uniform walks in and says, ‘Evening ladies.’
    ‘We’ve got two gentlemen today,’ one of them says, giggling.
    He looks around and spots two men mopping the floor and says, ‘Hi.’
    They wave their hands to him. One of their legs goes through a hopping bust.
    David saunters by. His big stomach wobbles. He sees a white woman in a long robe and asks her, ‘Do you want to sex with me?’
    ‘No. You almost squashed me yesterday,’ she answers.
    ‘But I don’t weigh anything. How I look means nothing.’
    ‘It’s my feeling. I almost suffocated under your bulky body. Sorry.’ She walks away.
    ‘All right.’ He isn’t disappointed. There are many naked women around and he has almost infinite time, he believes.
     The cleaners have finished their job and leave, pushing carts full of chemical bottles and cloths. The security guard has long gone back to his office.
    The lights are switched off.
    It is now dark with some vague light from the windows.
    The strolling translucent figures are distinguishable in the dark.
    A thin woman in a red dress is talking to a small child. The dark David, who is thinner than before, is swinging his sword half-heartedly. The white naked woman, who still hasn’t changed, is trying to do the splits over and over again. The woman with wings walks by and asks her, ‘Do you want a hand?’ The white woman says, ‘It’s all right. I can manage somehow.’
    Out of the windows, the vague moon moves behind thin clouds. Some stars blink. Others stay still. An insomniac crows flies, cawing.
    The white fat David’s translucent body stands out in the dim. It is as if a negative shadow is moving without an object.
    When the opening time is near, all the moving figures go back to where their original forms are.
    He struggles to get back into the slender David. He manages to put his lower body in. When his whole body is almost in, the whole marble statue pops. The small bits and pieces of marble are all over the plinth and the floor around it.
    Where is David? Nobody knows. There is no translucent David there or anywhere else.
    You might assume that when the original statue has gone, the translucent one will go as well. You might be wrong. He might breeze in one day. Who knows?
    Dark David goes into the bronze statue. Because he is much thinner than the original one, the statue shrivels as if it were a deflated balloon. The sword and the hat haven’t changed much, but they have flattened as well. The whole thing on the plinth is a brown blob. Where is David? He wasn’t that small. And where are the unchanged sword and hat? Beats me.
    A middle-aged man, who hasn’t changed much in the body size-wise, gets into the old man picture and the entire figure becomes blurred and disappears. There is a dirty white space where the old man used to be.
    An old woman, who has a hunch back, struggles into the picture of a middle-aged woman without a hunch. The picture whirls a little, starts melting, and dribbles down to the bottom. Some goes onto the frame.
    A sad facial expression of a head pops in to a smiling head, which gets on fire and then leaves pale-white ashes on the plinth.
    All the exhibits in the museum are gone, except for the white naked woman, who argued with Brown David. She is still standing with her arm high in the air, trying to escape from the man who tried to rape her, who isn’t there anymore.
    ‘Jesus Christ! I’m the only one left.’

Concealed Carry

    My advice; don’t get gas at a rundown station. I’ve never been robbed at gun point, but at 6:00am on my way to work that’s what happened. What idiot robs somebody in broad daylight with video everywhere? Did those antiquated cameras work?
    Stupid...real stupid!
    Was that damn gun real or what? The medium height and weight fool had a fake beard plastered on his face. He was too far to jump, so I shoved my hand in my pocket and reluctantly tossed the cash, my last fifty bucks. A car pulled up and he hopped in the dark Chevy sedan.
    I should’ve been scared, but I was too pissed.
    I got stuck up and I’m carrying too. What good was it? Well a bad leg made me vulnerable, it was necessary.
    They shot out the back of the station down the alley. I couldn’t hang up the nozzle fast enough. A car in front forced me to reverse and speed around a row pumps to get in the alley. They were halfway through, but the sound of my tires slamming against the wheel well when I hit a speed bump hidden by tree branches and other debris was enough for me to end the pursuit, but anger outweighed logic.
    I sped to the next one, cleared it with ease and my Camry broke on to the street.
    Those idiots were still on the same street.
    I was a half block behind in no time. In the process I ran two lights. They planned their escape well; no cameras and so far, no cops. I should’ve dialed 911, but instead I opened my console and took out a .38 revolver. They must’ve seen me; they accelerated, took a sharp turn and nearly hit a guy in a pick-up parked on the corner. The old timer was still honking when I flew by. I was right behind when the driver slammed on his brakes, a move I anticipated and avoided rear ending them. He did a way too fast three sixty in the next intersection, swerved from side to side, gained control and sped to the next alley. I slowed to make sure one of them didn’t jump out and shoot. I kept honking to attract attention. God, please don’t let anybody pull out their garage, not now and I squeezed off a round at their gas tank. The Impala swerved to avoid a light pole. I slid to a stop and got ready to reverse if necessary.
    Did I hit it or what?
    Why didn’t they return fire?
    Somebody had to hear the shot and they’ll call the cops.
    I was pissed not crazy. I didn’t want to kill anybody over fifty bucks unless I had too. They turned into another part of the alley. I slowed, it looked like a dead end 50 yards ahead. A go right or left sign dangled off a pole. They made a right.
    A trap.
    Perfect cover for it too, abandoned garages, three foot weeds growing through the cracks in the concrete, broken glass and trash scattered everywhere. If I follow I’m dead. They’re waiting; one might be in the bushes waiting for me to round the corner and boom, boom...bye, bye, Jeremy.
    No, thanks idiots, I’m not suicidal.
    I stopped; not the best thing to do when one of them could sneak up behind me, but I remained and listened. Suddenly, tires squealed...here they come. The Impala sped past I followed, turned the corner too fast and my back end swung around and hit a metal garbage can. Dammit, now I got a 250 deductible to pay. It was bound to happen. I needed to stop, but I threw caution to the wind and shot out on to Turner Blvd. not far behind them. But, my four cylinders were no match for their eight. They continued to pull away probably heading for the expressway ramps past the viaduct. Which will they take the express or local lanes? A couple of dogs ran from between two parked cars. They swerved to avoid them, lost control and slammed into the brightly painted concrete pillar of the viaduct. The Impala shattered into pieces that flew across all lanes of oncoming traffic. I slowed and pulled behind a parked SUV. There weren’t many cars headed in the opposite direction of the impact. No other cars were involved. Thank God. They had to be doing eighty on impact because I was doing sixty and choked on their dust.
    Now...I hear sirens in the distance.
    From what I could see the cops or whoever would have to scrape their remains off the concrete like bugs off a windshield. You couldn’t tell what they were driving, car or truck. Glad I contributed to their demise, the city’s a little safer. I made a u-turn and a beeline out of the area and hoped nobody made my vehicle.

    Stuck up five minutes from the job and after all that mess I was only a half hour late. It felt like eternity. Being a personal assistant, my customer requires around the clock attention. My co-worker can’t clock out until I arrive. I explained the stick up, not the chase. It didn’t matter; the scornful look on Shirley’s round face said it all and she rushed out the door to her other job. I could’ve been killed. Who cares? I settled in and got to work, I’d tell my wife later. Would she believe me or call me a fool for reacting that way?
    My replacement arrived ten minutes early like clockwork, being older, the grandmother type, Karen demonstrated maturity and dedication. I called in and got off the clock. I’d almost forgotten about the rear panel damage on the car. Closer inspection revealed the dent could possibly be knocked out with a fist with the right tap and no damage to the paint. Maybe. I wasn’t in the mood to try now, a cold beer called.

    The Old Folks Lounge hadn’t been blessed with presence in months. It was the best place to have a beer in the early afternoon, and my seat closest to the window was open. Security sat a couple of chairs down next to the entrance and an old cigarette machine. Why they kept it probably had something to do with security. Today’s milder temperatures allowed them to open the back door with an old fashioned oscillating fan ventilating the place. New trash cans would do the trick, but who am I? A broad shouldered barmaid, who appeared to be transsexual, smiled and greeted me while topping off my glass of Miller. I realized several bottles of whisky had the same volume and position since my last visit. That first sip was the most refreshing. I looked up at the flat screens and watched a scene of the early morning accident.
    “Two fatalities when auto slams into railroad viaduct” inched across the bottom of the screen. For a while I’d forgotten about that mess, now I was totally interested. Police are still investigating, but witnesses say they didn’t see any other vehicles involved.”
    Good, nobody saw me and if they did I was a block behind them. That second sip, no gulp, of beer went down better knowing I helped indirectly rid the hood of two worthless parasites. No telling how many others they’ve stuck up or killed.
    Trying to watch three TVs at once put a crook in my neck. A shot, only one, of rum will cure that. The barmaid leaned over showing her cleavage while he/she poured my shot. I smiled and wondered. Real or fake? I felt eyes on me; a guy wearing a baseball cap and a filthy t-shirt stared in my direction. Was it me or the barmaid? She wiggled her full figure with the tight blouse and skinny leg jeans toward whoever he was. I finished my beer, but his staring pissed me off. I stared back and he shot off his stool and came at me. I shoved my hand in my belt...he stopped. Whether he saw my pistol I didn’t know. He was shorter, half my age, wider, but with a face that only a mother could love. “Why you stop, asshole.” I shouted. The few customers in the place got silent ready to vacate the place.
    “Don’t mess with my woman.” He stepped back and bumped against his seat.
    “You need to learn how to hold your liquor, young man.” I said and stepped further away from the bar. The more I looked at him the madder I got. “I ain’t interested I didn’t know this place changed like that.”
    “It hasn’t, take your hand out of your belt, old man!” A tall solid built guy shouted with his hand on his holster concentrating on my hands. “You don’t carry in my bar.”
    I moved my hands and went to sit back down. “Relax man, he started it.”
    The owner walked up to me. “Get out or go to jail, old man, and don’t come back.”
    “Gladly.” I grabbed my cane off the back of the seat. The ugly fool who challenged me smiled and went back to the other end.

    The cool breeze felt good, but my nose twitched when I passed through a cloud of smoke from patrons standing along the building around the corner. I was glad I didn’t park on the corner; people have a tendency to sit on it. I waited a minute to see if the guy would follow me. He didn’t. Amazing how the threat of being shot changes behavior. I sat behind the wheel trying to decide, should I go to another bar or go home?
    Home...where it’s safe.
    I glanced in the mirror to pull out and a setoff flashing blue lights approached. Too much activity on the corner was my guess until the cops pulled up and got out. Great, now what? The Black and Latino officers had no regard for the cars behind them on the narrow residential street. The older heavier Black cop walked over and stared down at me. “Sir, what are you doing?” Duh, I’m trying to leave idiot; of course I better not say it. His slim partner stood in a offensive posture at the rear of my vehicle. She appeared to be in training.
    I sighed, and then put on the act. “I was a starting to pull out and go home officer, what’s the problem?”
    “We got a call about an older guy with a pistol.” He held out his hand. “License and registration.” Everybody on the corner was tuned in...nosy bastards. I complied; my license and concealed carry card were next to each other. “Well, Jeremy Wesel, sit tight.” He returned after checking me out and gave me my IDs. “I’m not going to ask if you’ve been drinking Mr. Jeremy Wesel even though I can smell it, but I’m in a good mood. We’re going to circle the block and you’ll be gone. I don’t like arresting seniors who get into arguments with people in lounges.”
    “Thanks, officer.” First, he couldn’t smell it, he wasn’t close enough and I wasn’t legally or physically drunk, but I appreciated the pass. They returned to their cruiser and gave the crowd a dirty look that scattered them and turned on 95^th street. I did the same, but I went in the opposite direction.

    I told the wife what happened I knew what she’d say. “You know why you went through that mess, don’t you?” I shrugged and continued eating. Every since I got the concealed carry permit when I had to go in bad areas, that goddamn gun turned me into an asshole magnet and a slight asshole. But, I was also less tolerant of any foolishness. I don’t have an arrogant swagger so why do fools challenge me? It got worse every time. To hell with that pistol, I’ll leave it home to protect my castle.

