It took a bit before Jesse was able to get the story out; she kept breaking down and crying. Five minutes before, she was ready to castrate Dealie, now though, she couldn't quit sobbing. She was sitting in a small chair we kept by the phone table in the foyer. I always called it the stupid chair because I thought it was stupid because no one ever sat there. I got down on my knees before Jesse and place my hands on her hers.
"Take a deep breath, Jess, let it out slowly, then tell me what Eunice said. She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. At moment, Ricky, our seven-year-old daughter came in from the kitchen, dripping wet from playing with the hose outside. "Why's mama crying, daddy? You screw up again." That made me a little mad, first words out her mouth assuming I did something wrong. I kept my temper in check though, "Hell no, I didn't do anything. Why would you say that?" Ricky had red all over her mouth because was busy working a popsicle over, "Whenever Mama's crying it's usually because you did something dumb." I chicken-necked her, "Now that ain't nowhere near the truth, Ricky. When they told your mama Grandma Lu died, did I do something dumb then?" I had whole list of things, and I was going to keep on fact-checking her like a Facebook algorithm when I followed her eyes over to where her mama was sitting there looking at me like I was some kind of an idiot. "Sorry, Babe. What did Eunice tell you?" She turned to Ricky first, "Honey, you do your mama a favor." Ricky shook her head yes, "You bet, Mama." Then she turned and stuck her red-colored tongue at me. "That cat done went and peed all over the bathroom floor again. I've warned her several times. I need you to catch it and give it a good spanking. Tell her not to be peeing on my newly mopped floor. You do that for me?" "Which cat, Mama, Sweet Kitty or Dumb Demo-cat?" "Did I ask you to quit calling Delores that name, Honey?" "Daddy does." "That's besides the point. We've had that discussion, remember. I need you to catch Delores for me. You think you can do that?" Ricky nodded and took off running out the door. Now, before you start thinking that my wife is an animal abuser; Jesse knew full well that Ricky had a better chance of catching Lou Brock stealing second than she had of catching that dumbass cat. She had a better chance of throwing a BB out the kitchen window and knocking a pecan off of our apple tree. I wouldn't want say that our darling little girl was smart mouthed and clumsy, but I got pulled over by a deputy once, and the deputy made Ricky get out and take the tests for public intoxication. He was just trying to make a point about her mouthiness. She wasn't drunk, of course, and she let him know she weren't very happy about the situation. I laughed my ass off all the way home while she sat there and fumed. She even flipped me off before she went in the house. Jesse waited until Ricky left, then said, "Somebody shot Barlow in the head twice while he was sitting at home. Sheriff thinks it was Dealie." "Did he say that exactly?" "Didn't have too, Lee. They called here looking for him. Asked me if you knew anything about where he was. Do you?" "No, not really. I think he might have gone fishing though." "Do you know where?" "I can look ." "You need to do that, Lee. If they come on him suddenly, things might get out of hand causing them to shoot him or something." "Dealie wouldn't pull no gun on a cop?" "He didn't mean to shoot Barlow that time either, but he did. I want you to find him and talk him into turning himself in, and I want you to go with him when he does. Can I trust you to do that, Lee." The last bit caused me frown, "Why you even ask like that?" She saw that I was upset and got up and kissed me, this time on the lips. "Go save my brother, Hon." I was outside backing out the driveway in my two-toned, blue and white 65 Ford Ranchero when Sheriff Johns and Deputy Jones pulled up in front of my house in a police cruiser. I was looking in my rear-view when I saw them get out and saunter over to where I was. Sheriff Johns walked just like Jackie Gleason in the Smokey and the Bandit movies, he got there out of breath and motioned for me to roll down my window. "Well, well, well, look what we got here, Deputy Jones. A suspicious looking character doing suspicious looking things." When I didn't bite, he tried a new approach, "Where you headed off to in such an all-fired hurry?" "Who said I was in a hurry. Besides, it's none of your business where I'm headed, Butch." He hated it when people didn't respect his office. I knew it but figured he'd more likely let things slip if he was angry." He turned red, "Damn it, Lee! We got ourselves a real honest-to-God murder on our hands; so don't go messing with me today . Let me remind you, these here badges we're wearing carry the full authority of the law. You don't want to mess round with the Law, we got this here thing called obstruction of justice. Law don't take kindly to those who attempt to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the wheels of justice. We just might have to run you in and lock you up. I hate to think about that pretty little wife of yours out here by herself." I laughed, and it made him madder. "I know you didn't come out here arrest nobody today. There's only two of you. Remember the last time you two tried to take Dealie in by yourselves? Besides, you got no reason to suspect him for killing Barlow." The mention of Dealie's name sure got his hackles up in a hurry, "Then how you already know we looking for Dealie? How you know Jake Barlow got hisself ventilated last night?" "Ventilated? Damn, Butch, you been watching too many cop shows on the TV. Your secretary Miss Eunice called out here about thirty minutes ago looking for Dealie. I suspect she mighta already found him by now while you two out here playing TV cop." He got madder than hell and turned toward Deputy Jones. I heard him say something under his breath like, "Damn that woman!" It took him about a full minute before he regained his composure and turned back around. "If you know where Dealie Reed's hiding out, you better tell us, less we might suspect maybe you have something to do with it." "I'll be honest with you. I was just going to look for him, I'm going to try to talk him to go in and talk to you guys." It was Deputy Jones who answered, "You suspect him then?" "No, I don't. I got no reason to believe that Dealie would do something like that. He ain't no killer. I suspect that you guys ain't being guided by anything more than a strong dislike for the feller. I just don't want to think bout you two numb nuts tryin to sneak up on Dealie with your guns drawn and someone getting their dick shot off by accident." "Dealie's the only one, far as I know, that's already put a bullet hole in Old Man Barlow. He went to prison for burning the man's house down, remember?" I had already argued with Jess all morning and I was tired of arguing. "If I find him, I'll bring him to you. In the meantime, you need to go back to where you found Barlow and find some real evidence. The kind you can use in court. If I remember right, you the only one, far I know, brought a case against someone for murdering someone who wasn't even dead." I decided to get out of there before the volcano erupted and rolled my window up, and as I pulled out, I saw the sheriff and Deputy Jones start arguing. It was probably because what the Sheriff had said about Miss Eunice, the secretary/dispatcher, who happened to be Deputy Jones great-aunt. I suddenly remembered something I needed to know, so I pulled back up to where they were arguing. Whatever it was about, it was getting pretty heated. "Where was this killing done? I thought Barlow was living over in Hartford with that widow woman." It was Deputy Jones who answered, and he had to look over at the sheriff before he did. I saw the sheriff hesitate, and just that moment, Jesse stepped outside in a white halter top and a pair of shorts, they both stood there silent for a moment, then I saw the sheriff nod his head allowing Deputy Jones to speak." "He was living with that widow in Hartford up until a couple of months ago. We heard that her three boys got together and convinced him to find other living arrangements. He came back and rented Jack Morton's old place out by the river. He had been out drinking, but left the bar about midnight. He was sitting on a sofa in the living room taking his boots off when somebody, using a trellis outside a window on the north side of the house to aim the rifle, shot him twice in the head. Sheriff found one of his eyeballs smashed up against the TV screen." Deputy Jones started chuckling, "It was like that CBS image with the eyeball and shit." The sheriff gave him a look that told Deputy Jones that he wasn't supposed to be revealing that kind of information an another that said 'don't be laughing. It ain't professional.' I ignored the looks and asked, "If he was already home, I remember from him living with Lu, she said he locked the doors every night." The deputy nodded, "That's how we found it. House was all locked up." I waited for him to figure out the obvious information that I needed to know. It took a minute before he realized it and blurted it out, "Someone called it in. We got the message on the recorder about six the next morning when Miss Eunice came in to work. She said that someone had tried to call it in before, but got flustered and hung up the phone." "Someone? Man or woman?" "Woman." "What did she say?" "She said that Old Man Barlow was dead in that house, gave us the address and said that it was Dealie who killed him." That was it, Deputy stopped talking and just stood there grinning like he expected me to pat him on the head or something. "Seem to me that instead of being out here harassing law abiding folks, you two oughta be looking for a woman." The sheriff looked a little perplexed and I heard the deputy whisper, "The woman who called it in." I was already backing out the driveway when the sheriff got the message. The implications of the question made him made so he started running down the driveway after me. As he ran like Jackie Gleason, more of a stumbling forward really, he was yelling,"Who said we ain't, you little smart aleck sumbitch? Who said we ain't looking for a woman?" By that time was already on the road. I looked over at Jesse who was watching from the porch and waved. My pretty little wife waved back. As soon as I turned the corner on Oak Street going toward home, I could see Jesse had already heard the news. Our street was lined on both sides with these tall stately oaks. It looked like a movie set for a movie made back in the Fifties. Our house, which was built by the man who designed Concord back in 1900, was at the very end of the street in the center of a cul-de-sac. I could see her standing out on the veranda, and she was obvious she did not look happy. Small town women are like the CIA, they know everybody's business. I suspect the only reason that the Agency don't recruit more of 'em is they are not known for keeping secrets either, soon as they hear something juicy they consider it their sacred duty in life to make sure ever body else in town knows it.
