Yes, I know, I know. Cain and Abel were brothers and that didn’t go so well for Abel, and subsequently, mankind. But by and large throughout human history family represents the strongest of all human bonds. If only we could view all of our countrymen as our sisters and brothers today as we go to the polls. How might this altruistic notion inform the way we cast our ballots?

You don’t know me but I’m your brother
I was raised here in this living hell
You don’t know my kind in your world
Fairly soon, the time will tell

You
Telling me the things you’re gonna do for me
I ain’t blind and I don’t like what I think I see…

Take this message to my brother
You will find him everywhere
Wherever people live together
Tied in poverty’s despair

Oh, you
Telling me the things you’re gonna do for me
I ain’t blind and I don’t like what I think I see…

“Taking it to the Streets”

Living on the Fault Line (1977)

Pat Simmons of the Doobie Brothers

To the disenfranchised, the poor, the put upon, the bullied, the mistreated, and the forgotten – you don’t know me but I’m your brother…

The Doobie Brothers were a good-time romping stomping rock band that caught fire at the beginning of the seventies. They were initially known for lightening fast guitar playing, a beat you could stamp your feet and dance to, and tight vocal harmonies. They could have very well just remained a solid house band save for 1972’s “Jesus is Just Alright with Me” which was more of an affirmative chant than a pop song. It was a song that changed everything. The lyrics are scant but the emotions they invoked resonated because it was a loud and joyful notion that was just a statement of fact. I’m no bible thumper, but Jesus, and his message of love as espoused upon in the New Testament are alright with me. This spirited song made no attempt to denigrate other religions, and made no real effort at recruitment. To me, it appears that many Christians today have lost their way. They might thump on their bibles and beat their chests and rip their shirts open as they pass the collection plate but too few are cracking its covers and reading what it actually has to say, because if they did they would come to realize that there are some severely conflicting messages between the Old Testament’s fire and brimstone, animal sacrifice, and an eye for an eye, and The New Testament’s chronicling of the teachings of this guy named Jesus with his message of love your neighbor, turn the other cheek, and live and let live. While I always looked upon these two books as an evolution in divine thinking with Jesus as the original hippie and God as the progressive father trying to get hip with kids today, I have always felt that the newer book is a course correction of the older one. But too many folks think that they are right in choosing between the two, and much to my chagrin, so many choose the harsher message of the two. And no, I’m not advocating to ban the Old Testament, or any other book that is in existence, but rather, what I am encouraging is a massive dose of reality. Lincoln stated, “A house divided cannot stand,” which perfectly explains the demise of several rock-n’-roll bands, and what could well be the demise of our scared American democracy.

Any band named after a marijuana joint could be expected to party, and the Doobie’s certainly did, sometimes a little too hardy. There were several lineup changes, and the music went from a rowdy edge to some social introspection when Michael McDonald joined the group in 1975 and founding member Tom Johnson left the group in 1977 citing health issues, but fans suspected creative differences were afoot as their sound began to lean more heavily towards jazz, horns were introduced, and female backup singers wore tight sequined dresses and chanted, “Take me, take me.” Not that that was all bad, but rock-n’-roll is a dish best served loud and completely uninhibited. Try to box it in and it just sucks. But before all that came to fruition 1977’s breakout album Living on the Fault Line announced that they were still at the top of their game, and “Taking it to the Streets” as sung by McDonald, was far and away the best song on that album.

What does any of this aforesaid drivel have to do with today’s midterm elections? Everything. We, the compassionate among us, have been taking it to the streets since the heinous murder of George Floyd in 2020. Since those brave citizens in Minneapolis stood up in bone freezing weather and said “Enough!” this past winter. Since the “No Kings” rally’s became a monthly occurrence. Now, today – today is the day. While some view it as retribution, as a comeuppance, as a heartfelt “Fuck you” to MAGA, I choose to view it as a mere course correction similar to the evolution of the Testaments. As a country we lost our way, and I don’t want to waste any more time looking for where to place the blame, but rather to view us as moving towards a more equitable redistribution of not only our nation’s wealth but also of goodwill towards all of our countrymen.

I choose to look towards MAGA as my brothers who simply don’t know me. They are not all stupid. They most certainly are not all evil. They have mortgages, and car loans, and kids and college. At worst, all they are is simply misinformed which is easy to do in today’s grievance fueled click-bait worshipping news media environment. Most struggle just as much as I struggle, and what I struggle the most with is in reminding myself that we must remain civil towards one another.

In closing let me again state that to the disenfranchised, the poor, the put upon, the bullied, the mistreated, and the forgotten – you don’t know me but I’m your brother…

And it is in deference to this fact that I will choose the way that I vote. And fairly soon the time will tell. No matter how this all goes, please, everyone remember, we must remember to remain civil. A house divided cannot stand.

Matt Taibbi, most frequently looked upon as Rolling Stone Magazine’s best snark reporter since the great Hunter S. Thompson blew himself to that great newsroom in the sky, makes the point that most of us really don’t want unbiased news reporting anymore. Most of us just want to be entertained, and beyond that, agreed with.

In this case, you can judge the book by its cover which has Sean Hannity of Fox News set against a red background, and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC set against a blue background. Republican versus democrat. Conservative versus liberal. Right versus wrong depending upon which side you’re on, and both are unshakably certain that they are on the right one. Therein lies the rub. Logic would tell us that neither side can be entirely right or entirely wrong. Life just doesn’t work that way, but the news we choose to consume does. If we as a society aren’t careful, our news will shape us instead of fulfilling its intended function of recording who we really are.

Hannity is the flesh and blood equivalent to a set of those windup chattering teeth thrown onto a glass table, and Maddow resembles a pit bull unable to let go of the bone long after the meat is gone. Each, in their own way is entertaining, but we must remember that it is all just shtick and not take most of it as dogma. Someone of Taibbi’s considerable intellect is able to discern the routine and even poke fun at it. Garden variety intellects such as mine grasp the remote like an electric stun gun and zap back and forth between the two warring sides. Who to believe? Especially, if we don’t want to make the effort to think for ourselves? Fondle the buttons and get lost in the surreal world of suspended disbelief. Anything can happen, and the media can be counted on to exhaust the possibilities. Pushing the buttons and getting the scoop is akin to pushing the plunger on the needle and absorbing the fix, but you will soon learn that if you don’t want to become addicted, that the only button that could possibly help you is the one that says, “Off.”

Not as enlightening or as penetrating as Taibbi’s The Divide (2014), but few books are. Hate Inc. points out that any serious citizen does need to be less placated and better informed, and in that vein, it could be viewed as a long overdue public service announcement.

My first Phoenix office in 1979 was just a portable drafting board in a rundown apartment shared by a roommate that didn’t complain about my monopolizing the kitchen table, but it was an inconvenience, just the same. I survived because of it and gained enough income to move to a much nicer apartment with no roommate where I once again set up on the congested dining room table. From there, I went to my first home and set up an office in a guest bedroom. Then I built my first set of office furniture, purchased some drafting stools, and set up two stations in the converted carport. That office lasted five years until I was forced to sell to get out of debt.

My first “real” office was the middle space in a three office commercial building designed and built by a local architect, so it had some nice details such as a striking entry door with a simulated stained glass panel that was just chunks of colored glass, but at night it radiated beautifully. It had a separate conference room that looked out onto a small atrium. It was here that I hired my first employee. The local blueprinter was just across the street, and a building over was Phoenix’s oldest strip club. The area was transitioning from residential to commercial and driving down the street one day I noticed a house with a guest house setup that was three lots in from the corner, and heeding the equity lesson from the architect’s that rented to me, I jumped at it.

I attacked that place with everything that I had in me and in six weeks’ time moved in while purchasing my first two real drafting tables. I also splurged and purchased a used drafting chair with an actual back. I rented out the quest house, and the main house was entirely devoted to the business with the exception of the back master bedroom and bath. This office grew to three employees, but I made the critical error of heavily committing to computer aided drafting (CAD) that was in its infantile stages in ’86 and by ’88 the expensive equipment and endless succession of worthless computer operators financially buried me. That coupled with Charlie Keating’s “Savings and Loan Scandal” lead to heavy debt and caused me to sell out after another five years had passed.

A woman architect who was dating my best friend that she met at my last annual Halloween party thrown at my former home rented me her condo containing her office space and moved in with him. A horrible life-changing accident occurred with my move in, and that office only lasted five months before I moved to Palm Desert, California, taking a job that I grew to hate, and within a year-and-a half I was fired and back on the street and forced by necessity to go back out on my own. It was the best thing to ever happen to me, but I needed to get set up in an office quick, which I did by joining forces with a lady landscape architect who had a second story space on swanky El Paseo, the street of dreams for the upwardly mobile, or filthy rich – take your pick. I thought I was on my way. We skirmished, she moved out, I did the largest project of my career there, and then the economy slowed, a rent sharing associate moved out unannounced one weekend, and once again, heavily in debt, I was forced to leave after two years.

I went back to my apartment that my first (and only) wife had walked out on me from two weeks earlier as a result of said economic downturn, and my refusal to abandon my career. I set up the major drafting equipment in the master bedroom that I could no longer stand to go into, and set up a more comfortable drafting space in the cramped dining room. I made enough to survive and took on a job with a swimming pool company where I obtained my first contracting license before leaving for what I thought would be greener pastures.

I then bought an A-frame home 20 miles out of town located in a pinion pine forest at 3,000 feet in elevation. The home was constructed entirely out of knotty pine and I set up shop in the expansive living room of that mountain cabin. Here, with the fireplace roaring in winter, I planned to mellow out and become more selective in the projects that I would take on while building up my reputation as a top notch landscape architect. Three weeks after moving in a devastating forest fire rolled through the community. My home was saved but every tree was a stark black skeleton. It was like living on the moon and it cut the heart out of me as I descended into a tumultuous period. I quit at the pool company and shortly thereafter ran out of money That home lasted all of 20 months.

I entered a nomadic period, went back to Phoenix trying to renew old client acquaintances, worked from a rented drafting station out of an architect’s office, started to starve, became homeless and slept for two months on the floor under my drafting board before finally swallowing my pride and going back to California with my tail tucked between my legs. I caught on with a homebuilder who had an office/showroom on El Paseo, and I brought in what was left of my drafting equipment and worked out of their basement storage space. Nobody ever went down there. If I was needed, they called me to come up which was fine with me because it was wound licking time and I fondly remember sleeping on the couch as I slowly recovered and reentered the land of the living.

I then hooked on with a young swimming pool contractor and moved into an old converted hotel complex. Here I set up two drafting stations, had enough room for the trusty couch, and actually was able to financially breathe a little easier with his work and the work that came from my own clients. The central courtyard contained two massive mature evergreen elm trees. I loved this office and was able to start writing again after a half-decade-long dry period. About this experience, I wrote in my autobiography entitled: Career in Crisis: A Landscape Architect’s Professional Journey (2007): “…these two majestic specimens with their slightly flared, multi-hued and mottled trunks, are the gate keepers to what little serenity that I have left in my life (p. 361)…Well, so much for serenity in my life as less than a year from arriving at my, ‘kinder gentler place,’ the eviction notice came (p.373).” The city was allowing a developer to raze this historic building complex in order to erect a gas station. The evergreen elms were the first to go. Looking back, this was my favorite office. It oozed character, and I did some of my best work while I was there.

In the spring of 1997 I moved to a two story office complex two blocks closer to the center of Palm Desert and took 1,500 square feet of space that had previously been occupied by the largest landscape architectural firm in town. It had a print room with flat files and a view looking into a central courtyard featuring an enormous Chinese Pistache tree, and every late fall I greatly enjoyed looking out from my windowsill drafting station into its riot of brilliant red leaves as it turned color before dropping them. This tree marked the change of seasons for four years before I moved on. It was here where I started my own swimming pool contracting business, which more appropriately could be looked upon as the beginning of the end. The contracting business grew to 21 employees and there were payments to be made on seven new vehicles. Between the design business and the contracting business I was working so hard that I no longer drove home during the week and had a shower installed in the downstairs reception area across from the conference room. The trusty couch gone, I slept on the floor.

To cut overhead and to be present for my new family, I rented a 350 square foot trailer in “downtown” Anza (population 5,000) for a year before moving into what became the guest house when I purchased a new double-wide for our five-acre property. In one rendition or another, in one room or another, and sometimes in all the rooms, this has remained my office since 2001.

The contracting business, which was little more than a comet streaking across the sky, in the grand scheme of things, went bankrupt in 2002, and I was forced by necessity to revamp the landscape architectural design business which enjoyed a brief period of prosperity. In 2006 I moved back to the last office complex that I had been a tenant at in Palm Desert and took space in a separate 450 square foot building overlooking the back parking lot, and dubbed by the previous landscape architectural firm as the “dog house.” It was a great little office. I bought a new couch to sleep on for those nights that I stayed down the hill to meet a deadline, and the conference room was small but impressive with its own fireplace that never got used. Then the economic meltdown of 2008 hit and work was hard to come by. I rented out the conference room to a deadbeat tenant who never coughed up the rent so I threw in the towel in 2010 and moved back to the guest house up the hill from where I am now typing this tale of woe and remorse.

So…what do I know about offices? They come and they go. Some are most definitely better than others. They were more enjoyable when they had trees to look out upon and when my invoices for services rendered exceeded my bills to be paid immediately. It was a lot of fun setting them up, decorating them to radiate my personality, and then settling into them. And, it was a royal pain in the ass when I had to pack up and leave them. I can’t tell you how much drafting equipment and office furniture I gave away or had to repurchase through the years to accommodate the dictates of my various moves. During those periods when I was office-less, or far from my office, I learned that the public library suffices for all but actual drafting, and that the city administration buildings where I obtained plan approvals and construction permits always tended to have clean restrooms. Any office that allowed me to knuckle down and concentrate on the work at hand was a good office, and any office that allowed me to sleep overnight on a trusty couch was a great office.

Book Launch: "Reconciliation with Remorse" 3:00

Qawish’s father was Takwa to their clan and enjoyed the favor of the Net. The Net was chief due to inheritance and the all-powerful leader over the proceedings of the annual mourning festival known as the Nukil, which was six weeks off. This, the most important religious ceremony among all the Cahuilla Bands, was held in winter after food stuffs were stored in huge basket granaries and the rhythm of life that hummed, buzzed, procreated, and reared its young wound down and moved slower while the earth breathed easier.

The Net was assisted during the Nukil by the Paha and the Takwa. The Paha would lead the various ceremonies, start the people in song, and carry out the wishes of the Net. The Takwa was in charge of food gathering, and food distribution. Qawish, now in his fourteenth year, was expected to assist his father in procuring fresh meat for roasting and in so doing would bestow great honor upon himself and his family.

Big game, consisting of deer, bear, bighorn sheep, and prong-horned antelope were all available within a ten-mile radius. Qawish and his father discussed what would be needed for the fiesta. Black bears were revered while grizzly bears, roughly four times larger than their cousins, were feared. The band and all the surrounding bands were in relatively good health and there was no imminent danger of starvation, so bears were ruled out as a part of the upcoming extended hunt. For this Qawish was mostly glad as a 1,200 pound male grizzly had chased him up a tree the previous fall when he was on the high plateau at the upper reaches of Palm Canyon harvesting abundant and tasty pinion nuts. The bear had come upon him quickly and became enraged for no apparent reason as grizzly’s are apt to do. Qawish ran through the thicket of pine trees looking for one high-limbed enough to discourage the bear from attempting to climb, which they almost never did. Qawish didn’t want to be the first in his band to change grizzly behavior, and when he spotted a tree whose first scaffold limbs were roughly twelve feet high he scampered up the pitch laden trunk and into the protective needle canopy. The huge bear stood on its hind legs pawing skyward with its forelegs. Four black claws scraped the lower branches causing the tree to tremble almost as badly as Qawish was. The animal shook its enormous head, slobber flying in all directions; eyes aglow like the coals of a campfire. It let out a thunderous roar and Qawish looked down into its fearsome mouth with flashing white teeth. Perhaps today would be his last day upon the earth. If the bear were to eat well or merely assuage its anger with a kill, Qawish’s telewel, if he were fortunate, would be spirited off to the gates of Telmekish. There Qawish would have to plead with Montakwet, the man who never dies, to let him in. Almost instinctively, from the numerous teachings of the elders, from listening intently to stories told around the campfire, from knowing what course his life was supposed to shortly take he knew what Montakwet would tell him: “Qawish you have not received your Hemvachlowin. Without your invitation onto manhood you will not know how to behave in Telmekish. You have not taken a wife. Nor have you given your band any children. You have harmed no one in your young life but you have helped no one either. Mukat may decide not to crush your spirit between the two large hills that lie just beyond this gate but you will be banished to the wind, to the open desert. You may blow beyond our homeland and your name may not be whispered upon the lips of your people. You are unfortunate to die so young Qawish, unfortunate indeed.”

Qawish looked back down upon the bear now resting on all fours, growling low in bewilderment. He sang softly to the bear in mournful tones, interspersed with guttural grunts. He asked the bear for forgiveness, for what he had no idea, but the bear must have known or surely, without such, he wouldn’t have been so upset. He asked the bear for strength so that he could bring his incessantly shaking limbs under control. He asked the great bear for skill as a hunter for the bear had come upon him hardly snapping a twig.

Most of all he asked the bear for his life as a symbol of devotion to Mukat, the god of all life. Qawish’s song lowered to a hum, which seemed to persist for hours and then, wedged carefully between the tree’s branches, he drifted off into a deep restful sleep. It was nighttime when Qawish first awoke. He was hungry in a way where the front of his stomach seemed to touch the back of his spine. He decided not to leave the safety of the tree until sunrise and then he remembered that he was in a pinion. He pried open the cones and shelled the nuts which he instantly popped into his mouth. An owl hooted off in the distance, a symbol of good luck on an impending hunt. His spirits so bolstered, Qawish laughed silently and hoped the owl wasn’t hooting for the benefit of the bear.

When he returned to his village, Qawish was teased for weeks by the other children for being the “bear boy.” He didn’t know whether or not to be ashamed, but that confusion was heavily outweighed by the sheer joy of being alive. Unbeknownst to him, Qawish’s father, the Net, and the Pul had taken an interest the story. Qawish had shown remarkable composure under extreme stress and thought clearly under difficult circumstances. Such behavior was respected among men who carved out an existence, even prospered, in such a hostile environment. Perhaps the bear had spared this boy at the behest of Mukat who intended greater things for him. Perhaps Moon had caressed his brow while he slept in the tree bringing him serenity and knowledge to be revealed at a later date. Whatever had happened out there on the high plateau was beyond the scope of normal occurrences, which meant that Qawish had traveled to another realm for an extended period of time. Who knew for a fact what it all meant? This Qawish could be somebody special, someone they would have to watch.

Qawish and Father decided to provide at least one antelope, one deer, and one sheep for the Nukil, which was only a month and a half away. The antelope would be chased, penned, and strangled. The deer would be stalked and shot with bow and arrow. The sheep would be ambushed and clubbed at a watering hole. All three endeavors would have to take place in the space of a week in order to provide meat fresh enough for the festival. This would require enormous fortitude and great physical strength. Qawish’s father was stout and well-muscled, the strongest man in the tribe. He was respected as a great hunter and spoken to slowly, softly, and only when someone had something important to say. The Net had gained his lofty position through inheritance, and to his credit, served his people reasonably well, which was good because, unlike the tribe’s medicine man, the Pul, if he became too powerful, he couldn’t be killed. But Qawish’s father had earned his position as Takwa through enormous effort and practiced skill. Qawish loved his father deeply although the expression of such was never overtly shown among Cahuilla men. He feared disappointing him more than he feared the wrath of the great bear. His father, knowing his son’s doubts, because he had once harbored them himself, spoke to hum firmly but with an underlying kindness which Qawish had heretofore never seen. “My son you are about to become a man for this hunt is not for boys. The Net and the Pul have spoken to me and we are in agreement. You and four others are to receive your Hemvachlowin in two days time when the sky is black before the coming of the new moon. Prepare yourself my son and know that I believe in your courage, in your generosity, in your loyalty to your family and our band.”

Although he always knew it would come, Qawish was stunned that the moment was upon him. He had seen the ceremony many times and knew what it meant, but there were aspects about it of which he was unsure to the point of terror. Certain elders responsible for the collection of jimsonweed would be sent out to gather the hallucinogen at the start of the Hemvachlowin while the initiates were interned for five days to a special enclosure outside the Kishumnawat or main ceremonial house. The medicine man would work with the old men to prepare jimsonweed after they returned with parts of the plant. The plant was slowly boiled for three days while the old men sang all night long in recognition of its powers. On the fourth night the boys were administered the concoction by the medicine man, the amount in accordance with their age and weight. The boys would then dance under its influence until they became dizzy at which time they were seated in a quiet spot where they had their visions, which were the rights of passage into manhood. Qawish was fine with all of this but there was an inherent danger in the ceremony. Last year his friend Sukit had died, apparently never waking up from his dream. No one within the band outwardly held the Pul accountable, but Qawish distrusted him, distrusted his motives, and feared for his life. The Pul held the power of life and death over these young boys. Perhaps he had made a mistake or perhaps he didn’t like Sukit or someone in his family. But Qawish’s father was the Takwa and the most feared man in the band.

Although Qawish feared for his young life, he had no doubt and was just as certain that the Pul had no doubt, that if he were to die that his life would be avenged.

When the beginning of the Hemvachlowin was upon them Qawish’s mother wept openly as he was led into the enclosure with the other young men. This was an accepted practice among Cahuilla mothers who, like their husbands, weren’t prone to hugging, kissing, and other open shows of affection towards their sons. They expressed emotion, either sorrow or joy, by crying usually after an absence or sometimes upon a departure. Qawish’s father watched with his own trepidations. Like all Cahuilla males who had made it to adulthood he had experienced the trance of Datura stramonium and had his own special vision which he kept privately to himself because of its foreboding. He worried not that his son would die, for that rarely happened, but that his son would have to live with the burden of sorting out a vision as awful as his own.

For three days and three nights Qawish and the others sat cross-legged in the enclosure. They never spoke to one another and no one spoke to them except whoever brought them their food twice a day. Qawish thought a lot about the impending hunt with his father. He tried to picture aspects of the chase, the stalk, the deception, and the kill in his mind’s eye. Sometimes, late in the evening, he thought about a girl one year his senior that he was briefly introduced to at the Santa Rosa Village at their Nukil two years ago. Shy to a fault, he didn’t lean in close enough as she said her name and now wanted to kick himself for not knowing it. She was very beautiful, and the hardening in his crotch told him she was very desirable. Rumors, that were almost a form of currency in a Cahuilla village, had it that she would be at the Nukil. Qawish wondered if she would be there with her new husband if she had one. Had her parents arranged for her marriage yet? If not, how was he to convince his parents to arrange for their marriage? On the third night he awoke with a sticky moisture in his crotch that wasn’t urine and that’s when it struck him – the constant chanting of the old men. He knew that someday he, too, would be old, for if an Indian recognizes anything he recognizes the cycle of life. He loved and respected the elders and was appreciative of their efforts to hasten his journey into manhood. But, with the arrogance of youth, he chuckled as he peered out at them through the lashed reeds of the enclosure softly saying to himself, “Dance you old fools. Enjoy our sacred ritual. Chase away bad spirits and invite good ones to accompany you in song. Howl at the moon if you want to. Pray that I’ll become a man. Do what you will to help me, but from this moment forward, I will be my own man.”

The old men sang and danced and had a grand old time of it for two more nights. At the beginning of the fourth night the gate to the enclosure swept open and the initiates were led out to the large ceremonial campfire. One by one they stepped up to the medicine man to receive their drink of kikawal. Qawish was not so cocky now. He prayed to Mukat to forgive him if he had in any way insulted the elders or the honor of his band. Although he stood stoic and straight as an arrow, somehow his eyes met his father’s, and then he drank from the thin clay urn and swallowed deeply, not knowing whether or not this would be his last drink.