Concrete Hurricane

    “Christ has no body on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.”
    ~ St. Therese of Avila

    Damp gray hair extended three inches beyond a woman’s forehead. Her cheeks shook. “So just get one of your minions to do it.” She laughed, yet her lips barely parted, and her face showed no expression. Five people in business wear stood around her. They laughed.
    Behind the group, a gray wall topped with windows that displayed a gray sky rose twenty feet over a studio. Billowing metal partitions carved out niches in which individuals stared at monitors and investigated floor plans on granite tabletops.
    The woman hid her hand in her sweater’s sleeve and looked at a gray football jersey encased in glass. “Joe predicted we’d win by 21. And we would have, if they didn’t try that flashy play in the first period.”
    A man tapped a tablet. “This guy, the sports writer? He said it was a noble attempt in the first quarter. It would’ve been great if they pulled it off.”
    “Know what Joe says about newspapers?” The gray-haired woman spun the sleeve, which made a clicking sound. “He says that the guy who has no education is better off than the guy who gets his education from a newspaper.”
    They laughed. One man with white-framed glasses and a white swirl on his tie laughed a “kh-kh-kh” sound. His white swirl cufflinks glistened and he used a handkerchief to wipe sweat from his face.
    The gray-haired woman’s cell phone emitted the sound of thunder. She puffed her cheeks, then blew into it. “What? Unf—why? I want to know why.” More spinning and clicking. “This is unfathomable. It’s not like she’s missing math or science. Beethoven . . . Beethoven’s . . . your daughter misses one recital? Trust me. Beethoven won’t rise from the dead to punish you.”
    A young man with a stiff gait approached the group. The man with the sweaty face pulled him aside. “Parrot, where’s that tie? I told you to wear that tie.”
    “I got something on it. I told you at the fundraiser.”
    The woman, still on the phone, remained expressionless and raised her voice. “This is common sense. You say you’re going to get his shirts cleaned today, you do it. It’s common sense.”
    The sweaty man, emitting a closed-mouth squeak, showed Parrot a magazine in which a man leaned on a concrete slab. Headline: “The King of Common Sense.” Callout: “‘In the whirlwind that is the building process, concrete remains the material with the biggest whomp.’ – Joe Branditch, president/CEO, Kiddon Slab.” Joe Branditch’s shirt bore the white swirl. His crossed arms concealed his hands, and exposed a bracelet with four gray squares.
    A crown of lightning bolts branded the sweaty man’s glasses. He dipped them in a glass of water, and then, squeaking, tapped the photograph. “Now I thought I told you to wear that tie.”
    “I . . . got to have it cleaned.”
    “Tell me you got the coffee, yes?”
    Parrot nodded, then snapped the rubber band on his wrist as he shuffled off.
    He returned with a canvas tote that said “Pine Haven Foods” in rainbow colors. He pulled out a package labeled Count Plush Coffee, then flipped it. “All right, Rich. We got Sumptuous Cinnamon Caramel Swirl. We got–”
    “Bwh-whoa, whoa-ah.” Rich fluttered his handkerchief near the tote. “What’s that? I said Styrian Imports.”
    “I got it cheaper here. And they do this thing. This ‘Shop for the Show?’”
    “Generally speaking, you should generally . . . do . . .”
    “The high school gets a percentage of what you pay. The theater program? It’s ‘Shop for the Show.’”
    “Now I understand you’re a great patron of the arts. And I appreciate Pine Haven’s support of tomorrow’s Oscar winners, but let’s be . . . the word is sensible, yes?” Rich squeaked, and waved the handkerchief toward the woman, still on the phone. “Let’s think about this.”
    The woman’s cheeks swelled. “Well the receipts are wrong then. Trust me. If my hus . . . my husband . . . my husband said it’s supposed to be ready today, then it is.”

    The conference room’s windows displayed a light snow and buildings rising into a sky as gray as the room’s walls. Parrot brought in three boards, and the gray-haired woman grumbled and expanded her cheeks. “He doesn’t look like a Parrot.”
    Rich flourished his handkerchief. “You are absolutely right, Mary Jo. But Parrot is one of our highest flying designers.” Then he laughed “kh-kh-kh.”
    “Well if he flies too high . . .”
    A young woman entered. She wore a bright green and orange sweater and a snowman pin. She had two funnel-shaped coffee cups and a plastic bottle filled with dark green liquid. “Happy Monday, everyone. Mr. Givins, you get Luxurious Deluge. And House Twist for you, Ms. Branditch.”
    “Mrs. Mrs. Branditch. And where’s the stirrer? Didn’t you leave room for cream?”
    “I’m so sorry. Here, I’ll get you another.”
    “No no no. I’ll just deal with this.”
    Parrot accepted the bottle, then placed his hand around its label. “Thanks Penny. Penny’s our administrative assistant . . . for now. She just got done with finals.”
    Branditch grumbled. “Secretary.”
    “She’s studying to be an architect.”
    Branditch, straight-faced, looked at the young lady’s yellow boots and released puffs of air. “Maybe before she becomes the next Frank Lloyd Wright, she should take a course in common sense.”
    As she backed out of the room, Penny, her lips contorted, stumbled. “Great I hope great day . . . your day’s great.”
    “Now go play in the snow.”
    Rich Givins squeaked. “Sometimes I think those bold colors? They kind of seep into her head.” He sipped his coffee. “Oh bow-WOM. This is exquisite, yes? Parrot, this is the stuff I told you about. Count Plush? Have you ever had this, Mary Jo?”
    Branditch stood, approached a photo of a building. Her gray hair touched the gray wall. “Who supplied the concrete for this?”
    “I’m not even . . . they were . . . what’s the word? We just had a lot of problems with them. Never again.”
    “You’ve learned from your mistake, then.” She stretched her hand over a cube-shaped gray candle. “Joe likes these. I gave him two.”
    “Oh those? Where did we get those? Sssss . . .” The handkerchief flapped. “Styrian? Styrian Imports, yes. Don’t they have common sense written all over them?”
    “They’re on his desk. They’re from me.” Branditch returned to her seat, then pulled up her sleeve. Four concrete squares sat on her wrist. She touched the letters embedded in the squares. “B, budget. S, strength. Time. Appearance. These, I want to keep these top-of-mind today.”
    Parrot curled the bottle toward his arm as he sipped.
    “S-T-A-B. Stab. That’s a way to remember these. The things with the biggest whomp when it comes to architecture.” She took two more bracelets out of her purse. “Now I want you two to wear these.”
    Parrot snapped the rubber band on his wrist.
    Givins held a bracelet in his steepled hands. “Absolutely. Let’s do it. It’ll keep us focused, yes Parrot? Help us think more concretely. Kh-kh-kh.”
    “I’ll just, what if I just keep mine here?” Parrot set his next to his drink.
    Branditch’s cheeks swelled. “What did your minion give you to drink there?”
    “This? Yeah, it’s called Green Indeed. A puree. It’s got a lot of vitamins, and it tastes good. And it’s super healthy.”
    “Sounds what I’d call . . . playful.”
    “Would you like one?”
    “No no. But I bet our daughter, she’d like it. She’s in third grade.”
    “I suppose. There’s apple in here, and grape. Even some veggies. I suppose . . . she’ll like it.” Parrot set the bottle behind a framed “Silver Award” from the Illinois Concrete Institute.
    Branditch, puffing her cheeks, touched her bracelet and stared at Parrot. “Joe, my husband Joe? He says that people who reject these things? They reject common sense. Do you reject common sense?”
    Givins traced the swirl on his tie. “Ahhh . . . Parrot’s . . . he’s a sensible designer, yes Parrot? Like budget-conscious sensible? Like timely sensible?”
    “Well, yeah yeah. Noted.” Parrot put on the bracelet.

    While Parrot presented the first two concepts, Givins often commented on how the “STAB” parameters applied. When Parrot responded to Branditch’s questions, her face remained expressionless, though her cheeks swelled occasionally. She also answered calls: two during which she repeatedly mentioned Mr. Kidwell, and one that ended with her saying, “I’ll tell you what. You failed. You failed to have it done on time, so you, you or one of your minions, will deliver it to him. And you will do it free of charge. That only makes sense.”

    Snow swirled outside the windows. Parrot set the third concept board on an easel, then gave Branditch a paper copy. “Now this one, it’s all about the kids. Truly. I think they’ll like it.”
    Givins wiped his cheek. “If I can? Just real quick, Mary Jo. This is strong aesthetically. It’s got this oomph, whoomph. No whomp, I mean. Whomp, with its aesthetic appearance? And it’s still strong.”
    Parrot jiggled his bracelet. “It’s mostly precast concrete. But this one’s also got this feature wall here. I’m thinking metal panels for this. Zinc, maybe. With this color, and the kids–”
    “I’m concerned.” Branditch leaned forward until her hair covered the children in the sketch on the table. “We’ve got a tight tight schedule. I’m concerned. I’m concerned about this slowing things down.”
    “These things, these panels? They go up quick. Quicker than concrete, actually. You just snap them right on.” Parrot used a green marker to write “Thrive” on a flip chart. “This green? They call this ‘Thrive’ green.’”
    “But what’s its function?”
    “It’s really for the kids. It’s inspiring. A fun entry statement.”
    Givins steepled his hands beneath his chin and nodded. “Inspiring, aesthetically, and time-sensitive.”
    “I’m not convinced. I’m talking about its function. Its building function. My hus—function. Form follows function. That only makes sense.”
    Parrot snapped the rubber band. “I think, to create an inspiring educational environment today? Form and function go hand in hand.” He flipped his green marker, then caught it. “It’s a strong entry statement. And it’s just cool.”
    “Just cool.” Branditch released a smileless laugh. “I can tell you this. I can tell you metal’s not as strong as concrete.”
    “Well, yeah, yeah. I suppose not technically. I’m talking about image here.”
    “They didn’t build the Colosseum with metal panels, did they?”
    Givins tapped his glasses, and, while the snow snicked against the window, released a quiet squeak.
    Branditch pulled her sleeves over her hands. “Trust me. You can get that same look much cheaper with concrete.”
    “There’s a tiny cost difference, and the metal’s got this gream—gleam, I mean. Gleam.”
    “You can’t convince . . . my husband likes to say, ‘Durable trumps flashy.’”
    “Noted. The panels are durable.” Parrot flipped the marker higher, caught it.
    “As board president, I’m concerned about this. What about the sun? Now I can see that color fading. Then there’s water. The rain and snow . . .”
    “If you’re worried about . . .”
    “Rain and snow . . .”
    “. . . have these special coatings.”
    “Rain and snow . . .”
    “. . . special resins . . .”
    “The rain and snow hit that? I’m concerned about rust.”
    Parrot sipped the Green Indeed. “I see your concern. But they’ve done studies. This stuff’s coated with these special resins. They protect against humidity, temperature, UV rays, all that.”
    Branditch’s sleeve lashed the sketch. “These kids . . . are gonna . . . scratch it up. Durable trumps flashy.”
    “Zinc’s self-healing. Over time, any scratches just blend in.” Parrot looked at his drink. “Besides, I think if the design respects them, they’ll respect it.”
    “I’ll tell you what. Kids, I know. Kids will not respect it. Kids . . . you cannot convince me otherwise.”
    Givins tapped his bracelet. “Parrot, let’s put this in perspective real quick, yes? Generally speaking, kids are, for lack of a better word, wild.”
    “This stuff, it holds up. I can show you examples. With weathering, and in rough communities. I think the kids–”
    A bang beneath the table by Branditch. “I’m gonna tell you, it looks expensive. As board president, I have to be aware of taxpayer perceptions. That just makes sense. Taxpayers. What do you think taxpayers will say when they see your . . . wall?”
    Parrot, stretching his hand over the bottle’s label, took a sip. “I suppose . . . I just wanted to design it for the kids. It’s not that expensive, and it’s durable. But it’s got something beyond that. There’s something inspiring here. When the kids see–”
    The sound of thunder from Branditch’s phone cut off Parrot. She exhaled into it. “Where’s Mr. Kidwell? I want to talk to Mr. Kidwell.”
    Givins stuck a finger in his coffee, then rubbed it on his forehead. Parrot mouthed “one second” to Givins, then walked out.
    “Now I’ll tell you what. I understand you’re a secretary . . . secretary, and secretaries aren’t what I’d call the brains of the operation. I’ll tell you what my husband said. He said when our son comes home with . . . comes home with a slip asking for permission to attend some musical? There’s cause for concern there.”
    Parrot returned with a magazine.
    “As board . . . as board . . . I want to talk to Mr. Kidwell and I want to talk to Mr. Kidwell now.” Branditch ended the conversation, then pressed the phone into her hair. Then she grumbled and gripped her keys.
    Parrot set the magazine on the table. “Here. You can see the artificial weathering here. It’s like twenty years here, and it still looks new.” He flipped the marker—it nearly hit the ceiling—then caught it.
    “You know the kind of schools my husband and I attended? Tiny brick . . . tiny little buildings, with none of this these extras. Just bare bones.”
    Givins tapped his glasses and bowed toward Branditch. “Sounds remarkably similar to my school.”
    She struck the air with her keys. “No flashy walls, none of these flashy colors.”
    “I suppose . . .” Parrot picked the bottle’s label. “But today, with baby boomers?”
    “Today . . .”
    “There’s this call . . .”
    “Today . . .”
    “. . . more inspiring stuff.”
    “Today, my husband is a principal at a successful company. He’s in charge of over three hundred people.”
    Parrot snapped the rubber band.
    “This is a school, not the Gugglenhein [sic]. Trust me. As board president, I’m out there. I talk to these Budron Cove people. What they want is bare bones. Form follows function.”
    “But when Sullivan said that? ‘Form follows function?’ I think he meant the facility—the way it looks?—should reflect its purpose. For a school, it’s about inspiration.”
    Givins flapped the handkerchief. “Actually, it kind of reminds me of a UFO.” The “kh-kh-kh” laugh. “Really, nobody wants their kids going to school in a spaceship, yes?”
    Parrot held the other two boards next to the one on the easel. “Here. If you were a kid, which one would you like best?”
    Branditch plunked the keys on the sketch and remained straight-faced. “Unfathomable. I’m not a kid. I have something called common sense. Now maybe with your Sullivan, and your little green drink, you don’t understand that. As board president though? I’m responsible, and I’m concerned.” Her key chain was a gem shape atop a curving funnel.
    Givins dabbed his forehead. “I can see where you’re coming from, Mary Jo. It’s a bit . . . what’s the word? Indulgent, or feisty. Too feisty.”
    The rubber band snapped. “Here. These are like wings. The Budron Cove falcon? It’s a wing, see? It’s inspiring . . . soaring and . . . potential.”
    “I’m board president, and I’ll tell you what. These people . . . you use the word ‘inspiring,’ they’ll think your head’s in the clouds. Maybe you’re flying too high, Parrot.”
    Parrot peeled off the bottle’s label.
    “Tell me. When people come to me—I’m the board president—asking why their school looks like a spaceship, what should I tell them?”
    Sounds of wind and sleet.
    “I’d like you to convince me. When these people, common sense people who paid for this school, complain that it looks too expensive, what should I as board president tell them?”
    While Parrot took a sip, Givins’s squeak joined the hisses and gusts. Then Parrot flipped the marker. “Tell them it’s all about exploration.” The marker hit the ceiling. Parrot toppled the bottle as he lunged for the marker. The marker deflected off his hand, then hit Branditch’s sleeve.
    A green puddle expanded on the table, and if you looked closely at the sleeve that covered Branditch’s hand, you could see a green dot, approximately three millimeters in diameter.