My wife Jessie can scream like a ten year old girl. Good thing she's pretty. People seem to tolerate shit like that more if the person doing it is reasonably good looking. I remember back in grade school there was this big, red-haired freckle face girl with shoulders like a linebacker named Luella Douglas who ever body thought was crazy. They all teased her relentlessly. Later, she earned two PhDs and went on to lecture on Philosophy at Berkeley. At the same time, there was this skinny, good-looking kid named Billy Prescott who was one crazy sumbitch. It was obvious Billy was going to look like an Adonis when he growed up. He'd tear the wings off of birds and shit, but people treated him normal in comparison to how they treated poor Luella. Billy Prescott used to trail after her on her way home and shout stuff like, "Luella Douglas has a face like a frog, red on the head like the dick on a dog!" One day, she had enough of it, and hauled off and knocked him out cold in the hallway at school. I mean to tell you people treated her different after that. Funny thing was, was she seemed to become more attractive after she dropped Billy. I don't know if it was the confidence she felt or just that people looked at her different. Billy, on the other hand, dropped out of school because he couldn't take the teasing. He later lost his front teeth to the crack pipe, went without bathing, and became a sneak thief. Then, after his second wife left him, he ran a hose out his tailpipe into the cab of his truck and went to sleep for good. I don't know what it means, or even if it means anything; it just a memory that popped in my head when I was thinking about how to tolerate Jesse's screaming at me. You could take my wife, put her in pair of cut-offs and cowboy boots, and drop her down on Rodeo Drive and no one there could tell the difference between her and any of them other models, millionaire's girl friends and wives, and movie-star wannabes. That is except for one thing, the beauty of them women, if described using just one word, would have to be the word, vacuous. I've thought about it a lot and don't know how else you could describe someone who's willing to pay a hundred times more for something, just to able to say that they paid a hundred times more for something. Them women look awful nice, but they don't seem none too bright, or even all that happy, for that matter, running around wearing all them sequins and jewels. I don't think Jessie would do something like that even if she had the money. Outwardly, she had the same kind of looks as them ladies, flawless skin, perfect teeth, beautiful auburn hair and these luminous violet eyes, but if I had to choose one word to describe her looks, I would have to say she had a curious beauty. I guess might even say suspicious, or uncertain, but I think that look of self-doubt that pops up ever now and then, only comes from her always having to deal with her daddy issues. Her daddy Pepper Jack Reed was the craziest sumbitch this town ever seen, and her older brother Dealie Reed, well let's just say Dealie didn't fall far from the tree. Ever since I've known her she's wanted to know things, you know, like how things worked and shit and , on top of that, she's always unsure about how she looks? Her beauty could be overwhelming at times, I wouldn't even be ashamed to use the word transcendent to describe it; there were times, when just looking at her as she slept, helped me understand that despite of all the bullshit associated with being alive on this weird little planet, there was something right and good about it all. But when she was bubbling over excited about something at the dinner table, describing something she had learned about a movie, or a book, well, she could force a smile out of a flat rock. Right now, though, she was standing right in front of me, poking me in the chest with her index finger, madder than hell, and screaming like a ten year old girl. "Damn it to hell, Owen Leon Davis! What did I tell you would happen if I ever caught you talking to my brother Dealie?" "Now, Babe..." "Don't you go trying to 'Now Babe' me, Lee! What did I tell you?" "You said you'd cut my testicles off with a rusty saw blade and feed 'em to the neighbor's dog." "AND?" "You'd divorce me and marry Tubby Rollins and drive around town with the top down, so ever one could see what I made you up and do." "AND?" "You'd wait till I was asleep one night, pry my mouth open with crowbar, and cut out my tongue with that same rusty saw blade that you cut my testicles off with and staple it, my tongue that is, to my forehead with a carpet staple." I knew she was gonna scream that word "AND" again. She was kind of predictable in that way and pretty fed up with her brother Dealie at the time, and it was a fairly long litany of punishments that she had come up with, and I been forced to memorize them all and repeat them back to her on more than one occasion, but right before she said the word, she looked down and discovered, to my complete and utter embarrassment, that I was getting more than little bit turned on by screaming at me. I guess I should explain. You see, pretty as my wife is when she's sleeping, she is so much freaking hotter when she's angry. I don't believe there's ever been anyone hotter in the whole damn universe than Jesse Reed Davis when she's angry. She had looked down at the same crotch area that she was just threatening to mutilate with a rusty saw blade and saw that all them threats were doing was turning me on. The look on her face instantly went from one of rage and fury to one of stunned disbelief, "Leon Davis, do you actually mean to tell me that you are standing there getting sexually excited while I'm screaming at your dumb ass?" My own facial expression went from being completely contrite to one of abject embarrassment. "I surely wish I could say no, Honey. I know how stupid and shallow this makes me look, but, I just can't help it. Damn it Jesse, when you are sleeping, I look at you and think, you're the prettiest girl in the whole state of California, and that's saying something because its a big ass state, one of the biggest, but Babe, when you're angry and screaming and shit, in my eyes, you become the sexiest woman in the entire universe. It's got something to do with your nostrils flaring. I'm not sure what." It took a second for the words to sink in, but when they did, they worked, and they calmed the storm a bit. She was trying her damn best to stay mad at me, and couldn't, but she was also equally determined not to let me off the hook so easily. "Sexier than Marylyn Monroe?" "Shit, she would have been the First Lady of these here United States if she was half as sexy as you. President Kennedy would have kicked his old lady to the curb. Hell, if she'd been sexy as you President Kennedy would probably still be alive." Now I'll admit, I'm not all that bright. My daddy used to call me dumbass when he called me at all, but I could sure come up with pretty good complement when I needed one. I know that most women would have thought what I said was pretty damn cheesy and wouldn't give me the time of day if I addressed them words to them, but I didn't come up with complements for them, I had carefully crafted 'em for Jesse. My wife wasn't dumb either; she was actually one of the brighter people I knew, but I knew she had some serious daddy issues too. And I swear, I never took advantage of this knowledge unless I knew it was for her own good. She needed, for her own sake, to get over her anger at the only brother she had. I also had enough of getting scolded and worked up a little courage when I saw that dimple she was trying to hide appear on her left cheek. Our two girls were on the other side of the lawn playing with a water hose and were just starting to look over at us like they were worried about their daddy. "I get the picture, Jessie. You're mad at Dealie! But I ain't saying another damn thing until you let me explain myself." She didn't say nothing, just stood there tapping her foot and giving me that look that said whatever gave out of mouth right then had better be freakin good. "I didn't have a chance, Jesse. Dealie came out of Deuce's Store fore I even knew he was in there. I was just pumping gas and minding my own business." "You could have walked away without talking to him." "Bullshit I could! Dealie been my best friend my whole damn life! How'm gonna turn my back on him? Hell, let me remind you, your brother saved my life more'n once." She called my bluff on that one. Remember, I said she was suspicious. She had caught something in my voice that didn't ring true, "Remind me, Lee. How exactly did he save your life?" Actually, I had saved him from drowning once, so I just reversed the facts, crossed my fingers and hoped she didn't remember the details, "He pulled me out of Dawson's Reservoir that time when I fell in passed out drunk. Remember?" She eyed me some before