The young men started dancing about the fire as the chanting of the old men with the entire band in accompaniment grew to a deafening din. Qawish danced furiously and with purpose, for he was determined to be the last one to be led off to the quite spot where he would have his vision. The fire pulsated strange colors while sparks snapped with the menacing suddenness of a startled rattlesnake. The faces of the onlookers were at first distorted and then turned to masks of his ancestors, who he did not know, but were certain to become part of his life now. He grew dizzy and tired and still he danced. If he were to die, like Sukit, he would take his last breath on his feet. Qawish looked to the heavens, and the stars fell towards him in unison. A falling star meant that someone’s telewel has departed. If the medicine man were to see it, then he and he alone knew whose spirit it was. Qawish looked towards the Pul, but the bear stood in his place. It was not as ferocious as before, but timid, almost friendly, and from its eyes tears welled up and then flowed like the streams in the spring. Then Qawish fell to the ground and was carried off to the quiet spot.

When he regained consciousness, the bear had left the circle, and the band shimmered in the firelight like ghosts. He looked to the east and saw a dim sunrise. Suddenly strange four-legged beasts thundered onto the horizon with skeletons atop their backs. Their hats were golden, beset with curved red plumes. They howled like wolves and kicked at the sides of their mounts. Instantly Qawish realized they thirsted for the band’s blood. He turned to shout out a warning to his people but his voice betrayed him, frozen in fear. The Pul raced into the fire kicking the coals about. Sparks swarmed like bees about a hive while the hoof beats roared towards the village. Qawish somehow found his feet and with a blood-curdling shout charged at the approaching hoard. They kicked more furiously at their mounts and drew long shining sticks and pointed them directly at him. Qawish’s voice came back to him and he screamed at the top of his lungs, “Stop you monsters. Stop before Mukat’s people. You will not harm us for we are the Masters. We have been chosen. Disappear you monsters. Go before you face the wrath of Mukat, for he will give us the power to fight you. Go now! Be gone!”

In the red glow of sunrise the riders dissipated into a swirling cloud of dust. Then Qawish fell like a stone into his father’s waiting arms and he slept the sleep of his ancestors not sure if he would ever wake up.

Qawish awoke late in the day with his head pounding and his limbs feeling weak. He wandered back to the crowd of people still congregated around the area where the ceremonial campfire would be re-stoked and lit that evening. His mother led him back to their kish and fed him mesquite cakes and dried choke cherries with cold water. He would not be allowed meat of any kind for another month, and the tartness of the cherries, even though sweetened with honey, made him look forward to the impending hunt.

Qawish wanted to take some more sleep before the upcoming evening’s ceremony which would continue for five more days. The old men would instruct the initiated young men in appropriate adult behavior, in dancing, in the use of gourd rattles, and in memorizing the enemy songs. Qawish was not certain of the merit of the enemy songs because the singing of such at certain ceremonies frequently led to arguments and fights among the women. When hostilities degenerated to hand-to-hand attacks the men usually separated their wives at the first sight of blood. Qawish’s mother was known to become quite agitated towards members of other sibs and prone to starting fights. This was a mystery to him because he usually found her quite levelheaded and extremely patient.

She was among the best basket makers in the entire tribe and frequently traded her wares for valuable or rare commodities. She was adept at weaving flat baskets, shallow bowls, deep storage baskets, and particularly women’s hats, which she generously gave to women and girls who assisted her in plant gathering forays, in particular, mesquite pods in June and acorns in late October. The men assisted in the heavier labor of gathering agave hearts in February and cutting fan palm spidices laden with raisin-like fruit in early fall. Entire families, even the men, usually assisted in group-collecting where large areas were swept over but never swept clean. From centuries of lessons the Cahuilla had learned not to over exploit their environment. Sometimes forty to fifty percent of any given crop was left on the plants to allow for the survival of other dependent species and for regeneration through seed propagation of the species itself. The Cahuilla, as with many other tribes of indigenous peoples, viewed themselves as being a part of the whole ecosystem, but never as a dominant species. The referred to themselves as “The Masters,” not of the land, but of other Indian peoples in their surrounding region. Qawish was fond of the sweet tunas that came from the prickly pear, chollea, the beavertail cactuses in mid-summer and the manzanita berry Jell-o-like mold in early fall. He would occasionally drink ocotillo tea or tutut derived from Mormon Tea with his mother just as sunrise peeked into the desert. Uncharacteristically, he accepted a full urn of it from his mother prior to joining that evening’s ceremonial campfire.

Qawish danced athletically and with an unbounded joy shaking an intricately patterned gourd rattle at various angles and with varying degrees of vigor taking notice in the assortment of sounds it would yield under different conditions. When he tired and rested at the edge of the fire, one of the elders gave him a flute made from an antelope’s leg bone. It was open at both ends and contained no holes on its body. Qawish was shown how to play the instrument and from it he emanated a sad mournful melody. He would own the instrument for the rest of his years, and it gave him great comfort in times of disillusionment and grief.

He was taught to memorize the enemy songs, about twenty in all. Mostly, he was taught to be generous to the elders, devoted to his eventual wife, and to stand strong against rival tribes. By the end of the five-day session he felt as if his brain was going to burst under the pressure of all the new information he had to assimilate. Then he was told to return to his parent’s home and ready himself for the incredible hunt to come at month’s end.

The month prior to the big hunt Qawish and his father scouted the selected game species to learn of their movements and to discuss how best to bag their prey. The antelope would be the most difficult as they ranged in small herds in open grassy areas with little cover behind which predators could hide. With the benefit of several sets of eyes, at least one animal was always watching ready to alert the others. They spotted and concentrated their effort on a herd of seven animals with two males, four does, and one kid born the previous spring. One of the males was decidedly older and walked stiff-legged. If they could corral both males they would take them, but Qawish’s father doubted that the young male or females would fall prey to their ruse. Their herd had a habit of traveling east to west along the northern face of the San Jacintos. This boded well for a morning hunt, as the wind would be in the hunter’s faces and the sun at their backs.

The deer flourished in herds at 3,500 feet in a bench area above the source of Andreas Canyon. It would be an easy thing to organize a drive and run them past brush blinds containing sharp shooting bow hunters, but Qawish’s father wanted to teach his son the thrill of the stalk where skill, patience, and physical endurance were required, as they would be in all things throughout his life. While they would enlist the aid of others to drive the pronghorns, the deer and the sheep they would hunt as a pair.

The bighorn’s represented the biggest challenge, as they were the physically strongest of the three game animals. With legs honed to muscular perfection through a lifetime of rock hopping up and down stony, seemingly impenetrable canyons, a hoof strike delivered by a two hundred pound male would instantly snap human bones. The same male charging forward with curled horns up to three feet in length mounted on a head weighing thirty pounds could butt a man all the way to Telmekish before he ever knew what hit him. One or two arrows, or even four or five, could not be readily counted upon to drop a bighorn. And it was doubtful that either archer would get more than one shot off in the presence of such a stealthy animal. If one or both hunters missed all would be lost. Qawish’s father knew of a watering hole mid-way up Magnesia Spring Canyon that a pair of bighorns frequented every three to five days. There were tall cottonwoods draping over the water’s edge, and Qawish’s father felt he had a good plan.

The night of the antelope hunt Qawish found sleep difficult. He was not hunting rabbits with curved throwing sticks or pulling them from their burrows by impaling them and then twisting the pointed barbed spears until the animals could no longer attain a foothold. This was big game and Qawish knew that if he failed he would hear the teases of “bear boy” or perhaps “antelope boy” all over again. He pulled his warm rabbit fur blanket up over his shoulders and wandered out of the kish to an outcropping of rocks at the edge of the village. The Cahuilla marked time by the passing if thirteen moons, and here in the faint light provided by the crescent of the year’s second, Qawish saw his father sitting still and listening intently. Qawish’s father merely nodded acknowledgement of his presence as his son curled up at his feet. Then they both smiled with a knowing contentment as an owl hooted sadly somewhere out in the canyon.

When the orange red glow of sunrise faded to the pale eggshell blue sky of early morning Qawish was slowly walking toward the small herd of pronghorns. He stopped every time he saw the muscles in their forelegs tense and would start in again as soon as their heads bent downward to continue grazing. The animals knew that something was approaching; something that could possibly harm them, slowly they sauntered away from the impending danger keeping an ever respectful distance, never once allowing the implied gap to close. In this manner Qawish was able to slowly herd the animals two miles westward and in front of the mouth of Tacheyah Canyon. Then, with startling precision, five drivers sprung from the grasses clapping and whistling. The herd bolted into the canyon and ascended towards its upper reaches. The youngest male was running out in front at sixty miles an hour, the females and kid perhaps ten miles slower, with the old male making a valiant effort but falling to the rear. When he was clearly separated from the herd, other drivers burst forth from the rocks, now shouting and waving their arms to turn him into the small box canyon where the makeshift corral was located and death awaited. The gallant old male picked up speed briefly to free himself from his tormentors and then he braked hard as the sheer rock wall of the canyon’s end jumped up in front of him. He noticed the reed enclosure and then noticed the removable front gate approaching him in the fashion of a battering ram. Closer it drew as he stamped his feet nervously backing away with head turning and eyes darting desperately looking for an escape route. Although he was capable of doing so, it is not in a pronghorn’s nature to jump fences so the doomed creature shuffled backwards away from the ever-approaching brush wall. He tried kicking when it pushed against his chest, but it was too late, and he was pinned. A man arose from over the gate and swung a cord made from the fibers of Agave deserti over its neck. The cord was the strongest of all available materials and easily strong enough to resist the flailing of the 110-pound animal. Within minutes it succumbed as Qawish’s father prayed for its spirit and thanked the animal for exhibiting a good and noble death.

The antelope was strung up and the last of its blood was dripping from its slit throat when Qawish ran up to the corral. Although he had dressed many animals with his father and worked their hides with his mother, this was the first time he had picked one out from the wild, plotted its death, and been successful. He was visibly awed as he circled the carcass. The tri-colored coat of rust, white, and black, which made it so hard to spot as an entity out on the open range seemed simple, yet elegant, up close. Its jet black horns were 20 inches in length and would make a fine ceremonial headdress. There was enough available manpower to skin and butcher the animal on the spot. Carrying the load back to the village would not be a difficult task. Although the predominance of the meat would be eaten at the Nukil some of it would be passed around the campfire that night as stories of the hunt were told to listeners who would hang on every word.

Qawish and Father retired to their kish early and were carrying two deer heads with antlers and skins attached up towards the meadow above Andreas Canyon well before sunrise. They walked slowly, bow and arrows in hand, and seemed to be mirror images of one another although Qawish could not help but notice that the antlers of his buck’s head were comprised of mere twin spikes while his father’s sported a full eight points.

Life in the arid desert had taught them that the air was stillest in the early morning and built up velocity as the land warmed. Now was the best time of day to avoid the detection of the wily deer. Father’s bow was constructed from mesquite wood while his own was of willow. Both were fortified at the grip with the leg tendons of the recently killed pronghorn, which were lashed to the body of the bow. Qawish could hardly pull his sinew drawstring all the way back but father had told him that at the moment of truth adrenaline would take over and he would prevail. Qawish had his doubts.

They spotted a herd with a large ten-point buck 250 yards uphill and stopped at the base of a canyon live oak to don their deerskin camouflage. Qawish’s heart started pounding and his father tapped him on the shoulder showing him to draw air in deeply through his nostrils and expel it out through his mouth. After a half-dozen such breaths Qawish had regained his composure. Father plucked some dried grass from the ground and lightly tossed it upwards to see if there was any detectable breeze. He seemed pleased when it fell to the ground without shifting whatsoever. This was their first stroke of good fortune, as without the nuisance of a betraying wind they would have their choice of which direction to stalk the buck from. They looked up into the canopies of the neighboring oaks to see if any squirrels or birds were out to chatter a warning to their forest brethren. With everything clear they crept out from behind the trunk of the oak and the two deer men started their stalk.

A buck with such a large rack most likely weighed well over 200 pounds. Racks are not a true indicator of age but verification of an expansive and nutritious diet. Forage had been plentiful the previous fall which was a fact bore out the full-bodied gleaming antlers. He was pawing the ground intently searching for acorn mast as there were no edible green grasses to speak of on the mid-winter ground plane.

The remainder of the herd, six does and two yearlings were 100 yards off his furthest flank away from the hunters. Bucks of this stature were given their distance in a primeval show of respect. While the herd may be keeping a watchful eye for each other, they were not as likely to be concerned about the male. One of the downfalls of nature is the apparent belief that the strong can defend themselves. Qawish and his father chose a slightly depressed dry streambed as their path of travel. Although one slip on the loose cobble that lined the bed would spell out immediate detection, the advantage of having the majority of their lower bodies screened from view warranted the risk. This course would gain them 100 yards with 150 yards to go. They would strive to be within 50 feet of their quarry before letting fly with their arrows. The streambed was traversed within 20 minutes but that was of little consequence to Father for experience had taught him that they would have to use as much stealth and physical strength as they could muster to traverse the rest of the way, predominately over open ground.

They affixed their arrows into their drawstrings before reconvening, for to do it later may cause a sound that would alert the deer. Down on their haunches, their makeshift deer skin robes barely touching the ground they started their slow pursuit, which would take hours. The oaks were widely interspersed and about 25 yards separated each tree. Fire swept through the meadow almost twice a decade, the most recent being two years ago. Sagebrush dotted the ground and would have to provide what little cover they could employ. Slowly, slower than the desert tortoise, it seemed to Qawish, they crept and occasionally crawled towards the buck being careful to stay positioned behind his powerful white buttocks and out of his best line of vision. They stopped frequently to regain their silent breathing. The set of Father’s jaw took on a look of grim determination. Qawish’s lower back ached while the backs of his thighs were numb. The physical demands of the advance were exhausting. They had been at it for an hour and still they were just halfway. A deer’s biggest physical asset is its hearing, which can be extraordinary. Next comes its sense of smell. They have relatively poor eyesight, especially for stationary objects. They can detect the slightest motion, however. The deer men knew if they moved when the buck was looking in their direction the hunt would be over.

For a few moments the buck seemed skittish and they stopped altogether not moving a muscle. Qawish looked down at his ribbonwood arrow admiring his mother’s craftsmanship. The wood had been rubbed and rolled over rough stone and then ground smooth by passing it through a square of hide filled with rough sand gripped tightly around the shaft. His tip was fire hardened while Father’s had a chipped point of flint glued in place with pine pitch and lashed to the shaft with thin sinew. Both their arrows had two eagle’s feathers attached to the base of the shaft. Qawish’s band did not keep captive eagles and these feathers probably came by way of trade with the Colorado River tribes. The Mohave, the Halchidhoma, and the Yuma were all known to capture newborns and raise them in cages or tethered to perches. The Navajo and Hopii to the far east raised eagles as a basis of trade, and it was quite possible that the feathers that adorned Qawish’s arrow had traveled hundreds of miles and passed through numerous hands. All Qawish cared about, at the moment, was that arrows with eagle feathers flew the most true cutting the air with the same precision as the venerated bird.

Upon father’s signal they were on the move again now plodding forward slower than the tortoise, slower than the snail. So slow that they hardly seemed to move at all yet Qawish knew that somehow they were moving because the deer’s body grew closer. After another hour they were within range. Qawish’s father was not given to taking unnecessary chances especially in light of the effort he had just put forth, yet he knew that if his son were to be a man that his son would have to shoot the first arrow. Qawish was surprised at Father’s signal to shoot first but time was precious. No time to question, no time to think. Barely time to lift the bow and pull back the drawstring with every fiber of every muscle in his body straining to their fullest. Father was right that he would find his strength at the moment of truth. He couldn’t let Father down; he couldn’t disappoint his people who lived to tell these tales around the campfire. He had an obligation to the deer to take its life this day and not let it suffer wounded in the bush for weeks before dying. All these thoughts whirled through his head as, breathlessly, the nock of the arrow left the drawstring. He had aimed just below the left shoulder where the heart would be but the arrow landed in the rib cage. Father’s landed closer to the mark just as the animal stiffened from the initial hit. Rarely will a creature as noble and majestic as a 220-pound mule deer succumb to just two arrows. True to the code of the wild, it would fight for its life. It lurched forward on unsteady legs as father let fly with his second arrow which landed in the hindquarters. As if shot with adrenaline the buck picked up speed and headed up grade. Then, realizing the resistance of the rising ground to his rapidly dwindling strength, the buck turned downhill and raced down Andreas Canyon.

Qawish’s father was not too terribly upset by this development. He knew that he had driven his first arrow hard and it appeared that his son’s arrow was relatively well-placed. He didn’t relish the prospects of dragging a 220-pound load seven miles back to the village even with his strong young son’s help. There was little probability that the buck would reverse his course and travel back uphill unless they were fools and forced him to. Since the deer was moving in a favorable direction they would simply press their advantage and keep it moving towards home.

They separated and took opposite sides of the canyon following the fatally wounded deer downhill. It was just a matter of time before the animal would drop. Qawish thanked the deer for making his job easier and prayed to Mukat to give him strength to keep up with Father when the time came to drag the carcass back to the village. He lost sight of the deer’s gray-brown coat on several occasions but the telltale white rump would flash through the thickets of wild grape that lined the streambed at the bottom of the rapidly descending canyon. Father moved like the shadow of a hawk gliding over open ground. Qawish seemed to slip and stumble along, but he was keeping pace. Three miles from home the deer gave out. It tried to regain its feet three times before collapsing in a panting heap. Qawish sang softly to the deer as he had to the bear trying to comfort it in death. Father brought his full weight and all his strength to bear upon the deer’s midsection taking care not to be struck by flailing hooves. Qawish stepped on its windpipe ruefully and resolutely as the buck’s glassy brown eyes penetrated up at him, through him it seemed, to spirits beyond.

They gutted the deer and left his entrails as an offering to coyote the trickster. Then each, with a side of the animal’s magnificent rack in hand, proceeded to drag the buck back to the encampment.

They were spotted coming out of a palm grove at the base of the canyon as the last shafts of sunset wee fading behind San Jacinto peak. The children, as they always do, came on the dead run. Some men rushed up to help with the load but Qawish’s father waved then away. He and his son, of whom he was immeasurably proud, had come this far and they alone would release it to the village women at the center of camp.

There was joy in the village that evening. The fire rose higher, the people chattered louder with an electric current of excitement. At the edge of the firelight the women dressed the deer. Qawish’s mother took center stage directing the others. Although humility was an admired trait among the Cahuilla, she wasn’t about to let this moment go by without thoroughly basking in it. “My husband and my son have brought this fine deer to our village. And before the Nukil they will bring us a mighty ram. You will see. Just you wait and see.”

Qawish and his father were fed the choice tenderloins as others received various cuts of meat. Again, the majority was set aside for the Nukil. The lower quality cuts not appropriate for the Nukil would be cut into thin strips and dried as jerky. The antlers would be honed to sharp awls while the leg bones would be worked into spear points. Other bones would make stirring utensils. The bones of the spinal column would be fashioned into necklaces. The hide would be transformed into loin cloths and leggings for her two men. As with all tribes of Native Americans, the deer’s gift of its life to the people was deeply respected and nothing was wasted.

The men of the village, one by one, draped on the deer costumes the hunters had worn and danced about the fire pointing the antlers at Qawish and laughing good-naturedly. The sparks cracked free of the flames and rose quickly in the cold night air. They rose towards the stars, towards the luminescence of the Milky Way, which the Cahuilla knew with unfaltering certainty was really just the dust kicked up as Isil and Tukat, coyote and wildcat, ran their eternal race.

There were now six days left before the start of the Nukil, which Qawish felt would be plenty of time to bag the ram. Father seemed worried and his wife knew that he wished that she hadn’t puffed out her chest. But Mother felt she had good reason to boast a little. She, after all, had worked night and day over the last month to weave the desert agave into strands and then cords, which were knotted together to form a large net. Two end corners had a length of cord attached that were long enough to act as attachments for a snare. This contraption, if all went right, would be the device that would entangle the ram long enough for the men to subdue him. In the morning the two men went to the lower reaches of Tahquitz Creek and cut four stiff, yet springy, main branches of the desert willow which they stripped clean. They took these branches along with other tools and materials with them on an 11-mile walk to Magnesia Spring Canyon. They picked a promising cottonwood that hung over the watering hole and lashed the butt ends of the desert willow branches to the main trunk. Next they buried the net in a gravelly beach area which was worn free of vegetation due to the sheep’s and other types of animal’s frequent visits, Then they attached one of the end cords to two of the end tips of the desert willow branches. All the cords were well-hidden and they swept the gravelly beach area clean with a leafy mesquite branch. They lashed a small cottonwood branch and tule mat platform into the canopy of the cottonwood. Block type trips were made to hold the bent desert willow branches in place against the constructed platform. The blocks would have to be kicked out of position to trip the snare cords and lift the entrapment net. Qawish would be responsible for two trips and Father would man the other two.

They filled two large clay pots with drinking water from the spring and took them up the tree to the platform. Two other empty clay pots would be utilized for urination and defecation. They had to keep their human scent off the ground and hope that the breeze would carry it away from the capture area.

They notched hand and footholds into the main trunk of the tree to facilitate getting to the ground quickly, and after practicing on these for a short while, they climbed up into the tree that they wouldn’t leave until the moment of truth.

Both men were wrapped in sewn rabbit skin blankets to ward off the cold. Neither could speak a word. Father had schooled Qawish in basic sign language weeks in advance so they could communicate rudimentary things, and fourteen feet up in a blind with nothing to do but wait for the sheep to arrive, there was no need for lengthy conservation.

Although the Cahuilla loved roasted sheep and the animal’s jerky was juicier and tastier than deer jerky, partaking in it only rarely happened. Throughout Father’s life of thirty-six years he has feasted on sheep less than a dozen times, and even at that, owing to his hunting prowess, he tasted it far more often than the majority of his clansmen. Bighorn would be heartily welcomed at the Nukil, and Qawish couldn’t help but think how impressed the parents of the object of his affection would be. But whenever this wonderful day dream crossed his mind it was tempered with the unwanted question of how impressed would her potential husband be?

Qawish knew that a fortunate set of circumstances would had to have occurred for a girl so beautiful not to be married. Girls were routinely wed at twelve years of age. Parents arranged marriages with the boy’s father initiating the request to the girl’s father. Qawish was sure that her father must have been approached many times if she wasn’t married by now. Only two things could have occurred for the girl to still be single. Either her father didn’t like what was being offered in exchange for his daughter’s hand or his daughter refused the offer herself. It was highly probable that a great deal would have been offered for such an attractive girl and unlikely that she would deny her parents repeated requests to marry, for respect for parental authority ran deep among the Cahuilla. If she was still unmarried her father was either picky or greedy or she was one hell-bent fire-breathing woman.

From the tracks they observed upon arriving at the watering hole they knew that it had been two days since the ram had last drank. Bighorn can go at least three days without water and up to five days in cooler weather. It was now early February and the days were cool and the nights cold so, conceivably, the ram might not appear for three more days which would put things precariously close to the start of the Nukil. This worried Qawish but not nearly so much as the realization that he didn’t know for a fact whether or not this was the sheep’s only watering hole. If it had others he may not show up for weeks.