Douglas J. Ogurek bio

    Douglas J. Ogurek’s fiction appears in over 40 publications. Ogurek is the communications manager of a Chicago-based architecture firm and has written over one hundred articles about facility planning and design. He also reviews films at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. More at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com.

Havana

    When Jay walked into the bar a second time, the same old man nodded at him and held up his glass in a small salute.
    “So,” the old man said, smiling slyly, “the golfer returns. Did you have a good game today?”
    Jay returned the smile. “I could not find a course to my liking.”
    “Perhaps later,” the man said, “when the families start to come, you will find a course more suited to your game.”
    Jay sat down at a nearby table. “You may be right. Tourist dollars provide a powerful incentive for diversity.”
    “Perhaps, instead of golf, you found time to pursue other interests—business interests?”
    “As I mentioned before, I’ seat, waking only when the pilot announced their approach to the Jose Marti I’, still slept. Jay leaned forward. Framed in the small window, long, thin faraway clouds paralleled the western horizon, looking like knife wounds slashed across the purpling sky. Through his shirt, Jay used a’among the first to take advantage of the administration’s lifting of the ban on travel to Havana, attending a fortuitously scheduled co’t think you are only a college professor, Mr. Lansky—I think perhaps you are a gangster.”

    wenty-six hours earlier:
    Jay Lansky dozed fitfully in the tight confines of the economy-class seat, waking only when the pilot announced their approach to the Jose Marti International Airport. In the seat next to him his younger colleague, Paul Ripley, still slept. Jay leaned forward. Framed in the small window, long, thin faraway clouds paralleled the western horizon, looking like knife wounds slashed across the purpling sky. Through his shirt, Jay used a forefinger to trace the healing surgical wound on his abdomen, a nagging reminder of his own mortality, of time ticking away.
    Visit Havana, a decades-old wish—check one off on the bucket list.
    He and Paul were among the first to take advantage of the administration’I’m a bit long in the tooth for senoritas.” He’d lost Patsy to breast cancer three years ago, her death coming just a week before his sixty-fifth birthday. There’d been no one else since. What was the point?
    Now Paul chuckled. “But not for Mojitos, right?”
    Jay felt the change in the plane’s’momentum, the right wing dipped a few degrees, and the sun-bathed city rose into view outside their window. “No, not for Mojitos,” he said.

    Their taxi to the Bellevue Deauville Hotel was a 1956 Plymouth, white over coral. The cab’s interior was worn but clean, and the engine purred like it was new. Jay had read somewhe’e that in the ’70s and ’80s whole automobiles had b’en shipped to Russia and their parts duplicated and shipped back to Cuba. It was a rather ingenious idea, he thought as he admire’ the sea of pastel-colored vintage autos passing through the narrow streets.
    The conference hotel was like something conjured up from a 1950s sci-fi vi’w of the future. With a two-toned blue multi-story façade, and odd triangular shape, it looked ’ore like a parking garage than a hotel. But ’t was modestly priced and towered over the renowned Malecon Seawall and the Bay of Havana. From the sidewalk, Jay ’ould see the section of the city known as Old Havana—an easy walk. Maybe the accommodations weren’t so bad.
    He and Paul checked’in, found the elevators, and rode up to the eleventh floor. Their rooms were side by side and faced the bay. Jay looked out at the wide, slow ocean with the evening beginning to settle onto it. He felt more at peace watching the undulating water than he ’ad since his surgery. Jay’s reverie was interrupted by a knock on the door. He left the window and opened’the door’80s whole automobiles had been shipped to Russia and their parts duplicated and shipped back to Cuba. It was a rather ingenious idea, he thought as he admired the sea of pastel-colored vintage autos passing through the narrow streets.
    The conference hotel was like something conjured up from a 1950s sci-fi view of the future. With a two-toned blue multi-story façade, and odd triangular shape, it looked more like a parking garage than a hotel. But it was modestly priced and towered over the renowned Malecon Seawall and the Bay of Havana. From the sidewalk, Jay could see the section of the city known as Old Havana—an easy walk. Maybe the accommodations weren’evening air. A thin sheen of perspiration dampened Jay’s forehead and upper lip, but it felt good. Too much time spent behind air-conditioned walls, way too much.
    A mixture of restaurants, bodegas, and small retail shops lined both sides of the street. Music wafted from many of the storefronts, a mélange of s’ringed instruments and horns that filled the night with a sense of easy, lazy melody. Down the street a forty-something woman leaned against a ’55 Chevy 2-door, white over mint green. She wore a pale yellow shift dress and smoked a long, thin cigar’tte. A cascade of dark curls and long, thick eyelashes softened the strong features of her olive-toned skin.
    Jay stopped and nodded to he’. “Tu coche?”
    “No.” A plume of grayish-white smoke curled up from her nostrils and circled her head and face like a veil.
    “Oh, well ... I used to own one like it ... when I was an undergraduate.”
    She gestured toward the open storefront with her cigarette. “It’s my great uncle’s car.”
    Inside the narrow space, cloaked in shadow, a man sat at a small square table. Behind him on the wall an electric-blue neon sign’spelled out Vedado. Below the sign, amber-colored bottles decorated a softly-lit back bar.
    The bar’s atmosphere intrigued Jay. It had a local feel and somehow seemed appropriate as his first stop after the hotel. He stepped inside and found a table close to the old man—one where he could take in the bar’s interior but still observe foot traffic on the sidewalk. Aside from him and the man, the pla’e was empty.
    A whiff of tobacco and perfume announced the presence of the woman from the curb. She stood looking down at him. A cascade of dark curls and long, thick eyelashes softened the strong features of her olive-toned face.
    “You would like something to drink?”
    “Cerveza, please. Draft, if you have it.”
    She moved behind the bar, drew a tall beer, and brought it to his table.
    “Cuban,” she said, “Bucanero. Tell me if you like it.”
    Jay tasted the beer—cold, flavorful, and refreshing. “It’s good.”’She smiled, show’ng rows of perfect white teeth, and then walked back out to the Chevy.
    Since entering the bar, Jay had noticed the old man eyeing him carefully. He wore a pale blue guayabera over white trousers and sandals. Tufts of white hair sproute’ from under a narrow-brimmed straw hat and blended with the stubble covering his cheeks. Jay lifted his beer to the man—a gesture of acknowledgement—and took another long drink.
    “Norte Americano, no’s interior but still observe foot traffic on the sidewalk. Aside from him and the man, the place was empty.
    A whiff of tobacco and perfume announced the presence of the woman from the curb. She stood looking down at him. A cascade of dark curls and long, thick eyelashes softened the strong features of her olive-toned face.
    “You would like something to drink?”
    “Cerveza, please. Draft, if you have it.”
    She moved behind the bar, drew a tall beer, and brought it to his table.
    “Cuban,” she said, “Bucanero. Tell me if you like it.”
    Jay tasted the beer—cold, flavorful, and refreshing. “It’s good.”
    She smiled, showing rows of perfect white teeth, and then walked back out to the Chevy.
    Since entering the bar, Jay had noticed the old man eyeing him carefully. He wore a pale blue guayabera over white trousers and sandals. Tufts of white hair sprouted from under a narrow-brimmed straw hat and blended with the stubble covering his cheeks. Jay lifted his beer to the man—a gesture of acknowledgement—and took another long drink.
    “Norte Americano, no?” the man said.
    “Si.”
    “Then welcome to Havana and to the Vedado. I am Diego Reyes, owner of this establishment. The girl who would rather smoke on the curb than pour drinks is my niece, Carla. We are happy you have chosen to patronize us.”
    “It’s of his own mortality, and woke refreshe’ the following morning. Throughout the day of meetings and panel discussions, he thought more than once about his experience the night before at the Vedado. It made little sense to him—a quiet drink at a quiet place—but the more he thought of it, the greater was his desire to return.
    At the end of the day he again declined drinks and dinner from Paul and several other colleagues and hea’ed left out of the hotel toward Old Havana and Vedado.

    “A gangster,” Jay responded. The name association was a familiar refrain, one he sometimes enjoyed. “Now why would you think that?”
    Reyes dark eyes twinkled with amusement. “When I was a boy there were many members of the mob doing business in Havana. Mr. Meyer Lansky was well known here, and his brother Jacob managed the Hotel Nacional in the late 1950s.” The old man removed a thin cigar from his pocket and us’s movement broke the moonlight into a thousand shimmering pieces.
    Jay slept soundly that night, a brief respite from the lingering thoughts of his own mortality, and woke refreshed the following morning. Throughout the day of meetings and panel discussions, he thought more than once about his experience the night before at the Vedado. It made little sense to him—a quiet drink at a quiet place—but the more he thought of it, the greater was his desire to return.
    At the end of the day he again declined drinks and dinner from Paul and several other colleagues and headed left out of the hotel toward Old Havana and Vedado.