nodding, "Okay, that's one. What other time?" I hate to reveal how shrewdly calculating I can be so early in the story, especially when it involves my dealings with the woman I love more than life itself, but I aimed this one like a matador in a bullring, "You don't remember? Now, that breaks my heart, Jesse," I feigned like I was staggered, "He introduced me to the most beautiful girl in Concord. My entire life changed at that moment; it pivoted, I mean did a complete 180. You got to admit before I met you, I was a worthless little sumbitch, and suddenly I found a purpose." Jesse started to laugh but caught herself before she did. Then she took off one of the pink flip-flops she was wearing and tossed it at me. "You're still a worthless idiot, Lee!" She acted like she was still angry, but her tone had changed, "He burned down my Mama's house, Lee. Burned it down with her wedding dress and all her jewelry. Burned up the tea set that my great, great, great, grandma Irene Lewis brought over from Ireland. All our family pictures and all our mementos were in that house. Everything my Mama owned was in that house, the house that your friend Dealie burnt to the ground without so much a thought about what it would do to me." She was quickly working her way back into a rage. She had inadvertently let it slip that she wasn't so mad about the belongings though; revealing that she was angry because he did what he had done without any regard for her feelings. I decided to gamble and knew I had to bend the truth a little. I had no other choice. "Not thinking of you? He's really sorry, Jesse. He told me to make sure you understood how sorry he is, but he just couldn't handle the idea of big-assed Belinda Barlow sleeping in your mama's bed." "Belinda Barlow sleeping in my Mama's bed? What the hell are you talking about?" It was bending the truth a little because I didn't know for sure, I was assuming a lot, but I was still 90% certain. I did know for a fact that old man Barlow already had a well-to-do girlfriend over in Hartford while Jesse's mama was dying in the hospital, and I'd seen his nasty looking daughter Belinda carrying several boxes of household items from the back of loaded pick-up into the backdoor of Lu's house after Lu's funeral. "Yeah, Dealie said he'd heard that Barlow was going to give your mama's house to Belinda, and she was going to move in with her husband and them six crazy ass kids." "All them wild-assed kids she had by that lunatic Larry LaValle? My mama's house?" "Well, technically, Jess, it was Barlow's house after Lu passed away. But this new lady friend he has owns a nice spread outside of Hartford, so I believe he was going let Belinda and her kids stay in your mama's house. Dealie said he went blind crazy when he heard that, and he knew what it would do to you, so he decided that there was no way in hell he could let that gross, filthy ass Belinda and that sleezy Larry LaValle sleep in his mama's bed. Not to mention all them crazy kids going through Lu's jewelry and stuff." They say that the way into a man's heart is through his belly. Could be true, I don't doubt it, but the quickest way into a woman's head is the mention of another woman. If Jesse thought for a moment Belinda Barlow, the grossest, filthiest female in the whole county was going to be sleeping in her mama's bed with someone as nasty and disgusting as Larry LaValle, she would have burned down the house down herself. Might even been a rusty saw blade involved too. I could tell that she had lost all her anger about me and Dealie talking and was pondering on the ramifications of what I'd told her. "That house was rightly ours. It was my granddaddy's house. Mama was born in that house." "No argument from me. Never could understand what Lu was doing with Barlow." That observation added a twist to whatever Jesse was thinking. "She was lonely, Lee. She told me she was lonely after Daddy died." "I understand that, Hon, but to go from Pepper Jack to Jake Barlow, that's more than a little leap. That's one of them quantum type leaps. No body in this town could undertstand it. It'd be like you going from me, the handsomest man in the Tri-County area, to take up with Fuzzy Brown, a man who ain't took a bath since he fell in the river chasing a runaway pig." And just like that, I was out of the woods. Jesse started laughing and couldn't stop, and I tell you, if she was sexy when she was angry, and transcendent while sleeping, she was way too lovely for any man made words to ever describe her when she laughed. I just stood there grinning and let her laugh. After a while, she stopped and walked over to where I was and kissed me on the cheek. Then she took my hand, lifted it to her lips and kissed it too. "I guess, he'll want to see Rowdy," she thought out loud while I was pushing a loose strand of lustrous brown hair over her right ear. "I expect so, Jess. He's his daddy after all." When we were walking back toward the house, the phone rang inside. Jess signaled for our five-year-old Mattie to go answer. Mattie came back out and told Jess that it was for her, so Jess let go my hand and hurried to see what it was about. I was thinking to myself what I needed to tell Dealie to set our stories straight. I was happy that I hadn't had to outright lie too badly. I knew that Dealie hadn't been thinking about Jesse when he burned down that house, he was way too impulsive to ever think like that, but it all boiled down to the same thing. Jesse would have lost her shit had she known about Barlow's plan to give her mama's house to his daughter. I didn't figure I was too far off on that. And she came pretty damn close to telling me to go deal with him myself when he wouldn't give back her mama's jewelry. In fact, we were discussing our legal options on the matter when we heard the fire engines heading toward Lu's place. I was mulling all this over when she suddenly popped her head out the front door holding the phone in her hand. There was a weird expression on her face." "Lee, Jake Barlow's dead. They're looking for Dealie!" The moment I pulled up to the gas pump, looked over and saw the chicken sitting by the opened passenger door of the sixty-nine Camino with a off color tailgate parked in front the store I knew that Dealie Reed was back in town. I tried to get my gas pumped so I could get out of there before he saw me, but there I was in the process of screwing on the gas cap when he burst out the store, popped the top on a tall can of Coors, took a big-assed swallow and saw me. His long brownish blonde hair hung down to his shoulders and he was shirtless, red from the sun, and wearing a pair of cut-off jeans and a pair of muddy neon-green Crocs. From where I was, I could see some of the skin on his shoulders was peeling.
"Damn it to hell! If it ain't Leon Freakin Davis his own damn self! Get your ass over here, Boy!" I waited for my receipt, calmly shut my door and walked over to the front of the store. Dealie jumped down off the curb, bounded toward me, and grabbed me in a big assed bear hug. "You bout the last person I expected to see in Concord today, Dealie! I thought they run you off for good. What the hell brings you back here?" "Run me off! Shit, boy, you know me better than that. They tell me not to go someplace, and I'll guarantee ya, that's the one place I'll be." He took a big drink from his beer, "I know you heard bout Aunt Lucy breaking her hip. She said I could stay in that room behind her garage if I helped out till she got back on her feet." He released me, and we stepped back a foot or two and gave each other the once over. "I know you was probably tryna get back in the car and get away from here before I saw you." I laughed, "I ain't going to lie to you. Soon as I saw that dead chicken by the door, I knew it was you." "That chicken ain't dead, Lee. She thinks she's a possum. Started fussing with me, so I told her to get the hell out the car. She just over there sulking." When he said that, the chicken stirred as if she'd heard her name. "That's right you moody little bitch. We talking about you!" "Dealie, you do know if Jesse knew I was sitting here talking to you, she'd be throwing my shit out on the yard and changing the locks on the doors." He laughed, "Damn, I never seen no one hold a grudge like that girl. She flipped me the bird at Mama's funeral. You know that?" "Told me she did it. She also swears that you shot Barlow on purpose." "I did shoot that fat ass on purpose. He was trying to kill me at the time. I just wanted to scare him a little. Try to get him out of my mama's house." "Jesse can't get past the fact you took the gun over there in the first place." "I'll admit to the fact that I went over there to beat up on him a little. I don't dispute that. Man was six foot three inches tall though. It was a lot harder than I figured. Hell, we must have wrestled and beat on each other for thirty minutes before he grabbed that pick-axe. I