You Bastard!

We immediately recognized the sound of Jon’s old Chevy laboring up onto the swale out front while Carla and I were having lunch on the back patio. Both Jon and his car shared a hacking cough that announced their arrival. He often stopped by unannounced, as I did with him.

Anticipating the click of the gate as he came through the side yard, I knew there was just enough time to take one last big mouthful of the warm chicken and cheese enchiladas with sour cream that we had reheated, leftovers  from last night’s dinner at Ned’s Southside.

Chewing quickly as Jon approached, I got up from the lawn chair to greet him, and partially stumbled forward with my head down, feigning an odd but unmistakable urgency. He had already begun to continue our conversation from earlier in the day: “That eyeglass place fixed me right up. The girl who adjusted my glasses…”

He didn’t finish his sentence before I blew out my lunch all over the grass at his feet, successfully splattering his shoes. Jumping back as I lurched forward falling into him sloppily and getting a bit more enchilada sauce on his right sleeve, he bravely tried to support me. As I was bending deeper and retching a few more times for dramatic effect, Jon started to recover his senses and say something when I stood straight up, grinning. “Care for some chicken enchiladas? They’re great!” He could only come up with “You bastard!” as I smiled and called Rufus over and pointed to the mess on the ground. “Here you go boy, lunch!”

Jon is so gullible, I'm always getting him with something and he goes for it every time, hook, line, and sinker. Like when we were squirrel hunting in the woods back in Virginia. Walking along an old path together, Jon hung back to water a tree. I saw my opportunity to scurry up ahead, and pulled a warm Tootsie Roll from my jeans pocket, popping it into my mouth, being sure to tuck the wrapper back out of sight into the same pocket. A few quick chews and I spit the glistening mess out onto a rock in the middle of the path. Dropping back again, and walking in tandem, the two of us came up on the rock. I pointed, “Oh look, animal droppings!” Jon stopped to contemplate the shape and size of the droppings, mulling over the unstated question of what kind of animal had left them there and when. I knelt down, “they’re fresh” I observed as I slowly pushed a finger into the largest piece. “and warm!” Jon started to squirm, “that’s gross, I hope you get some kind of animal disease” I just smiled as I lifted a large dripping chunk up for close inspection as I told him: “You can tell a lot about what kind of animal it is from the smell…and taste” Jon looked down at me with horror as I quickly popped a chunk into my mouth and started smacking my lips and using my tongue to mop a sloppy brown shit circle around my lips. “Tastes like Fox” I said. “Probably a Red fox but could be Grey. Definitely female though, and she‘s got kits!”  Jon started stammering.

Grinning like a fool, I took another big glob and was pushing it toward Jon as he stumbled backward. “Here, you taste it and see what you think.” He couldn’t scramble backward fast enough.

Later, even after I had cleaned-up in a nearby stream, Jon kept his distance, convinced that I had shit for breath and brains. He thought I had totally gone over the edge. It wasn’t until I pulled out another Tootsie Roll and offered him one that the truth dawned on him. I smiled a large chocolate grin as he turned red and lashed out: “You bastard”!

I’ve been doing the same stupid stuff to Jon since we were kids in the fourth grade. Why he thinks that just because we’re old now I wouldn’t pull such juvenile stunts anymore, I have no clue, He goes for it every time, getting red and very angry, spitting oaths at me about never again this and that. But he loves to tell the stories over and over throughout the years, and I love to hear them too. I’ve already got some great plans for his wheelchair, his toothbrush and a hidden camera in his bathroom when we’re eventually relegated to end our days in some nursing home. I love the guy and he loves me, and when I get him all worked up by pretending to be dead, I look forward to hearing him blurt out: “you bastard!”. That will be like the sweet sound of angels calling me home.

hmh

A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing..

The “Defense Intelligence Agency”...DIA, I loved telling people: “I'm DIA” That's where I wound up when my college deferment ran out. I hustled my butt over to the Air Force and joined up before the Army got it's hooks into me. Then I opted for computer operations. In 1971, that was big stuff. The fact that there were few computers on the front lines in Vietnam hadn't escaped me, so that's what I picked. After some brief, and often pointless training (any of you guys remember “pass in review”?) I wound up assigned to the Pentagon in the DIA. We kept records on Red Chinese missile sites and Jane Fonda. Mostly I ran a huge copier on the graveyard shift making multiple copies of top secret documents earmarked for distribution to the big brass with a need to know. One night we managed to talk another airman, actually an airwoman, out of her panties and up onto the copier for a nice sit down picture session. Although we were always supposed to open the copier up after every run and pull the drum to wipe it clean of residual images, in the heat of our good fortune, we didn't. The next day the joint Chiefs of Staff were handed their top secret documents, just like every other day. But that day there were way more dots in the background of the text. Dots that if you pulled the document away and got some distance, became quickly recognizable to every man in the place. All of a sudden the picture came into view and any thoughts of Vietnam or Chinese missile sites were immediately shut down. Every joint chief began thinking with his reptilian brain stem... “Well Hello Honey!” I like to think that, along with my late night buddies, we helped to do our small part for the anti-war movement that day...or at least briefly shift the focus to even more important things...