    “A gangster,” Jay responded. The name association was a familiar refrain, one he sometimes enjoyed. “Now why would you think that?”
    Reyes dark eyes twinkled with amusement. “When I was a boy there were many members of the mob doing business in Havana. Mr. Meyer Lansky was well known here, and his brother Jacob managed the Hotel Nacional in the late 1950s.” The old man removed a thin cigar from his pocket and used a black metallic cutter to snip one end. Then he raked a match across the top of his table and held the flame to the cigar, rolling it between his fingers and puffing until the tip turned a bright orange. “And now there is a new Mr. Lansky visiting our city.” Reyes leaned forward and gave Jay a knowing look. “I think maybe you are here to, what you would call, get the lay of the land, make new contacts—or, perhaps to reestablish old ones.”
    Jay chuckled to himself. The old man had an active imagination. Play it out, he thought, what could it hurt? “And if you are correct in that assumption, Mr. Reyes, how does that involve you?”
    Before the old man could answer, Carla appeared from behind a door at the end of the bar. She drew a Bucanero from the tap and brought it to his table. Her fingers lingered on his for just a moment as she handed it to him. Then she moved through the front doorway and out to the curb where the Chevy waited.
    “My father worked for Jacob Lansky at the hotel, and sometimes he worked for Meyer Lansky doing ... other things. The money was good, business was good, and then the Russians came and everything went to hell. The Lansky brothers left with all their friends, the new government nationalized the oil companies, and the people of Cuba found themselves scrambling for everything from gasoline to pantyhose.”
    Jay watched Reyes over the rim of his glass, the cold beer tasting good in his mouth and on the back of his throat. He sat the glass down and said, “Thus gave rise to the Cuban black market.”
    “There, see,” the man said, “you understand. I knew you would.”
    Again, Jay chuckled inwardly. “I teach Latin American studies.”
    “Of course you do. And this market has continued, thrived even, in the years since. My father was a part of that network, and as I grew older, I became a part of it, too.”
    “And, presumably, still are,” Jay said.
    Reyes held his hands out, palms up and shrugged. “I do what I can to provide for the people’s needs. But I am growing old and tired. I could use some help.”
    “And you think I could be that help?”
    “I think you came to Havana looking for something. I am not sure what it is, but if you stay long enough, perhaps you will find it. Perhaps I can help you find it.”
    Jay finished his beer and stood. “I’m only here for three days. My flight home is day after tomorrow.”
    “And what awaits you at home, Mr. Lansky—a wife, children, teaching more students about Latin America?”
    Jay paused. “My wife died three years ago.”
    “Lo siento. It is hard, being a widower. I am one myself. But perhaps it is time for you now to, as you might say in the States, live a little.” Reyes took a long puff on his cigar. The sweet-smelling smoke drifted up toward the ceiling in blue-gray curls. “If you change your mind, paperwork, documents, legalities—all of that needn’t trouble you. I have many friends.”
    A soft breeze blew in from the sidewalk, and along with it, the same flowery fragrance that belonged to Carla. “Thank you for your time and the interesting conversation, Mr. Reyes.”
    “Thank you,” the old man said. “I will be here tomorrow night. Perhaps I will see you then.”
    “Perhaps,” Jay said and turned to leave.
    Outside, Carla leaned against the Chevy, her dark eyes lingering on his face, a half smile on her lips. “My uncle has made you a proposition?”
    “I suppose you could call it that.”
    “He believes you are a gangster.” Her smile widened. “I don’t know if that’s true, but I would like to think it is so.”
    “And why is that?” Jay asked.
    She pushed off from the car and linked her arm through his. “Because it makes you seem dangerous ... and sexy.”
    Jay laughed. “I’m a college professor.”
    “Of course you are,” she said, echoing the old man’s earlier comment. “Now, Mr. Professor, will you walk with me?”
    “Sure,” he said. “Which way do you want to go?”
    “You are staying at the Bellevue?”
    Jay nodded.
    “Let’s go that way,” she said, pulling him toward the bay.
    Minutes later they stood arm in arm looking out over the Malecon Seawall. The summer breeze rose and fell, rolling like the ocean, with a quality that was sensual and female. The heat rising from Carla’s body bathed Jay’s skin like a balm, stirring feelings in him he had thought stilled forever.
    “It is beautiful, is it not?” she said.
    Jay turned so that he looked down into her face. “Yes,” he said, his heartbeat ramping up with the words, “but not as beautiful as you.”
    She lifted her face and brushed her lips against his, softly at first, then again more firmly. After a moment Carla broke the kiss and rested her head on his chest. “I would think the bay is even more breathtaking viewed from your hotel room.”
    “You should see it,” Jay said.
    “Yes,” Carla replied, “let’s see it now.”

    Jay awoke early the following morning smiling and filled with renewed energy. Carla had left sometime during the night, but the scent of her lingered on the bedsheets. It had been like something out of a dream. But it wasn’t a dream. He laced his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling, thinking about her uncle’s question from the previous night. What did he have to go home to—more classes and stilted faculty get-togethers? Watching the seasons change from his off-campus house, spending restless hours tossing and turning alone in his bed? Two more years, the doctor said—if he was fortunate.
    He remembered reading books and seeing movies about mob activities during the forties and fifties, Meyer Lansky and his buddy, Lucky Luciano. Maybe, he thought, it was time for this Lansky to make his own luck.
    During his last day of meetings, Jay’s mind drifted back to the previous evening’s pleasures. It had been almost three years since his wife died, and he had been with no one in the interim. Hadn’t wanted to, wasn’t even sure he could. Now he recalled every detail Carla’s smooth skin, the taste of her tongue, her gasps of desire, and his own.
    He met Paul in the hotel lobby after the conference adjourned. “I’ve decided to extend my stay on the island,” Jay said.
    Paul seemed surprised. “Can you do that? Just stay for a while, I mean.”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “What’ll I tell the folks back home, the dean?”
    Jay smiled. “Tell them I’m on sabbatical.”

    Jay dressed in a cream-colored tropical wool suit and a dark blue open-collared shirt before leaving the hotel. On the way to Vedado, he stopped in a clothing store and purchased a straw Panama hat the same shade as his suit and a pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses.
    Carla was behind the bar when he arrived. She arched her eyebrows as he entered, and then nodded her approval. Jay was at once relieved and excited.
    Reyes was at his usual table and said, “The professor returns.”
    Jay pulled out a chair and sat, this time at the old man’s table. “Could be I am no longer the professor. Perhaps I’m just a man who came to Havana looking for something.”
    Reyes’ eyes slid sideways in Carla’s direction. “And have you found it?”
    “Part of it, at least, but I believe there is more to be found, with your help.”
    The old man took a moment, lighting one of his thin cigars, and then said, “Tell me what you need in order to pursue the rest.”
    “If I’m to stay on the island, I’ll need whatever is required legally ... or otherwise to permit that. And I’ll need somewhere to live.”
    Carla had come out from the bar and was observing the conversation from behind her uncle’s chair. She glided around the table and placed her hand on Jay’s shoulder. “I have a small house near the bar. You will stay with me, at least until you find a place of your own.”
    Jay looked up at her and nodded and covered her hand with his. Was he really doing this? Was he out of his mind, this nearly seventy-year-old, tenured college professor? He thought of something his mother used to tell him as a child about ‘flying too close to the flame.’ The moth flew too close and died as a result. Jay was dying anyway. Before he did, he wanted to feel the heat, the danger, the sweet ecstasy of truly living.
    “I’ll need you to show me the ropes, too,” Jay told Reyes.
    “It’s no problem, Mr. Lansky, but I must warn you, the black market is not a long term proposition. With Cuba opening up for American travel, the economy will prosper. We may have at best two years, maybe less.”
    Jay turned his head and kissed Carla’s smooth, warm hand, then extended his own hand to the old man and smiled. “I appreciate the warning, Mr. Reyes, but I think I can live with that.”

unless

feel warmth from the sun
touching legs, shoulders, your skin

unless you’re woman

SNOW and EMBERS
From 3 Teeners – Men between Wives

    Monday 5:45
    K.M.
    Your mother said it was urgent that you call her immediately. You had already gone when the call came in and we didn’t have your motel number.

    This was the note Keith found on the message board at the construction site when he showed up for work Tuesday morning.
    After hanging up from the call to his mother, he immediately put in a call to Myra in the main office in Cleveland.
    “Look, I need some help. I just talked to Mother...she says there is an emergency...”
    “Somebody ill?”
    “I asked her, but she didn’t say...she was hysterical...or at least she sounded that way...with her you never know. This is a bad time...we’re having some problems with the frame...But I suppose I’d better get down there and see what this is all about...”
    “Of course you must. Do what you can on the job, and I’ll be working out something for you...Get back to you in an hour or so...one way or the other...”
    And, surely enough, Myra worked things out for him. She talked to the bosses and cleared a short leave for him. And she lined up a series of short flights that would relieve him of spending long hours in commercial airports.
    He spent the morning mapping out things with the crew foreman, and by noon he was on a flight to Cincinnati. From there he was on a freight plane for Washington.
    On this flight, he drifted into a pleasant nap that led to a delightful dream: Myra in overalls; Myra in a business suit; Myra in the kitchen with her apron on. She wouldn’t allow herself to be seen in a swimsuit, but there she was in a skimpy two-piece job. And then Myra in negligee! And she was singing in that husky, tuneless voice! Things were about to get sticky!
    But just as matters were shifting into an exotic plateau, the plane landed in Washington at midnight. He then had to rush to catch another freight shuttle to Charlotte.
    And on the flight to Charlotte he hurriedly tried to get back to sleep, hoping to recapture that dream. He was unable to doze off, but his thoughts were full of Myra, with remembrances of how he had come to know her.
    Myra was a whiz. When the company had been smaller, she was called a dispatcher, somebody who knew where everybody and everything was, knew how to find who or what anybody needed. Then when all the mergers came about, she continued to do what she had always done, but she was ever more valuable as a troubleshooter now that the corporation had crews in construction sites all over the place. She could get on her keyboard and cite the quickest flights to whatever sites, where to find this equipment or that information. She never used an office, rather keeping a desk in the hall where she was more accessible when someone needed her.
    She was already a solid blue-collar fixture in the main office in Cleveland when Keith came to work there as a hands-on construction engineer. The bosses had told him that he should call on Myra whenever he needed logistics help, and he quickly came to realize why the management held her in such high regard.
    He also found her refreshingly attractive in a plump, bubbly way, this in sharp contrast with Thelma, his thin, sophisticated, poster-girl wife.
    And even after Thelma walked out on him, unable to handle the routine that had him on construction sites here and there and home only on weekends - sometimes not even on these - he never considered Myra as anything more than a comrade-at-arms, for Myra did, after all, wear a wedding band of her own.
    Then came a fateful afternoon, a Friday when he had been in afternoon meetings in the company’s main offices. Upon leaving the building he found Myra in the parking lot. She was in her car, churning it, pumping it, trying desperately to get it started, even as the battery was obviously getting weaker.
    In her thirties now, her hair was still raven without the help of tint, her teeth were still white, and the dark eyes still sparkled. She may have put on a little weight - that’s why she would refuse to be seen in a swimsuit - but she was still ever so plumply attractive and bubbly.
    Keith walked over to her car, signaled to her, and she released the hood latch. He lifted the hood and signaled for her to try the starter again. He held up his hand, giving her the halt sign. Then he motioned for her to step out of the car. She looked under the hood with him.
    “Myra, it could be a number of things, but one thing is sure: your battery terminals are badly corroded...and your battery is suspect...Why don’t I take you home, and your husband can come back with a scraper and some jumper cables...”
    “I don’t have a husband...”
    “But I thought...”
    “I was...but we have separated...”
    Keith took her home on that Friday afternoon, and then he went to her place early Saturday morning. From there he took Myra and Margie, her eleven-year-old daughter, back to the parking lot. Keith cleaned off the terminals and posts, got the car started, and then followed them to a garage where the battery was replaced.
    Thereafter, Keith spent many hours with Myra and Margie, their time together limited to weekends because he would fly to a construction site on Monday and not return until Friday.
    It was really a halcyon period for Keith. His brief marriage had really turned cool before it heated up, and in the few months before Thelma threw in the towel his weekends had been torture. So the calm times with Myra were something like a respite.
    And he learned about Myra, about the husband who would not keep a job, who drank a bit too much, and who was a compulsive gambler. From him Myra was separated but not yet divorced.
    So Keith’s apartment stayed mostly unoccupied as he spent so much time at Myra’s suburban bungalow. They’d play badminton or rent a movie, or go skating, or play scrabble or simply laze around. And after church on Sundays they’d go for drives that usually ended up in picnics.
    More often than not, Margie would be along. Keith and Margie got along famously.
    And with Myra and Keith, a warm but circumspect intimacy was growing, and growing.
    On a Friday, he got back to town and went to his apartment for a shower and change. He found Myra waiting for him at his door. The look on her face told him something was very wrong.
    “Keith, do you have a beer for me?”
    “Of course. Come on in.”
    He dropped his luggage inside the door and they shared a long, rather tentative embrace. He went to the refrigerator and got a couple of beers and they sat on the couch in his den.
    “Keith, I’ll get right to the point: I won’t be seeing you anymore. Edward has moved back to town...he has a job and he has begged me to take him back...”
    Keith had never met Edward, and since Edward was a subject that never came up between him and Myra, he only knew about Edward what was generally known around the workplace.
    “Is that what you want to do?”
    “No, it isn’t. I don’t feel right about it at all...but he is still my husband...legally, anyway. And then there is Margie...Keith, I don’t know what to say...You and I...and Margie is so fond of you...”
    “You don’t have to say anything...We have to do what we have to do...”
    That appeared to be the end of things for Keith and Myra. When he was in the main office, he avoided passing Myra’s desk - too painful even to see this probably sad girl he’d become so fond of.
    Some three months passed. Keith was on a construction site in Tennessee when he got a mid-week fax from company headquarters. His advice was needed in a critical meeting, so he was to fly back to Cleveland in a company plane immediately.
    And there was a memo at the bottom of the fax sheet: “Please stop by and see me before you leave for the day. - Myra”.
    Keith did not wait for the end of the day - he stopped by Myra’s desk even before dropping in on the meeting already in progress.
    She said, “You’ve heard?”
    “Heard what? I haven’t seen you in weeks...I would have stopped by, but I thought...well, I thought it might be awkward...”
    “Well, Keith, I finally threw him out. Period. He wasn’t drinking as much as before...and the rumors of a woman might be just rumors. But I couldn’t ignore some evidence...He lost his job and didn’t tell me...and as far as I could see, he was staying at home all day...not even looking for a job...so I threw the son of a bitch out...”
    “I can’t say I’m surprised...”
    “Look, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to see me any more...but I’ve missed you...so has Margie...But things are awfully messy right now...I won’t go into all of it at the moment...When, and if, things ever stabilize, maybe...”
    “Maybe we could get together again? I surely hope so. I’ve missed you, too...So do we have to wait for things to stabilize?”
    When Keith’s meeting was over a little after five, she was waiting for him in the parking lot. After a long embrace, they walked two blocks to a neighborhood tavern where they sat and had a couple of beers.
    “Tell me now: just how messy is it?”
    “Terribly messy...Since he was staying at home, I suppose he had to gamble...to him, the main purpose of a phone is calling in bets...”
    “Calling in bets? How? I mean, if he had no job, how could he continue to make bets?”
    “Well, now, here’s the sweet part: when we took out the mortgage on the house, it was in both our names. So scarcely a week after I threw him out, I learned he had forged my signature to get a loan on our equity...”
    “So he’s gone, but you’re stuck with another home mortgage?”
    “That’s what it has come to. In short, I’ll have to sell the house. I could have Edward charged with forgery, but what good would that do?”
    “How soon?”
    “As soon as I can sell the place...”