pulled that gun to try to scare him into not using that pick on me. I only shot after he stuck that pick in my shoulder. You know that Mansfield DA had it in for me ever since that first go round." The DA in Mansfield County was an arrogant prick. He had once tried Dealie, me, and one of our friends named Tubby Rollins for murdering Lucky Roberts, another friend of ours who was the son of a wealthy car dealer. Problem was, there wasn't no murder. The three of us had gone to party back in the woods with some girls that Lucky introduced us to that night. Dealie, Tubby, and me woke up on the floor of this cabin in the morning with blood all over the place and a pinky finger wearing Lucky's ring sitting on the kitchen table, no girls, no shoes, no Lucky. We were examining that pinky finger when Sheriff Butch Johns and his Deputy Stupid Johnny Jones walked right in the kitchen. Deputy Jones was a twin, and his brother was always called Smart Johnny mainly because he hightailed it out of Concord soon as he graduated from high school. Stupid Johnny didn't just land on his name by default though, he was more than just genuinely stupid. The patrons of the King Tut Bar and Grill were always getting in arguments, sometimes even fist fights, over who was dumber, Deputy Stupid Johnny Jones or Dumbass Lester Monroe, the dishwasher at the Tut. Local legend had it that Lester flunked first grade three times. We deduced that we had no memory of that night because them girls had drugged us and stolen our money. Yet, the Mansfield DA was full of ambition, and Lucky's Dad was very pissed off, apparently because he had just bought Lucky that pinky ring for his birthday. Sheriff Johns had an life-long hatred for Dealie's deceased daddy, Pepper Jack. I had always heard that old Pepper had stolen the sheriff's fiancé right before the wedding. That fiancé was Dealie's mom Lu who also happened to be my mother-in-law as I had married Dealie's sister Jesse, or the Divine Jesse Reed as people called her around here. I never put much stock in that story because I couldn't see what someone as classy as Lu would ever see in Sheriff Johns, but then again, I couldn't ever figure what she ever saw in Pepper either. And saying that, there was no way any of us could ever figure why she up and married some one as universally despised as Jake Barlow. Anyways, the three of them got together and concocted a crime without a body and without much in the way of evidence or witnesses. The Mansfield DA handpicked the jury and went to ranting and raving while waving around that pinky finger in the plastic bag. Most of them jury members had never seen a gold ring on a pinky finger in plastic bag and they were pretty freaking impressed. That DA was making a lot of noise and shit, but none of it made any sense if you cared to listen in on what he was saying which I guess I must have been the only one doing. Hell, Dealie was sleeping through the whole ordeal and all Tubby did was giggle and turn to jury to make sure they knew that Dealie was snoring. It was more than a little bit surreal even for a low rent place like Concord, and things didn't look real good for our chances. Hell, one time, while I was supposed to be sleeping, I heard Sheriff Johns lecturing Stupid Johnny on the benefits of using an electric chair instead of the gas chamber. "Hell, we'd have to import that gas shit from somewhere else; we don't manufacture that stuff round here. We do got plenty electricity though." He nodded his head like he was an expert and passed it over to Stupid Johnny. "My Granny says we got more'n nuff tricity to do the job. There's only three of 'em. She did says we might as well fry them Haskell boys while we got the chair out." The sheriff would spit his juice in spittoon, wipe his chin off, and agree. He liked it whenever someone agreed with him," Your Granny's a right smart women. And I do agree with her about them Haskell boys." My dad spent a whole bunch of his life's savings to hire a private investigator who finally succeeded in digging Lucky Roberts out of crackhouse in East St. Louis. So, Lucky came waltzing into the courthouse on the last day of the trial waving that little stub pinky at the jury, so they had to let us go. They weren't real happy about it. Most of them, jury and all, were really looking forward to a first class capital punishment display. Paper said that they hadn't hung nobody in our town since the 1870s when they strung up a German guy supposedly for horse theft but really more because he fought on the wrong side at Vicksburg. I guess people round here thought that that was an awful long time to go without an execution. For some reason, I suspect because most the respectable people in town didn't care for Pepper Jack anymore than the sheriff did, that the Mansfield DA came out of the ordeal looking like a hero of sorts, and he got elected mayor of Mansfield after running on a law and order ticket. I can't remember his real name. I was more than a little bit nervous at the time, and we got so used to calling him DA Sumbitch that became the appellation that I remember. When he ran for a second term as mayor, Dealie and his friends went all over the county crossing his name out on his posters and writing in DA Sumbitch. On election night, he got more votes under that monicker than he did his own. As them memories of the trial were flooding through my head, Dealie had finished his beer, crushed the can and tossed it in the trash can by the front door, then gone over to his car and told that chicken to get in. The hen stirred and walked over and jumped into the passenger side as if it were obeying. Dealie then walked over closed the door behind it like he was locking in a prom date. Next, he started the Camino up and pulled over to where I was standing and rolled down the window. "Lee, you gotta tell Jesse to forgive me." It got real quiet for a minute. The conversation had come to the edge of things. Forward movement in any direction was bound to cause some serious repercussions. "Dealie, I think she'd forgive you shooting that fool. It was you burning down your mama's house that pushed her over the ledge. Ever thing your mama owned was in that house." "She gotta understand that I couldn't take that fat ass living in my mama's house. Thought I'd give him a Viking funeral." "He wasn't dead yet, Dealie." Dealie chuckled, "After I got out of jail for the shooting, I paid Tubby's brother ten dollars to get that fool drunk. I figured he'd go home and pass out. I nailed every door shut but clean forgot about the basement." He looked over at me to see how I'd take that information. I din't want my eyes to betray the fact that I never really bought into the idea that Dealie really ever meant to kill Barlow. I knew him well enough to know that if that door to the basement was unlocked, it was because Dealie had left it wide open for Barlow to escape from. Trick worked though, Barlow left town right after Dealie's arson trial. Dealie got sent upstream for a while.The judge was kind of lenient though, most people round here didn't much the idea of a worthless piece of crap living with someone as loved and respected as Lu Reed was. Jesse and I were raising Dealie's boy Rowdy with our own two girls. He stopped talking for a minute then looked up at me, "That ain't why she's mad at me anyway." I thought about not asking but took the bait, "Then why's she so angry, Dealie?" "You and her were the only two people in this town who ever thought I could rise above being born Pepper Jack's boy. She's mad at me because I let her down, same as you." "Me! I ain't never said shit to you, Dealie, about nothing. In all the years I knowed you, I ain't said shit about anything you've ever done!" "You tried to warn us, Lee, about them girls that night. Kept saying it was a mistake for us to go out in them woods." "I coulda got out the car when we stopped to get beer. Carl offered me a ride home, you remember." "I saw your face when you first woke up and saw Lucky's finger sitting on that table. You looked over at me." "And?" "You don't always need words to cast judgement, Lee." He rolled up his window slowly, mouthed the words 'tell her', and nodded at me before taking off through the gravel parking lot. I swear as he pulled away I saw that chicken jump up in the rear window and look at me like I was dumber than Stupid Johnny and Dumbass Lester put together. I was having some drinks and dinner with my daughter once at a small bar at a hotel that I was staying at in San Diego. I was about three Scotch and waters in when I get a case of verbal diarrhea and start slurring out information on everything that I had been reading about for months. Now, the verbal genre of loose bowels is no different in some ways than the real deal and attempting to halt the flow of loosely bound words by placing your hand across your mouth works no better than trying to shove a cork up your butt.