Looking into Father’s eyes he could see a serene calmness, which he knew he must acquire if he were to win the favor of his people. Nothing in a Cahuilla’s life was for certain with the exception of death. The availability of plant and animal food stores from year to year was dubious at best. The vagaries of the weather, especially the time span between rain and draught, could never be predicted. The harshness of the terrain and the creatures that lived within it could turn for the worst at any moment. The Cahuilla were taught to expect hardships and not to be surprised nor complain when they came. Cooperation among families, bands, sibs, and the overall nation represented any given individual’s best chances for survival. Hot heads who wanted to fight with their hands rather than use them to work for the good of the group were not respected as tough men, but rather viewed as idiots and were quickly ostracized or even run off. When push came to shove, as it frequently did in the desert, you wanted to be sure that the man next to you would keep a cool head and do the right thing and not panic in a manner that could get you both killed. If you doubted a man’s ability to act positively to duress the last place you wanted to be with him was out in the desert or on the chaparral where your worst fears could easily turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Qawish looked over at his father and was certain that in the aspect of behaving as a responsible man that he had no peers.

They slept in shifts with Father determining the duration from the clock that he apparently kept in his head. Qawish was astonished that a mountain lion didn’t notice him perched overhead and felt confident that neither would the bighorn when and if he showed up. Bob cats were more numerous than he ever imagined. Rattlesnakes slithered up and slinked away. Raccoons playfully washed crayfish at the water’s edge. Rabbits and a host of other rodents appeared from out of nowhere and scurried off at the slightest rustle of leaves, a yip, a bark, or a growl. They cowered when the owl hooted, and then Qawish took hope. The owl had hooted.

They had been up there four night. His limbs were stiff and the mesquite cakes had grown redundant. His ears prickled when he first heard the hoof beats of the ram. Father silently awoke at his urging and both drew in their breath as if their chests would explode if they received too much air. Five minutes went by before he appeared and nonchalantly ambled over to the pool of water. He seemed to jump straight up when he heard the trip blocks being kicked from their positions. Then he was entangled in something that tripped him every time he tried to get his legs steady underneath him.

Father was first down the tree and swung his heavy ribbonwood stump club into the animal’s massive chest. It was a solid whack met with the ram’s terrified bleating. The ferocity of the blow had knocked the ram from the net but the men blocked its escape. Father lifted his club again but before he could downswing the ram reared up on its hind legs and charged. The bighorn blasted directly into Father’s hunched chest with its enormous curved horns. There was such a wallop that Father flew back in the air striking his back against the cottonwood. The ram again reared up but before its front legs hit the ground, Qawish snapped one of its rear legs at the joint with a tremendous swipe of his club. The ram hit dirt and again tried to rise. Amidst a cloud of dust and cries to wake the dead of the entire Cahuilla Nation, Qawish swung savagely breaking the remaining three legs. The helpless ram cried out in anguish, its valiant spirit pleading with Mukat for salvation. Qawish rushed to father who warded off his compassion with his forearms. “Finish it my son! Do not let this noble beast suffer another moment!” Qawisg set upon the ram striking its skull several times. Stopping, exhausted from the assault he had just levied, he sunk to his knees aside the ram’s head and watched the last flicker of life leave its eyes. He crawled back to his father and surveyed the damage. Father’s chest was red and deeply bruised. Qawish felt about the breastplate and ribs breathing a sigh of relief that nothing was broken. His back was cut and bleeding from hitting the cottonwood but Father, as tough as he was, would live.

“Listen my son; I will gut this fine ram while you climb high enough in the canyon to send smoke signals. It will soon be daybreak and they’ll be seen for the whole village knows we are out here and they’ll be keeping a watchful eye. Send for carriers and send for the medicine man.”

Qawish didn’t want to leave father but he knew better than to ignore his instructions. It was his duty to do the logical thing no matter how much his heart ached. Within a quarter-hour Qawish was atop a rock outcropping high enough to be seen from the village. He built a fire and passed his rabbit skin blanket over it. Puffs of smoke rose in the sky and Qawish kept them coming. Three hours later he heard voices down in the canyon and knew that help had arrived. Qawish sprinted back down the canyon to Father. Five men were hoisting up the ram with its legs lashed to a cottonwood pole set atop their shoulders. Solemnly they greeted him and then walked away carrying the dangling ram back towards the village. The medicine man and another were attending to Father. The Pul shook a turtle shell rattle with a raven wing attached over Father’s body. The assistant was applying a poultice of powered creosote leaves and crushed eriodictyon leaves to Father’s chest. A salve containing the ashes from the burned stems of buckhorn cholla was applied to the cuts on father’s back and his blood had already coagulated. Qawish now felt differently about the Pul. Perhaps he had judged him far too soon and too harshly. The assistant stepped away allowing the medicine man to bend over to Father’s mouth and suck air into his own mouth drawing out bad spirits that may have been opportunistic enough to try to take advantage of the Takwa’s weakened condition. He expelled the spirits with three puffs of his breath sent skyward. He repeated this process three times and then pulled his patient to his feet. Qawish reached out to steady his father who stumbled slightly and then straightened his back. He smiled at his son and indicated that Qawish should lead the way back to the village.

They soon overtook the men toting the ram and Qawish slid into the rear of the formation and shouldered his share of the load. The men motioned him to the front for this was his proper station on this important day. Qawish’s father seemed to strengthen with each step and he looked forward at his son. The boy who was now a man stood as tall as he with shoulders nearly as broad. In time he would be even more of an imposing physical specimen. Father knew his boy’s mind. It was not that long ago that he himself was young and full of masculine energy that needed an outlet. Soon his son would marry and bring him the joy of grandchildren. He fell back a little and whispered to the medicine man, “Will you teach him? We both know he can’t be Net. Takwa and Paha are a waste of his talents, but Pul is a lofty position. Will you teach him?” The Pul nodded to his friend of many years. “Your son is headstrong, but bright with no lack of courage. He made short work of the ram at the moment of truth and he was able to get you help. He’s becoming a fine man, but Pul? It may take more patience than he has, but if he does have it he could well become the greatest medicine man the Masters have ever seen.” Qawish’s father was pleased with those words as they trod across the desert floor at mid-morning. The wind blew strong through the western passes and buffeted against his sun-weathered face. He cast a prayer to the wind to be sent to Mukat. He thanked their great leader for sparing his life, for the gift of the great ram, but most of all, for the gift of his son.

Qawish’s mother wept openly as the ensemble with Qawish leading the way paraded triumphantly through the village. Father, his rabbit skin blanket slung tightly across his shoulders, shielded his wounds from public view. He would ache for days and well into the Nukil but no one amongst the other bands would know it. The medicine man danced about charging at onlookers in the manner of the great ram while shaking his healing rattles ferociously and encouraging the other men by motions only they understood to do likewise. Soon the whole village was abuzz with rattles as a plaintive song wafted out across the desert and up into the canyons. The village was on the verge of celebrating the Nukil and such was their joy at the sight of the bighorn that Mukat could hardly blame them if they started a little early.

Again, the village women would dress and prepare the animal. Its horns, bones, and hide would be used in much the same manner as the deer. Qawish’s mother assumed command and was the first among them to run her fingertips over the growth rings comprising the outer sheath of the animal’s venerated horns. This ram had seen many years and undoubtedly escaped the travails of countless hunters, but not hunters as proficient as her husband was and her son was becoming. Her family would be esteemed at the Nukil and for many years to come. Her son must go to the vertical rocks higher up in Andreas Canyon and mark them with the events of this hunt for the entire world to see. Such a petroglyph would bring him great honor among his generation and many generations to come.

Qawish found sleep difficult during the two remaining days before the Nukil. On the morning of the event runners burst into the village announcing that the first of the visitors were on their way. Every able-bodied person in the village sprinted to greet them. Droves of arrows filled the sky in celebration as the people, in unison, let out a resounding shout. This would be reenacted throughout the day as other clans emerged from the canyons. Many were “called” to participate in the Nukil while many more came to observe the ceremonies and revel in the gaiety. In all, two hundred visitors swelled the boundaries of the village by nightfall. The Net had called only about thirty and they would soon sit with him in the circular fifty-foot diameter Kishumnawat and be the first to partake in the opening meal. Those who were called took their seats inside the Kishumnawat while the others found seats around its outer periphery. Inside the Net approached each, knelt before them, and with a hushed voice thanked them for coming. He gave them a bit of tobacco, which they would smoke before the meal. Each guest, in return, handed the Net some symbolic shell money that would be returned to them at the end of the Nukil. Then the Paha announced that is was time to partake in the feast. Inside, the chosen ones ate solemnly while, outside, the remainder of the visitors were immediately fed, for this is the first courtesy extended to a guest of an Indian home.

After the first meal all the people gathered at the center of the village and joined in song and started in with a massive circle dance. The old men would smoke tobacco and sing all night as the women and children, one by one, would retreat to the edges of the ceremonial bonfire and fall fast asleep. Young men, once their wives were asleep and would not see how much they gambled, engaged in games of peon with scores of interested cat-callers and well-wishers looking on. Some families would leave the fiesta much richer and some much poorer, yet they would play, because they had always played. It was their way and always would be.

The girl who Qawish wished to marry arrived with her parents late in the evening for such was the distance of the walk from Santa Rosa Village. They made their way to the center of the swaying throng and were greeted jovially by the Net. She came into Qawish’s full view with her jet black hair gleaming and her brown skin radiant by the firelight. Time stood still. The stars didn’t twinkle. The flames didn’t leap. Smoke didn’t rise. The music no longer played. And the dancers were motionless. All that existed was her face in the firelight. She stood alone beside no husband who surly would have been close to her side. Qawish looked up to Mukat and prayed that she would accept his hand in marriage. And then he remembered that he must get her name.

He just couldn’t just walk up to her and ask her, as that wasn’t their way. Father was busy as the Takwa always was at the Nukil. He must ask Mother if he could wedge in between her friends, or he would have to wait for a few days for the enemy songs after which she would have many. With much urgency he spirited her away to the entrance of their kish. “Mother you must help me.” “What is it my son? What is so important that you drag me away from my friends?” “See that girl over there by the door to the Kishumnawat? You must get her name!” “Why now son? This can wait until tomorrow.” “No it can’t Mother! You must get her name now!” “What is so important that you scream at your mother?” “I will marry that girl if she will have me.” “Well you better remember that your father and I have the biggest say in this. I’ll talk to him tomorrow, and we, not you my son, will decide if she’s good enough for you.” “What! Are you crazy! Look at her!” “ Oh yes, she’s pretty alright, but it takes more than that to make a good wife.” “Mother, I must know her name!” “Don’t raise your voice to me Qawish, or you’ll have your father to deal with.” “Mother, please!” “Oh alright, but you just remember that I’ll decide if she’s good enough for you.”

Her name was Suwet and to Qawish it was the most beautiful sound in any language. He repeated it over and over as he drifted off to sleep under the stars in his deerskin blanket. He would sleep outside the kish for the week of the Nukil as the guests were given first choice of beds in the kishes although there were hardly enough to go around this year. In truth, bodies were strewn about all over the village. One had to be careful not to step on someone and walk a good distance to relieve himself.

For two more nights the elders sang the creation story inside the ceremonial house as they passed about a basket of tobacco to constantly smoke. Around the larger fire outdoors the festivities were more loosely structured and the celebration was more of a party than a commemoration of the dead. By the third night Mother was up to her old tricks. Five choruses into the enemy songs, her fingers were wrapped around some poor woman’s neck. Father was inside in the midst of an important ritual so it was up to Qawish to restrain her. He pulled her away as the other woman’s husband lashed out at her. Qawish shoved him to the ground and the look in his eyes told all onlookers that worse would happen to anyone who dared touch her.

He laid her to rest on a palette of furs in their kish that was empty at that moment. “Mother, are you alright?” “Yes son. Don’t worry yourself about this. Any good woman is expected to defend the honor of her ancestors.” “And the other woman?” “Her ancestors are her business. Whose side are you on anyways?” “Your’s, Mother. I will stand by you always.” “Of course you will for you are a good son.” “Mother, have you talked to father? Has he talked with Suwet’s father?” “Yes son, I did as you asked. Your father has tried to barter with that man but he wants the sun and the moon and the stars. He wants over half of our gathering sites, many baskets and furs. He acts as if she’s the only watering hole in the desert.” “Maybe she is mother. What have you found out?” “She respects the elders. She listens to her parents, unlike some young people I know.” “Mother I just couldn’t wait – I had to know her name.” “I know Qawish, but her father wants more than we can give. Your father has another plan that he will speak to you about after the Nukil. That girl isn’t going to get married before then, and with what her father wants she might die a virgin.” “Oh, Mother, the way you talk.” “Son, will you bring me some sweet water?” “Of course Mother. Then you will sleep well?” “Yes son, I will sleep very well and I better not lay eyes on that old hag when I wake up in the morning.”

Qawish left the kish after his mother had fallen asleep. Mother was a real handful, thunder and lightning at times. Although he loved her with all his heart, he sincerely doubted if any man, except his father, could have stay married to her. He wanted a softer wife to lie beside and if Suwet were to become his wife he was certain he would lie beside her often.

The Nukil was soon to end and Qawish dreaded its closing ceremony, which was the dance of the effigies. All week long the woman had made life-size straw effigies of the people who had died during the previous year. These were dressed with the best skins and adorned with the most exclusive ornaments. Qawish had brought numerous shells and other artifacts to Sukit’s mother to use on his effigy. He knew that her heart was heavy because, so too, was his. He didn’t know how he would hold up during the ceremony or how he would feel towards the Pul who presided over it. He looked to the day with foreboding and the only positive thing he could see about it was that it would have to be completed before he could talk to Father about Suwet.

That night the Pul danced and strutted about the ceremonial fire. He plucked three hot coals from its center and swallowed them in quick succession. Then he started to shake uncontrollably until he at last stuck a stick about eight inches long with owl feathers attached down his throat and regurgitated his takwa. The object turned out to be a small lizard that jumped from his hand and scurried off through the stunned crowd. The medicine man then danced about the fire stopping dramatically and puffing loudly three times into the air while motioning upwards with his cupped hands at the same time. The onlookers instantly copied this behavior because they had the utmost faith in him. This procedure was repeated six more times and then the evening diffused into various groups performing various rituals or playing peon like it had all the previous evenings.

At the brink of sunrise, with the Net leading, all female relatives proceeded out of the Kishumnawat walking two-by-two with the effigies of the dead in hand. Gifts of mesquite meal were passed out to the guests. The procession stopped just short of the ceremonial house. The marchers proceeded to dance and sing and cry. Onlookers threw shell money and other valuable articles into the center of the circle and those who were not chosen began to immediately rush about and pick it up. They danced a while longer and then the women from the procession marched in single file to the outskirts of the village and burned the effigies in a recreation of how they were earlier cremated. The people stayed in the village knowing full well what the rising smoke symbolized. The Indian respects the dead as he expects others to respect him when he is dead. The smoke tells him his time is coming. Each, in their own way, questioned whether or not they were ready.

The Net milled about the crowd finding each of those that had been “called.” He handed each individual a string of shell money which they would return the next year. Thus many of the strings were very old being crafted by ancestors. The longer they stayed in the tribe’s possession the greater the respect they represented for the cycle of life. They thanked the Net and departed. The Nukil was over.

Qawish left Father alone for five days, as he had slept but a few hours during the Nukil and was exhausted. Furthermore, he, the Net, and the Paha had to wind down the event by returning possessions, distributing unused food, and directing a general cleanup. When it appeared that the proceedings of the Nukil were no longer on Father’s mind Qawish approached him and asked, “Do you know my heart about Suwet?” “Of course son. How could I not? That’s all your mother nags me about. I wish you could be married today just to get her off my back. We need to go fishing and discuss this and get out of earshot of her for she now wants grandchildren and won’t let up until she gets them. I pity you son, if you do get married, for she will jump from me to you with her impatience. You will not be able to have children soon enough. Yes. Yes, let’s leave for Santa Rosa Village today. Let her eat our dust as we depart.”

Qawish rarely heard such a tirade from his father and suspected the fatigue and the stress related to the Nukil fueled much of his fire. He also wanted to keep the flame burning as he ran to the kish to get their bows and blankets and a small scale seining net. “Where are you going my son?” Mother asked. “Father and I are going to net some trout in Tahquitz Creek and take them to Suwet’s father and he will try to arrange for my marriage.” “A marriage will be nice Qawish. It will bring me grandchildren. Hurry my son and bring me grandchildren!” “Mother you known it will take some time.” “Yes. Yes, I know son, but hurry and don’t waste any time. I want grandchildren Qawish, and I want them now!” Like all good Cahuilla mothers, she wept as he left on his journey.

Even though full from gorging themselves on a variety of dishes at the Nukil, Qawish’s Father knew they would be hungry before they reached Santa Rosa Village and brought adequate dried provisions. They shortcut across the desert floor to the mouth of Tahquitz Creek. They approached a badger sunning itself at the mouth of its den and decided to walk a wide swath around this tenacious fighter. It was a good nine miles to the upper reaches of Tahquitz Creek where Father knew of a fishing hole that he kept quiet about. It was late afternoon when they reached their destination. They would take trout in the morning for they couldn’t keep them fresh overnight, and to build a small holding pool would be useless with fisher, martin, foxes, otters, mink, raccoons, and even that trickster coyote sneaking about. Trout held in a shallow pool would be easy pickings for these creatures who would welcome an easy meal. They chewed on mesquite cakes and deer jerky and enjoyed the soothing sound of the gushing and trickling brook as it flowed past.

Father’s edge was gone now. Get him out in the wild and he was an immediately changed and invigorated man. They sat silent for a while each knowing that it was time to talk yet not knowing quite what to say. Father started, “Qawish, I know you have your heart set on marrying this girl but I don’t know if it will be possible. Her father is unreasonable and stubborn. He would find Mukat an unsuitable suitor. I cannot give up much of our land holdings to appease him. These were passed on to me by father and Father’s father since time began. They will feed you and your family – whoever you marry. We can be generous with baskets, blankets, and furs but there’s a limit to that also. Listen to me son, there is only one way that you may be able to impress this man enough to let go his stranglehold on his daughter.” He paused waiting for Qawish to ask the inevitable question, but his son held back not wanting to interject when his father was in a contemplative mood. An awkward silence was once again broken by Father. “Perhaps the wife of the chief is what he wants but all the Nets of the eastern bands are relatively young men. Their sons won’t take over for years. Paha and Takwa mean nothing to him, but Pul; Pul is important. He respects and fears the medicine man and he might let his daughter marry a Pul.” “Father you know I’m not a medicine man, and after what happened to Sukit, I would never want to be one.” “Wanting and getting are two different things in this world my son. If you want this girl you will have to impress her father, and what do you have to impress him with?” “Father, I’m a hunter like you. That’s what I want to be.” “Listen son, you could be both a medicine man and a hunter. It’s not forbidden.” “How could I be a Pul? I never thought about it.” “I’ve talked to the band’s Pul, and he will teach you, but you must be willing to learn.” “What would I learn?” “How to heal the sick, advise the uncertain, cast out evil spirits, and cast spells upon the treacherous rendering them harmless. How to ask Mukat to help us is time of drought or war. How to use all the plants. How to shape shift and eat fire. But most importantly son, you can speak directly to the ancestors and hear their hearts.” “Father, the people will kill a medicine man if he gets too powerful or performs badly. I thought about doing it when Sukit died.” Qawish’s father was taken aback by this admission and didn’t speak for nearly an hour. When he did finally speak he didn’t mince words. “You’ll never be Net. Do you want my life? The Paha and the Takwa they complain to. The Pul is respected but feared. No one ever complains to him. He is given the best without asking and most of the time the people just leave him alone. A husband is required to be good to his wife’s father and brother. This man wants wealth but may settle for power and there’s no man more powerful than a medicine man. Qawish it’s probably the only way you’ll ever marry Suwet.”

Now it was Qawish who sat silent for an hour listening to the brook and the wind and the beating of his own heart. Finally he asked, “And how would I become a Pul?” “I’ve spoken to him and he will teach you. They watch the children when they are young to see which ones could be like them. He has watched you since you were a boy. He thinks you’re hardheaded but otherwise worthy. He’s gone so far as to say that you could be the greatest medicine man our people have ever known.” “But he killed Sukit!” “No he didn’t Qawish.” “Then why is he dead?” “Because it was his time. Somewhere the fox barked, and it was his time.” “I’ll try to sleep on this Father because I can see that this is important to you.” “It’s not only important to me son, it’s the only way you’ll have the girl.”

Bear visited their camp that night and watched over Qawish. His footprints revealed that he straddled the boy and walked off at morning’s first light. If a grizzly wouldn’t kill him, then perhaps the people wouldn’t turn on him if he got too powerful. And besides, he reasoned, there’s a difference between being powerful and acting powerful. The Cahuilla were proud and didn’t like arrogance thrown in their faces. If he didn’t belittle them, perhaps he would be loved. There was a great deal to gain by being Pul, not the last of which could well be the hand of Suwet. He woke Father and told him that, despite his fears, of which there were many, he would do what he asked and the do the best that he could for his people.

With the contentment that a good decision brings they waited for the morning sun to warm the winter-chilled water enough to make the fish more active. Then they chummed the water with fresh grubs they collected from fallen trees along the moist stream bank. As the fish ate to a frenzy they pulled the seine across the stream capturing many as a testament to the hierarchy of the food pyramid. Once the brilliantly colored trout were gutted with flint scrappers and tied to a sinew stringer, the two men started out with their catch towards Santa Rosa Village seventeen miles away on the high desert plateau or on the blanketing dense chaparral, depending upon whose telling the story. Santa Rosa served as the mountain crossroads for the eastern half of the Cahuilla Nation. Set in a bowl on the southern flank of Weal um Mo it nestled 2,200 feet below Toro Peaks yet hovered 4,600 feet above the Anza Borrego Desert to the southwest and the Colorado Desert to the northeast. Palm Canyon and its side canyons sliced through the San Jacintos and vented at the doorstep of the village. Martinez and Coyote Canyons challenged the rugged southern escarpment to knock on its door. The Santa Rosa range itself rose like an emerald greed island up out of the desert. The village was the mountain jewel of the Cahuilla Nation and it was well-protected. News of the movements of Qawish and his father had spread like wildfire through the village long before they arrived there at sunset. They immediately visited the Net’s kish and Father was granted an audience with Suwet’s father while Qawish remained there.

At Suwet’s family kish Father negotiated his best deal. He delivered the gift of the trout and he gave up over a hundred acres of prime gathering sites, four deep baskets, one each of cougar, bighorn, and deer skins. A generous offer by anyone’s standards, but the man wouldn’t budge until father let it be known that his daughter would be marrying a medicine man in training, but a powerful medicine man of the future, no doubt.

Suwet would say her goodbyes and be brought to Qawish’s village in two weeks time. There her father would take his baskets and skins and announce that he now had rights to certain gathering sites that had stayed in Qawish’s family for hundreds of years. “And may the rattlesnakes strike at your heel and the black widows bite at your testicles for the rest of your years,” whispered Father as he left his in-laws-to-be’s kish.

They left two hours before sunset and traveled three miles into Palm Canyon before making camp. Father went to sleep early fully expecting that it would be his last full night of sleep in quite a while once Mother got wind of what he had to give up so that Qawish could get Suwet’s hand. Qawish stoked the small fire and stared out at the fullness of the season’s third full moon softly playing his flute. Somewhere out on the canyon’s west wall a mountain lion was caterwauling, which made him somewhat nervous, so he was glad when Bear appeared in the distance. Bear climbed out to the edge of a cantilevered rock formation, rose to his full height, and clawed at the moon. Qawish couldn’t say for certain but was reasonably sure that when he turned his head in the direction of the campfire – he was laughing.

Marriage was quite possibly the most anticlimactic event in the lives of the ritual rich Cahuilla. When Suwet’s father brought her to Qawish’s village there was no ceremony, no pomp, and no circumstance. She would live in the kish of Qawish’s parents for several years, and when the time was right, her husband would construct one of their own. Qawish was expected to talk at length with his parents and very little with his wife so that his parents would not be neglected. As time went by Suwet was to see the wisdom in this custom, as she didn’t have much to say to her crazy mother-in-law, anyway. Suwet lived in the kish with her shy husband for three weeks without sleeping with him as they slowly got acquainted. She was beginning to feel like the marriage might never be consummated when Mother announced that she and Father would have to go visit her parents at Torres Martinez Village. They finally had the kish to themselves and the young couple was not seen for days.