    In Charlotte he changed planes once again, this time into a commercial carrier. It was 7 AM when he landed in Hartsville.
    His first thought was of a shave. The dark stubble on his chin and neck was beginning to irritate. He fished a ditty bag from his suitcase and went into the men’s room of the small private airport. He removed his shirt and washed his face.
    Then he gasped – how could a grown man come off without his razor?
    He put his suitcase onto the back seat of the Ford Escort that had been rented for him (something else Myra had taken care of). It was a little after 8:00 when he entered the city limits of Meade. When he passed Becker’s Drug store, he almost stopped to buy a razor, but thought better of it.
    (“Hell, I’ve got to get this thing, whatever it is, over with...if I stop here, somebody will tie me up with small talk...”)
    But he did stop at a phone booth for some talk that he didn’t consider small. It was just 7:00 in her time zone, so he got her at home.
    “I just got into Meade...”
    “Into the crisis center?”
    “That’s about the size of it.”
    “Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think...Do you think you’ll see Pop?”
    “I’ll make a point of it...”
    “Good...both of you need that...Anyway, I can hardly wait till Friday...”

    He pulled into the circular drive in front of the big, impressive house he had once called home. While the place may have changed superficially, there were no surprises. The white house had its Doric columns, high banisters, and rocking chairs that were never sat in, all smacking of paint and polish. The small lawn before it was manicured and very formal.
    His mother’s black Continental was in the garage. As he parked behind it, he noticed the BMW.
    (“Somehow I knew that’s what this would be all about.”)
    He carried his suitcase with him. The front door was unlocked and he went through the immaculate entrance hall. Then there was the over-decorated, over-formal parlor, and then a narrow hallway. He found his mother in her breakfast nook off the kitchen with her very civilized breakfast of tea and toast.
    In her mid-fifties, she was stylishly slender, carefully coiffured, and, except for the obvious efforts to be prim and formal, she was an extremely attractive woman, with her tall grace complemented by smooth skin, an even oval face, and striking sky-blue eyes. She was sitting there in her dressing gown. Her make-up was fully in place, and Keith had no doubt that all the proper foundation garments were under the gown.
    She spied Keith and sprang up from her chair. After hugging him and pecking his cheek, she broke into a fit of sobs.
    “I’m so glad you could come...I just don’t know what we’re going to do...”
    Keith, quite familiar with this kind of behavior from his mother, stood and waited for the hysteria to subside a bit.
    “Look, Mother, I had to juggle things to get this little bit of time off...I’ve got to fly back this afternoon one way or another...So we’d better get on with it! But first: I saw Bobby’s car outside. What’s he doing in town?”
    “That’s part of the problem,” answered the still sobbing but dry-eyed Mother, “so I’ll get Robert and we can have breakfast...”
    Keith almost blurted out that his mother was stalling, but he took the stall obediently. “I’ll grab a shower and be with you in a minute...”
    And no need to ask if Bobby had a razor (“He’s sure to be one who uses the latest electric job, and this beard cries for foam and sharp steel.”).

    When he returned to the breakfast nook, Bobby was standing there with his mother.
    Even if he’d not been wearing a silk smoking jacket and white ascot, one could not have missed the trappings of a professional actor: the carefully styled dark-brown hair, the complexion that gives off the aura of makeup and sun lamp, the obvious emotional control.
    (“You can tell he’s an electric razor man!”)
    Bobby and Keith shook hands and took seats at the table. As they were getting the routine how-you-doings out of the way, Mother served them eggs that had been scrambled by Carol, an old family retainer.
    When they finished the eggs with toast and marmalade, Carol took away the dishes and the three of them adjourned to the parlor for coffee, where Keith figured they’d finally get to the reason he was summoned for this crisis. Keith and his mother sat on a sofa and Bobby slumped in an armchair.
    But Mother and Bobby were chatting about something or other, apparently in no hurry to get to whatever the vital subject might be.
    Keith cleared his throat and blurted out, “When you called yesterday, Mother, it sounded like the world was coming to an end. I really had to juggle to get these few hours here - we’re right in the middle of a project. And now that I’m here, you don’t seem any the worse for wear...”
    “Oh, Keith, it’s awful...what I’ve been through...”
    Keith then looked at Bobby, the Bobby who probably shouldn’t be here, the Bobby who was sure to be the root of whatever disaster Mother was so slow in getting to.
    Hollywood Bobby, the lead in all the school plays, ballet lessons, piano and voice lessons, fencing lessons, drama camps every summer; then a “scholarship” which paid a small part of the tuition for an exclusive private school, still leaving much more to pay than the total at almost any other school. Then the change of schools, and more changes of schools until, the last Keith had heard, he was “working out of Atlanta” - some little theater, some TV commercials, but at the moment sitting here with every hair in place and with a condescending smirk.
    “Well, Keith,” pined Mother, “you know your father just walked out on me...”
    “Of course I know that, Mother - you called when it happened, and Pop sent me a card...but that was six months ago! You’ve got the house and an allowance, haven’t you?”
    “Oh, I suppose most people would say he has been reasonable, not that it makes up for the humiliation he has caused...”
    Another sobbing fit followed, and Keith waited impatiently for it to pass.
    “You wouldn’t believe the embarrassment, Keith. When the Garden Club meets...and I have to go...I am president, after all...I see all the sympathy in their eyes, and I can imagine what they are saying behind my back...”
    “Mother, of course I am sorry about you and Pop...”
    “Don’t refer to your father in that colloquial manner...”
    “O.K. But Mother, this thing has happened. And you seem to agree he has taken care of you financially...So what’s the problem?”
    “Yes, I said your father has been reasonable in a way...I have the house and he sends me enough to get by on and to take care of most of the bills...But it is so humiliating...”
    “Mother, you must have realized how miserable Pop has been since he retired from the plant. You couldn’t have been surprised when he left here...we all knew he was feeling lonesome and useless, didn’t we?”
    “I did all I could, Keith. I tried to get him interested in things. I took him to meetings...”
    “Come on, Mother! You know very well he couldn’t stand meetings - he’d had enough meetings to last a lifetime...”
    “...And I tried to get him to take a European tour with me...”
    “No good! Something like that would drive him up the wall He’s happier when he’s doing things with his hands...”
    “That’s right; all he ever wanted to do was go fishing...and when you were in school, he went to all those ball games you played...and those auto races... even those awful wrestling things...”
    “And you never went with him...”
    “Goodness no! I can’t picture respectable people...”
    “But if he enjoys those things, he must think they’re respectable enough.”
    “Oh, Keith, he’s a retired executive; he has so much to offer a community. But he’d rather slouch around in those old clothes...and burn those awful cigars...”
    “Which you wouldn’t allow him to smoke in his own house!”
    “That’s not true! He had the back porch...and he could use his study - after I put in a purifier!”
    “Well, anyway, I wasn’t surprised when he decided to leave. I got a card from him. He praised you as a great lady, but said he couldn’t stand it any longer. Said you decorated the house and ran it in ways that made him feel like a stranger...That card is all I heard from him. Do you know where he is staying?”
    “Do you remember that little farm he bought...north of town?”
    “With the pond on it? Yes, we went fishing out there.”
    “Well, the houses on the place were decrepit. He’s living out there...in a trailer!”
    “Where he can fish every day, and smoke cigars when he pleases?”
    “Yes, and we’ve been hearing of some other disturbing things...And did you know that he has a job? As a night watchman! Imagine!”
    “No I hadn’t heard that...But, again, Mother: I must insist...What is it that made you call me? Why was it so necessary for me to come down here, and right now?”
    “I haven’t told you everything yet...”
    Bobby’s smirk was now a bored stare as his mother went on. “You see, I had to go to family court...he’s reduced the stipend I was getting...”
    “Oh? Can you be a bit more specific?”
    “I keep the house, as agreed; and he gives me living expenses; there is a fund for my car, and there’s hospitalization...all that stays the same...”
    “Then what changes were actually made in the arrangements?”
    “He’s stopped Robert’s allowance!”
    “Robert’s allowance?”
    “Yes! Would you believe it?”
    Keith paused for a long look at his indignant mother and then at her now fidgeting younger son.
    “Mother, the only thing I find hard to believe is that he was giving Bobby an allowance in the first place! Bobby is twenty-four years old! You are not in school again, are you, Bobby? I thought you were working in Atlanta.”
    Bobby, in his rich stage tone, answered, “I am, but I’m not making any money.”
    Mother broke in, “He was doing television commercials. I hate to see him wasting his talent that way, but they do pay well...”
    Bobby spoke up again, “You see, Keith, I was spending so much time on call for the commercials, I was letting too many good opportunities slip by, good roles that could help my career...”
    “Hold the phone! You were working steady and you decided not to?”
    “I’m still working steady, but this is a stock company. We’re doing an exciting new play. There’s a good chance it will be presented on PBS...”
    “But with this stock thing you don’t get paid?”
    “Very little, Keith; hardly enough to live on. But this is just too good a vehicle to pass up...”
    “So you asked Pop for an allowance and he turned you down?”
    Mother took over again. “That’s not exactly the way it was. Your father was giving him a small allowance all along, but he stopped it.”
    “Pop was sending Bobby an allowance? Since when? I don’t understand.”
    “Well, your father wasn’t actually sending Robert a stipend; I was.”
    “You were? A while ago you sounded as if you were just eking by; how can you manage to send Bobby money?”
    “When Robert was in school, I had an account set up by bank draft.”
    “But Mother, that was six years ago, and Bobby finally dropped out of school...or at least he quit switching schools...I wasn’t able to keep up with it all...You mean Pop agreed to let the allowance continue?”
    “Well, he didn’t disagree. I just saw to it that Robert’s allowance continued when he left school to go on the road that time...”
    “But Pop didn’t know about the allowance?”
    “I never lied to him! But, no, maybe he didn’t know about the arrangement. You know how dead set he was against Robert’s developing his talent as an actor!”
    “Let me see if I understand this: you just let the allowance account stay active, and Pop didn’t know about it?”
    “Now don’t sound so stern with me, young man! When Robert makes a name for himself as an actor, your father will be proud that he helped in this small way! I’m Robert’s mother; I had to look after his interests...”
    “Oh, I get the picture all right! How did Pop finally figure all this out?”
    “Oh, some accountant working with your father’s attorney. He kept asking me about the nature of that account. I finally had to tell him. I don’t know what the accountant may have told your father.”
    “So it boils down to this: you call me with a crisis, and it has to do with an allowance for Bobby? That’s why I had to juggle to get a day off at an especially bad time?”
    “But Keith, you’re the only one who can really talk to your father!”
    “Me? Talk to Pop?”
    “Yes. He would listen to you! Your father spent so much time with you. When you were playing all those ball games, he was always there. But with Robert it was different - he never really understood Robert! It was like pulling teeth to get him to go to see Robert in a play...you remember how Robert always got the lead in the school plays...and the storm your father had when Robert started dancing lessons...and went to drama camp! Why, he wasn’t even pleased when Robert got that drama scholarship!”
    “Well, I do remember that the school was expensive...”
    “But it was in Robert’s chosen profession, after all!”
    “Anyway, I guess that’s water over the dam...But I can’t see myself talking to Pop on this allowance thing!’
    Bobby said, “It wouldn’t do much good for me to talk to him, Keith. When I was at home a year or so ago, we got into an awful argument...I don’t suppose I behaved too well...I walked out on him.”
    Mother took over again. “Keith, they just lost control - both of them had doses of pride...But this is really critical. This play may be just the opportunity Robert has been waiting for...”
    “Tell me, Bobby, is everyone else in the play blessed with independent means?”
    “Well, some of them hold down jobs, like waiting on tables, working in gas stations, that sort of thing. But I’m second lead. I need free time to work on the part, to keep sharp...”
    Keith looked at his younger brother and grinned. “Bobby, that’s where you and I part company...you always seem to have something against holding down a job!”
    “And you’re just as stingy-minded as your father!”
    Bobby got up and stormed out of the room, with Keith wondering if there were a drama lesson there somewhere.
    Mother moved over to Keith and affectionately squeezed his arm. “Keith, darling, forgive Robert - he’s hurt by all this. He sees this play as his big chance, and now he feels pinched for money...”
    “Mother, I don’t have any ill feelings toward Bobby, but I do think he should be on his own. Maybe he should be taking one of those jobs like some of the others have to do.”
    “That would kill him, Keith...and that’s why I am begging you to talk to your father...”
    “I just don’t think I can do it!”
    “...And, really, you might break some ice. You see, the divorce is not final. If you could get it across to your father that he could come back home, it could be like it was before. I’m not a vindictive person. Of course I am hurt by all this. That’s to be expected after all he’s put me through. But I have a forgiving nature. And think of it: what he’d save on living expenses by moving back here...why, that alone could almost be enough for Robert...And, well, I don’t like to heed rumors, but there is talk that everything out there in that trailer is not circumspect...”
    The tears came again. Keith knew this routine very well, but by then he was out of patience.
    “Stop it, Mother!”
    The sobs stopped abruptly. “What are we going to do?”
    “I don’t know that we can do anything. But I’ll run out there and see Pop...No promises, you understand...I’m not going to try to get Pop to do what he’s against, but I will talk to him! O.K.?”
    “I’m so glad you came. I knew I could....”
    Her poignant words fell on Keith’s back as he was leaving the room.