The main discovery I had made in that time period was through reading Tom O'Neil's excellent book Chaos where the author blows the lid off the Manson killings of the late Sixties by revealing that DA Vincent Bugilosi and one of his prime witnesses Terry Melcher (the record producing son of Doris Day) knew that they were lying about things. The author infers that Bugilosi knew his case was dirty all along and was mainly concerned in seeing that the case worked its way out to a predetermined outcome. The message of the book is that the authorities and the media lied to us all along and used the highly publicized murders for ideological and political purposes. That's some really important stuff right there, and most of the time I can suppress that natural urge to behave like the Howard Beale character in the movie Network and scream what I learned out of my upstairs window. But get a few drinks in me, and my brain does the equivalent of what my stomach does after it mixes up the contents of a large Chicken Salad topped off by a couple glasses of iced tea. I can't control the outcome. The words just start sliding out on their own. If I were sitting with someone who shared my passion for discovering obscured truth, the moment could actually result in a somewhat interesting if somewhat garbled bar conversation. (On long solo drives, I sometimes imagine myself having such conversations with the likes of Charles Bukowski, Martin Amis, or Christopher Hitchens.) However, the fact that my daughter's interests are vastly different than mine, combined with the fact that we occupy staunchly opposite ideological positions, and the fact that she is far more acclimated to living in a much stranger world than the one where I acquired my basic foundations, I knew instantly that I activated the perceptual filter that revealed to her the presence of the tin foil hat I sometimes wear upon my head. The difference between her perception and mine is that I understand that everyone on this planet has been gifted with such a hat at birth along with the ability to filter out its presence in polite society. While the young often see it on the heads of their elders. No! Wait a minute! I take that back. Most people never actually see the hat. They simply use the phrase because they've heard someone who they admire use it to "roast" someone else who they don't particularly admire, and often those of them who use it most, do so directly proportional to their own ignorance of the subject being discussed. On the other hand, the elderly eventually see the tin foil topper whenever they shave, brush their teeth, or place their dentures in a jar. They come to like the way it looks and sometimes fashion it into a patriot's hat, or an admiral's hat. Some even fancy they see themselves wearing the admiral's hat sideways like Napoleon with their hand tucked neatly into their underwear and come to imagine that it is doing yeoman's work in filtering out the combined, harsh effects of 5G, The View, Rachel Maddow, and CNN. The divide between young and old is a natural thing. We are all born on the clock and have it written in our DNA that the time we have to make our mark is severely limited, but then we have to come to grips with all of the slow-assed drivers who appear to be taking one last scenic drive, one last victory lap perhaps, in the left lane while pointing out the window at all the posted speed limits. While, at the same time, far too many young people plant the nose-end of their Teslas firmly into the license plate frame of the car ahead of them like a male dog in heat, and have yet to understand the wisdom contained in the three car length rule, or have never even heard of Coach Wooden's advice to "Play fast, but don't hurry." One of the worse things we do as human beings is rush about with our heads up our ass circling the hour glass drain like headless chickens farting out our personal mantras via the syncopated and often synchronized puckering of our sphincter muscles. That night in San Diego I wanted to cry. I was drunk blathering and couldn't stop myself, couldn't keep myself from looking foolish in the eyes of one of the two most important people in this world. I love my daughters and hate the fact that I live so far across the Gand Canyon from them on the ideological map. Yet, apparently not enough to abandon my personal beliefs though. I figure I might need these beliefs someday to save the world after the mainstream media and the mud brained mockingbirds have spread enough untruth to tip the balance in favor of the Lie. And if not the world at large, at least, enough of the boulders to hold fast to as the world I've known my whole life rapidly disintegrates into nothingness all around me. However, that night back in my room, I finally understood that there was really no pressing need for me to look for the differences in the way that we each perceived the world, while there was an urgent need to discover common ground. I also developed sense enough to keep most of my beliefs to myself in the presence of people who have little or no interest in my personally experienced and often modified version of truth. That is unless, of course, there is Scotch involved. I told my daughter that night that I was going to start keeping a ledger where I would place all wild-assed, unproven and controversial facts I run across on one side of the ledger, and all the things I could somewhat verify on the other. I say somewhat verify because anything that exists on this material plane is open to suspicion. In fact, if we humans had ever acclimated our knowledge and understanding to the demands of infinity, we might have to someday actually face the weird reality that proven facts can be both true and false at the same time. Imagine having a brain that could handle that without freezing up! The purpose of the ledger was twofold: 1) to clear my own mind of all the gimcrack bullcrap that was clogging up the avenues in my head 2) to make sure my foundations were fundamentally sound. More importantly though, I knew there was also the real possibility that the accumulation of such truth would somehow reveal some of the more obvious hidden truths that I was missing because of all the junk I had piled in the windows of my perception obscuring an outside view of things. The book on Manson made me realize that it was time for me to question everything I thought I knew, even the oft glorified and golden myths of my youth, especially those myths! I now believe that anything of a mythic nature is particularly open to deeper discussion. You know, things like Ken Kesey's story of how he first acquired the LSD needed to jump start the Psychedelic Movement, the photo of three bums in Dallas, the thinking behind the Tonkin Gulf Affair, things of that nature. There's a whole freaking warehouse full of half truths and outright lies to look into. For example, why is it that everyone back then knew a whole bunch about Charlie Manson, but nobody hardly knew anything about Tex Watson, the man who did almost all of the killing? I've decided not to watch any more television for the time being. The people on TV lie about things that they said on air just a week or two before. They lie about everything pretty much, even things where there is no discernible reason to lie. I guess they have to practice, but that makes them a pretty damn unreliable source in my book. And the conservative news people aren't doing any better as they sound a lot like that English guy on The Curse of Oak Island who gets way beyond excited every time they find a rusty nail. They keep handing their viewers information that is three and four years old, holding the bits out in front of us in their grubby little hands like its the most natural order of journalism to hand us facts we figured out for ourselves several years after it could have done any of us some good. I no longer believe that the Sixties were in any way, shape, or form an Era of Peace and Love, except in the minds of the young and the foolish who were among the greatest victims of the time. I also believe that the people who work for the mainstream media along with a majority of our political leaders are actively engaged in the suppression of Hope, mankind's greatest weapon against the dark unknown. Well, it's official. I've just lost my oldest, dearest friend. I'm cutting all ties to him. He's dead as far as I'm concerned. It's very sad because he's been my ride or die since I was about five years old. At first, he was so exciting to be with, so intelligent and well versed in all things. He knew more than anyone else I knew. We watched sports together and saw plays and movies. He literally grew up with me. He was with me when I first got a glimpse of what Disneyland looked like. He was SF Giant fan too, and we both followed the career of Willie Mays, my first hero.
Later we both got into basketball at the same time and fell in love with the old school Celtics, you know back when guys like KC Jones, Bill Russell, John Havlicek, and Dave Cowans were playing. He loved Ali like I did, and Roberto Duran and Marvin Hagler. We went through the Vietnam era together, and he helped supply me with facts to bolster my arguments when my dad and I fought over politics at the kitchen table. He was also with me in Mr. Montoya's class in the sixth grade when we found out that President Kennedy had been killed. When I learned about my dad's cancer scare on the same day that we took mankind's first step on the moon, my friend was there too. When I was all alone in my house after my wife left, he was the only one who I could consistently rely on to keep me company. We shared many a late night movie with me sitting on couch in my t-shirt and pajama bottoms eating double cream Oreos. He also was the one who kept me company late at night after my dad passed away. Lately though, he's been babbling and sounding a whole lot like Pop did when he had full blown dementia. He was remembering things incorrectly and kept recalling things that never happened the way that he said they did. I could handle that, but then he started outright lying to the point I couldn't trust a single thing he told me. It was obvious that he was getting all of his information from someone else, someone who didn't have my best interests at heart. Finally, it got to the point that it was clear that all he wanted was my money, as he kept trying to coerce me into buying things I didn't need or want. The last straw though was when he start hanging out with all these evil, nefarious looking people who lied as much he did which was pretty much every time they opened their mouth. Yep, it hurts me so much, but after a long 65 year long friendship, I finally pulled the plug on HAL, my television. I think the most important event in my mom's life was when she was about ten years old and her beloved father died in the middle of the war. I think dealing with that enormous heartbreak made her into the woman she was. The whole time I knew her, she always escaped into books in order to deal with the hard things that life put in her way. I got way too many books in my house because of her. I saw her bean my dad once with a can of green beans because he came home drunk. I was hiding behind the couch. I had snuck into the living room in order to watch TV after bedtime. I always felt that it was unfair because my dad worked so long and hard to support us and needed time to blow off steam. I asked her about it when we used to drive around the valley when I wanted to get her out of the house after Dad had died.