When Qawish finally emerged from his family’s kish he was a changed man. Now he understood how come Father put up with Mother and still left the campfire early some nights when there were perfectly good songs to sing and tobacco to smoke. Now he understood why it was so important to continue the cycle of life. He thanked Mukat for this newfound wisdom, thanked him for good health, and hopefully, a long life. But most of all he thanked him for his fine young wife.

Qawish first child, a girl, was born in the spring of the year of our Lord 1377. Three more were to follow in quick succession. The Pul spent so much time teaching him that it was hard to find time to go hunting. Eventually Qawish just brought him along and they became fast friends.

After the birth of his second child, a boy, Qawish convinced Father to help him build his own kish while Mother wept hysterically. They brought eight ten-foot long greasewood posts with wyes at their tops down from the hills. Six formed the corners and middle posts of the new kish while the remaining two supported the ramada. The ridgepole and two side beams were made of mesquite trunks that were laid horizontally between the upright crotches of the vertical posts. Crude rafters of smaller diameter mesquite crossed the roof skeleton while woven bull rushes and tules comprised the sides. When Qawish went up into Palm Canyon to get fan palm fronds for the roof he discovered that someone had torched the petticoats to improve the fruit harvest and clear out debris. He was forced to use the tules again to build the roof, but he swore to Suwet that he would cover it with palm leaves when they were available. Then he went up into the canyons himself every year to torch the petticoats and avoid the work. Such is the nature of fire at the hands of the Indian. He used it to make his life easier and to improve the productivity of the environment, which also made his life easier. Except in rare rainy weather, or when it was extremely cold, the family congregated under the ramada.

He found father out there one day instructing his first granddaughter in his version of their creation story. “Mukat and Tamaioit were twins who lived in the land of darkness. Eventually they tired of this and made light and created the earth to live on. After a while they decided they needed to make people, especially wives, because they were lonely. They formed their people out of clay. Mukat took his time and formed perfect people. Tamaioit wasted time and sloppily made imperfect people. They had parts in the wrong places and the eyes in their heads pointed the wrong way. Mukat’s people were dark while Tamaioit’s were light.” “How light, grandfather?” “I don’t know. I’ve never seen light people. Listen little one. After a while they got so busy creating plants and animals and all the good things of the earth that they forgot about Tamaioit’s sloppy light people. Mukat’s people populated the earth and he is out true creator.” “What happened to Tamaioit?” “He’s still around little one. When the earth shakes it’s him complaining that he doesn’t get enough credit and he wants the people to notice him more. Anyway, Mukat was generous towards Tamaioit on account of the fact that he got the short end of the stick. He let his brother have some of his good people as coyote people while he kept the rest as wildcat people. A mother and father must be one or the other.” “What’s Father?” “He’s a coyote because I’m a coyote. Children go to the father’s moiety.” “What’s Mother?” “She’s a wildcat because wildcat’s have to marry coyotes.” “And Grandmother?” “She’s a wolf and a badger, ruthless and mean.” Qawish’s father laughed and laughed and then looked up to his son and asked, “And where are you off to son?” “Los Coyotes. An initiation ceremony. I’ll be back by the new moon.” Mother, who had just come outside, caught the tail-end of their conversation and said, “My son, the big medicine man, doesn’t have time for his family anymore.” Father, acting deeply wounded said, “Our son has become a fine Pul and everyone wants to see his powerful medicine.” “I must be off. It’s a long journey. Look after Mother, and Suwet, and the children.” Father nodded in affirmation and said, “May Mukat speed you on your journey son.” Qawish looked to his mother who said nothing. She cried bitterly as soon as he stepped away.

Qawish was in high demand and performed at many Nukils. Father and Mother grew older and his wife wider around her hips, less beautiful in her face, but warmer with each passing winter. His four children, two boys and two girls, brought him much joy and his life was filled with happiness until one night the fox barked and Father lay cold in the morning.

As was their way, Mother went back to live with her parents although her father was dead and her mother had one foot in the afterlife. Suwet could hardly hide her glee as she helped Mother pack and walked with her on the 31-mile journey to Torres Martinez. Mother cried every step of the way. As was their custom, it was up to Qawish to give Father a proper funeral and he burned his kish to the ground and another kish was never built on that piece of ground and the Cahuilla Nation mourned for a very long time.

He saw his sons marry and his daughters move to other villages. He cremated his wife in the year of our Lord 1419. Then the old medicine man went from village to village entertaining with his flute, casting out spirits, healing the sick, performing with hot coals. He knew more than anyone about how to use a great many plants. As proof of his big medicine he frequently shape-shifted into Bear, his old friend, as the people ran from the campfire. In the latter years of his life, among the Cahuilla, among the Luseno to the west, the Serrano to the north, the Diegueno and Kamia to the south, the Chemehuevi; and the Colorado River tribes to the east, Qawish was known for his powerful medicine and before he died, legend had it, that he was looked upon as the greatest medicine man of them all.

For that was the way that it was back then in the beginning. The vision that he had had as a boy haunted him throughout his years. The monsters always got closer but never too close, for Bear would always appear to protect him. Qawish died in the year of our Lord 1439. The horror of his vision was visited upon his grandchildren three hundred years removed. The Spaniards first rode past Palm Canyon Village in 1772 and Santa Rosa Village in 1774. They considered the land worthless and therefore concentrated on persecuting the coastal tribes to whom they taught Christianity at the tip of a whip. The Americans, my ancestors, arrived in the mid 1800’s and proved to be worst. The Cahuilla numbers were decimated by war and smallpox but they never succumbed. Historians say it was because of their physical isolation, but I say it was because of their hearts. In 1891, the United States government classified them as “Mission Indians” although they never accepted the mission system and its perpetual lies. Today they live on reservations that they begrudgingly accepted and were not forcibly corralled on to for they never would have stood still for that. Their ways are dying with each new generation though their numbers, in retaliation to continuing affliction, increase.

I often wish that Americans could somehow see how it was back then. The people lived on the land and respected it. Elders were held in esteem. Animals, in many ways, were equals. Indigenous plants provided food and medicine. They never took everything and when they did take something nothing was wasted. They coexisted with the natural world and never once thought to dominate it. Life was oftentimes hard in a harsh environment but it was also magical and wonderful, simple yet diverse, and always meaningful.

I can only hope that the spirit of Qawish and his people lives on, so not only the Cahuilla, but also all of us, can find our way back to the way that it was in the beginning.

Author’s note:

This piece first appeared in the Magazine of History and Fiction and later was included in my environmental book entitled: Econation: American in Environmental Perspective (2005). I’m running it here on its 21st anniversary.

At its beating heart this is a book that appeals to the reader’s powers of observation and feelings of appreciation. This book speaks in the language of reverence honed from patience tempered against overwhelming feelings of awe, for to really revere the Earth that binds us to its gobsmacking beauty is to know how much we have left to learn of its secrets and to ask for its forgiveness. To heal the scars of the many upon our Earth we have to be diligent in our efforts to make restitution and be willing to roll up our sleeves and get to doing it – now, posthaste, immediately.

This is a beautifully-produced book; a hardcover with a textured cloth surface and a wide ribbon bookmark, this work announces that it has class from the moment you pick it up. Formatted square at 6” x 6” it could easily be mistaken for a jewel box which is only fitting because there are many gems harvested from mining that thing called life inside of it. It is a substantial book built to withstand the long haul of time and an ongoing journey through many hands. It is reasonably priced considering the internal color photographs and the slick paper they’re printed on. Neither publisher nor author intends to get rich as it appears to be a labor of love on both their parts. The message inherent in the work appears to be more important than the maximum amount of money it could garner. I like these kinds of books because they are so rare.

Taking E.O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia one step further Tweit introduces the term terraphilia. Wilson wanted humanity to know that some amongst our numbers have an affinity for the wide-eyed mammals that we interface with on this planet while Tweit feels that we should strive to develop a love for the ground beneath our feet (terra) and all life (philia) that exists upon it.

The planet is an intrinsic part of our humanness. Our interdependence is expressed in a cell-level bond essential to our being: I call it terraphilia (p. 9).

The author develops this work in four stages; the four seasons themselves, as defined by the summer and winter solstices split by the spring and autumn equinoxes. Everything in balance, life and death, the cycle of the seasons, the very makeup of functioning ecosystems when they are healthy. There are a lot of books written recently about the benefits of being out in nature as defined by new terminology such as “forest bathing” and the such. Tweit simplifies this to taking in what she describes as “Vitamin N” noting that as little as 15 minutes a day of exposure to nature yields remarkable benefits that suppresses a human’s fight or flee mechanism.

The author introduces elements of haiku as captions for several of the amazing photos such as:

Winter solstice:

snow-plastered

cattail stalks raise tattered flags

winter warning (p. 41).

Spring equinox:

from seed to bloom

bluebonnets shout spring joy;

stop! listen (p. 79)!

Summer solstice:

as summer cracks whip

storm stalks through rose sunset

on lightening legs (p. 163).

Autumn equinox:

pumpkin globes swell

earthy and succulent orange

my mouth waters (p. 202).

Tweit, along with a multitude of indigenous philosophies feel that humanity’s relationship with nature has to be a reciprocal affair, and the driving force behind that reciprocity is gratitude for the bounty of nature; expressed not just as an altruistic notion inside our heads, but effectuated by action on the ground which is the only meaningful way to be sincere about anything. An appreciation of Mother Nature is all well and good, but what are we doing to protect her? And then we have our greatest allies, the trees, as a shining example of a reciprocal relationship that Nature’s grand design baked into the cake. Written as a literal expression of poetic justice:

It took poetry for me to see the reciprocity that is at the heart of life on Earth.

Here’s how it works: Plants, along with photosynthesizing algae and bacteria, create food through photosynthesis, a word that literally means using light (photo) to make chemical compounds (synthesis). In this case , the complex sugars that feed plants and the rest of the living world. They draw carbon dioxide from the air plus minerals and water from the soil and use solar energy to split the larger molecules into their component atoms…

Without that respiration, Earth’s atmosphere would be too oxygen-starved to sustain humans and other oxygen breathing creatures. We inhale plant’s oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, our waste gas, which our photosynthesizing kin inhale. Our breath links us in a vital exchange. That reciprocal relationship is fundamental to life, an interdependence that reaches from the air around us to deep inside our cells. Our green kin are our partners in life (p. 47).

In short, what we need to know is that if other species die, we die, and yet the majority of our population sits by and watches the Anthropocene’s accelerated rate of species extinctions with stunned alarm but not much preventative action. And Tweit does provide several calls to action in checklists which she terms “practice.” If only we are to answer these calls with unbridled enthusiasm the Earth would be a far better place to live because everyone knows that practice makes perfect. What a wonderful world that would be.

There are 52 sections to this work each representing every week in a year, so the book can be viewed as weekly meditations if the reader is so inclined to read it that way.

Week 32, “honoring water” really got to me. I’ve spent my entire career as a landscape architect practicing in desert biomes gravely concerned about conserving water. I’ve issued dire warnings about our wanton disregard for water and the foolhardiness of wasting it in several environmental books, but Tweit says it more eloquently and humbly in the following passage:

We can survive for a long time without food, but not without fresh water. Without this miraculous fluid, our bodies wither to desiccated husks, our tissues and bone devolve back to the dust we came from. Without water we simply cannot exist at all.

Yet we use water thoughtlessly, waste it, pollute it, and let it run down the drain or the gutter. It’s time to honor the everyday miracle that is fresh water (p. 135).

Week 46, “be the poet of your place” solidifies Susan Tweit’s status as a poet, for true poets know that poetry is more about communicating feelings than mastering words:

The poets of place are those who know and love a specific locale or region well enough to speak it’s truths, ugly as well as beautiful, and stand up for the particular challenges and magic of each place. They champion the places they love…

We can all be poets of place. And our places need us now more than ever: to know them, love them, illuminate their uniqueness, defend and nurture them. To sing their songs (p. 193).

This book is an achievement, a prayer of sorts, a summation of a life well-lived in subservience to nature and all things natural. If this review makes it onto Amazon it will display five stars, and if not, just like the essence of poetry itself, the words will live on in the memories of those who heed the message and in the hearts of those who don’t question its truths. It inspires a gravitational pull towards wonder.

Wonder, after all, is like love: the more you share, the more you feel (p. 129).

And now it’s time to take this wonderful book to the “take one or give one away” bookcase at our local Post Office so that it can begin its marvelous journey through many hands. Safe travels.

I have difficulty staying indoors on a glorious fall day. The wanderlust comes upon me and I just have to get out there amongst the riotous beauty of it all.

Halloween occurs deep in the fall signaling that colder weather is approaching which inspires a live-for-today attitude in me. When you know that you are on the verge of losing something that you deeply love you relish it even more while you still have it. So Halloween is my favorite day of the year, steeped in the traditions of The Legend of Sleepy Hallow (1820) by Washington Irving, which many consider to be America’s first and best uniquely American ghost story. The pumpkin mounted on the fearsome rider’s head that was ultimately hurled at a terrified and fleeing Ichabod Crane shortly thereafter became the symbol of Halloween, and the ongoing symbol of the fall season right on up to Thanksgiving. But, for me, fall is pretty much over the day after Halloween which inspires a sense of melancholy, of loss, and a need to reassess my life. For many this comes with their New Year’s resolutions, but that has never been the way I look upon my life. I measure the years, and the milestones of my life by the passing of Halloween parties, and for the entirety of my adult life I have thrown one every year which for the most part have been joyous fun loving affairs.

We spend a lot of time and effort (and expense) decorating, and every year the pressure mounts to outdo the splendor of the previous year to the point where what was once a simple task has now become a major endeavor. Our family, friends, and neighbors usually attend an early evening event with their kids dressed in every costume imaginable. We roast marshmallows around a large fire ring in our courtyard and then lead them in a hysterical frenzy to several candy laden stations located around our property, which has affectionately become known as the “Trick or Treat Trail.”

It brings joy to my heart to witness the children so happy and excited, and it always dredges up memories of my life at nine years old, marooned in an uncaring foster home in Tampa, Florida with 12 other kids in a cramped three bedroom home. Our foster parents were obviously doing this for the money and their lack of concern was easy to see for anyone who was looking, but no one seemed to be, least of all our absent parents. In a word my existence there was miserable. Our foster father was cruel and occasionally violent, and I became adept at fading into the woodwork and finding ways to spend as little time as possible under that roof. Us kids had each other and not much more, but that was enough on Halloween night 1960. There would be no festivities and no trick or treaters welcomed at our house, which was a relief to us all because it was the last place on Earth that we wanted to be on that magical night.

Eight of us trick or treated around the immediate neighborhood and then fanned out to surrounding neighborhoods until the pillow cases we pulled off our beds were full. Then we returned home, dumped our treasure on our beds, switched costumes, and went back out there again…and again, until all the porch lights were turned off, and the entire area seemed to be in a blackout. They were onto us alright, those poor kids from the foster home weren’t going to be able to take advantage of them anymore. It was a victorious night, anyway; one of the very best in my entire life. So Halloween holds a special place in my heart.

In my hormonal teenage and fresh flesh gunslinger years Halloween was a near intoxicating event where the girls stepped outside themselves and dressed like tarts and sluts and showed off what they had; and while some had more than others, I appreciated the effort extended by them all. Back then Halloween seemed to be a sort of 24 hour purge of decorum and morality – the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, and I played it to its fullest extent. Those were the days.

As an elderly adult, now with three grandchildren living in our home, Halloween represents an opportunity to leave them with the best of lasting memories. They don’t realize that now, but I have no doubt that they will. That’s why I still go all out, and besides, I know that my life has become the candle in the pumpkin and I know what always happens to it, but while it’s still burning I savor the glow, the warmth, the fleeting mirth that it brings.

The leaves of the deciduous trees up here on the high chaparral turn later than in the Northeast back in the countryside of New York State where I grew up after gaining freedom from that suffocating foster home and where I attended junior college. Their color hangs on until Thanksgiving, and after turning a dull depressing brown, some still don’t drop until Christmas. So I still have time to travel these twisting country roads and go out to some beautiful mountain lakes that glisten with an absurd enchantment guaranteed to seize my spirits and make me overjoyed to still be alive.

For me, Halloween is still the best, the very best of everything, and always will be until that candle goes dark.

Author’s note:

This piece is to appear in the upcoming poetry and essay collection entitled: Here’s the Deal!

John Cameron Fogerty was born in Berkeley, California on May 28^th, 1945. He was raised in nearby El Cerrito a small bedroom community outside of San Francisco with the star-crossed history of being founded by some survivors of the devastating 7.9 Richter scale San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It’s population perpetually hovers at about 25,000 inhabitants. His father, the handsome Galen Robert Fogerty, worked as a typesetter for the Berkeley Gazette and struggled as a prat-time writer rarely getting any of his work published. His mother, Edith Lucile was a nursery schoolteacher and did the bulk of the parenting in a household of five unruly boys. Both were musical and frequently sang the old time tunes together, especially those of Stephan Foster the “Father of American Music,” who died destitute at age 37. Like John, many assume that Foster is a southern boy, but that is wrong as he’s from Pittsburgh. Later in his life Fogerty would identify with Foster, who had written over 200 songs, as both were bilked out of much of the music they wrote.

Both of John’s parents were heavy drinkers, a situation which greatly hindered their foothold in the lower middle class of post-World War II California. Fogerty has what he calls a “hazy” memory of when his parent’s divorced but feels it happened when he was in the third or fourth grade. All the boys stayed with their mother and their economic condition declined substantially after his father left, but he did maintain contact with John taking him to an austere camp on the Green River of Northern California during the summers, the fond memories of which John wrote about in the song entitled: “Green River” on the third of CCR’s seven albums containing the same name.

Well, take me back down

Where cool water flows, yeah.

Let me remember things I love,

Stoppin’ at the log where catfish bite,

Walkin’ along the river road at night.

Barefoot girls dancin’ in the moonlight.

I can hear the bullfrog callin’ me.

Wonder if my rope’s still hangin’ to the tree.

Love to kick my feet ‘way down the shallow water.

Shoefly, dragonfly, get back t’your mother;

Pick up a flat rock skip it across Green River.

Well!

I grew up on the banks of the Allegheny River located in Western New York State. It is one of the eastern most rivers whose waters would eventually flow to form the mighty Mississippi that then flowed to the Gulf of Mexico. I did everything and more of what Fogerty reminisces about on that river, and likewise, they constitute some of the best memories of my young life.

John, by his own account, was a disinterested grade school student rarely paying attention to anything outside of his music classes. He had a 35-home paper route and made around $25.00 a month delivering the Berkeley Gazette, the same newspaper that his father formally worked for, and with his money he most usually bought 45 rpm records by groups that flourished pre-British Invasion: The Platters, The Coasters, Duane Eddy, El Dorados, Elvis, Everly Brothers, Bill Haley, and a host of other performers that would soon be taking a backseat to the Brits. Fogerty states that the first time he heard Presley’s “My Baby Left Me,” he had an epiphany, and although not yet a musician, decided that this is what he wanted to do. The guitar is what spoke to him the most and he felt that Elvis’s lead guitar player Scotty Moore virtually invented the rock-n’-roll guitar. Throughout his life he would be a student of blues, rhythm and blues, country, and in particularly, rock. In his autobiography, written with the assistance of Jimmy McDonough, entitled: Fortunate Son (2015) the third chapter, “My Influences,” goes on ad infinitum and makes it clear that Fogerty was hooked on the idea of being a rock performer. By the time he was twelve years old in 1957 he had bought his first guitar, a Silvertone along with a five-watt amplifier from Sears which cost $80.00. His mom cosigned the promissory note that he paid off with money earned from his paper route. He was adept at dissecting his records and played along with them to develop his chops.

His two older brothers were drawn to the black music that was categorized as rhythm and blues that was played on radio station KWBR out of Oakland. John took an interest in Little Richard and Ray Charles and then dug deeper into the blues themselves with Jimmy Reed, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Howling Wolf.

John on lead guitar was the driving force behind the formation of the teen band the Blue Velvets along with Doug Clifford on drums and Stu Cook originally on piano but later switched over to bass guitar. They were a good enough trio to play at dances and Boys Club functions in and around the Bay area, When John was 14 they backed up a 25-year old black musician named James Powell at a small studio in Oakland on a doo-wop song entitled “Beverly Angel,” and the demo actually received air play on KWBR. John overdubbed the bass guitar and was extremely excited to actually hear himself on the air.

Tom Fogerty, John’s older brother by four years, joined the Blue Velvets and was promoted to the position of its front man and lead singer. When you’re 14, someone who is 18 seems so much more mature than you are, so it’s understandable why the three younger band members acquiesced to him. So seniority had its advantages up until that time in the not-too-distant future when talent would trump seniority. This lineup would eventually become CCR, but the members had to go through a few renditions and rearrangements before that happened. John had a keen interest in all aspects of the music business: playing, recording, mixing, and especially, song writing. It was this devotion towards all aspects of his craft that would lift him to the heights of rock royalty but also would cause him the soul crushing anguish that nearly drove him to ruin as the years were to unfold.

He laid hands on a Sony add-a-track tape recorder that allowed him to overdub onto his original home spun tracks. This allowed him to further dissect music that he wanted to emulate. He states in Fortunate Son:

It was up to me to really study songs on the radio, discern what people were playing, and how that worked with that arrangement of the song. I was the translator. I could decipher. Most people just hear music as one big sound coming at you. When I heard music. I heard the parts (p. 77).

Fogerty was always fascinated with tape recorders and record producing in general, and these talents, honed in his early years, would aid him greatly in his middle and later years as he would play every single instrument and produce every single aspect of three out of his nine solo albums entitled: The Blue Ridge Rangers (1973), John Fogerty (1975), and Wrote a Song for Everyone (2013).

In April of 1964, John Fogerty acting as emissary for the Blue Velvets, solicited representation from Fantasy Records after watching a three-part television documentary entitled: Anatomy of a Hit that was produced by San Francisco Chronicle music critic Ralph Gleason who would later become the cofounding editor of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967 with Jan Wenner. At 18 years of age Fogerty was naive and unprepared to navigate the dark underbelly of the record business. Three brothers, Max, Sol, and Milton Weiss owned Fantasy and Saul Zaentz was their bookkeeper. Everything appeared innocent enough, and Fogerty even worked on site packaging records for shipment. Fantasy recorded some of their singles cowritten by him and his brother Tom under the pen name of Wild and Green. The Beatles had just arrived on the scene in ’64 and they took note that several of their songs were cowritten by Lennon and McCartney, so they followed suite. Fogerty embraced the British Invasion with the Kinks and the Rolling Stones riding into the American marketplace on the Beatles’ coattails. He felt that these groups were somewhat true to blues and rock roots and as such were moving the emerging rock-n’-roll scene forward. What was good for them would eventually be good for him because he was improving as a musician and a songwriter and was determined to get to where he wanted to go.

In November of ’64 Max Weiss called them over to the studio to receive their first single and they were surprised, then dismayed to see that the label had them credited as “The Gollywogs.” This was a Max Weiss managerial brain-fart because Weiss thought the name would tie the group to the British Invasion and help launch their success. Fogerty hated their new name and their even stupider stage outfits but realized they would be stuck with both for a while. Tom Fogerty sang the lead on the first four songs of their first two 45’s. Tom was a doo-wop singer, and John was following the path of the growling sneering style of Elvis and Mick Jagger that was rapidly gaining in popularity. By the time of their fifth song, he had taken over the lead and the Gollywogs gained in popularity.