    (“How about that? Pop lives in a trailer and she thinks it’s gross! Well, Myra lives in a trailer, and it’s damned nice.”)
    Myra was able to sell her house almost immediately, but there was so little left over from the indebtedness that a down payment on even a modest house was out of reach.
    So she bought an acre lot in the country. Keith, using some company equipment and the help of a couple of friends, leveled the lot and landscaped it. Then they shopped around and found a more than functional repossessed trailer.
    This had been home to Myra and Margie for over a year now. A divorce is expensive, and Edward was unwilling and unable to contribute anything to the process, so this was put on a back burner. Myra was given custody of Margie. Edward had visitation rights, but he had moved out of the area and had not kept in touch.
    Keith was more or less a member of the family on weekends. However, if he did spend a night in the trailer, he slept on a daybed.
    (“Could I tell all this to Mother? Me cavorting with a girl who lives in a trailer? One who actually has to work for a living? And Mother thought so much of Thelma because she was so ‘elegantly thin’! Mother would say poor Myra needed to go to a spa!”)
    
    He found a phone booth at the edge of town and called Myra at work.
    “Just checking in, and I only have a minute...I’ve had a session with Mother...”
    “How was it?”
    “Not so good...I’ve never told you much about my family, have I?”
    “Not much...but I’ve always sensed that you were not too comfortable talking about it...and that’s all right...But I’ve noticed a little sparkle when you mention Pop...”
    “I’m on my way to see him now...”
    “Then you know where he is?”
    “Yes. He’s had this little farm for years...he doesn’t have a phone...but he’s got a job as a night watchman...so he’ll probably be at home.”
    “You’ll call me after you see Pop?”
    “Sure will.”
    