She told me the only time he had ever got angry enough to rough her up was when she knocked a glass of whiskey out of his hands in front of his brother and some other men. She told him on the way home that if he ever put hands on her again, she'd leave him and she assured me that she most certainly would have. I asked her if he did, and she looked at me like I was stupid or something because she was sitting right there and knew that I was just asking to be dumb. She told me they got married because they only had each other to turn to, and they had no where else to go. After he got beaned with that can of green beans, Pop suddenly got religion, started going to church, and quit drinking altogether. Things got pretty smooth after that, I assumed they figured they were working for the same team. I guess it's fair to say that what religious training I got was because of them green beans. I knew them sumbitches had to be good for something. I had always been a cut and run kind of guy when things got too ugly to bear. It drove my wife crazy I know. The fighting that my mom and dad did in front of us when I was young still, to this day, cuts away the ground beneath my feet whenever I hear couples speaking in anger. I would even leave movies in the middle if a man and a woman started fighting in the film. When mom began the process of leaving this material plane, there was a whole lot of ugliness involved, and there were a lot of times I wanted to just run away and lose myself in a book so big that no one would ever find me, but I didn't. I stayed and did a whole lot of things a son should never have to do, and saw things that I'll never be able to forget as long as I live. But I'm glad I did, I was glad I was there and doing those things that needed to be done, and I only wish that I'd been there even more. Mom used to tell me that time heals all wounds, but I don't believe she really knew. I saw the way her eyes would fill up with water whenever she mentioned her Daddy; that wound still looked kind of fresh to me. Life as a writer in the Age of Gold, as the later half of twenty-first century was being touted, wasn't very taxing. In fact, I could barely remember a time when it was. Most mornings I got up to an already made cup of pre-stirred coffee with two hazelnut creamers, walked outside and sat in the world's most comfortable deck chair, watched as the sun rose over the Sierra Nevada mountains behind me, and gazed out upon it's dazzling, golden reflection upon Lake Tulare, the largest freshwater lake in the world. Life was so easy that I often wondered why it was that way, and why I possessed the myriad of privileges that I did. It was Ouzel, the artist, who kept reminding me of the truth as he knew it. "THEY too get bored my friend." A few creative friends and I were gathered around a bar named The Argo which was owned by another friend of ours named Miguel De Santiago, a tall, bearded, very handsome pianist from Barcelona, Spain. When Ouzel mentioned the word THEY, everyone at the table, Vesuvia The Sexy, a red-headed lounge singer, Gordon the All Knowing, an English historian, Ouzel, Myra Rosas, a poet of uncommon beauty, Leo, the bartender, and myself, we all looked over our shoulders. It had been over ten years since the events known as the End of The Bickering, and in many ways things were so much better. Still, that anxious feeling that someone was always listening was pervasive, and I wondered if any of us would ever have a day without its ghostly presence. We all knew that the ominous pronoun was as close as anybody in human history had ever gotten toward identifying whoever or whatever was in ultimate control. The proper noun Antediluvian had appeared suddenly out of nowhere to describe a group that once been known, in the first part of the century as the Corporate Elites. Gordon, who enjoyed the privilege of access to the deepest historical archives ever assembled informed us that the term was first used as a joke in one those ubiquitous late night talk shows that were once employed as means of social control. The term went 'viral', a well-used colloquialism, and a word that we now know simply meant a concept that was used like an aerosol to fertilize the collective consciousness. Gordon's first book The Unturned Stone, the one that led to his invitation to sit on the Council, was a brilliant analysis of the events occurring in the last half of the Twentieth Century and which ended in the year 2030 with the Good Vibration (The event was actually named using the title of the Beach Boys song a group which had begin by singing music associated with the surfing culture of California). The more formal term for the period was the End of the Bickerings. Everyone sitting at the table, and many millions of others all around the world had gotten up one morning and witnessed what looked and felt like a glitch in the flow of time. The sky suddenly shimmered, and our vision of the the world got blurry, and everything in it shook for exactly one second. Yeah, one second. Most of the population of the Earth and the majority of its man-made objects simply disappeared from sight. Things like houses, buildings, highways, cars, public schools, igloos, telephone poles, and planes were gone. Some things, a lot actually, remained it was true, and the main difference seem to be that the things that were left behind were the beautiful things, simple, of undeniable use and inspirational. For example, the Golden Gate Bridge still spanned the San Francisco Bay, the Statue of Liberty maintained its post in New York Harbor; the Space Needle in Seattle, the Eiffel Tower in Paris were still there The Cathedral of Chartres went one step further and actually elevated to a position five feet higher than the ground it once rest upon. At the same time, all of the crime and drug infested housing developments, concrete banks, ugly billboards, the mansions of the greedy, fast-food restaurants, public schools, traffic lights, trash piles, the homeless encampments, and all of the graffiti covered, boarded up buildings in the inner cities were gone in the flash of an eye. One of the strangest things that had happened was although most of the homeless were gone, it was not all of them, some were still there. It was later assumed that it was the drug users amongst them who had disappeared, but not even all of them. The strangest thing of all was that Washington D.C., the U.S. Capitol and most of the people who worked there were gone along with the White House, the President, and his political staff. Wall Street at noon was strangely silent and it was later determined that ninety percent of the denizens of Manhattan were missing. "Elaborate on the idea that THEY get bored too, Amigo," said Gordon as held up his empty gin glass so that Leo could see it. " I think there might be some truth to the idea, but also think it could just as easily be that they need someone to record the truth, lest they forget it. Before Ouzel could respond to that, Myra took up the gauntlet as she usually did. "You are both partially right. They do get bored and in their idleness, they have chosen other people like us to find the truth for them. No more heavy lifting, for them. They are too powerful, too entrenched to ever be afraid of the truth again." I loved looking at Myra when she spoke, her jade eyes lit up and her voice was like the smoke from burning incense. I opened my palms and raised one eyebrow to ask, "Well, what then?" She told me once that she loved the way I talked without using words (It's why I did it). So she flashed a grin my way before she answered, "Haven't any of you ever wondered why they are on this side of the divide and still in position to call the shots? Maybe they need the truth we provide to sustain their position." While the others oohed and sighed in realization, I quickly glanced at Gordon, and it was obvious that it was a subject he really didn't want to get into in this setting. We had discussed the issue somewhat the last we had went fishing. He had some very strong opinions on the matter. In fact, there was a passage in his book where he had discussed the Pilates (He pronounced it pill lah tez) a term he had he coined himself to refer to the political class of the first quarter of the twenty-first century). The name was a reference, of course, to Pontius Pilate the Roman governor of Judaea(36 to 26CE) who pronounced sentence on Jesus Christ. It was plainly obvious that Pilate didn't really want to condemn Christ, but willingly did so on behalf of the Roman Empire in order to maintain his privileged position as an interface. Gordon stated that the position was no longer needed as humanity on this side of the divide had "leveled up" after the Good Vibration. He shared that he had found evidence that the rest of humanity hadn't disappeared at all. They were still there with all their toys and tribalism where they always had been. It was the rest of us who had translated into a supra-sensible higher level of consciousness. Myra had almost hit the nail on the head. Gordon had explained to me, that they, whoever they were, needed the truth that we mined for them from our own subconscious which was now pretty much exposed to the elements. He mentioned that many, many years ago the elite class had discovered the truths contained in the ancient wisdom and decided to restrict excess to those truths, distract the general population with banalities and half-truth and outright lies, keeping the information secret in order to gain advantage and power. Along the way, they realized they were missing out on advantages to be gained by the valuable knowledge they possessed. Some bright people amongst them realized they needed a lot more illumination to be able to forge portals through the dimensional interface large enough for them sneak through by hiding amongst the truly enlightened. The problem was that their oppression of the truth was working too well. So, in the middle of last century, they initiated a series of psychological operations designed to push the human evolutionary path forward at a rapid pace. They designed and propagated culture in a way that expanded the consciousness of some while continuing to oppress others. In their writings, they referred to those who didn't get it by the pejorative BREATHERS. The term was defined as being humans who were seemingly incapable of showing a positive growth in consciousness, people who could easily controlled, easily manipulated, and willing to believe almost anything, no matter how absurd, to maintain their position in society while never taxing their mental/emotional states. We woke up in this new world like newborn babies, I mean, except for the fact that most of us were older, and even maybe, a little more curious about life than most of our missing neighbors had been. It was a context thing. For example, I had traveled to the bar on my new bike. When I had gone to sleep that first night I just lay down on picnic table that had been in my back yard. When I woke up, I was in a bed in my new house, the one above the lake, the one that floated three feet off the ground. The funniest thing about it was, it was the house I often dreamed about, a simple, rustic affair kind of like a cross between a mountain cabin and a beach house, but a little more luxurious than either. Everything I needed was there, yet it very uncluttered and clean. I had two simple bedrooms upstairs, a living room attached to the kitchen divided by a long marble counter with four chairs, and a library/office space which doubled as a reading room and place to write. Then there was the porch that surrounded the house with one side facing out over the lake and another facing the mountains. That comfortable deck chair I mentioned earlier had no visible means of support. It looked like a little floating cloud and was as soft and fluffy as you would imagine a cloud would be. My bike had no wheels. It was silver and shaped like a fish; it had handlebars and a seat and pedals. It also moved very fast. The real crazy thing was that I didn't really need it. I soon learned that I could just close my eyes for a second and travel around as fast as I needed. It was decided by all thought to keep things kind of similar for while as the newness was a bit overwhelming. It was kind of like watching that old 200l Space Odyssey by director Stanley Kubrick where no one understood the ending because of the lack of context. A decision made to keep things the same for a while to orientate ourselves to this new and strange environment, thus the bike with no wheels. It was also decided that we would be required to use the pedals. Indolence was frowned upon above most things and many believed that we would get very lazy unless we participated in some mandated some physical activity. The bike actually had a device mounted that recorded every pedal we took. I didn't mind, and neither did the others; it felt good to stretch our legs, and we often went on group cycles. Probably the weirdest thing I could mention was the only rule that THEY actually wrote down and distributed. It seemed THEY feared that we would close our eyes for longer periods, and they wouldn't know what we were thinking. Sleep as we once knew it was no longer required, yet we kept the night time with its procedures the same, with one big exception. We could not close our eyes for prolonged periods of time. When the lights went out, a camera mounted over our beds would activate and if we closed our eyes too long, or actually went to sleep (which was still possible, even if unneeded) an alarm would sound to remind us to keep out eyes open. We never knew if they could even enforce the directive, but we were not argumentative types by nature. I'm not sure if they ever knew that most of us had learned to day-dream long ago, and had we wanted, we could just easily sleep with our eyes wide open. When I arrived home that evening, I was more than a bit troubled, more so than I had been since I had arrived on this side of things. My son Jason was still on the other side. Gordon had mentioned that there was a group left behind there who were referred to as the 49 %. They were the people who were so close to transitioning, but were holding on to something that kept them from achieving the 51% shift in consciousness that would have placed them on the other side of the divide. My son was very strong willed, brave and intelligent. So intelligent that he thought he was strong enough to doubt the existence of God. I suspect that was what held him back. Gordon also informed me that there had long been small portals which made it possible to travel between the dimensions. He explained that all of those ancient myths which talked about facing dragons and other such monsters in subterranean worlds had been about such traveling. He also explained that THEY were doing their best to get all of their own relatives out of lower depths before they shut down the portals. They assumed that shutting down the portals would guarantee their entrenched existence on the higher level. All I knew, was I needed to reach my son and convince him of the foolishness of his war with God. And I had to do it soon. I showered and went outside, sat crosslegged and meditated (with eyes open) on the porch facing a large new moon. I envisioned my daughter Julie rocking her nephew Billy, my grandson, to sleep on a hillside north of Fresno (babies were exempted from the closed eyes restrictions). I tried my best to manifest an image of my son being there in the morning when Billy awoke, but something kept obstructing the vision. Afterwards, I read a chapter from a book about Hunter S. Thompson, the man who created Gonzo journalism. I was researching to write a book on how the world of 1960's had opened the door to such a flood of lunacy, ignorance, and lies to where it had gotten to the point where you could not even acknowledge the difference between day and night without making someone angry. When I arose from the cross-legged position, I got up to the thought of how my knees no longer creaked and my back did not need stretching. I went inside to my bedroom and thought about darkness and the lights turned off. I crawled into the most comfortable bed I've ever known, and keeping my eyes wide open, dreamed about a lady named Susie. "Shut the hell up, you stupid B#@&! I wasn't even looking at you. You're freaking crazy!"