At age 20 John Fogerty married Martha Paiz and they lived the spartan existence of young married couples. He admits that they were both too young, and that the vast majority of marriages at this age ended in failure, as theirs eventually would. His wife had a big and loving family which he found attractive because it was diametrically opposed to his life with his own family. He felt that the Gollywogs were going nowhere fast and his personal frustrations were mounting. After they opened for Sonny and Cher at Memorial Stadium in Sacramento and were well-received by their largest audience to date, he felt that they were at a tipping point, that they actually had a chance to make it. It would take another two years before the Gollywogs would morph into Creedence Clearwater Revival, and there would be some tumultuous times before, and even more so, after they did.

It didn’t matter that he was married, and the young couple had recently welcomed the birth of their first child when he received the worst news any young man could receive in the sixties – Vietnam – the scourge of a generation and the splitting apart of a nation. He was drafted, and he most certainly didn’t want to go.

My second favorite all-time Fogerty song is “Fortunate Son.” It is the ultimate anti-war anthem, and Fogerty literally screams the lyrics. The song appears on their fourth album entitled Willie and the Poor Boys released in 1969 and it comes on like gangbusters, in your face, no bullshit, and best of all, no more governmental lying will be tolerated. It is the truth in all its brazen ugliness, and if you don’t like it, well…that’s just too fucking bad. Of the songs six unbalanced verses the last three strike at the heart of the matter.

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask them, “How much should we give?”
Ooh, they only answer “More! More! More!” yoh

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no military son, son
It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one, one

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one, no no no

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son, no no no

In the spring of ’69 I was an apolitical junior in high school heading off to a track meet on a gorgeous late April day in Western New York, when a convoy from the Army Reserve pulled up next to the school bus. We waved at the guys, but they didn’t seem to notice us as they stared stoically straight ahead. I said to no one in particular, “What’s with them?” “Vietnam, baby! That’s where I’m headed after graduation, to get my ass shot off.” He was a senior, the only black kid in our lily-white Catholic school, and his life was already in jeopardy. Those Army guys across from us were sure to ship out soon. No wonder they were so sullen. And for what? I began to take a much more serious look at the “Vietnam Conflict,” and I didn’t like anything of what I saw. What a monumental crock of steaming hot shit the old white men running our country were feeding us. As much as I love to dump on Trump, I can’t blame him for ducking out of that war. I had just one year to figure out a way to wiggle off that hook. I considered going to Canada if I couldn’t get a college deferment. I just couldn’t see the point of it. Nobody had attacked us on our soil. Whose honor were we protecting, anyway – the French? Vietnam was just a display of willful stupidity and unbridled arrogance on the part of the old white men, and as Fogerty so eloquently stated (“…I ain’t no senator’s son…”) it wasn’t their sons coming home in body bags.

Originally classified as 4-F early in ‘66, a few months later, John Fogerty received a letter from Uncle Sam saying that a mistake had been made, and he was now 1-A. Shortly thereafter he received his draft notice. After some kind-hearted finagling with the dates on the part of a recruitment officer, he was able to join the Army Reserve. The thought of being shipped off to the “Conflict” nearly gave him a nervous breakdown and he resisted by fasting as his weight dropped down to 129 pounds. In ’68 he was honorably discharged upon learning that he had a mild form of dysentery that could spread like wildfire through the troops. “Fortunate Son” literally reeks with well-aimed accusation and condensation, and to this day Fogerty opposes wars intended to make the rich corporations even richer while the sons of the poor do their dirty work and give up their own lives for them.

Vietnam split many American families right down the middle. My uncle who raised me had been a WW II Navy veteran who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor. He had to have his parents sign off because he was only 17. He graduated high school that spring and was shipped off to basic training on the Great Lakes. He became a machinist on the USS. Buchanan, one of the most decorated Destroyers in the Pacific. He and his fellow crewmen called Destroyers, “tin cans,” and the Buchanan was hit several times and seemed to always be in need of repairs, so he was kept busy. The crowning moment of his military life was when the Buchanan escorted General Douglas MacArthur over to the Battleship Missouri to receive the surrender of the Japanese fleet, and then returned him to Yokohama. My uncle never talked about the battles he was in, but he always talked with great pride about that day. His felt his country needed him and he answered the call. He was a bonified American hero, an upstanding member of the “Greatest Generation.” He was in no mood to hear my protests that my county really didn’t need me and needed to get real as to the importance of that stupid “Conflict.” We hardly ever talked to each other before I went off to college in the spring of ’70. In ‘67 heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay refused his induction into the service and famously said, “Ain’t no Viet Cong, ever call me nigger!” He was convicted of draft evasion and paid the ultimate price of being stripped of his title and banned from boxing, but he became Muhammed Ali and wound up being revered for his stand. There were Vietnam vets enrolled at my college who had mustered out of the service and were there as part of the G.I. Bill that continues to get watered down to this very day. They all had the same advice – “Don’t go.”

To be clear, I have never looked down on a Vietnam veteran, or any veteran, although some have looked down on me. I have never spat on an American flag or damaged anyone’s property. To those who enlisted, that was their choice, and I respect their right to make it, even though it was different than mine and I highly suspect that they were sold a bill of goods. To those who were drafted and had to go against their personal preference, I commiserate with what was their unfortunate plight. To those who President Jerry Ford pardoned, it could very easily have been me, and I felt he was right. If the country ever needed healing, it was after Vietnam. Fogerty was genuine in his hatred of stupid wars then and now stating in his autobiography:

There was a time when I could barely talk about Vietnam. Since I was lucky to get into the reserve, I wasn’t sent to Vietnam. I wasn’t in combat. There was such an anxiety in those years over whether or not I was ever really going to go,…I must admit that practically every time I’d think about those guys, our vets, I would cry. I’d hear “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” on the radio and would lose it. Because it was just so senseless (p. 118).

The real answer is, we were fighting for businessmen, fighting for guys to get rich. Not for me, not for my friends out there in the field, but for the guys who own companies, wrapped up in military contracts, the guys paving the roads, building the buildings, making the bridges, and finding the oil - all that crap. Those people who want your kid to die so that they can get rich. And if you look at our kids today, that’s still pretty much what they are fighting for (p. 119).

His discharge papers arrived in the summer of ’68 right after the release of their first album. Fogerty hit his lowest point and his highest point of his young life almost simultaneously. Four of the eight songs were written by him, one was cowritten with his brother, and of the three covers “Susie Q” was a monster hit quickly rising to number 11 on the Hot 100. He had a taste of writing success and he had a notebook full of songs that would eventually get him ranked number 40 amongst Rolling Stone magazine’s top 100 greatest songwriters, and inducted into the 2005 class of the Song Writer’s Hall of Fame.

In the fall of 1967, while still in the Army Reserve, he bought a song writing notebook and began to capture on paper the snippets of lyrics that were swimming around in his head. The title page pictured in his autobiography features 10 song titles, the first one is “Proud Mary,” and the next to the last one is “Bad Moon Risin’.” Fogerty was then 22 years old, but already knew the makeup and tastes of his audience which determined the direction he wanted to go in as he states in Fortunate Son:

“…They’re hiring me to play for a dance. I better play danceable music.” That remained my directive over the years, even as I got on the big stages of the world. I went for music that made you shake your body (p. 69).

In the summer of ’69 CCR went to Woodstock and played on the second day between 12:30 and 1:20 a,m. following the Grateful Dead who had had a long delay because of equipment problems, and as Fogerty remembered it, had put the crowd to sleep. He vetoed their performance being put in the famed namesake film because of the comatose audience at the start of their performance, but he also claims that they had woke everyone up before leaving the stage and having the audience primed and ready for Janis Joplin.

CCR had already released three of their seven albums before Woodstock and the group, for all its fame, only lasted for four years before its existence was sacrificed on the altar of ego. While it appeared that this was the end of their tragic story, in truth, it was just the beginning.

Stories diverge between John and his band as to who was right and who was wrong, but by the spring of ’71 his brother Tom left the band. All three of Fogerty’s bandmates had orchestrated what amounted to an intervention and demanded that their songs also be put on their albums. This has been the kiss of death in a great many bands who either refused it or allowed it for both ends of the spectrum are rife with peril. I have experience in the area of insurrection amongst the personnel, and I can attest that’s it’s always the guy that’s least capable of being the boss who always wants to be the boss. If you allow it, even on a trial basis, he soon proves you right and will never accept responsibility for his failure as he blames everyone and anyone with the exception of himself for his failure. This guy becomes a cancer upon the organism. Then you come to realize that he is on your mind more than your business is on your mind, and when that happens, that guy has to go.

Fogerty made the strategic error of allowing his two remaining band mates to put their songs on the band’s next (and last) album entitled: Mardi Gras. Stu Cook wrote three songs and cowrote one song with Doug Clifford while Clifford wrote two of his own songs. Fogerty contributed the songs that somewhat bailed the album out, but by all accounts, Cook’s and Clifford’s lyrical contributions, as well as their lead singing efforts caused the record to tank. Jon Landau in his Rolling Stone review called the record, “…the worst album I have ever heard from a major rock band, and may be known in the future as ‘Fogerty’s Revenge’.” Revenge was not sweet, the band disbanded, and the bitter infighting was soon to commence. Following is the backstory concerning the decades long hostilities.

In October of 1967 Fantasy Records bookkeeper Saul Zaentz along with a group of financial backers bought the label outright. Zaentz called a meeting with the Gollywogs to inform them of the new ownership and a new operational paradigm. The band stated that they wanted to make a real record, jettison their awful name, and receive a new contract. According to Fogerty, the band had an all or none policy whereby if just one member was opposed to anything it was immediately vetoed. For his part Zaentz had apparently sold everything he owned in order to afford the acquisition and was living out of his older model station wagon. He explained to his one and only clients that they were essentially equal partners, a family so to speak. Fogerty readily admits that he didn’t quite comprehend the legalities then, and most likely still wouldn’t understand them even now. The guys had Stu Cook’s father, who was a high-powered San Francisco attorney look things over, and they then felt comfortable enough with his findings to sign on with Fantasy Records utilizing their new group name of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

I’m stepping up on to the soapbox now. Cook’s father apparently wasn’t paid for his efforts, and his efforts matched his lack of renumeration. Stu Cook reported back to his bandmates that all was well. The contract was grossly flawed with the most egregious clause containing the verbiage that the song writer(s) would not own the copyright to their songs. Whenever I encountered a problem in my career; felt that I was either bilked or outsmarted by the other party, I could go straight back to the contract and see what was either left out or vaguely worded that allowed the problem to crop up. Furthermore, whenever someone writes a contract, unless they’re a complete idiot, they are always going to slant the words, stack the odds so to speak, in their favor, This isn’t dishonest per se, it’s just intelligent self-preservation, and should be reasonably expected by the party on the other side of the table. Whenever words that are not on paper but are used in pep-talk types of conversations, especially the “f” type words like family or friends, the situation is bound to devolve into the ultimate “f” word – fucked. Fogerty intimates that he remembers Zaentz telling the group that if they were to make it really big that he would rip up the initial contract and write them a new one. Zaentz, of course, has never admitted to this. States Fogerty in his autobiography:

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that when you are trying to make a deal with another entity, there is back and forth dialogue over the contract. You negotiate - it’s expected. They propose something, you send it back with a counteroffer. The lawyers haggle, hopefully with some input from you, and an agreement is eventually reached. I didn’t know that then, but a prestigious attorney like Herman Cook certainly would have. That’s the very reason we asked Stu to take the contract to him. So that should’ve been done for us. It wasn’t. We were too dumb to know anything about that – all of us. I mention this because in the years since, Stu has been in the press talking about what a terrible businessman I was – Boy did John ef up. Ironically, it was business major Stu who was supposed to get input from his lawyer father. Herm’s only supposed advice was that it was okay to sign – no revisions, no additions, nothing,

Over the years, I have often wondered if Stu ever showed the contract to his father (p. 129 -130).

By the time the band was releasing Willie and the Poor Boys containing the fun-loving feel-good tune of “Down on the Corner,” in November of ’69 they were bickering and feeling anything but good. It was a three on one attack, the most severe accusation being that John was too controlling, and perhaps he was. Given the intensity and depth of the dissatisfaction, it seems utterly amazing that they were able to produce what I personally feel is their very best album, Cosmo’s Factory in July of 1970. The album spent nine consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 chart. They were now the second top selling band in the world behind the Beatles, and just like the Beatles they were hurtling headlong ahead towards self-destruction.

They were able to release their fifth album entitled: Pendulum in December of 1970 just in time for Christmas sales which were lukewarm in comparison to Cosmos Factory. Perhaps John Fogerty was worn out by then, perhaps he really did feel the need to venture into new territory, but whatever the reasons the album was a definite departure featuring less guitar and adding saxophone and keyboards played by himself and some keyboards played by Stu Cook. Two songs charted at number eight: “Hey Tonight,” and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” respectively. As previously noted, shortly thereafter Tom Fogerty left the band.

Who really understands the convoluted dynamic of sibling rivalries? It’s often said that some families, especially dysfunctional ones, just have to fight to get along. Being a younger brother myself, I can tell you this, if you’re the younger brother, you will always be the younger brother, and Tom Fogerty just didn’t seem able to accept the fact that his younger brother was calling the shots and that his star was shining much more brightly than his own. This same situation has famously occurred in reverse with The Kinks with younger brother Dave Davies jealous of older brother Ray’s superior songwriting talent. The Everly Brothers eventually were called “The Hate Brothers,” by insiders. This dynamic of the raging green-eyed monster wreaking havoc amongst brothers is just a part of the heightened sense of drama that defines rock-n’-roll. John admits that Tom was a talented rhythm guitar player, and the music when they were hitting on all cylinders, bears this out. However, the fact remains, that when you start out the leader, the intended star, and end up being surpassed, that there are bound to be some underlying resentments. But Tom Fogerty was not a star; just a good player meant to add to the composition of a group, and not to lead one. His solo career produced ten albums with his first one released in 1972 that was entitled: Tom Fogerty charting at number 78 among Billboard’s 200. As a founding member of CCR, he was inducted posthumously into the 1993 class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Tom Fogerty died in September of 1990 because of AIDs contacted from a blood transfusion given to him during the 1980’s for back surgery, a common guitar player ailment. The only time he and his brother played together again was at his 1980 wedding reception.

There is some ugly business concerning the ’93 Hall induction ceremony when Fogerty refused to play with Cook and Clifford who acted shocked even though they were earlier informed of his stance. This was the first year where the inducted artists were asked to perform if they could and Fogerty did honor the request by performing some of the Creedence songs he had written with Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson among others. The press played it up as a meltdown, but in the final analysis, it was much to do about nothing. Springsteen has always spoken highly about his friend and somehow managed not to take sides. The rancorous business would continue and following is how the whole sordid affair got started. But first a little background as to why things got so vengeful, again from Fortunate Son:

We also agreed that if the group ever broke up we wouldn’t allow one or two of us to run off and call ourselves Creedence Clearwater Revival. We had seen other groups do this over the years like the Platters or the Diamonds, where some fraudulent version would be out there with one or maybe none of the original members. We agreed that either we were all in the band or else it just couldn’t be.

And I gave the other guys equal share in the songwriting income (p.147).

Predictably, once it was obvious that the group had in actuality made it big, they reminded Saul Zaentz of his earlier statement about ripping up the original contract and writing a new one, and just as predictably, he developed amnesia concerning making any such statement. Zaentz offered instead to include them in an offshore investment scheme that would be good for all, and unbelievably, without even again consulting attorneys, the band went for it. The offshore scheme quickly began to seem sketchy, and John Fogerty wanted out – lock, stock, and barrel, while his bandmates did not. Long story short, all three of them joined forces with Zaentz and sued Fogerty who then lawyered up and became embroiled in a decades long battle the upshot of which was that Fogerty paid much in attorney fees and garnered nothing of his offshore investment money. The good news for John Fogerty was that he was John Fogerty, and as such was talented enough to have a thriving solo career, which the others were not, but that was hallow satisfaction because of his brother’s death. With the passage of time John was able to see that Tom probably felt enormous pressure to provide for his family after he knew he was dying and therefore got drawn into something that he might otherwise would not have. As for Cook and Clifford, they had the idiocy to resign with Zaentz and record and go out on the road as Creedence Clearwater Revisited. All of this ate at Fogerty, of course, and in 1985 he made the ill-advised decision to record a song entitled “Zanz Kant Danz (But He’ll Steal Your Money)” on his Centerfield album. The Zanz in the song was a greedy little pig and the music video had pigs in it. Predictably, Saul Zaentz sued Fogerty for $140 million for defamation of character and forced Fogerty to at least change the song’s title to “Vanz Kant Dance.” If you have the one of the first 250,000 Centerfield albums which has the original version of the song, take heart as it is now considered a collector’s item. In 1989 Fogerty tried to buy ownership of his songs back from Zaentz in a deal brokered by famed music promoter Bill Graham who advised John to pay Zaentz $600,000.00 to ease the emotional sting of the “Zanz,” thing after which Saul would bargain in good faith on selling the songs back to John, and after receiving the money, Zaentz didn’t bargain at all. He had managed to unscrupulously dupe Fogerty - twice! Bill Graham was a notoriously tough negotiator, but he also had a reputation for being extremely fair, at least if he liked you. He didn’t much like Saul Zaentz after that, and Fogerty never got the ownership of his songs back. The animosities continued on, and if there was any reason whatsoever for the flimsiest of lawsuits, these two were likely to engage in them.

All of this completely over-the-top venom caused Fogerty to descend further into depression and alcoholism. He had divorced his first wife Martha Paiz in the early seventies, lived with a woman in Paris, France for a year, and then went back and lived with Paiz and their child before finally separating in the mid-eighties. The Saul Zaentz business really didn’t help, but they really weren’t meant for each other. He then met soon-to-be divorced Julie Lebiedzinski in 1989 in a bar while on tour in Indianapolis, Indiana, and they married on April 29^th, 1991, and John Fogerty got a second chance at life, and nearly blew it. Once married, the romantic and subsequent honeymoon period quickly wore off, especially for Julie who quickly came to realize what she had signed on for. He was drinking heavily, prone to fits of rage followed by long periods of depression.

He seemed unaffected by the birth of their first two sons, Shane in 1991, and Tyler in 1992, respectively. Julie, to her credit, held firm and stuck it out. In the midst of all this chaos, after a ten-year production period, in 1997 he finally brought out the astounding Blue Moon Swamp, cementing his place in the genre of his own making – swamp rock. With the birth of their third child, daughter Kelsey Cameron Fogerty in October 2001 the ice finally thawed and he began to embrace being a father and a husband; and a friend, as Bruce Springsteen encouraged him in his endeavor to become a better more loving parent. Fathers and daughters – there’s something to that one, to be sure. John Fogerty was now back in the land of the living and reaping the rewards of his long and tumultuous career. In 2010 the Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him on the basis of his blockbuster hit baseball song “Centerfield,” the only musician that they have so honored to date. The bitterness began to dissipate perhaps because of Saul Zaentz’s death in 2014 or more likely because it was just too heavy a burden to carry around, and he was finally able to let it all go – beautiful wife, beautiful children, adoring fans, the respect of his peers, the belief in himself that he was truly an exceptional songwriter – it all amounted to a new lease on life, and perhaps he feels no more alive than when performing on stage with his two sons. What could be better than that? They joyfully sing a lot of his old tunes now as there’s nobody left to sue him. He just never mentions Creedence at all.

My all-time favorite song of Fogerty’s is “Lodi.” Lodi is a mid-size city in northern California that is 60 miles inland from San Francisco and 40 miles south of Sacramento in California’s Central Valley and boasts a current (2020) population of 68,000, although in 1968 the population was just under 29,000, when Fogerty introduced their first and namesake album entitled: Creedence Clearwater Revival. Set in the midst of an undoubtedly conservative hard-working farming community, it is the ultimate career despair song written when he was just 23 years old. At this age many boomers had just graduated college and had started in on their first jobs, looking down a long road towards 40 years of doing something that they were already starting to hate. The message of, “Welcome to the real world,” was like a severe slap in the face. Soon the devastating body punches would follow. Of the song’s four verses, the second verse is the most depressing:

Rode in on the Greyhound

I’ll be walkin’ out if I go

I was just passin’ through

Must be seven months or more

Ran out of time and money

Looks like they took my friends

Oh Lord, I’m stuck in Lodi again

Three words defined the angst of an entire generation – “if I go.” Unless you’re an adventuresome alpha type personality, one of the most terrifying things in life is career change. There’s no guarantee that the grass will be greener on the other side. Fear of the unknown has derailed many promising careers when someone decided to play it safe, stick with it, endure the struggle, grin and bear it. If this sounds familiar, on a personal level, I can tell you this; you don’t want to hit 70 and be asking yourself, “What if?” Caving into the terror of change oftentimes leads to the hollow ring of future remorse. Life is for the living, and taking calculated risk enriches life. Stepping off the soapbox now.

I count song writers as bonified poets because both most usually have to tell a complete story with very few words; with the song writer most often trying to perform that task within the span of all of three minutes. Fogerty’s critics accuse that his songs are simple, as if that’s a bad thing. His autobiography has lots of short sentences because he needs just a few words to get his point across. He, is not given to using big words and explains his position in Fortunate Son:

“Susie Q” is a pretty simple song. After Sgt. Pepper, rock and roll grew up and everybody got all brainy and highfalutin and introspective and impotent – I mean important. Some people look down on what made rock and roll what it is in the first place: fun. Loud, in-your-face, rebellious. Full of attitude. Definitely not “I have a dissertation that I must explain.” I’m a guy who admires “Wooly Bully” as much as “The Times They Are a-Changin’ (p. 137).”

At a time when most rock bands were trying to one-up each other with the most compelling and meaningful protest song John Fogerty was remaining true to his blues and rhythm and blues roots and inventing swamp rock which was his take on delta blues with a rock-n’-roll infusion. He only did one protest song in the entire career of Creedence Clearwater Revival, but it was the ultimate protest song. Give the man his due.

In 1990 he came to realize that he had never even seen the delta even though the vibe of so many of his songs such as “Born on the Bayou,” and “Run Through the Jungle,” caused a lot of fans (including me) to think that that was where he came from. He then began visiting the grave sites of his blues heroes buried in Mississippi six times over a six-week period, even purchasing a headstone for the grave site of Charley Patton who Fogerty felt was one of the early blues best singers. When you have heroes, the best thing you can do is honor them.

Although about as close to the sixties San Francisco acid-rock music scene as any musician could get, he never adopted it or identified with its ethos. John Fogerty was his own man who did things his own way and one of the things he insisted on doing was to give his audiences their money’s worth by never performing high or drunk. Bill Graham felt the same way, and Fogerty has a huge admiration for the man. He takes a few shots at the Grateful Dead regarding their penchant for perpetually playing while completely fucked up. He just isn’t into it.

Despite his opposition to the Vietnam war, it’s a touching irony that Vietnam veterans are among his biggest fans. Earlier in his career a Vietnam vet had told him that when his battalion was sent out on night maneuvers to engage the enemy, before leaving their base that they would blast “Bad Moon Risin’,” over the sound system. It bolstered their courage and perhaps made the enemy think: These guys really are crazy. Let’s get out of here. His autobiography starts on the south lawn of President Barack Obama’s White House for a performance for the President, the First Lady, and America’s war veterans that was to be called A Salute to the Troops: In Performance at the White House. The concert was then to be broadcast world-wide on the Armed Forces Network. Fogerty is getting ready to perform and debating in his own mind on whether or not to open with “Fortunate Son.” He first graciously complimented the President and the vets in attendance and then did what he had always done. He sang that song with everything he had in him, and the vets went ballistic.

Indeed, John Fogerty is one of America’s most fortunate sons.