    It had been several years since he’d been to the farm, but little had changed on the ten miles of paved road and four miles of dusty dirt roads leading through the brush that surrounded the place where he and his father had often gone fishing. Off the county-maintained dirt road was a bulldozed single lane trail intermittently covered with pinestraw. This went on for a half-mile and ended at a large pond, almost a lake, surrounded by pines, oaks and willows. To the right of the pond was Pop’s place, a small, single-wide trailer with a deck and a pier that extended over the pond. This was set off by a recently mowed green yard inside a chain-link fence. Pop’s six-year-old LTD was parked outside the fence.
    The sign on the gate said BEWARE OF DOG, but Keith saw none and he gingerly opened the gate, crossed the yard and stepped up on a small covered porch. The trailer gleamed like one either steam-cleaned or freshly painted.
    Sounds of radio or television came from within. Keith knocked on the door and got no answer. He pushed open the unlocked door and stepped inside. To the right of the door a narrow hallway led to what appeared to be the master bedroom. He stepped to the left into a living room where a plain sofa and a couple of armchairs gave off a masculine, almost military simplicity. A step up led to a kitchen-dining area. Two pots on the kitchen stove were on low-boil. And, again, the utensils were in a simple, neat military order, so much in contrast to the frilly mansion he had so recently left.
    Beyond a glass sliding door was the deck with the pier extending over the pond. His father was seated at a picnic table on the deck in loose cotton clothes and bedroom slippers. Keith watched him for a moment. His father was reading a newspaper, sipping coffee, and occasionally puffing a big cigar. A very large German shepherd was asleep at his feet.
    Keith, not ready to confront the dog, opened the door an inch or two.
    “Hey!”
    “Why, Keith! I had no idea...it’s all right, George, he’s one of us!”
    The older man patted the dog and stood up as Keith stepped out of the door and closed it behind him. The two men embraced, with Pop patting Keith on the back.
    “Good to see you, son...mighty good!”
    By now the dog had sensed a friend and tried to join the reunion.
    “Meet George...he’s more than a companion...he earns his keep around here...He’s friendly now, but it pays to stay on the good side of him...”
    “I suspected as much, Pop. You’re looking good, Old Man!”
    Pop was sixty, with all his teeth and with the same iron-gray hair he’d had for thirty years. At 5'10", he was a solid one-ninety with a thick chest and heavy arms. There was a slight bulge around his middle, but he gave off a sense of energy and good condition.
    Pop poured Keith a mug of coffee from a ceramic jug on the table and had him take a seat in a lawn chair by the table.
    “How’d you manage to get off work? Through with a project?”
    “No, we’re doing this plant in Indiana...be there six months at least...I’m just down for the day...”
    “Oh, I see. Your mother call you?”
    “That’s right, Pop,” he said firmly, but he couldn’t suppress a little grin.
    “She cried the blues to get you here, right? And she wants you to talk the two of us back together?”
    “Right again, Old Man!”
    “How much do you know about all this, Son?”
    “Well, that card I got from you when you split up...and several long, wandering letters from Mother...Can’t say I know a hell of a lot.”
    “Right. And I don’t know if that’s fair to you...You want to hear my side of it?”
    “Whatever you’d care to tell me.”
    Pop looked at his watch and mused, “It’s ten-fifteen. It’ll be a little over an hour before lunch is ready, but I think I can say about all I’m capable of saying in less time than that. Tell you what: why don’t we ditch this coffee and have a couple of beers. It’s nice and cool out here and the bugs don’t get bad until late afternoon. That suit?”
    While Pop tended to the pots on the stove, Keith stepped down into the living room and then went down hallway to use the half-bathroom. This was adjacent to what would probably be called a guest bedroom, currently used for storage. In this room, things were stacked on standing shelves and, again, in neat military order.
    When Keith joined him on the deck, Pop was in a canvas chaise-lounge with a can of beer in one hand and a cigar in the other. A beer for Keith was on the table beside the several others in a cooler.
    Pop toyed with the cigar for a moment before putting a lighter to it. He lit it, took a long pull on it, and blew out a cloud of blue smoke.
    “I’d start from the beginning, but I’m not sure where the beginning is. So let’s fix it about fifteen years ago. At the plant, they moved me off the line where I belonged and put me into the office...a damned executive, for crying out loud! At about the same time, whether by luck or otherwise, some of the investments I made - you know, rental properties, little pieces of businesses, whatnot - they all started paying off...the property I sold to the highway people, in particular...”
    “...Think on this: there were these old guys I used to run with - you remember some of them...veterans, old timers...we used to go to the VFW for a few beers after work, go to the races and wrestling matches...”
    “Yeah, Pop, I went with you sometimes. Remember Haystack Calhoun used to wrestle in his overalls?”
    “Yeah, Keith, I enjoyed it so much more when you went along...but, you see, the other guys from the plant...well, they just didn’t feel right going places with me after I was promoted. Hell, I was a damned big shot!”
    “...So your mother got a bee in her bonnet - we just had to buy the old Bradley place...so we could have a decent home...Oh, I know I should have put my foot down, but, as you know, your mother is a forceful woman. So we bought the place and she became a decorating maniac...Hell, you lived there, you know all this. The place had to be ready all the time in case Better Homes and Gardens wanted to take pictures...I was too busy to interfere or to get riled, and we just rocked along...”
    “...Think about it: all the old guys I used to have a few beers with - they didn’t really want to go gallivanting with a company executive. And then you went off to school, and I started getting lonesome...I mean, the only unwinding I did for years was when you were playing a ball game, or when we were fishing...”
    “And then there’s Bobby. I’m not saying your mother purposely set out to alienate the boy from me, but look at it! He was going to this lesson or that one - acting, fencing, even singing and dancing. And he was gone every summer to this camp or that. It’s an awful admission here, but I don’t really know that boy...And then all that business about going to that plush college, and then changing schools and changing schools...and never any hint of getting a job...His mother kept saying he was just a step away from something...”
    The cigar was slow burning and Pop started on his second beer.
    “This’ll have to be my last beer. I have to hit the sack by one o’clock, and if I have any more beer I won’t sleep for having to go to the bathroom...”
    “...But things got really bad when I retired from the plant. Seems your mother had my retirement all mapped out. I was to join the Lions and the Rotarians - she even sent in my name. And she wanted me in the history society, and a bunch of other things. She had a spiel about what I could offer the community...And I don’t know if this is so or if it just seemed so, but she seemed to be stepping up the social calendar - all kinds of groups were meeting at the house. And get this: I was to use the back door, unless I was properly dressed. And she fixed up the back porch and a den for me, so I could stay there when she had company, or if I wanted a cigar...”
    “...The long and the short of it, Son: I was plain bored and lonesome. No old buddies to spend time with, and with you gone, and maybe I ought not to mention this -your mother and I haven’t shared a bedroom for years - that’s something respectable people don’t indulge in after a certain age...”
    “...This place here? As you know, I’ve owned this property for years. Used to make a little money on it when I could lease out the farm acreage, but that kind of thing dried up. So, to pass the time I started coming out here to work on the place. Rented a backhoe and leveled off this plot; got a road scraped; built a sluice for the pond. Got to where I’d come out here every day and work...Of course your mother raised hell when I came home smelling of work and woods and maybe some manure...but I kept at it...got me a nice little garden on the other side of the pond...”
    “...Well, I won’t even try to recall the exact sequence of events, but it was about two years ago I decided we had to make a change. Would you believe I had to get an appointment to talk to your mother? Yes, I’m sure you can believe it! Well, I put the cards on the table. Told her things had to change, that I couldn’t go on with my home being such a sterile, unhappy place. Got nowhere, of course...The place is still a museum, isn’t it?”
    “I can’t argue with that...like it’s ready for a group of tourists...”
    “And I do believe I will have one more beer...So I told her I couldn’t take it anymore and she ignored me! And since I was having my best hours out here, I just bought myself this trailer and moved. Your mother keeps the house...I have a good retirement plan and social security will kick in, so I can live here reasonably well, and still give your mother what I think is a pretty good living allowance, with hospitalization and that sort of stuff...So here I am!”
    “...Of course, your mother didn’t seem satisfied with her living allowance. I can show you the books if you like, but I think what I was giving her is a reasonable part of the total income...Lawyer Boggs is representing me, and he brought in an accountant. I didn’t want to be mean about it, but we simply had to cut back from the amount she was asking for...we think the judge will go along with us on this...”
    “...Right now I have a little shortfall of ready cash, so when the plant over in Eastover advertised for a security guard, I applied and got the job...I’ll stay with it for a couple of years at least...until I get the trailer paid off...or maybe longer...”
    Keith, also on his third beer, mulled all this over. He had, of course, decided there was no point in bringing up the business about Bobby and the allowance.
    “Are you happy, Pop?”
    “Son, happiness is a relative thing. I regret losing Bobby - I’ll always regret that, and when I think about it, it hurts. And your mother...we just don’t feel for each other like two married people should. I didn’t get from her what I expected a marriage to provide, and I’m sure it works the other way around...and certainly I regret any pain this separation has caused her...No, I don’t enjoy that aspect of it...but I can’t help thinking that the two of us are better off apart...”
    “...I get in at seven-thirty in the morning, and I have all these things to do - the garden, work around the trailer...I built the porch and this deck and pier and I did the underpinning. And I had a good time doing these things...and there are still fish in the pond...I go out in a boat sometime, or just fish off the pier...”
    “The night watchman’s job? Dull sometimes...go an hour or two without seeing a soul...but that’s not too bad, really...get to do a lot of walking...I get together with the other guards and some night employees in the lounge and shoot pool about an hour before work. There’s ten of us altogether, kind of a regular gang...I had all ten of them out one Saturday for a fish-fry...And get this: I’ve been wanting to build a shed...they’re all coming out and bringing tools and we’re going to have a building party...”
    “...On my nights off, I sometimes go to the VFW...couple of buddies from the old days have forgiven me for becoming an executive, especially if I wear my security-guard uniform...and I’m making some new friends. Happy? It’s not Disney World, but I’m getting more out of life than I have for some time...”
    “...But get back together with your mother? No, Son, it’s not in the cards...I’d be nothing but miserable, and I don’t really think it would make her happy either...”
    They said little else before going in for a lunch of boiled chicken with rice and garden-grown lima beans, and Pop had made some cornbread. They ate in relaxed silence for a few moments before Pop said, “We went through my situation all right, but what about yours?”
    Keith knew what his father was leading up to, but he said, almost in a shrug, “What do you mean, Pop?”
    “You think you might get married again?”
    Keith grinned. “Thelma walked out because I was always on the construction site. And I’m still on the construction site...fly to the site most Mondays, then fly home on Friday...and in some weeks, not even then...What woman is going to put up with that kind of schedule?”
    “Well, you make good money, don’t you? Looks like women would be chasing after you...Besides, sooner or later, they might kick you upstairs - like they did me...”
    “Put me into an office? No, Pop, that’s not likely...I’m a construction engineer - to me that means working on the site...”
    “So you’re going to be flying to sites for years to come? Living in motels all week and just be home on weekends for the rest of your life? Not making yourself a home?”
    “Oh, things could change a little before long. The company is expanding, and there will be branch offices. Could be that I would be the official engineer in one of them, you know, the engineer on call for all the sites in that area...and I would be part of a team that inspects completed projects and supervises reconstruction and expansion.”
    “But you won’t start looking for a wife until that happens?”
    “I didn’t say that, Pop.”
    “Oh? Then tell me about her.”
    “Not much to tell. Myra is a troubleshooter in the company’s Cleveland office...she’s a couple of years older than me...we’ve been getting together almost every weekend.”
    “She been married before?”
    “Yes. Has a thirteen-year-old daughter...She’s had a hard time with her husband, a loser if there ever was one. She hasn’t gotten a divorce...her husband lost their home to gambling debts, so she’s been on the ropes financially, and I know divorces are expensive...”
    “Well, now, even when you’re telling me the downside, your face lights up when you talk about her...She’s nice?”
    “Oh, yes, Pop. She’s a smart girl...practical and sharp. And I’m crazy about her daughter...”
    “She pretty?”
    “Oh, yes. Now, she says she is overweight, but I don’t agree ...Thelma was a good-looking girl, but I always thought she was just a little too skinny...”
    “Got a picture?”
    “No. But I’ll send you one...”
    “Sounds like a good thing, Son. I’ve been a little worried about you since you and Thelma broke up, with you not really settled in one place...afraid you’d get lonesome and hook up with the first good-looking thing that came along. But the kind of fellowship I’m sensing here has a ring of truth about it...something sensible...You made any kind of commitment?”
    “Well, not officially...but I think we both know what’s coming.”
    “You behaving yourselves in the meantime?”
    Keith grinned.
    “Unfair question, Keith; I withdraw it. Did you tell your mother about this situation?”
    “Not a word; she didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.”
    “Good move. But let’s keep in touch... I’d like to meet the lady, before or after any event...”
    “We’ll see what we can do. But about keeping in touch, neither of us is too great on writing letters, and you don’t have a telephone...”
    “Oh, I’m getting one...in just a few days...need one for the job, mainly. But the number will be unlisted. Imagine what I’d be in for if your mother knew I had a phone!”
    “But you’ll let me have your number?”
    “Of course. I’ll call you as soon as it’s installed. What do I do if it’s during the week? Call the Cleveland office and have them put me through to you?”
    “You could do that, but it would be best just to call Myra at the main office and have her get me the message...that falls under the head of troubleshooting.”
    They sat in silence for a few more moments.
    “I don’t care for dessert, son, but if you are so minded, there’s Jell-O and ice cream handy...”
    “No thanks, Pop, but could I use your razor? I went off without mine and my stubble is beginning to itch....”
    “Of course. Go through the bedroom...the razor and things are on the sink.”
    Keith left his father to clean up the lunch dishes and went to Pop’s bathroom, a small, closet-like room with a tub-shower and built-in cabinets under and over the sink. And like the rest of the place, there was a ship-shape military air about it.
    There was a sentimental pleasure in all this - he enjoyed using Pop’s ancient Gillette double-edged razor, and his obsolete mug and brush. He leisurely lathered his face and then gingerly pulled the heavy old razor across his stubble.
    As he was shaving, something was almost catching his eye, something he could not quite focus on. This gave a slight feeling of something amiss, something out of order. But he dismissed this idea and continued the work on his stubble.
    When he had rinsed off the excess lather, dried his face and patted on after-shave, the something that had been hovering finally came clear to him. In the bathroom mirror, he could see things hanging on the door behind him, things that did, indeed, violate the military order of the place.
    (“A woman’s slip, a garter belt, and a bra, a substantial bra, at that!”)
    His imagination ran wild in wonder over whether the owner of these things had left the trailer wearing a spare set of these items, or if the lady in question had simply departed without bothering to replace the garments!
    When he joined Pop in the kitchen area, he said, “Pop, I guess I’d better be moving on...”
    “Yeah, and I’ve got to be getting to bed...need five or six hours and I’ll be all right. I don’t envy you having to report to your mother...But, Son, I’ve told you how things are...There’s no way I’ll be going back. I’d do anything reasonable for your mother...In her own way, she’s a good person...but I can’t see trying again something that hasn’t worked for thirty-five years...”
    “I understand, Pop. I guess I had figured it this way all along, but I wanted to hear it from you...and I am so glad you’re not so lonesome anymore...”
    “Well, yes, there is that! There are some regrets, but I guess things are about as good for me as they could be...and I hope things work out for your mother...”
    They shared a hug and Keith was gone.
    He drove slowly back toward town, deeply pondering a possible scenario for his mother.
    (“Yeah, she’d take him back, all right...shower him with forgiveness that she’d shout from the rooftops, but keep the cigars out of the house and get rid of the dog. And she’d restore Bobby’s allowance without informing Pop that any such thing existed...”)
    There was a phone booth outside a little convenience store on the road just before he got back into town.
    “Myra, I’m back...”
    “Did you...”
    “Yes, I spent a couple of hours with Pop...and he looks great...”
    “Can you tell me about your mother?”
    “I’d rather go into that Friday...for now, let’s just say the crisis is not life-threatening...and it’s something I couldn’t do anything about anyway.”
    “Your flight is at four-thirty...”
    “Yes...but I’ll be there in plenty of time...By the way, you look great in a two-piece swimsuit!”
    “Keith, you’ve never seen me in a...”
    “But, beautiful lady, you can’t control what you wear in my dreams...”
    “What color was the suit?”
    “I don’t remember...anyway, you changed to negligee...”
    “What did that lead to?”
    “I don’t know...the plane landed and I woke up!”
    “Do you want to see me in a swim suit?”
    “Later. Negligee first.”
    “Well, we’ll see about Friday...Margie is going to a movie with some friends...maybe the plane won’t land at a critical time...”
    “And, by the way...I promised to send Pop a picture of you.”
    “My, my. How did that come about?
    “He asked me and I told him.”
    “What did you tell him?”
    “Just that I spent most of the weekend hours with a charming example of the opposite sex...”
    “Did you tell him how I look in a swim suit?”
    “No. My dreams are not for general discussion...”
    “Even this Friday?”
    “On this Friday, any discussion will hardly be general...”
    “I should say not! Did you mention me to your mother?”
    “No. Again, I’ll have a lot to tell you Friday...”
    “Yes, you will...but maybe we can get to your dreams first...”

    He bypassed another painful stop at his mother’s to report what couldn’t be reported. He was fighting sleep on his way to the airport in Hartsville.
    (“I noticed a bunk at that little airport...a nap before the four-thirty flight would be nice...I’ll call Mother when I change planes in Charlotte - the crying won’t be so loud from there!”)
    He found himself breaking the speed limit in putting distance between himself and his mother’s home.
    (“Suppose Pop did go home to mother? Would her undergarments ever hang on a door in Pop’s bathroom?”)