The woman, already visibly angry, lost all control at being called a b$%#, "At least, I'm not some pervy, muscle bound dumb ass jock who uses his gym membership to scope out hot, young, women while they're exercising!" "Hot! Girl? You a five at best! You know what that means, don't you? You average! You a mediocrity on your best day and probably one them crazy, narcissistic hoes who thinks that everybody else is staring at them. And you call yourself a girl. I bet you in your mid- thirties with a couple kids. If I was trying to pick up a hot girl in a gym, I damn sure wouldn't be wasting my time looking your way." The woman sneered sarcastically, "I didn't say everyone. I only said that you were, and I said it because you were checking me out. You waited until I started doing squats then peeked over here. Don't believe me? I'll show you the evidence! I sat my camera up to catch you guys in the act. I'll show you." "You sat the camera up? Hell, I walked in after you did." He stopped for a second to think and then quickly arrived at the conclusion, "Aha! You were already in here when I came in. Aha! You sat your camera up in order to get trap some dumbass so you could capture it own your phone. You're one them crazy ladies who likes to post up videos pretending to be offended!" The woman, realizing she'd been caught red-handed, started to stutter out a defense but only managed a very weak, "You don't know what you're talking a........" Then she looked down toward the ground and noticed that he had placed his own cell phone behind his back pack pointing directly where she was currently standing." Look! Your camera is pointing right at me. You wanted me to accuse you! You're one of those sick dudes who trigger women into reacting so you can video and try to make them look foolish!" It was at this point, the manager of the gym, a tall, Matthew McConaughey lookalike in an Adidas warm-up suit, came over the the scene and immediately set about trying to sort things out between the man and the girl. The man and the woman had calmed down considerably but still talked over each other in their efforts to tell him a version of even that, however fabricated, presented them in the best light. He wasn't having any of it though and made them speak, slowly one at a time. Afterwards, he thought about what they had said and then looked at their strategically planted cameras and understood what was happening right away. "This is fucking disgusting. Both of you should be totally ashamed of yourselves! What complete asses you are. You're just hypocrites. Just think about how your selfish actions reflect on others. In trying to get a few likes on your web page, you greatly diminish the problems that people are being going through on a daily basis. People see your shit and greatly diminish the real problems in our society that make life a hell of lot harder for the rest of us. Here, I want you to get your stuff get your stuff and get the hell out of my gym!" The manager bent over and grabbed the guy's packpack and tossed it toward him. Next, he went and got the girl's phone and handed it to her. He then pointed them toward the exit. Shamefaced, they both stumbled across the cluttered gym floor. The bright light of the sun outside entered the slightly dimmer light of room as the door opened and then shut snapped shut behind them. As the manager began walking toward the desk, his slightly paunchy, balding, and bespectacled assistant came around the counter to question him on what had just happened. "Damn, Donny, you toasted them fools. That little speech you gave almost caused me to start tearing up. Hell, that lady was damned near crying and that musclebound idiot's face was as red as a cherry." "Shit, I'll bet you that shame they felt probably lasted till the moment they got outside of the door. In fact, they'll probably be setting up their little scam inside of another gym in less than an hour." "You really think they're serial offenders?" "No, more like serial offendees!" "Offendees! Ha ha! That's a great one! You think that one up yourself?" Donny nodded, "Yep. Just now when you asked me that question." He pushed through the small, swinging gate to get behind the counter, but stopped suddenly and turned back to the trailing assistant."Did you get it all?" "Yep, every bit of it. I had it posted before the door shut behind them. It's really gonna make the gym come off looking great too. Like we really got ethics or something." They chuckled at the observation. "Damnum! That lil skinny one sure can fight. She kicking that big girl's ass."
"Sho is. It was that running start gave her the advantage. Caught that other un by surprise; if she had time to get ready, I spect we'd be watching a different fight." "Maybe, that lil gal hits a lot harder though; you can hear her hitting her all the way over hear.' My older brother Glen and I were standing outside the Reina Del Mar restaurant, our breakfast go-to, located right in the center of town. The two girls fighting were doing so right smack dab in the middle of the intersection of Rosewater and Main, the x-marks-the- spot middle of the dusty, little farm town of Concord, California. City leaders liked to claim that the town was the Tomato Sauce Capital of the world. They even said so on the sign they erected on the exit off highway 53. The sign had a big, old, smiling red tomato wearing a golden crown and and a purple robe. The city even had an annual Miss Tomato Sauce Queen contest which coincided with the Pizza Sauce Parade marking the end of the harvest season. The two combatants were denizens of the homeless encampment currently located in the city park. The park, located about 100 yards south of where they were fighting, used to be called Rosewater Park in honor of one Millicent Rosewater the first mayor of the town when it incorporated back in 1923. Legend was that it was the Rosewater family that had donated the land for the park and had pushed through the beautification efforts that led to its creation. It had been a nice little oasis at one time with several tall trees and a large grassy expanse dotted with some picnic tables, a swing-set, merry-go-round, a couple of slides and a remodeled restroom. On the northeast corner sat the hacienda styled Veteran's building with its brick lined arches, whitewashed walls, and red-tiled roof. In the center of the tiled courtyard, there was fountain dedicated to the men who had gone overseas to fight in World War I. Nowadays, the people of the town just called the park Dreamworld because it was the hub of most drug activity in the community and far from being an oasis, the place now looked like what it was, a homeless encampment littered with shopping carts, tents, plastic shacks, copious amounts of trash and a small community of dispossessed souls, largely said to be have been pushed out of the larger cities to the south. There were many rumors floating around that the officials of those cities paid for the train tickets to Concord and the tents in San effort to thin down their own herds of meth addicted outcasts and fringe dwellers. My brother and I ate breakfast at Reina's most every morning, and sitting inside the restaurant and watching the carrying-ons of the park people was better than most of the reality shows on TV, no, make that better than all them damn shows, if by better, you meant more interesting, or even, more simply just being real. Damn near all of the foot traffic across the street were the meanderings of the drug addicted and the dispossessed although I don't how we could refer to them any longer as being dispossessed as their possessions stacked up into ever larger piles of trash and it was obvious that most of them, along with their drug use, were being subsidized by the very people they looked upon with suspicion and disdain. There is even one lady who we referred to as the Walking Lady who slept on a little strip of grass between the restaurant's parking lot and the sidewalk. She walked back and forth relentlessly. Glen and I thought that surely that someone in authority would eventually realize that you couldn't have that lady sleeping out by a parking lot and relentlessly pacing back forth. She clearly had some severe emotional/mental issues and needed help. The City officials kept saying it was out of their hands because the State said so. She hovered over the area like a figure from a bad dream. I walked over to where Glen was parked and only then noticed that his passenger side was caved in, and he had bubble wrapped and duct taped the space where his window used to be. "What the hell happened here?" He walked around to where I was. The women were still fighting in the background and the walking woman would pass in and out of the picture as she paced back and forth in front of the restaurant. A crowd of park dwellers had gathered and yelled out their support for one or the other of the combatants. Some even mimicked the fighter's efforts which, had they not been so real, loud, and in color, could have leaped right out of Keystone cop movie. "Oh that. Someone backed into Vicky at the grocery store last week. I sent her up to get me a six-pack of Guinness and she come back with that." "What the hell's with the bubble wrap. I seen plastic windows before. I don't recall ever seeing one bubble wrapped before, and damn, man, how many rolls of duct tape you use on that sumbitch?" Glen's shoulders slumped a little as he explained, "When we moved the last time to where we live now, Vicky found a deal on bubble wrap. Let's just say she ordered a lot more than we needed. and as for the duct tape; you gotta use a lot