Book Promo: "Lines and Lyrics: Glimpses of the Writing Life" 4:16

Cobbling together $7,500 from friends, family, or anyone else that would lend it to him Wenner started the magazine on a tightly stretched shoestring based in a printer’s archaic shop in San Francisco’s warehouse district. In exchange for hiring its services, the printer gave the magazine free rent on an upper floor. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, or the audience more accessible, as the “summer of love” was just beginning to wind down. Stated Wenner in the first black and white newsprint issue that had a press run of 40,000 copies and featured John Lennon on the cover:

We have begun a new publication reflecting what we see are the changes in rock and roll and the changes related to rock and roll…Rolling Stone is not just about the music, but also about the attitudes that the music embraces. We have been working quite hard on it and hope you can dig it (p. 64).

In the early years John Lennon and Yoko Ono were the magazine’s biggest advocates lending their considerable celebrity to it, and Lennon with his no nonsense outspoken style of expression was always a star interview until that fateful day when he never again would be. Writes Wenner:

We had done the interview in New York City, December 8^th, 1970. Ten years later, to the day, John was dead (p. 129).

There’s a lot of name dropping and A-list cronyism going on here, but enough whining from the peanut gallery because he lived the life, knew the participants, and earned his station as a rocker because Wenner understood the essence of Rock and Roll deep in the marrow of his bones and was always down to abide by its primary rule: you had to know how to party, and Wenner was adept at it.

Lennon was just one in a vast list of rock stars, movie stars, record executives, writers, political figures, and even presidents that Wenner would befriend, and why wouldn’t they be his friend? Wenner was handsome, engaging, generous, and stood at the helm of a magazine that grew to 1,000,000 monthly subscribers by the 1980’s and to an international readership of over 6,000,000 by the 2,000’s thus giving it the power to make them all richer and more famous than the already were. Wenner makes mention of Mick, Bono, Yoko, Dylan, the Boss, Michael Douglas, Jackie Onassis, John Kennedy Junior, Lorne Michaels, Pete Townsend, Barbara Streisand, Bette Midler, and Bill Clinton all by their first name and almost in a dismissive “it’s no big deal” type of passing, and readers instantaneously know who he is talking about. This is access behind the curtain of fame on an unprecedented level.

With fast rising professional photographer Annie Leibovitz acting as the driving force, to be on the famed cover of Rolling Stone, became something of an industry wide obsession. A case in point being:

Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show hit number one with their single “The Cover of the Rolling Stone” in which the band lamented that although they “take all kinds of pills that give us all kinds of thrills,” they just can’t get on the cover of Rolling Stone.

We put them on the cover. Fair trade (p. 169).

As brilliant as the photography was, as informative as the record reviews were, as glittering as the stars and celebrities were, what separated the journalistic men from the boys was Rolling Stones’ writing by its incredible stable of writers. Contributing writers looks like a who’s who of contemporary journalism: Cameron Crowe, Joe Eszterhas, Ben Fong-Torrez, P.J. O’Rourke, and the ranting and raving always bombastic Hunter Stockton Thomson the inventor and sole practitioner of gonzo journalism. But even Thompson had to adhere to Wenner’s bedrock rules, the ones that caused them to stand head and shoulders above the rest.

The criteria I had set forth for Rolling Stone stories from the beginning were these: It had to be about something interesting and important, and not duplicate something you could get elsewhere; you had to report the hell out of it, meaning be passionate and get involved; and you had to write it well – long if necessary – and accurately in every detail, and in the end tell the truth about what you think (p. 330).

After ten years in San Francisco, Wenner and his staff were all maturing, pairing off, starting to raise families, growing up in other words, and while San Francisco has been and probably always will be home to several fine countercultural presses it will never be the center of the literary universe. New York is, and Wenner knew it and he just had to be there. Old hippies and die-hard acid rock fans accused him of selling out, but that’s what they always do when someone puts on a suit and tie which is exactly what Wenner did after relocating to Manhattan in 1977.

Along with Atlantic Records Producer Ahmet Ertegun, Wenner devised the concept for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which had its first induction ceremony in 1983. Twelve years and $30,000,000 later its permanent home was based in Cleveland, Ohio set at the edge of Lake Erie in a jewel of a shining glass building designed by famed architect I. M. Pei. Perhaps the best way to describe the magic of the Hall and the absolute excitement and glamour of its induction ceremonies is to look at Wenner’s own that occurred in 2004:

I started out feeling blasé about my own induction into the Hall of Fame in 2004 but ended up with my head in the clouds. Prince, Traffic, George Harrison, ZZ Top, Bob Seger, and Jackson Browne were in my class, all of whom were close to Rolling Stone, in our world. Sharing the night with Jackson, whose songs and comradeship were such treasures to me, made it even richer. A week before the show, Ahmet told me that he had gotten Mick to come in from London to induct me.

We sat in a cluster of tables with Keith Richards and his daughters, and Mick’s kids; Olivia Harrison was at the next table with her son, Dhani, his father’s doppelganger, and Yoko and Sean. It was a mess of Beatles and Rolling Stones and my kids, who all knew each other. I had Jane, Matt, the three boys, Don Henley, Tom and Shelia Wolfe, and Mick. It was a black-tie family picnic (p. 411).

Ahmet walked onstage with his cane, introducing my induction and giving a shout-out to Jane and Ralph Gleason. He spoke with gravitas. I tried to stay in the moment and take in the historical weight of Ahmet’s speech. Then he said, “To further my remarks, Sir Mick Jagger.” There he was, smiling wide with his tooth diamond sparking, dressed in a black suit…”

Jagger’s closing comments were:

“This is a wonderful, heartfelt occasion, and I will treasure the memory of it all the way to the airport (p. 412).”

At first glance, this appears to be an intimidating book weighing in at 556 pages and giving off the whiff of a real slog. But Wenner is an editor’s editor and broke it down into a mere 77 chapters rarely exceeding ten pages in length. Once the reader gets revved up it’s hard to put on the brakes. Editors are a rare and dying breed with their extinction becoming even more rapid at the hands of online self-publishing. They are realists and sometimes efficiently ruthless with an instinctive ability to get to what’s at the heart of a story and to cut what could give it a seizure. Above all else, they understand and are able to manipulate the ego’s and neuroses’ of their authors and have a sixth sense for how to draw out their best work. He and Thompson were meant for each other and neither could have achieved the heights that they did without the other.

America’s financial meltdown of 2008, which Wenner places at the feet of his archenemy, George W. Bush II, sent shock waves through the publishing industry, and Wenner was forced to adapt to the times with the three magazines he now published.

Those of us who ran magazine companies could read our own numbers and knew what the competition was doing. The internet was no longer a looming threat: it was at the goddamned front door, a vampire with seven hundred untethered tentacles, the ubiquitous iPhone. It was also causing our circulation, as well as our advertising, to drop. This was serious trouble.

I thought magazines could fight back if we played to our strengths: photography, design, and writing. But most magazines were trying to look like websites, imitating what the internet could do better, quicker, and give away free, Not a good strategy at any level. Magazine publishers had been discounting and sweepstaking subscriptions for so long that they had created the aura of low value and the expectation of low prices (p. 469).

When we added online advertising it seemed we had found our little piece of the digital pie and our business would survive, as lost advertising spending started coming back. We had five years of growth and profits. But the three dragons of Silicon Valley – Facebook, Apple, and Google – as if they didn’t have enough billions of dollars, came to steal what was left. They appropriated for themselves the intellectual property created by magazines and newspapers, repackaged it, gave it away free to our customers, and sold ads to our advertisers. They tricked the publishers into thinking that they were building traffic for their own websites. That was a lie, and one day the dragons walked away, leaving their victims in the news and journalism business to bleed out (p. 470).

Rolling Stone, even with decreased subscribers, was able to maintain its place as America’s best magazine by reporting the hottest stories, one such title being: The Runaway General by fast rising Michael Bates who worshiped at the feet of Hunter S. Thompson. A leaked prerelease copy found its way to Joe Biden’s and eventually Barack Obama’s desks, and the subject of the article, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal the head of our troops in Afghanistan and openly critical of the administration’s policies, was recalled on June 22^nd, 2010. Detractor’s accused the magazine of not just reporting the news, but of being responsible for creating it. Wenner explains his position:

We never tried to pretend that Rolling Stone was neutral. We were going to be scrupulously accurate and tell the truth. The word “objective” was a red herring, a claim that stating an opposing point of view was necessary even though that view might be a blatant falsehood. “Objectivity” didn’t mean fairness or honesty; it was just covering your ass. I thought that prejudicial adjectives and liberal cliches in the reportorial copy undercut the power of the facts. And I didn’t want to repeat what I had read elsewhere. We had to find something new and meaningful to add, not be the third or fourth article about the latest cause du jour. Nothing was going to be gained by blowing up. It was time to buckle up (p. 478).

That’s swimming against the current and having a real pair, and that’s what ultimately made Jann Wenner the greatest magazine editor of his generation, but the nonstop unending corporate takeovers of anything special and meaningful in America meant that the wolves were circling and Wenner was forced to develop his exit strategy.

The new reality, the race to pay back the bank before they forced us to sell, meant fewer pages, cheaper paper, and cutting back editorial – no more Sebastiao Salgado portfolios, no more full staffing. We narrowed our range, pulled back on bravado. The mission was to save money, which became a filter for everything. The fun started going out of it. Instead, it became a question of running out the clock. I would miss my plane, my home away from home, but those times of go-anywhere adventure were already gone (p. 490).

I was certain that Wenner Media wouldn’t survive as an independent company. It was the twilight of stand-alone magazines. The time was on the horizon where we could survive only under the umbrella of a big company. Within three years I expected to sell, take a short term employment contract, and at the fiftieth anniversary, in 2017, take my bow…I would hold on until then. The money play would have been to sell quickly, but I loved it and was not yet ready to let go (p. 491).

Hanging on wasn’t going to be easy. A crisis of confidence occurred in November of 2014 when an article entitled: “A Rape On Campus” turned out to be patently false. In dissecting where everything had gone wrong Wenner admitted that he and his team were guilty of running on journalistic autopilot. They believed the girl’s story and were quick to judgement, and even quicker to press with what they felt was a hot compelling news item, but alas, she had made the whole thing up, and the post mortem revealed a sloppiness in fact checking and an arrogant self-righteous in-house hubris run amok. Other journals were quick to condemn and revel in how the mighty had fallen. There are times in life when you just have to take it which was all he could do; lesson learned, back to hardnosed research and reporting; rise up from the ashes once again. Then came the broken hip, the massive heart attack, the operations, the long road to recovery, and walking with a cane.

In 2016 his son Gus found a buyer for Rolling Stone who installed him as managing editor with task number one being to drastically cut staff, costs, and quality while putting his father out to pasture. Wenner did not go quietly into that good night. Gus allowed him to do a final piece on climate change fueled by corporate greed and gallantly fought by a child, the prophet for Generation Z, Greta Thunberg.

The final curtain for Wenner’s long tenure at Rolling Stone was drawn shut after the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary – there wasn’t much of a bow – life goes on and the stories have to be reported, so he started in on this colossal and deliciously gossipy memoir. In his final chapter entitled: “My Last Letter From The Editor,” Wenner is humble and introspective; the old warrior no longer with a taste for battle but rationalizing why his former battles had been necessary.

I never thought I was a “spokesman” for a generation. Even to the extent that there was some truth to that, I recoiled from the idea. It was a trap. Mine was a generation that was looking for leadership, especially moral leadership, but those who thought they were the leader usually weren’t. Bob Dylan was allergic to the idea. Now I accept the fact that I had helped shape the way my generation viewed itself, its responsibilities, its laughter, its achievements. But I didn’t speak for it; I spoke to it (p. 553).

A longer review than is necessary, you say? A longer and more important career that usual, say I. When you think about it, given Wenner’s expansive reign at Rolling Stone, this book is surprising short – the masterful work of an editor’s editor. Marvelously done. Five stars. Pop the cork, and pass the champagne. Long live Rolling Stone, and thank God that Jann Wenner created it.

The Rise of Homo Sapiens – What’s so Special About Humanity?

Ever since we crawled out of the ocean / And stood upright on the land / There are some things

that we just don’t / Understand

Don Henley

“Building the Perfect Beast” Building the Perfect Beast (Copyright 1984).

How did humankind separate itself from the great apes, its closest genetic relatives? Two significant advantages were what allowed for the rise of Homo sapiens and their evolution into a recognizable form of civilization, those being opposable thumbs, and higher intelligence. Australopithecus arrived in Africa between four million and two million years ago, followed through the centuries by Homo rudolfensis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and finally Homo sapiens (us).

Until recent decades, most texts delving into anthropology assumed these various renditions of the human animal occurred lineally with a more advanced species replacing an earlier model. Recent theory recognizes that the various species most likely experienced a parallel evolution, in particularly with neanderthalensis and sapiens literally fighting it out for supremacy. Neanderthalensis was bigger, hairier, and much stronger than any given individual of sapiens, but alas, they were less intelligent which led to their demise as sapiens merely banded together in greater numbers, fashioned more advanced weapons of war, and eventually completely eradicated them. With neanderthalensis out of the way, modern mankind was left with no other option than to turn on each other; and this we indulged in with a vengeance.

The Advent of Civilization(s) – Let the Killing Begin

Hammurabi’s Code…According to the code, people are divided into two genders and three

classes: superior people, commoners, and slaves.

Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Copyright 2015).

When Homo sapiens vanquished Homo neanderthalensis from the face of the Earth they learned a lesson that would lead to their rise as the apex species on the planet, and what could well lead to their extinguishing themselves from the planet; that being that intelligence trumps brute strength, that there is safety in numbers, and that the advent of what we call “civilization” would enable the most cunning among us to rise to the position of the most powerful, entitled, and privileged amongst us. It’s a reasonable assumption that the shrewdest among prehistoric man found subtle ways to suggest to his clansmen that he should be nominated as leader/chief/king.

As humans evolved from hunting/gathering societies to agrarian societies the process of becoming progressively more civilized also evolved. This evolution was both boon and bane to our species in that life proved to be somewhat easier, at least superficially, but it also concurrently became much more complex. A case in point is the progressive reduction in the diversity of our diet that slowly led to many slow-killing diseases due to the lack of varied nutrition. Bellies were filled from massive monocultural crop harvests but oftentimes the overall general health of the farming society was compromised. Life spans increased due to safety in numbers, and the protection of the community/castle/city walls, but the freedoms inherent in free roaming nomadic societies was greatly reduced. Quickly laws were enacted, and a system of punishments devised to bring the law breakers back into the will of the overall community.

Initially, if wrongdoers were not killed outright, they were severely punished to the point of being marked with scars by cutting, piercing, or burning, and then they were released back into the general population to live in damning shame for all the others to see. When this form of reprisal proved ineffective, or the numbers of wrongdoers proved too numerous, the concept of imprisonment came to the fore. Harsh punishment through public shaming now became barbaric punishment behind prison walls.

The upper crust of any given society was always in the minority, because once a measurement of wealth and privilege becomes established, there is never enough to go around. The higher ups soon grew to fear the more numerous lower downs and needed some recognizable system of protection from them. In other words, they needed to preserve their civilized life style, and to do this they needed some form of bodyguards to enforce the laws that they drew up to separate the haves from the have not’s. This gave rise to various forms of policing, and the necessity to identify what their tasks were and what could be utilized for them to accomplish these tasks. There was resistance, of course, as everyone in any given society would like to know what they can and cannot do. Throughout the history of civilization the lower downs were always to learn that the laws would define what was and was not acceptable behavior on their part, and concerning the police – they can do whatever want. The primary tool available to the police is the license to inflict violence, even the power to perpetrate death upon the policed. Isn’t it a paradox of all paradoxes that those most entrusted with protecting civilized society are the ones allowed to behave in a most uncivilized manner?

When societies grew to the size and status of nations they also began to recognize that some nations were more powerful than some other nations. Weakness in mankind invites attack from the more powerful for it is always easier for them to take than to earn. Greed is the scourge of our species only exceeded by one other phenomenon of our own making; that being the advent of religions which all seemed to have one thread of commonality. It wasn’t kindness, it wasn’t generosity, it wasn’t a high regard for humanity; it was superiority. All religions claimed to be the one true religion, and many allowed their believers to wage war upon the believers of the other religions. In cases where the outright aggression of warfare is avoided, religions turn to punishment as the fuel that they run on. This is true all over the world, and it’s just as true in democratic countries, in particularly in the United States of America. Writes author Anne-Marie Cusac in Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America (2009) in Chapter 1: Where Punishment Is the Subject, Religion Is the Predicate:

As I will argue, American punishment has with the possible exception of several decades in the twentieth century, been a religious and, more properly a Christian activity (p.19).

The basic inhumanity that any given man extends towards his fellow man initially stemmed from nothing more than greed and ill-gotten gain. Then it became all about religious superiority, and unless contained at this point, will soon become almost exclusively about the “us” versus the “other.” Anyone different than us is less than us, and beyond that deserving to be punished by us. They have to pay for being different. The fundamental belief of supposedly civilized societies that allow themselves to come to believe that they have the right to become an oppressive society is that someone has to pay – somebody always has to pay.

An Uncommon Hatred – Slavery

The master who recognizes no humanity in his slave, loses it in himself.

Milton Meltzer

Slavery: A World History (Last copyright 1993).

Although definitions of the institution of slavery are frequently comingled, especially today in America’s equality charged environment, throughout history enslavement involved peoples of all races. It’s often said that the victors are the ones who get to write the history, and it should be noted that they are also the ones most likely to enslave their vanquished foes. While this may seem inhuman in the extreme, slavery was a step up from the consequences of prehistoric warfare where the general consensus was to kill all vanquished enemies in lieu of having to feed them. It’s undeniable that slavery arose concurrently with mankind’s transformation from hunters/gathers to agrarian societies.

At first, slavery was simply looked upon as just one more component necessary to support agrarian economies. There was soil, water, seed stock, and labor (slaves). The dominant ruling society looked upon their slaves unemotionally, and as long as not too raucously opposed the higher class just ignored the rights of the enslaved class. The callousness, the uncommon hatred that would become infused with the institution grew out of the rationalization that what they were capable of producing was more important than the quality of their lives. Although the masters considered their slaves as less than them, they had to concede that they were more than their draft animals, so it may seem mystifying why they treated them so much worse. Plantation overseers in the American south didn’t bullwhip their horses and then rub cayenne pepper into the cuts as they did to some slaves. They didn’t go to that extreme because little would have been accomplished by doing so. What they learned, and what became inherent in their behavior, was the dark art of intimidation which often bordered on the sadistic, and sometimes crossed the line into the fatalistic.

While just about everyone knows of the first African slaves brought to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, very few know that they became indentured for a period of seven years just like their white indentured counterparts imported from Great Britain. In fact, at least one amongst their numbers, one Anthony Johnson, completed his period of servitude and rose to become a plantation owner which was populated by both his black and white slaves.

At first, there were Britons who voluntarily sold themselves into indentured service for a chance of a new life to free themselves of the religious persecution and overcrowded conditions rampant in England at that time. Sometimes called “Freewillers,” they were treated as slaves throughout their period of servitude which was often extended against their will through various unfair schemes derived as punishment for a variety of petty offenses. Next the abundant numbers of abandoned and destitute street children were shipped out of the country to work in the colonies or on the sugar plantations of the West Indies, in particularly the island of Barbados. Then Great Britain started to purge her prison population. No matter how the human flesh was delivered, their lives in the Americas were ones of deep misery. Roughly 30% died during the ocean voyage to the New World; then half of those who survived the voyage died from overwork before exhausting their period of servitude. Those who did survive their period of servitude had little chance of survival on their own and even less chance of upward mobility. The indentured servitude system was designed to benefit landowners who become known as “The Grandees” through a practice known as the headright system whereby a planter was granted 50 acres for each living servant they brought to America. Huge expanses of land were quickly accumulated which just as quickly demanded more importation of very cheap labor to work them. Productively was an all-important and all-encompassing goal and cruelty was the vehicle by which that goal was achieved. States Don Jordan and Michael Walsh in: White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (2007).

In the 1620’s, the yield averaged 400 pounds of tobacco per worker. By the end of the century it averaged 1,900 pounds. This does not appear to be the result of the introduction of new technology or new equipment. In the 1660’s there were some 7,000 workers on Virginia’s plantations but only 150 plows between them. One is driven to the conclusion that workers achieved this fivefold increase in productivity due to the brutal pressure that was exerted upon them, day in and day out, for decades. Edmund S. Morgan refers to the principal significance of indentured servitude being that it taught planters how to use violence to compel workers to work, thus setting the precedent for the violence of African slavery (p. 194).

The 1670’s became the tipping point decade whereby white servitude transferred to complete lifetime black slavery. In 1671 the Virginia lawmakers decreed that all “Non-Christian” slaves were to be enslaved for life. The imported Africans were not Christians. In 1673 they further decreed that black slavery was now hereditary. If the mother was black, even if impregnated by a white master, the resulting child was deemed black and thus a slave for life.

Racism was a relative thing for the servile lower class towards the end of the 1670’s in that both blacks and whites were living an existence of such abject poverty that they saw little advantage in turning on one another. They had a common oppressor in their masters. With the rise in slave revolts toward the end of the century, during which white and black slaves oftentimes participated in equal measure, the planter class realized that they had to divide and conquer. State Jordan and Walsh:

European colonies in parts of the Caribbean had created a yeoman class by encouraging planters to parent children with slave or servant women. The Chesapeake colonies had not done this; in fact, they had positively discouraged inter-racial coupling. The task facing Virginia’s rulers now was to fashion a class that gave them ‘as many Virginians with a stake in suppressing servile insurrection as there were in fomenting it.’

They played the race card. The status of the European servile class was upgraded and a sense of racial superiority instilled. Meanwhile, the process of degrading non-whites was accelerated…Hitherto, the English had never applied colour to distinguish race. Now white servants, whose daily condition was little different from the Africans, were taught that they belonged to a superior people (p. 212).

Racism was officially birthed in America. The primary intimidation of whipping all slaves was now primarily reserved for the blacks. Both races were still living a miserable existence, but one race was most definitely punished more severely than the other. With the dawn of the 1700’s America’s practice of lifetime slavery was reserved exclusively for Africans while white servitude began to slowly fade away. After the American Revolution, England was banned from sending any white indentured servants to America. This gave rise to an increase in the “triangular trade’ whereby ships from various nations sailed to the shores of West African nations to pick up slaves purchased at bulk prices and then sailed to North America and sold the slaves surviving the voyage at auction and at good profit which they invested in tobacco, cotton and other goods to resell at even higher profit in England and other European nations before repeating the process all over again. Great Briton outlawed slavery and the triangular trade in 1807, and the United States half-way followed suit the next year (1808) by supposedly outlawing the triangular trade but still allowed home grown slavery to continue within its borders. In truth, smugglers kept it going up to the start of The American Civil War in 1861. The war lasted for four years until the Confederacy surrendered on April 9^th, 1865.

Union President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1^st, 1863, opening the floodgates for freed former black slaves to join the Union Army which tipped the balance of military power to the northern forces. Thereafter, the Constitution received three additional Amendments to solidify the new-found freedom of blacks. The 13^th Amendment outlawed slavery, elements of the 14^th Amendment guaranteed that blacks could not lose their emancipation, and the 15^th Amendment gave them the right to vote.

I have written in other pieces that the black man of 1865 had more rights than the black man of 1965, but that was for only a short-lived period of time. The blatant racism promoted by the Virginia Grandees of the 1670’s would evolve into an even worse practice nearly 200 years later, and that practice was to become known as segregation.

A Thinly Veiled Hatred – The Rise of Jim Crow

Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in effect,

emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized

social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (copyright 2010).

The 11 states of the Confederacy did not readily accept that General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. This disgruntled view point quickly led to an adherence to the “Lost Cause” and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) populated by sore losers unwilling to acquiesce to the reality of their condition. They didn’t like the fact that they had lost the war. They didn’t like being under the yoke of Reconstruction. And, they didn’t like black people. States Kristian Williams in Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (2015).