Divided We Fall…



My friend Jon made the point that the whole system is broken. He asked of no one in particular, how can we fix it? How can we get this country back to that kind of Norman Rockwell utopia we took for granted in the1950’S? We may yearn for dinner with Ward and June but we have no idea how to get back home. Now, all these years later after the burst balloon of Vietnam, after Nixon “lied to us all on TV”. after Camelot ended with a shot to the head, we’re done. America is no longer the greatest country in the world. As far as standard of living goes, we don’t even make the top ten. A nation undivided no more.. And with all the recent political stuff…the lies, the tens of millions spent on spin, the accusatory language by both parties, we’re more divided than ever before. And here’s the thing no one is talking about…yet. Regardless of who wins the election, it won’t stop. If Romney is the man, the Obama peeps will try to make him look bad at every turn, and vice versa if Obama is reelected. The election won’t be the end of it. Members of congress will continue to block legislation proposed by anyone other than their own party while they stuff their pockets and place their own personal gain before that of their constituents or what’s best for the country. So what’s the answer? I have little hope of real change until and unless we, as a country, are put into a life or death situation. America has always been good at coming together when we have no other options left. Maybe the threat is financial ruin when our currency truly has no value overseas or at the grocery store. Maybe a terrorist bomb that takes out the capital, or a nuclear war that starts in the middle east. All bad stuff with unimaginable casualties. Wiping the slate clean and starting over may be the only way we survive, if in fact, we do. But until something almost kills us? We will continue to wallow in giant bags of Cheetos washed down with big gulps of overpriced carbonated sugar water and think that watching Honey Boo Boo is time well spent. We are what we eat and perhaps extinction is the karmic answer awaiting us at the end of the toxic road we’ve chosen to travel for way too long. 



 
Sitting out on the old wooden balcony at Harry’s Seafood, lightly salted breezes cooled us as if we had set the thermostat ourselves. Views are expansive there, down onto the Bridge of Lions and out past the inlet to the open ocean. The bridge opened it’s mouth like a prone giant‘s yawn, allowing passage for a yacht bigger than most houses as it headed for the marina. Close behind, a replica pirate ship in full sail, nipped at it’s heels. We enjoyed the usual; Popcorn Crawfish Tails and a cup of She-Crab Soup. In no hurry to go anywhere, we savored our adopted hometown like a good white wine.

Life in the Gulag



I hated high school. Nothing fit, or felt right, and it was boring as hell. The bus ride to and from was OK though. An unusually excited girl, Mary Beth? Mary Elizabeth? Well Mary something anyway, had dropped out of Catholic school and always sat alone on the seat in front of me so she could turn around and gush nonsense at me for the entire ride. She really was sweet and all, she was just rather clueless. Mostly I let her spew while I thought about her sitting there in her little uniform that she still wore, how clean her hair looked, how she squished her large breasts up and over the back of her seat as if on a serving platter. That part of my commute ended when I replaced the bus with a motorcycle in my junior year. Winter rides froze my hands into claws that wouldn't even start to flex until third period. All that was fine too, but once inside school, the noise, chaos, the marching from room to room for long periods of sit down and shut up time? That stuff really sucked the big weenie. 

All I wanted was out.

Certainly it was no surprise that my grades were poor, given the fact that my father had been a Phi Beta Kappa at Johns Hopkins and top of his class at Harvard Law. All he cared about was academic achievement…and Mom. I not only didn’t compete with that, I actively sabotaged any possibility of getting good grades and mentally dropped out. Physically, I went to school every day, but it was rare for me to be there. On school nights, I was banished to the Gulag to “study” and get my grades up. That started at 7 PM on school nights, five days a week. Dad’s rule. It didn’t do shit for my grades but worked well for Dad’s agenda. He could watch Lawrence Welk with mom in peace, as if I didn’t exist. Cokes and cigarettes for everybody! (Except for those locked up in the Gulag of course)

Among other things, I occupied myself with a World Book Encyclopedia. Read that sucker cover to cover, A through Z, several times. I raised Drosophila and bred them for eye color… thousands of fruit flies looking out at the world beyond their mason jar through bipolar shades. Two-headed Planarian worms dared me to cut them, calling out from a covered dish that the neighbors would rather you not bring over to their party. Boiled straw added to pond water in a large container fed single celled critters and pushed them into overnight population explosions. I saw them all through the lense of my microscope, busily compiling a diary of sightings and drawings. Amoeba and their Sarcondinan brothers seemed to have inspired a 1958 Steve McQueen horror movie: "The Blob". Flagella and cilia pushed their cabs through heavy traffic... microscopic bumper cars.