Salvaging America, the Valkenheiser Way (Vote For Judge Alvin)

“God is in His Heaven
The Pope is at the Vatican
The King is in Madrid
The Viceroy is in Mexico City,
And to Hell with you, I’m in San Antonio.”
—a social expression of the Tejanos, in the years prior to the Texas Revolution

=+=

    What This Country Needs...is 50 little ones. This one with Greek Democracy and that one with Corporatocracy and another with Dan Aykroyd, gunked in freakish makeup, its Shire Reeve. “Perfect freedom, has no existence”. These, in Ben Hur, were the words of Pilate. Wisdom of the Roman World State, which took as she liked, and did not yield...but, wisdom.
    If you believe the professorial twaddle, re: No Absolutes, you understand our nation is a work in progress. Such a work, works only until those who will not be told, begin to rival those who salute, or who sling the tool and sing, or who can repeat doctrine as being necessary for survival. Yet as I’ve said, you cannot have IDIC and dialog. If you make a world of individuality to be realized, if ubermensch as understood is raw potential as Self’s weaponry, the Other becomes almost tertiary by consideration—however, assuming that’s wrong, that you would give or help, or not let anOther starve, I doubt you’d let the same Other dictate your behavior. Or belief system. Or stomp on your convictions. Or curtail your freedom. And if they did, and if they stood behind you in line at Target, it could get ugly, right? Except they have family and you have family, and association spreads to jobs, hobbies, churches—in my Dad’s era, The Lodge. Gathered even up to those low millions in your home state, what issues grappled at, things idealized or despised, angry voices or internicine warfare, all is limited. Rare comes Hatfields and McCoys in mortal struggle.
    Some will always bellyache, and some draw the booby prize of sad lives, but there exists understood, binary accord from horizon to personal horizon, Where You Live. There exists, via roads crisscrossed, a prevailing viewpoint and its chief rival. Sociopolitically, chicken soup for the citizen, is Zoroastrianism in the form of states rights. Ahura Mazda (as human statehouse), is the main and majority-accepted thinking, Where You Live; Angra Mainyu, likewise lives as the local/regional voice of dissent. Destined never to control, this voice must too be accepted—at least partially, in that it will never control. A stranger, an outsider, an interloper, a revenuer, a distant court or suited monarch or an American Reichstag bought by riches and flesh, may in theory, decide for us all...but humans, and nowhere more than Main Street, decide at last, for ourSelves. And we aren’t usually the Dalai Lama, in terms of concession.
    Foreign thinking, may be just a four-hour drive away, its foreign laws you despise, its foreign gulag, too. This universal shield acting as dragnet is finally, untenable. Persons are flying off society like heat tiles on reentry, because a Giant Presence, purports to speak for All. Once again, our founding, tricorn credo, is “Fuck You”. As for Marshal Gilligan, he can’t put everyone in jail. We are thus, as a nation, doomed to implosion, unless we gerrymander ourselves according to boundaries set by history as the cartographers drew it.
    The argument against states rights, aside from Stars, Bars and J.B. Stoner’s face never seeming to rub off in spite of every detergent, is the more general damning of “loss of rights”, i.e. each state, in deciding for itself, will result in gradations of liberties, which in turn will result in a bell curve of freedom, all the way from Woodstock to Nuremberg. Some states, will be restrictive. Even cruel.
    Uh. Yes. That’s the whole idea. Like the Internet can be summed up with the words, “It takes all kinds to make a world”. Yes, I’ll verify, there will be states you will not wish to travel through or near, lest you have to police your own behavior, which would appear an immense sticking point with Americans young enough to not recall Iwo Jima, duck and cover or Francis Gary Powers. American citizens are 60 proof-bombed on the divine right of “Get your fuckin’ hands off me!” when it comes to arrest over belief versus what’s on the books. And states deciding in folksy statehouses who can do what and what gets you thrown into a dungeon with a goofy, bearded cellmate, with no appeal to Candy Crowley, Bill-O or a 5-4 vote not legally allowed the court which makes them, is not only terrifying, it’s surreal. It’s sweaty, greasy barking mad Dan Aykroyd, removing part of his face. A funhouse madhouse grinned at all-friendly, by a sea of blue and badges. Some members of this Union, don’t like, want, nor will tolerate what passes for 21^th Century rights. Your rights within these retentive places, are therefore effected. Because the Law of Georgia or Utah or Oklahoma, beats You like a royal flush beats Joe Shilabotnik.
    I personally live in a state which has prosecuted 6 governors and sent 4 of them to prison, a place where they managed to “lose” the ballot box in the first election after statehood, declaring later over mulled cider, which man had won “unanimously”. So, this has nothing to do with purity or paragons of virtue. As the father of a friend told me in 1982, “you can have a town with six people in it, and one might be a murderer!” But in a nation of over 325,000,000 souls, each to their spin and with individual scissors going Boo Radley on “diversity” of even thought, decisions of a regional nature—those social, those personal, chief among them—most wish, in almost every instance, to decide within our clan, among our tartan, by that which our manic-depressive hamlets and their populi, say do. But for the densest concentrations hugging waters rising to their back steps even now, the rest of America, unforgiving as the villagers in Christy, aren’t going to accept any yolk of “outsiders”. I’m not saying we long for Sleepy Hollow, rather, if we know where everyone lives and can find them, our control issues are satisfied. Not everyone will agree, though in statehouse, county seat or automobile campground, but by way of simple subtraction, your state as passive isolationist, becomes both healthy diet and Tony Robbins seminar.
    Man, though reduced in mob size with local affiliates as the only tell all, of course remains (pardon me) nothing but trouble. My vaunted anarchist-friends of yore, fair swelled with pride affirming “the death of nationalism”, by way of “people becoming individuals and not ‘parts’ of things, anymore” (this, ca. 1986). The non sequitur which trips up everyone, forcing shibboleth out of everyone’s wellintentioned mouth, is that If All Are Individuals and If Nobody’s Perfect, you have no reason, outside of each person’s own, contrived finger food of The Golden Rule, to support any group thinking. Certainly not better your area or community or region. “Do unto others”, often means “as you personally understand ‘doing’”. This can mean lots of personal vendetta, false social causes sporting Groucho glasses, but it’s like capital punishment hailed as deterrent: you’re never gonna weed out specific, localized cancers within the human soul. It’s a given, no matter how big or small the model of peoples agreeing on sets of rules, you’re always going to have Tank Man, hokey-pokeying himself in Smallville’s Tiananmen Square...and, you’re always going to have dim rooms filled with smoking men, who make Tank Man disappear.
    Does it therefore matter a little bit, if half a nation, from election to election, gnashes teeth in a raging squeal, like the demonic image MTV once created to symbolize Mike Tyson? Sure, this one and that one will drive a car into an official, wrought iron fence, or dash, Olympian, across the White House lawn, or fly underneath radar into a building filled with powerful liars, or even pop a cap into a minor politico no one would give a damn about, otherwise...but, even given 50 states bristling with armaments and a formerly self-sustaining nation named Texas more and more flipping off The Beltway...what chance is there, really, for actual mass riots and cities in flames? What are the odds on martial law and the National Guard gunning down rebels? If it can’t be 50 fiefdoms of binary accord, it can’t be one, big blob of one, either. We therefore need only establish The End as not coming by way of the 4^th Planet of the Apes movie, no Jonathan Chance of Styx rock lore, no Kevin Costner for good nor postmodern Alexander for bad. No shooting and shooting and shooting, until POV demographics become HD. Americans, appear too unorganized to begin this bad scifi, but for scattered convoys of the terbacky-chawin’, and bad as US Intelligence is, like Homer Simpson knocking out every hobo, they at conclusion slam good old boys, bad old boys and ugly ones, too, inside. If indeed Man is by definition inept, a rude ass or a howling schizophrenic, what’s the point of a paradigm shift? Why alter a thing?
    A: Diversity—yes, even in thought—and given diversity itself means 97 things to 100 people...it, diversity, but for template of Self, is too great a cross for too many, to bear. It is, taken to its conclusion, chaos. And a stranger from a strange place telling you “NO”, then sending you to a supermax is, in a society modeling Universal Freedom, a dirty lie. America, reduces in judicial practice, to “freedom for everyone else”. This is how the interp plays, in simple logic. Simple logic, in nearly every dealing or home, reigns.
    From the unsold CEE poetry mms, A Forlornbook for Goths:
    “Human” as united, cannot grasp, let alone accept, such a calling up of Self, that this one sees darkness as light, another sees darkness as darkness but yet this is a fine thing, another says there is no difference between the two, another calling them Indian Red and Lincoln Green. Such individuals, to Human, must, if they are serious in such unfettered nonconforming, be incurably sick...and the spectrum is so broad, so diverse in the truest sense, as to allow for each to be a Self, each actualized as its IT seeks and develops, IT being ITs core root. Human finds this very, very troubling; Human wants that separate, to go away. Behind a wall. Behind barbed wire. To be instated, sedated, jailed or confined. Shot down in the streets, without the right God gave a ragweed. Human, demands this. It howls for it. It stamps its foot like a child. But, to say to “No” to Who One Is, is in the West, no longer permitted. Not openly. Not officially. Human is often, now, thwarted by Laws safeguarding Selves. Human responds, by rising up. Like Cain.
    That is the reason Ein Amerika is guaranteed to end badly. We aren’t talking about apocalyptic events or dominoes falling, as something beyond humans themselves. Like the old chicken vs. egg about “guns don’t kill people; people, kill people”. Does anyone give a goddam the peripherals, if the scenario majors in Mutually Assured Destruction? I admit, winning the argument has always been a gigantic priority, for Me...then again, I don’t care, not a jot, if everything we know turns overnight into the last 10 minutes of Miracle Mile. As Nero in concert, it concerns me not at all, and that in itself means You should be on it, nonfriend, and with the intensity of a “Double Naught Spy”.
    Man, Is Not Good. He Will Never Become So. And He Doesn’t Give A Crap, That You Don’t Like Absolutes. This means you can take all the red and blue dye in the world and pour it over Tim Russert’s grave, as it isn’t a question of “sides”. There is no “good” team, and no home but where we hang our hat. And it’s quite out of the Q, to spread the societal blanket nice for each, individual situation...but you’d be amazed, how much easier and fast under control any trouble will be, when Montgomery and Sacramento and Bismarck and Montpelier, Topeka and Salem and Boise and Dover, know exactly who and how many to subdue...because the force of any prevailing attitude, is what makes dissent go away, and the truth is, not one American wants anything other than their movie as they write it. Those half-cocked philosophical sorts with glaring smiles burned into their faces, those who swear they wish the raw feed, find even they do not, in practice. We, each identity, wish Utopia as Self desires...but if you think about it, Utopia as a general conception, we see as a matte painting. It’s peaceful, as there’s no movement, except for the robot servants some insist into theirs’. You aren’t going to get that matte painting, without a playing field leveled as by a Giant Hand. Via size reduction and by way of an incorporated state-level system, this (I grant, somewhat ominous) peace and “Come for the Festival, ay-yuh?” may not be a lock, but the near-beer of it, can be had in a six.
    For purposes of a planet filled with armies, a national Union is required. For purposes of home and hearth, something rather smaller, less dramatic, suffices. You’re welcome to live wherever you like, providing that in any, particular Rome, you do as those particular Romans do. And do your ‘do’, convincingly, please, because no one is more particular than a regional group with its particulars lined up and in order. It boils down to the assertion one cannot have everything, that choices must be made, priorities established. For a fair percentage of us, There Will Be Negatives. Mere geography, what view gets you off, is another trade. I’m elementary school enough to believe in strict majority rule, with no hand-patting rider attached to that line. Might making right, is the living rule of human beings. The idea of 50 fiefdoms run by 50 Reeves may not sound as fun as if they were going to St. Ives, but the odds are better than Vegas or Atlantic City you could, in The Information Age, find your home of “rightful thinking”. Of accord and belonging, acceptance and unity. Of rest. As with the disfigured mutant youth in Night Gallery, somewhere there is a place, a state, a community, a group, where You are the norm and the template. Where Order itself is as you like, or would love or breathe, whole, within.
    A tired, grimy concept of a luvluvluv melting pot which in reality never grows anything but colder, more separatist, a bullshit image playing out as High School Cafeteria America, is a place none can find peace. 50 states, each to their own but rendering unto Caesar, offers 50 chances. It may not be anyone’s dreamt ideal, but ideals are by their nature, goals as carrots on sticks. At some point, all but zealots quit striving and ship oars. This I recommend, as it’s coming up on kill or be killed. If in peace we would live, then understand, each of us in our daily walk, is separate but equal. He who would prefer a battle royale then thump chest as representing Jeffersonian dances of sugar plum fairies, is disconnected to the point he needs be a person of interest, or some “C”-student playing it Honor Society and never breaking character. Community in conflict on a national level is not a game, and just because media’s talking torsos can safely grimace or sneer, chide or mug hatred without worry, doesn’t alleviate. It does not give vent. It inflames.
    We have legislated ourselves into a corner, into a plumber’s prison worthy of Curly Howard. We can almost not move a muscle. It’s 50 neutral corners, or that is the end of the silly experiment of “freedom beyond kings”. If your pursuit of happiness, gets its peanut butter in my chocolate, then by me, push the button, Frank, show’s over. Balls to the wall, gone to the mattresses, the denouement of WATCHMEN, is infantile. You know damned well, Man is made of zero sum and Christopher Lloyd trying to be a Klingon. Man, is vainglorious. And, it’s not like other nations, a few with great might, aren’t paying attention. If America spider-cracked, it wouldn’t have to crumble inward. So, give up your rainbow hug of a postcard, and retreat where others nod at you like it’s church. I’ll do the same. It’s the only way any of us will get a wink of sleep, so to be ready if a global five-alarm sounds. Likemindedness, admittedly not for think tanks, is in the personal, what makes “safe”. Maybe less for the sad folks in Maryland. Annapolis may be their heart and mind, but that state will always have a poisonous cyst on its rear. One which used to be a pretty fair swamp.

CEE