During Reconstruction, vigilante actions and policing were often indistinguishable. The Klan – which saw itself as a force for order, especially against black criminality – took up night riding, at times in regular patrols. Its members stopped Black people on the roads, searched their homes, seized weapons and valuables, interrogated them about their voting plans, and often brutalized them. In many places the Klan totally regulated the social lives of the Black population, breaking up worshipping services, opposing the creation of Black schools (often with success), and establishing and enforcing a system of passes for Black workers.

In less routine actions, White mobs sometimes attacked individual Black people, Black political assemblies, and White Republicans. These attacks often involved the police as participants, or even leaders. For example, in April 1866, after a crowd of African American Union Army veterans prevented the Memphis police from arresting two of their comrades, the cops led White mobs through the streets attacking Black people at random. Mounted squads headed by police rode through Black neighborhoods, beating anyone they found on the streets and setting fire to schools, churches, and homes. The attack lasted four days, until martial law was declared. Forty-six Black and two White people died; ninety-one houses, twelve schools, and four churches were burned (p. 122)…

When Klan-type violence occurred, arrests were unusual, prosecutions rare, and convictions almost unknown. The attitudes (and sometimes involvement) of police officers and sheriff’s certainly impeded enforcement of the law, but this was only one of many obstacles standing in the way of convictions. Prosecutors were unwilling to press such cases, and magistrates were often glad to dismiss them. Klansmen frequently dominated juries – including grand juries and coroners’ juries. Witnesses and victims, like Sheriff Norris, were intimidated and refused to testify, while Klan members were eager to swear false alibis on one another’s behalf (p. 124-5).

The title “Jim Crow” was a tongue-in-cheek slur towards a black minstrel show performer and the general consensus is that The Jim Crow Laws arose in the former southern states of the Confederacy circa 1877 when various state legislatures started to pass what were commonly known as the “Black Codes.” The United States Supreme Court upheld these laws in 1896 in Plessey versus Ferguson when its issued it’s “Separate but Equal” edict which was an oxymoron of gargantuan proportions that existed until 1968 when it was in effect overturned by 36^th U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson with the enactment of the Fair Housing Act, which along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Right Act of 1965, served as the final nail in Jim Crow’s coffin; on paper at least.

In reality, America’s black population of today is just as persecuted as it was in the days of yesteryear, Home mortgages for blacks are harder to obtain and drawn up at higher interest rates than their white counterparts. Bank appraisers assign lower values to homes in black neighborhoods making upward mobility through home sales much harder to achieve. Nationally, the states in America incarcerate blacks at a minimum of five times the rate of whites, and internationally, America has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prison population. If it seems that American society has a disproportionate fixation on punishment in general, it’s because it does. Nowhere are blacks more persecuted than they are in America’s failing War on Drugs started by Richard Milhous Nixon with the formation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973 and forwarded by Ronald Reagan in 1984, and pushed ever onward and upward by Bill Clinton’s repressive “Crime Bill” in 1994. The adult males of entire inner city black populations were removed as a generation of children grew up without their fathers. Today, blacks make up roughly 15% of America’s overall population yet still account for 29% of all drug arrests. Most egregious, they only make up 12.5% of all drug users while comprising 33% of America’s prison population incarcerated solely for drug offensives.

When Barack Obama was elected as America’s first black President in 2008 it looked like America was ready to finally put the issue of racism to bed. Noting could have been further from the truth, however. Institutionalized racism and passive aggressive segregation became more subtly nuanced but just as pervasive right up until May 25^th, 2020, when white police officer Derek Chauvin placed his knee on the neck of black U.S. citizen George Floyd and did not remove it until well after Floyd was dead. America erupted in righteous indignation. American’s 45^th President Donald J. Trump, aka “The Mad King,” has shown himself for the racist he is, and our nation is now at the crossroads.

One current point of contention is the status of Confederate war monuments erected in the early 1900’s to support segregation and glorify the “Lost Cause,” but primarily to intimidate and remind blacks of who really was in charge. The Mad King opines that, “You can’t rewrite history.” To throw red meat to his base he has issued the fatwa of a ten-year prison term for anyone who dares to tear the statue of one of these traitors down. He has sent federal law enforcement of unknown and unmarked origin into Portland, Oregon to supposedly protect federal property, but in reality to intimidate citizens exercising their lawful right to peacefully protest. Make no mistake about it, we are watching a wannabe dictatorship forming before our disbelieving eyes. As usual, the tired old Nixon phraseology of “law and order” is just another one of Trump’s false narratives.

I’m not in favor of rewriting history. I am in favor of leaving some of our nation’s ignoble history in the history books for anyone interested enough in that specific subject to learn it there. When a bad history becomes a thumb in the eye to a segment of the population that suffered because of it and are constantly reminded of it – that’s inconsiderate and anti-empathetic. These dudes glorified in these bronze statues fought to keep black people enslaved and felt justified and noble in that quest. But as any sane person can see, there’s nothing noble in that. Ask the “You can’t rewrite history,” crowd how would they feel if their neighbor decided to fly the swastika on Memorial Day. That history is better left in history back where it belongs, and so too is the history of the Confederacy.

Covid 19 has taught me what’s it like to fear leaving my home for any purpose whatsoever. I now see the everyday stress of black parents who become worried every time their sons go out on the town. Clearly it is past time for America to finally live up to the promise of the oft quoted Declaration of Independence (1776). Whenever the prevailing power in a society doesn’t want to deal with the issue of their unfairness to those that they oppress, they say that the issue is, “complicated.” How complicated is it really in America’s southern states?

About the only thing that we should glorify about the memory of our Civil War is Lincoln’s, “Malice Towards None,” speech. Employ its sage advice. Let the racists go to their graves in peace. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” They will be facing it soon enough.

America’s Superior Society – The Police

The first step toward change is the understanding that things can change.

Kristian Williams

Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Copyright 2015).

Our society can’t even begin to address the issue of police reform unless we are ready to confront ourselves with how we personally currently feel about the police. As for me, I feel 60% of the police are basically honest people just trying to do their job, and unless specifically confronted, are not likely to be violent towards those that they arrest. Call this segment of the force the good cops. After that, 20% of police are indecisive as to how they would act in various scenarios. If surrounded by good partners they will behave in a good, or at least an acceptable manner; and if in the presence of bad partners they will behave just as badly as these partners do. Call this segment of the force the “chameleon cops.” Then there is the remaining 20% who are most definitely not good for the force or society in general. They may behave appropriately when in the presence of those who could censure them, but in the absence of that, they will always behave badly, get away with as much as they can, and can be counted on to make any bad situation worse. Call this segment of the force the bad cops. Applying your own opinion to this formula, how do you now feel about the police in America? This question is not intended just to stir up controversy; there’s an important underlying purpose for asking it. American society still needs some policing. The call for total defunding of all police is dangerous and not very likely to happen. When discussing how much of current police budgets to reallocate to other community based resources the vital questions are how many cops are really necessary and what should they be required to do? If you were to apply my percentages, the 60% of good cops can probably do the job, especially if their job descriptions were rewritten to exclude social work and family counseling and other forms of babysitting. The 20% of the “chameleon cops” can receive sensitivity and de-escalation training or they can hit the bricks. The remaining 20% of the bad cops simply have to go; and not over to the next county, but completely banned from police work altogether.

Radley Balko author of The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2014) sounded the alarm that something is awry with the police viewing their function as being at war with certain segments of our American Society. Writes Balko:

The federal government has been arming American cops with military-grade guns, vehicles, and other weaponry, but has little interest in knowing if all of that is affecting how and when the police use lethal force against American citizens. Cops are told all the time that the public presents a threat to them, and that threat grows more dire by the day. But as to what sort of threat cops pose to the public, the public isn’t permitted to know (p. 275).

But with the advent of camera phones we are all seeing this threat in vivid living color, not that the cops are too concerned about that, because their unions by and large have gained qualified immunity for them. When you think about it, there’s very little difference between the concept of qualified immunity and the corporate veil. The outcome of their actions towards society is essentially the same – the desire to be held harmless no matter what is done; no accountability whatsoever, in other words.

Balko is adamant in stating that he doesn’t believe that we live in a police state. He cites our ability to move around freely as an example that we are not completely controlled by cops. I differ, and offer up that if we are not living in a police state, that at the very least, we are living in a police wasteland. By that I mean that most of us who have ever been on the receiving end of police mistreatment by being force fed a heaping helping of their all-important command presence gone awry, or by their overreach of being overbearing, have come to the same conclusion as the great Hunter S. Thompson did when he wrote those immortal words: “Never call 911.” If they aren’t there they can’t cause problems, and if they are there, know that they are basically capable of doing anything with an extremely high probability of getting away with it. Indeed, many police reform proposals, such as exclusive camera and computer control of traffic violations, center around the public having less contact with the police. But what does it say of the state of policing in America that the primary recommendation to citizens to avoid suffering police brutality is for them to avoid contact with the police as much as humanly possible? Despite your best efforts towards this policy of avoidance, however, sometimes 911 calls on you. This isn’t progress. This isn’t reforming the problem, it’s avoiding it altogether. I say wasteland because the only viable way to feel safe is not to be around the police at all. Look outside, and if they are not there at all, then feel free to walk upon the land. If they are there, better to stay hidden until they leave. This is thinly veiled societal intimidation, and many cops like it that way.

It’s all about command presence, turf, and qualified immunity with the police – a superior society that through their all-powerful unions always seeks to play by their own rules, and holds a seething resentment towards anyone who takes exception to that very fact. It is a most dangerous undertaking to impugn their command presence, even when trying to run away from them. They can become so offended at having their direct orders disobeyed that some officers will simply shoot you in the back. Better not to argue with them and suffer through an arrest. You can always lodge a complaint later. Live to fight another day. It shouldn’t be that way, but unfortunately, it is. Better to utter, “Yes sir,” and “No sir,” no matter how demeaning, obnoxious, or overbearing they are. To meet their abrasiveness with any other answer is sheer insanity. Always remember the fact that too many cops allow their legally given authority to morph into undeserved feelings of superiority. They expect your respect solely because of their career choice and not because of their behavior.

When you see cops all in on protestors after the George Floyd injustice you have to ask yourself how this behavior is any different than the “all in” code of the Hell’s Angles? A case in point is Minneapolis police union president Bob Kroll who is outraged that anyone would dare to report on his 2009 off duty membership in a police motorcycle club called “City Heat” where on his motorcycle jacket was displayed a “White Power” badge which blended in nicely with his cohort’s other white supremacist symbols. Not too surprisingly, Kroll is a Trump supporter having appeared at a 2019 campaign rally where he introduced the President and whipped the crowd into a froth by stating: “The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable. The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around. He decided to start letting cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.” Incidentally, Kroll refers to Floyd as, “a dangerous criminal.” Kroll vows to get Floyd murderers Derek Chauvin and his three accomplices off and even reinstated. He sees nothing whatsoever that was “despicable” in their behavior. If you think that the police do not see themselves as a superior society, how do you square something like this?

Most police policy manuals employ ample use of the word “reasonable,” and know that they are the sole judges as to what that actually means. Reasonable suspicion and reasonable force is always at their discretion. A suggestion has been made as of late to substitute that word “reasonable” with the word “necessary” which more accurately parses the extent of their accountability, but when they are the sole judges as to their accountability, what would it really matter? In short, our American society can no longer allow the fox to guard the henhouse and expect anything other than disastrous results.

While the police unions all say their primary function is to protect officers, the oath of the officers themselves centers on defending the Constitution and the public at large. Clearly, there is an inherent disconnect here. The motto, “To protect and serve,” is disingenuous at best and untrue at worst when the people they always strive to protect and serve the most are themselves. Here’s a broad based question that should shed some light on how the public at large view the police: Do you think that the police’s primary job is to catch people or to help people? Clearly, the power of their unions must be drastically altered or completely absolved.

The nature of policing itself is designed to create tension between the police and those policed. To the non-police this is a person who is most likely going to cause you some form of inconvenience, expense, or hardship. Any approaching cop usually represents a cause for concern. Rarely do interfaces go very well. Consider the possibilities in ascending order of peril: disrespect, confusing commands, ticketing, handcuffing which usually means being jailed or occasionally killed. The only ones that don’t seem to be afraid of the police are the police, and most cow-tie to their so-called “Blue wall of silence.” Like a secret society, a fraternity, or a cult with an unspoken code, with secret handshakes and tips of the hat, the cops pledge allegiance to their culture as opposed to the public that they are sworn to protect. It’s more important to respect the pack than to protect the herd; and that’s what’s wrong with policing in America.

The Mad King spews excessive misinformation towards the liberal’s call to defund the police when what most really mean is to examine the potential benefits that could come from a reallocation of resources.

It is time to break up the powerful police unions, to ban choke holds, to mandate body cameras on all police officers, and end any whiff of qualified immunity; and know that ending qualified immunity relies on setting the precedent the way your first job or your first car loan could not be consummated unless you had at least one previous job or some established line of credit. Without it, everything you ever wanted was a no go. In other words, nobody wants to be the first to stick their neck out. Well…that’s just complete and utter cowardly and buck-passing bullshit; because it’s an undeniable fact that before any given precedent became a precedent some legal entity had to push the case and some judge had to rule on it. In other words, why aren’t those involved in America’s legal system doing their jobs?

Where are the Prophets? – A Voice in the Wilderness

Congress is too old. They don’t have a stake in the game.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (10/13/1989 - ?).

The family of man is now facing the biggest existential threat to its continued existence, and it’s not the Coronavirus, it’s the annihilation of the earth itself. With all the current distractions now rampant in our great land environmentalism is lost in the wilderness of apathy and greed and needs someone to lead it out. I said as much in 2005 in Environmental Cognizance: Towards the Year 2020:

But in order to inherit the Earth, change is inevitable. There are so many of us that you would think that one new leader, one new free thinker, one new child of God might be able to rise up and show us all a solution to the global environmental problems. Yes, it’s a big world out there and no one knows when or from where the next prophet will come, yet we all hope she/he will come soon. It’s such a big world (p.102).

Unbeknownst to me that prophet had already been born fourteen years earlier and turned 30 years old on October 13^th, 2019. She is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) from New York State’s 14^th Congressional District. She rose to power by defeating incumbent Democratic Congressman Joe Crawley in the June 2018 primary election. Crawley’s campaign war chest exceeded Ocasio-Cortez’s by a ratio of 10 to 1 and he was the fourth most powerful Democrat in The House of Representatives at the time of his defeat. Ocasio-Cortez went on to defeat Republican Anthony Pappas in the November 2018 midterm election. An underdog if there ever was one, her Socialist Democratic platform mirrored that of Vermont Senator’s Bernie Sanders’s which was put forth in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. She served on the Sanders campaign and became indoctrinated with the concepts of free college, universal health care, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and dismantling the richest one percent of America’s population through fair and just taxation. None of that, however, makes her a prophet. That was revealed in February of 2019 when she and Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced their “Green New Deal”.

Adopting the “New Deal” title in similar fashion to FDR of yesteryear, this bold sweeping proposal takes as a given that changes of gargantuan proportions are needed to lift America out of the doldrums of economic stagnation and to make the changes necessary for us to compete technologically in the future on the world stage. In addition to incorporating the initial planks of the Sanders’ campaign (free college, universal health care, livable wage, power to the people, etcetera), this resolution also proposed that the entire country switch to 100% renewal energy sources and achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030, and make major investments in the research and development of clean energy. Inherent in the intent of the proposal is the necessity to revitalize and/or rebuild our nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

Republicans instantaneously stripped a gear, and Hannity went over the deep end. They called her brash. They called her irreverent. They called her cheeky as a thinly veiled slur towards her Puerto Rican descent. What they couldn’t call her was wrong. In short, she is an old white man’s worst nightmare come to life; unless of course, some of them care about the fate of their children and grandchildren. Even the Mad King has noticed and readily states that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has “it,” and thank God she does. I say, like it or not, the prophet has arrived, so deal with it. The Mad King also says, “She doesn’t know anything.” She knows enough to know that the old paradigm simply isn’t working for her and her generation, and is certainly smart enough to quickly learn what she needs to know on the job. She has thoroughly absorbed the lyrics of Jonathan Edwards’s 1971 hippy classic resistance song titled: “Sunshine Go Away Today.”

Sunshine go away today / I don’t feel much like dancing / Some man’s come he’s trying to run my life / Don’t know what he’s asking…He can’t even run his own life / I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine….

Back I 2005 when I decided to add the subtitle to Environmental Cognizance: Towards the Year 2020 even I felt that there was enough time to right our listing environmental ship. Boy, was I ever wrong. Al Gore had already been robbed of the 2000 presidential election, Bush Two significantly weakened The Department of the Interior and The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Obama did very little to re-strengthen them as he talked the talk but failed to walk the walk, and then the Mad King appointed dolts determined to eliminate them all together to lead them. Those 15 years slipped by in the proverbial blink of an eye, and now things are so much worse than I originally thought. 2030 is just ten years off, and if the world’s environmental collapse holds true to recent form, we may not even have that long; yet the naysayers, the climate deniers, the rich and powerful who want to remain that way, and the entrenched old white men running our country all say that the Green New Deal is a rash overreaction. Well that’s what they have always said while failing to notice (or care) that we are plummeting off an environmental cliff. The conservatives also accuse AOC and her ilk of not caring about an ever widening generational divide. I say, why should they? The earth is theirs’ to inherit.

The Family of Man – There is Always a Changing of the Guard

“You cannot be afraid to speak up and speak out for what you believe. You have to have

courage, raw courage.”

John Lewis (1940 – 2020).

July 18^th, 2020. John Lewis died today; he of the spine tingling, soul shaking voice that could make you feel that you could march through brick walls. Flags flew at half-mast. Tears were shed. A few days later classy former first lady Michelle Obama posted an endearing short video of him joyfully dancing at a campaign event for Stacy Abrams to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy,” and as a dancer, John Lewis was fly and in command. A man of circumstance, who had a career for the ages. I thought to myself, They don’t make them like John Lewis, anymore. Thankfully, upon reflection, I realized that I was wrong about that; in fact, children are being born every day who could rise up to be just as significant as John Lewis ever was, hopefully in fact, one of them could be President.

The 2020’s are poised to be the most significant decade of the twenty-first century, because if they aren’t, humankind may not survive the century. We of the boomer generation look fondly back at the 1960’s as the most significant decade of the twentieth century in terms of social justice and championing for equality, and those kids out there right now marching in the streets protesting injustice are the one’s carrying the torch for their generation. Let’s hope that 40 years hence that they will be able to feel the same way. The rise of AOC is on the shoulders of an emerging environmental awareness, or epiphany if you will, that we only have ten years, one decade, to get things right, or they will forever continue to slide abysmally toward being all wrong.

The life of any family is like breathing. We can remember those who have gone on before us, but we breath our day-to-day air with those that are still with us. That I feel that I will soon be forgotten is because I have quickly forgotten others. That is quite simply inherent in human nature. Life is for the living, and a better life is when the living live and breathe in peace and harmony with one another. In the future of the family of man, life should be like a breath of fresh air.

Keeping the Family United – Mom Loves Us All

Don’t want to get myself shot down / By some trigger-happy policeman / Gotta keep a hold on

my sanity / I’m a twentieth century man but I don’t want to die here.

The Kink’s

“20^th Century Man” Muswell Hillbillies (copyright 1971).

When the twentieth century melted into the twenty-first century America was pretty much chugging along on autopilot. Rich were getting richer and poor were getting poorer. The pressures inherent in twentieth century living for the poorer classes appeared like they were going to more or less remain the same or possibly even get worse in the new millennium. Then something happened that united the country with an ironclad will to comfort and support each other – September 11^th, 2001, made the citizenry proud to be American, proud of our police and firemen, proud of our resolve. This was a gold-plated opportunity to unite the entire country, and for a short while that did happen; then, the opportunity was lost.

The Iraq War intended to purge that nation of its weapons of mass destruction proved to be an unmitigated disaster when none were found. Issuing his comeuppance to Osama bin Laden on May 2^nd, 2011, while widely celebrated in the U.S., soon rang as a hollow achievement that was overshadowed by the rise of ISIS in 2014. Donald J. Trump ascended to the Presidency of the U.S.A. in 2016 even though he lost the popular vote by 3,000,000 ballots. Under his chaotic “leadership” American institutions began to fall like dominoes as his cabinet choices were expunged faster than the revolving door of his past wives and girlfriends. If Trump wanted to dismantle a federal agency he was sure to appoint the politician who most hated it in charge of it. The scorched earth trail of agency appointments burned so fast and so completely that any given agency leader is now referred to as the “Acting Head of…[you name it].” Appointments and dismissals are happening so fast that it’s been suggested that their names be displayed on an easily erasable whiteboard. And just when it looked like this raging pandemonium was about to be accepted as commonplace “governing” the Coronavirus hit our shores in early January 2020 even though the leader of the free world did nothing about it until well into March. We were to discover that Trump had eliminated Obama’s National Security Council (NSC) directorate for global health and security and bio-defense designed to address pandemics just as ruthlessly as he had wiped out anything else that had reeked of his predecessor’s leadership. America’s economy cratered and Congress’s first bailout package, the appropriately titled “Cares Act” did little to slow the descent of the plummeting middle class while big business and the big banks quickly gobbled up the readily available federal cash as small business’s reeled and then collapsed. Just when it looked like conditions couldn’t get any worse, they did, when the George Floyd murder shocked the nation. So now here we are, all caught up until the Mad King leads us into the next national calamity that is completely avoidable, that being, the upcoming National Presidential Election. Paraphrasing the Temptation’s “Ball of Confusion,” and the band played on. The youth, the empathetic, those imbued with any basic sense of fairness are now protesting in the streets, including, get this, the moms.

All hail the mothers of Portland, Oregon offering themselves up as human shields to protect their righteous children from The Mad hardboiled society, very big on punishment and completely immune to empathy. How bad did American intelligence have to be to not know that he was “secretly” building up his war machine? The Catholic Church was mute, even cowardly, in refusing to speak out, or to even acknowledge his murdering of Jews in the name of ethnic cleansing. In other words, if you don’t think that something just as bad as Nazi Germany could happen today, you obviously refuse to watch even a small sampling of Fox News. How long will it be before Trump orchestrates his own “Night of the long knives?” While those not too particularly studious of history assume that Hitler just walked in and took over Germany, in actuality his rise to complete power required a number of steps that occurred over a two-year period.

In 1933 Hitler pushed through the “Enabling Act” which effectively made him Germany’s dictator. He was able to do this after a propaganda campaign that convinced the citizenry that there was an existential threat afoot within the country in the form of communist subversives. Sound familiar? Sound similar to Trump’s and Barr’s insistence that American citizens protesting injustice in our city’s streets are in reality “terrorists?” Hitler held a fear of a far left wing faction of the Nazi party called the Strasserist (SA) whose members numbered in the neighborhood of 2,000,000, and in actuality, outnumbered the country’s standing army. This alarmed not only Hitler, but the army brass, and they struck a deal whereby the SA’s power would be broken in exchange for a loyalty oath from army officers to Hitler. Sound familiar? Isn’t that exactly what Trump demanded of former FBI Director James Comey? Between June 30^th and July 2^nd, 1934, army loyalists rounded up hundreds of SA members and a minimum of 85 of them were executed; the entire event living in infamy, again as “The night of the long knives.” Hitler thereafter assumed complete control of the country and was unopposed to wage war on Europe. One of Hitler’s most famous quotes was: “If you tell a lie frequently enough, it will be believed.” Sound familiar?