It reminded me of when David Callahan had just turned ten years old and we went to the Rialto Theatre to see "The Blob" on his birthday. It was pretty scary and David tried to read a book to avoid the screen. Who brings a book to a movie theater anyway?

David was my best friend. He lived behind us, our backyards sharing a worn path between the two houses. At night we often ran that path barefoot and mashed fat slugs between our toes as they crossed the packed dirt in slow motion. We strung telegraph wire between our houses…my bedroom to the garage, to a tree in his backyard, to the window in his house where his telegraph key was set up. I had a key too, of course. So that was huge for me to bring communication with the outside world into the Gulag. David and I tapped out deep thoughts back and forth: “fuck you!”… “fuck you back!” I never thought there was anyone other than David or maybe his brother, Rick, on their end but wound up telling Mr. Callahan “fuck you!” several times even after he identified himself. I thought it was just David playing with me and I said terrible things about his dad’s infatuation with livestock. When I realized that it really was Mr Callahan, I told him that I was my brother, Kenny.

My Gulag had a built-in bar in the closet. An older friend bought bottles of Bourbon for me if I paid him double, so I had that too. For a while there I vomited nightly onto the soft snow under my bedroom window. Violent explosions of a nightmare minestrone…puke graffiti splattered and flash frozen into a mess the dog tried to eat during the day. When mom let the dog out to pee, Lucy would run around to the side of the house and come back with a frozen puke Frisbee for Mom to throw. Unlike my father, the neighbors on that side of the house cared about me. They called up Mom to offer their condolences that I must have been sick with flu out of my window “again last night” 

Good of them to check on me, those bastards.

But thanks to that aging World Book set, also relegated to the Gulag doubling as my bedroom, I did learn something …mostly in alphabetical order, of course. 

So now I’m prepared to take questions from the crowd…as long as they touch on subjects like fruit flies, flatworms, life forms smaller than the dot of a pencil, Morse Code, warm Bourbon with water…or any quick synopsis of subjects from A to Z based on the latest information contained in a set of the 1957 World Book Encyclopedia.

hmh

　

　

Lilly Belle

She wakes herself up, crying in the night, plagued by demons from her past who aren’t done with her yet. Now she’s safe, a life of comfort. But her early years spent as nothing more than breeding stock, have taken their toll. Blind, deaf, she can only outrun her old life in daylight, rolling on her back in damp grass, raising her nose into breezes seasoned with the scent of saltwater and freedom. But sleep is seductive on dark nights, urging her to think it’s all over, not clearly sure of just what it was anymore. The ghosts in her dreams reappear to drag her back into memories that cause her to cry out. Only for herself, by herself. I jump up with the first soft moan, rushing to her side to tell her it’s OK. Greed took away her sight and hearing before she was even conceived. Defenseless property of owners with a darker blindness, relegated to life in a cage. Nothing more than a womb used to produce more of the same. Sitting next to her in the dark, my hands on her body, rubbing reassurance through her short black hair. Her smell the comfort of familiarity. I whisper softly into her ear: “It’s OK girl, it’s OK.”… and feel her relax as the nub of her truncated tail starts to flutter like a hummingbird’s wing.

Sing to Me in F Sharp...

 My love for gadgets came from my Grandfather. We both used to get a little too excited over cameras and wristwatches. So when my parents gave me an Accutron as a High School graduation present (and after I had pestered them endlessly about it), Grandpa was green with envy. it kept time with a tuning fork that used a "360 herta tuning fork instead of a balance wheel as the timekeeping element. That was both innovative and groundbreaking at the time. (Yes, I just said that.) Grandpa started salivating and ran right out to buy one for himself. With that tuning fork, if you pressed it to your ear, you could hear it humming an F sharp. In the summer of 1966, I toured England with the church choir that I had sung in since I was 7 years old. When we hit Westminster Abbey to sing a capella for the Queen, our choir master realized that he had lost his pitch pipe. He had me listen to my watch and hum an F sharp. Scaling it up or down from there he hummed the proper note for us to start on. I told my Grandfather about the F sharp, but at his age he had lost all hearing in the upper ranges and just had to take my word for it. He still loved his Accutron though and enjoyed telling people that his wristwatch was always singing... in F sharp...