of that shit to keep that plastic in there, road wind being what it is and all." "Why don't you just buy a new door at a wrecking yard?" He looked at me like I was dumb, "Intend to, asshole. Still looking for one. In the meantime, I gotta figure out what to do with all that bubble wrap. That shit's driving me crazy. Kids always popping them bubbles; then Vicky gets mad and starts screaming, at me and telling me to tell them to stop popping them bubbles." "You do it?" "Yeah, but you know, kids gonna be kids." "Why don't you just throw that shit away? He didn't answer right away. He tried, but the sound of the cop's siren and the ambulance arriving was so loud, I couldn't hear. So, he stopped and waited. "You know Vicky. She's so tight that we're pumping shampoo and body wash out of a fifty gallon drum in my garage because she thought she could save five dollars by buying in bulk." "Hell, dumbass, just leave it in the back of your pick-up over night, and them people over there in Dreamworld'll take care of the problem." He thought about it for a while before answering, "You know that's the smartest thing you said in quite a long time. Look, one of them leaving in hand-cuffs, and the one that started it is leaving in an ambulance. Right there's proof that life ain't fair." My car screeched a little as I opened it, and I turned back to answer, "I don't know how leaving in an ambulance is much better getting hauled off to jail. That one there will be out in an hour. The other one will have a headache and two black eyes for a week or better. Sides, who needs to see a couple crackheads fighting to figure out that life ain't fair." Walking Lady eyed me suspiciously as I pulled out of the driveway. The next morning as I drove by the park, I noticed one of the tents had a bubble wrapped door and there was more bubblewrap curled around a palm tree next to the tent and the trashcan chained to the palm tree was completely incased in bubble wrap. Glen bought breakfast that morning because how well my suggestion had worked. It was the next morning though that shook us out of our routine as when we both arrived at the restaurant at the same time and when we got out of our vehicles, it looked like the whole damn park was covered in bubble wrap. "Don't look at me," Glen said as he exited his car. "We didn't have near that much. I don't know what the hell happened there." Before I even answered, I pointed over to where the walking woman was still asleep in her sleeping bag on the grass strip by the side walk. Her head rested upon pillow made of bubble wrap. "Apparently, that shit either breeds like one them deadly viruses, or else, what we have here is just a simple case of keeping up with the Joneses." Norman Westbay passed away a few days ago. Truth be told, I never talked to him all that much, just a few times in passing really, but the news of his death made me very sad. Later on in life, we became Facebook friends and found out that we kind of thought alike on a lot of things. This was probably because we grew up within two blocks of each other on the Southside of Corcoran. We didn't live out there because our ancestors were manor borne and bred or had staked out a claim centuries before. We came from migrants, people who moved into the area in search of better times; people who didn't mind getting blistered, sunburned, and dirty to find them. Yet, at the same time, my dad was probably the first person who ever broke the ground of our yard in order to plant something in the entire history of the world.
Norman and his friends were a few years older than me. He was older than my brother too. We were of that generation when the young men were being shipped off to the jungles of Asia with the admonition that it was, "Kill to be killed" out there and our leaders didn't seem to be overly concerned over which one happened first. On the home front, a lot of the drugs that were floating all over the place at the time happened to be provided by our own government. They didn't us tell that at the time. I only found out about it much later, read about it in a book. I came out of the Southside with a chip on my shoulder. Most Southside kids did. It's still there, by the way. It's the how the good Lord's going to identify us Southside kids when we get to heaven. My dad once sent me to a parts store to get a piece of packing because he was working on fixing our water pump. He was all greasy and didn't want to put his hands in his pockets, so he told me to just charge it. I went and got it, and it cost thirty something cents. There were four men there when I told the man behind the counter to put it on Dad's bill, two on one side of the counter and two men sitting on stools. I will remember until the day I die how those men looked at me when I told the man to charge it. I feel no hatred for any of the men; I never hated my dad for it either. It was just a moment of great clarity where the universe let a young boy know his exact position in both the world at large and the smaller hierarchies of a small farm town. There were probably times in my father's life when that thirty something cents could have been the difference between success or failure. Lawns were manicured on the North side of Barnum Avenue. The only curbs on the Southside ran around Mark Twain School. Men over there wore white shirts and ties in the middle of the week. The only time men wore a shirt and tie on the Southside was at a funeral or at church on Sunday. The differences were often very subtle, and even almost non-existent at times. Yet, there was no getting away from the fact that some of my immediate family had eaten possums and squirrels when they were young, and anybody who would eat one of them nasty ass critters would have had to have to have passed down something special in their DNA, something that distinguishes us from those whose ancestors were several generations removed from that particular source of protein. I'm seventy years old and I can still sense the condescension in someone's voice when they are talking about completely unrelated, and I can see it their eyes from across the room. Norman and his buddies were our heroes growing up. They rode around in cool looking vehicles with good looking females at their side, but mainly because they they didn't appear to take shit from anyone, especially those people wearing white-shirts and ties in the middle of the week. They taught us in their cheerful defiance, that it wasn't wise to trust an over-zealous preacher any more than a car salesman with a drinking problem. My brother told me that when he was a freshman, he had to sneak around the high school to keep from ending up being stuffed in a trashcan. Once in his PE class, the seniors were surrounding him, and it was Norman who stepped in and told them to leave my brother alone. That's pretty much what it took to become a hero on the Southside, to identify as one of us when the cool thing would have been to step away. Most people are mistaken in their understanding that consciousness works like a river, constantly flowing. It's more like a collection of individual photos moving so rapidly that their projection seems seamless. As one scene appears, the next is already hovering above it, and they transition at such a fast rate that they actually dissolve into each other with only the minutest change taking place. Eventually though, those changes add up and you find yourself in a completely different scene. As baby boomers, we shared a world with the likes of such diverse characters as Theodore Cleaver, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Davy Crockett, Mick Jagger, John Kennedy and his brothers, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendricks, Buzz Aldrin, Robert Young, Minnie Pearl, Red Fox, Elvis, Richie Valens, Martin Luther King Jr., Jane Fonda, Malcom X, Willy Mays, Cesar Chavez, and a whole host of others, fictional and real, who helped shaped our perception of reality. On the Southside of Corcoran, we shared a seemingly smaller world but one actually much bigger because of its proximity, wherein people like Pops Ramirez, Polly Payne, Mr. Coffman, Howard Loo, August Baker, Sixto Miranda, Ruth Dougherty, James Reed, and Mr. and Mrs. Reed loomed large. Their family stories were our stories, and their struggles to survive became our mythologies. There's a young girl who was recently offered, if I remember correctly, four million dollars to sell a T-shirt brand that basically dismissively called for my generation to hurry up and die. We are doing exactly that, but not because of the efforts of one stupid little girl. It's just the way that this world works. My dad was a part of what was known as the Greatest Generation. He lived just long enough to witness a world that not only didn't have a clue as to what that meant, but one that actually somewhat ridiculed his generation's efforts to save the world from tyranny. I hate to see any of the people of my generation die, especially the ones I knew personally. Dylan warned us early on about the harsh nature of this living, he was talking about our parents, but his words were an ominous prophecy of the current state of affairs, "Don't criticize what you can't understand," and "Get out of the new one [road] if you can't lend a hand." I guess we were never meant to understand any of this current insanity anyway. I hate it even more to see someone pass on who shared in what it was like to grow up back then on the Southside of Corcoran. Especially someone I looked up to and admired. It makes me feel pretty fucking lonely. |
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