King’s secret police. This harkens back to another period in time; the 1930’s and the rise of Adolph Hitler. The comparisons between Der Fuhrer and Trump are frightening. One theory postulated, concerning how a monster like Hitler could ever have come to power, is that life in Germany was so hard due to the dictates of The Treaty of Versailles that the citizenry became indifferent, even numb, to the treatment of others because they themselves felt severely mistreated. Punishment in this case bred a punitive society. They were a severe,

Donald J. Trump is a diabolical hybrid between Nixon and Hitler and has the potential to be worse than either or both combined. This threat is on high display dominating the news cycle 24/7, and yet we choose to tell ourselves that it can’t be as bad as it seems because rarely is anything ever as bad as it seems. The only problem is, that with Trump, everything is worse than it seems. Who knows what damage he’s doing behind the scenes? Mom – mom knows. When our own mothers feel compelled to protect our safety by taking to the streets it’s a sure sign that something is really wrong with our country to say nothing of the world. Mama earth who nurtures us all is in turmoil, and is in need of protecting if the family of man is to survive. If you won’t protect your own mother, who will you protect?

If Not Now, Then When? – Will the Family of Man Ever be a Reality?

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the

American psyche. We have a profound hatred for the weak and the poor, and a corresponding

groveling terror before the rich and successful, and

we’re building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

Matt Taibbi

The Divide: American Justice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (copyright 2014).

Is all this “family of man” business a dream, or a pipe dream? When you look at the deep divisions amongst Americans who represent a mere 5% of the world’s population and then compare them against the even deeper divisions amongst the world’s remaining population, it is easy to feel that the whole situation is hopeless. But, all there is – is hope. Therein lies the future of the entire planet. The complete disregard for the sanctity of human life is the biggest hurdle to guaranteeing that it will continue on into the future. The complexity of the human body itself is nothing short of miraculous, and yet there are so many people that feel that they can take human life with impunity either because they don’t believe what you believe, or worse yet, won’t do exactly what you tell them to do. Complete and total domination of the human spirit for personal gain has been a characteristic of mankind ever since our various renditions of our various species started walking upright on the land. Considering our ignoble and deplorable history, why should this moment in time, right here, right now, be any different? Because it has to be, or humanity is doomed. Because momentum to finally recognize the rights of all people has risen to the tipping point. That is why the Georg Floyd murder sparked worldwide protests. No human being should just have their life as nonchalantly snuffed out as one would crush a cigarette butt under the sole of their shoe. There was just something so viscerally wrong about it that no one could condone it, no one could ignore it, and no one could look away. Floyd’s human rights had obviously been stepped upon; figuratively and literally, and anyone possessing a shred of humanity found themselves questioning themselves: why him and not me?

If the family of man is to ever truly be a family the transformation has to start with a deep abiding respect for human life and human rights. In actuality, this realization is nothing new. On December 10^th, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was ratified at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris France when the then 58 members of the recently formed United Nations (1945) cast 48 votes in favor, eight abstentions, with two countries declining to vote at all. Pictures ran in American newspapers of our nation’s queen of compassion, Eleanor Roosevelt, the driving force behind this historic document, proudly holding the English language broadsheet in her hands. It served as the defining document for the humane treatment of all the peoples of the earth until (no surprise here) the United States Supreme Court ruled that the UDHR, “does not on its own force impose obligations as a matter of international law.” Predictably, the high courts of other nations around the world followed suit. The spirit of the document lives on, however, in the worldwide celebration of its creation every December 10^th, and the impact of the document birthed Amnesty International in 1961. Elements of the UDHR have been adopted through the years by other organizations such as The International Federation for Human Rights, Quaker United Nations and American Friends Service Committee, American Library Association, and Youth for Human Rights, to name but a few. So the precedent has been set and has been in existence for a long time, but just as with anything else involving totalitarian governments, it’s not what humanists encourage them to do, but what somebody can force them to do.

Fortunately, the government of the United States is not (as of yet) a totalitarian government, and we as a people have to get our own house in order before advising the rest of the world on how to run theirs’. The future of the family of man has to start on the individual level. Every citizen has to do an honest assessment of their conscience and see if they can behave in a more humanistic manner towards their fellow human beings.

The videos coming out of Portland, Oregon disturbed me greatly. That cop viscously striking a Navy veteran four times with his baton, that cop charging the wall of moms with his shield and knocking them back, those cops throwing people into unmarked vans – those cops are Americans too, and I wonder when they lay their heads to sleep at night; do they really get to sleep very well at all? Do any of them, now far removed from the heat of the moment that sparked those actions, lament that they did indeed take those actions? Anyone can claim that they were just doing their job, but sometimes the dictates of the job are inhumane, and a person of conscience knows it, wrestles with it, and has to reckon with it. Anyone can change when they come to the realization that what they are doing defies what they know to be right and just. If any of those cops do have a change of heart, let me be the first to nominate them for inclusion into the family of man.

Author’s note:

This piece originally appeared in Twist and Twain international magazine and was thereafter included in the essay collection American Turmoil at the Vanguard of the 21st Century (2022).

Book Promo: "American Turmoil At The Vanguard Of The 21st Century" 7:18

Jill Thrill, his main squeeze for all of three weeks was in the kitchen rustling up flapjacks and eggs while Fleabag his trusty cattle dog lay in the middle of the floor scheming on tripping up the unwary which now seemed to be her sole purpose in life. No one knew for sure just how old she was, but judging by the blindness in her right eye a good guess would be 15 years if she was a day.

Dusty was late to his chores because they had both tied one on last night at Desperados where the whiskey flowed like a mountain stream and the bullshit flowed right along with it. Jill Thrill was hung over and in no mood for lengthy conversation which was fine with Dusty because he couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t be taken as an insult because she was mighty sensitive to any constructive criticism at times like this. The flapjacks tasted like straw with a hint of sawdust and the yokes of the sunny-side-up eggs were busted. He drowned it all out with a massive pour of maple syrup which resembled molten road tar as he looked out the window contemplating what lie ahead. It was already one scorcher of a day at ten in morning, and the evaporative cooler was on the blink requiring a new motor. By eleven-thirty it would hit 105 degrees. It was Saturday, and if he hustled with the piled up weekend chores he could hit the hardware store and get the motor and install it before nightfall, so at least they could have a poke in relative comfort. So in anticipation of that he suggested to Jill Thrill that she spend the day in the comfort of air conditioning at her mother’s house. “I ain’t got a single word to say to that old bitch,” Jill Thrill screeched, and Dusty decided to let sleeping dogs lie; so now Fleabag could have some company. It had been two years since she went out to the pasture with him but that didn’t much matter as he only had five head left and three were destined for the slaughter house in mid-August after fattening up on what was left of the green spring grass. He needed the money because they had cut his hours at the auto shop, and besides, it had been a while since he had eaten any decent steak, so he would be sure to stock the freezer with a little for himself and Jill Thrill if they lasted, but he had his doubts.

He got his saddle and harness out of the tack room and hitched Rocket up and rode out on his twenty-acre spread with about twelve of it in grass and the rest covered with typical ribbonwood, sage, manzanita, and some occasional yucca. This place with its worn-down doublewide and sagging barn was nothing to write home about, but the views out over the high plateau on up to the towering mountain ranges were spectacular. The cows were languishing by the watering hole surrounded by some ancient cottonwoods and one of the expecting heifers had dropped a calf, apparently last night, with the good news being that the little fella’ was doing fine. Things were looking up. He pushed them into the upper pasture knowing that they would mosey back down to the watering hole by sunset. Then he rode out to the North fence line to finish repairing the barbwire section he had started last weekend. It wasn’t all that much of a ranch, but on any ranch the work is never truly done, so you had to break down your tasks and take solace when you were able to finish any given one. It was 1:00 in the afternoon when he road back to the barn unhitched Rocket and let him go join the cows.

The truck needed an oil change, and the shop was good about letting employees use the lift if there weren’t any paying customers needing to be serviced. When he arrived there was one car already up on it so he parked the truck and decided to walk to the hardware store. Dillion said he would call him when he got a turn and already have the truck hoisted by the time Dusty got back there. Cowboys looked out for other cowboys, and this wasn’t nothing Dusty wouldn’t have done for him.

He stopped in the Dairy Queen for a vanilla cone and ambled a quarter-mile to the hardware store seeking what sparse shade the too few street trees provided as he went. The motor cost $120.00, and just as he finished paying, Dillon called so he double-timed it back to the shop. He did the oil change lickety-split and headed home, but fate intervened when he spotted Jill Thrill riding in Ralph’s Sawyer’s pickup and sitting up close next to him and talking turkey in his ear. They didn’t see him, so he tailed them to Ralph’s motley singlewide at the only mobile park in the center of town that was more of a shanty town than anything else. The locals called the place, “Loserville,” and it chagrined Dusty to think that he was being outshined by a no count like Ralph who was a known drug dealer and ne’er-do-well. Jill had previously encouraged Dusty to buy her coke but he begged off saying it was just so damned expensive and he had seen so many of his friends go bust and split town because of it. Well…just because he didn’t want to climb up on that treadmill didn’t mean that she wouldn’t, and Dusty was sure that she was going to give up her pussy to get it. Let her fuck him – why did it matter now? Dusty raced home, gathered up what few things belonged to her, and sped back to Ralph’s place. He dumped it all at the door steps, banged on the door, and waited for Ralph to come out. Ralph opened his door just a crack and shouted, “What’s up Dusty?” “Apparently your dick asshole. You can have her.” Ralph knew of Dusty’s reputation as brawler and a mauler and thought discretion the better part of valor, but Jill had no discretion at all and burst out the door screaming, “You don’t own me. I’ll do what I want.” “Go ahead and do it then. See if I care. We’re done.” She rushed at him and tried to scratch his eyes out, but he just raised his massive arms and fended her off. Ralph stepped out pointing a pistol and blurting, “You just move on now Dusty. There’s no reason to mistreat a woman.” “So’s you the gentleman now? Is that it Ralph? I’ll hit you so hard they’ll arrest you in Temecula for speeding.” Ralph gripped the pistol harder and thrust it forward and stepped closer to Dusty who put his hands out saying, “Fight like a fucking man Ralph.” “Shoot his ass off!” Jill Thrill shouted at Ralph, and as he looked towards her in shocked disbelief, Dusty snatched the pistol from his hand just as easy as pie. “Ralph, you stupid son-of-a-bitch, I ain’t going to jail over beating you senseless. Thanks for the gun.” “Fuck you!, fuck you!!, fuck you!!!,” Jill hollered at the top of her lungs as Dusty got in his truck and laid rubber roaring away. She sure wasn’t much of an enlightened conversationalist, that was for certain a bonified fact. Well… that killed any thought of having a poke that night…at least with Jill Thrill.

When Dusty got back to the ranch he immediately stormed into the barn and viciously threw twenty/thirty/forty haymakers into the heavy bag that he kept hanging there for times such as these. It got his frustrations out and sure beat dealing with the cops who he hated with an unbridled passion. With the steam now blown off, he went to his home and got to work on replacing the cooler’s motor. There was literally nothing mechanical that Dusty couldn’t fix. Growing up just like his daddy did, who grew just like his daddy did, the Well’s men were self-sufficient sons-a-bitches who lived by the code that if you needed help then look to your hands at the ends of your arms.

He made short work of installing the motor and sat at the kitchen table guzzling a Fat Tire beer with the swiftly cooling air blowing over him. He got to thinking on Jill Thrill. She sure could hold his interest in the sack, he had to give her that much. He’d miss her banging body, but it wasn’t exactly a secret that she got around. She was pretty much like all the others over the last few years. Dusty liked his woman fast in tight skirts or jeans with their cleavage popping out. Sleaze with an edginess always got his motor running but the gas always ran out quick, and this “relationship” was no different. At 34 he was the living breathing embodiment of Ray Willie Hubbard’s Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother made famous when Jerry Jeff Walker sang it back in ’73 at the inception of the Outlaw Country music movement where Willie and Waylon and a host of others hung out in Austin and dressed in black and did a variety of rollicking tunes based on fuck what the establishment thinks. In truth, he had no more insight into the innerworkings of love now than he did when he was 20. But now he was crowding 40, and all that outlaw shit was getting old. Once he passed 37 he started getting desperate concerning why he wasn’t yet married and settled down which led to a seemingly endless succession of fast to start and faster to end truly horrible relationships. Dillon liked to tease him that he might as well just walk up to a woman and say, “Hi, I’m Dusty. Do you want to get married?” Well…perhaps he should take a long hard look at how he was approaching romance in general, but for tonight, he just wanted to get laid. He was also conflicted over his run-in with Ralph Sawyer. True enough that he was a douche-bag coke dealer, but a cowboy should never take another man’s gun, even if that man stole his woman. He decided he would take out the ammo and give it back to him after work on Monday.

At six in the evening the air outside was cooling down some so he decided to saddle up Rocket and ride out to check on the newborn calf just to make sure the little rascal was doing all right. Dusty was the last of a dying breed. Cattle ranching had been a way of life in the late eighteen hundreds through the early nineteen hundreds but had given way to agriculture by the end of World War Two. By the ‘70’s it was pretty much all over but the shouting when the agricultural conglomerates moved in, swallowed up huge acreages of land, and started pumping enormous quantities of water out of the aquifer. Today, what few ranchers that were left were more like gentleman farmers than cattle barons. Dusty kept up a vegetable garden and a kitchen orchard to save on groceries but he oftentimes felt more like a hippy getting back to the land than a cowpoke driving the little doggies along.

His cell phone rang startling Rocket who he calmed before answering. It was Dillon – who else? And what else, but what it always was on Saturdays when his wife was out of town at relatives? Same shit, different weekend. “Hey buddy, I need a wingman tonight. There’s a couple of sisters I met at the shop that want to meet some real cowboys, and you know what George Straight says, ‘They call me the fireman, that’s my name.’ You want to douse a couple of hot ones? Come on; it’ll be fun! Meet me at Desperados at nine. See yeah, wouldn’t want to be yeah.” With that he hung up before Dusty could get a word in edgewise. But what was there to say, anyway? He was a single successful guy who was horny as hell and he had no one to answer to. Hell yes, he’d be there with his dancing boots spit shined, his jeans skin tight, and the rhinestone buttons on his western cut shirt gleaming. And, of course, he would be sporting his favorite partying belt with the gargantuan rodeo buckle with one of the crossed derringers detachable and loaded. Hell yes, he would be primed and ready to have a whole lotta’ fun tonight.

Desperados was a bar right out of central casting with the swinging doors, a solid oak and brass walk up counter, and bottles of every known brand of alcohol in the Western Hemisphere stacked up high in the rear and made to look even larger by the gigantic mirrors behind them. Dusty arrived at 9:15; fashionably late not wanting to appear desperate, and Dillion wasn’t there yet. The vast expanse of wood dance floor was already starting to fill up, and the music was blaring some of that new who can scream the loudest music that was really rock masquerading as country. Townes Van Zandt was probably rolling in his grave, but what the hell? Dusty wasn’t here for the music – not tonight. He spotted Dillon with the girls on each arm. They were lookers, all dolled up with big hair, bright red lipstick, and their jeans took on a life of their own as they sashayed in. Dillion was probably the guy Confederate Railroad had in mind when they recorded Redneck Romeo. He not only looked the part, but he could cut a rug with the best of them. The crowd separated and made way for them faster than Moses parted the Red Sea, and Dillon took his seat at his usual table as if he were sitting on the throne of Henry the VIII. He had a certain arrogant verve about him, Dillon did, and it was obvious to all that the royal court had arrived. Dusty walked over confidently and said, “Hey Dillion, ladies,” as he tipped his Stetson to them. Dillon made the introductions saying, “Girls, this is Dusty, the roughest toughest cowboy in these parts. Dusty, this Shawna and Shanna. Twins, as you can see. Ain’t they something?” Drinks were ordered. Idle chit chat was exchanged in. Physical features were ogled and lusted after. The twins made their selections. At the start of the first slow song Shanna took his hand and led him out onto the dance floor. Her tightly pressed body against his was telling him that tonight was going to be a good one, and his crotch was telling her that he was up for it. The next song was one that Dusty could actually stomach and he and Dillion and the girls really burned up the hardwood with some fancy dancing to Alan Jackson’s Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow and as Alan finished singing, “Oh, I’m chasing that neon rainbow / Living that honky-tonk dream,” Shanna whispered in his ear, “Time to saddle up and ride cowboy. Let’s get out of here.”

Well…this evening was really starting to take off…and then the shitshow began to commence as Ralph Sawyer and three other dipshits who were obviously rough trade made a beeline up to them. “Got a bone to pick with you, Dusty,” Ralph, obviously emboldened by his cohorts, blurted out. Shanna’s body tingled under his arm as she sensed more than a hint of danger. “Look Ralph, I let you off the hook today. I’m even considering giving you back your gun come Monday. But if you fuck this up for me (he tipped his head towards Shanna) there will be hell for you to pay.” “What’s a matter Dusty. You don’t want your ass kicked in front of your new slut?” a voice boomed out. It was Jill Thrill. Who else? Why wouldn’t it be? Dillon assumed the floor saying, “Four on two. You boys got it in you?” They were pondering that very question mighty hard and most likely would have determined that they didn’t, but Jill Thrill forced everyone’s hand as she reached out and grabbed a heaping handful of Shanna’s hair. Shawna was on her scratching for her eyes and kicking for her shins. And so it started. Dusty plowed a right straight down the pike into Ralph’s jaw and he dropped like a ton of bricks. Dillon started doing a tap dance on one of the three toughs head, and the other two grabbed hold of Dusty. Big mistake. Dusty stomped one of his shiny cowboy boots on one’s foot braking it in three places, while head butting the other who flew in reverse into the bar, and as he careened off of it Dusty sent two sharp left hooks into his ribs breaking a couple and cracking a couple more. Turing to see if Dillon was okay he was pleased to see him kicking his fallen adversary in the stomach and swearing up a storm just to gain crowd approval. Dillon sure had a flair for the dramatic, you had to hand it to him. The crowd roared their approval which they accepted like the conquering heroes that they were. Just to drive the crowd into a frenzy the girls hopped up and wrapped their long legs around both of them while slamming their tongues down their throats. The cheers from the crowd were deafening.

Could the evening really get any better than this? Well…no, unfortunately and predictably there was an all-encompassing group buzzkill as the cops came streaming through the doors with guns drawn. Fucking party poopers one and all, they immediately cuffed Dusty and Dillon. Steve Wallace the bar owner spoke up in their defense. “The other guys and that nasty bitch Jill started the whole thing. They didn’t give these guys any out. What was they supposed to do? And I ain’t pressing any charges.” The cops went into a group huddle and one then went and uncuffed Dillon. “What about Dusty?” Steve Wallace asked. “There’s other charges,” the lead cop responded. “Such as?” Dusty asked. “Such as carrying a loaded firearm, smart ass,” the cop responded as he reached down and unclicked the derringer from Dusty’s belt buckle. “It’s legal,” Dusty asserted. “You don’t have an open carry permit dumb ass,” the cop curtly replied. Dusty hung his head and said, “Don’t suppose you could let me off with a warning if I go straight home and apply for that open carry permit just as soon as possible?” “No. Not on your life. You’re coming with us.”

The holding cell at the County jail was crammed tight with weekend drunks and wife beaters, but everyone steered clear of Dusty. For his part Dillon didn’t allow his concern for his wingman to interfere with his first two on one in years, and he was able to douse the desire of both of the twins. He did have a certain panache, after all. The girls went away and back to their husbands sexually satiated and thoroughly happy.

Dusty didn’t spring for his bail and waited to see the judge in three days who he suspected would waive bail and send him home under his own recognizance, which he fortunately did. The judge even agreed to waive the $1,000.00 fine if Dusty agreed to relinquish his derringer belt, which he did. Justice was served if not Dusty’s sense of self-well-being. He would keep Ralph’s pistol for all the grief he had caused him, but it would never be as cool as that belt. Arriving home he was dismayed to see Fleabag dead as a doornail in the middle of the kitchen floor. He buried her out by the barn and went to an animal shelter and acquired a young Australian Shepard who he named Dirtbag. That’s the reaffirmation of the cycle of life – out with the old, and in with the new.

Dusty’s cowboy life wore on. Finding love was an elusive endeavor while his life in general became a deary proposition. He lightened up on the whiskey and the hellraising in order to gain clarity but is unclear if he has. As of today, Dusty awaits middle age with a certain resolve not unlike the persistence of a gnawing toothache.

The good news is that the auto shop restored his normal hours so Dusty is in no danger of losing his ranch. One day a young buck came strutting in to pick up his sports car and sparked up a conversation with Dusty in obvious awe and admiration of his cowboy persona. At least that was still intact for all the good it did him. Dusty decided to give the kid the straight skinny and quite possibly a better shot at life.

“Hey kid…you want to be a cowboy? Don’t.”

Author’s note:

This piece is slated to appear in True Chili magazine this November. From there it will be included in the upcoming story collection entitled: Dysfunction Is What We Do Best.

I sincerely believe that Adam Duritz the front man and main composer for the rock group Counting Crows is one of our greatest American poets still alive today. Listen to or read the lyrics to these two cherry-picked stanzas from “Round Here” from their first album entitled August and…

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There were some occasions during my evolution when I could well have broken my arm patting myself on my back by taking some stances either mentally or physically of which I was proud. During my second year in college when one of my very best friends, and top campus player, told me that his dream job would be, “To be a philosophy professor at an all girl’s school. Let’s see what we can do about that failing grade Susie.” I knew where he was going with it and did feel it was wrong, although I didn’t have the guts to express my opinion for fear of being viewed as un-cool. Or, during my mid-thirties when I was dating a girl who was smoking hot, and who all my friends stated was way out of my league, and towards whom I actually entertained the thought of marriage before we had a conversation concerning the emerging AIDs crisis. She, being a devout Christian, knocked me back on my heels when she stated that, “The homosexuals deserve this. It’s God’s way of cleansing the human race.” I was shocked, and replied that, “Nobody deserves this. It’s horrible that anyone has to suffer like this.” She immediately excused herself from my presence, and I never saw her again. Or, when a young black man who I had taken in and tried to see through a college education, became angry with me because I put him on notice that he was taking advantage of my generosity and also growing more disrespectful by the day. I merely pointed out that he could make a more concerted effort towards helping out around the place. Enraged he screamed, “All you do is give me a place to live. I’m not your slave!” I could see that he was goading me towards making a racist rebuttal but I didn’t fall for it. I calmly explained that through life’s journey that he would come to discover that someone giving you a place to live was in fact a very big favor, and all I wanted was the small favor of some heartfelt appreciation validated by some actual effort in return. Upon my request that he leave, in a huff, he moved out, but not without punching a hole in his bedroom door. Today, I’m sickened by the Mad King’s views towards Mexicans because all the Mexicans I hired during the years that I had my ill-fated construction business were extremely hard workers and loyal almost to a fault if they were treated right, and by treated right I mean that I never forgot that they were men. Their sense of machismo is inherent within their culture, and not to respect that fact is a big mistake.

My personal evolution, however, was a slow and plodding circuitous route, and lately, I’ve been searching for the reasons why. Psychologist endlessly tell us that the first five years of a child’s life are the most important ones and shape what they will eventually become during their adult years. I believe this to be true and must admit that mine were so tumultuous because of daemon alcohol consumption on the part of my parents that I have no memories of these years. Recently I became enlightened by Marianne Williamson’s marvelously liberal book entitled: A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution (2019) in which she writes:

And when children can’t learn to read by eight years old, the chances of them graduating from high school are greatly reduced and the chances of incarceration are increased (p. 135).

I only mention this because I had trouble reading up until I was eight years old, even being put back to repeat my first-grade year. I struggled behind my classmates for a few more years before finally catching up and I believe that compromised my self-confidence to say nothing of my self-image. That Williamson was dismissed by comedians as “that little hippy chick,” repulses me because, out of all the democratic candidates, to me, she was the one who made the most sense. Now, as of January 2020, she is out of the presidential race, and peace and love is once again being written off as something that died at the close of the first Woodstock Festival. So say I, anyhow. The fact remains that my intellectual development during my early life was most likely marred by trauma, but I won’t use that as an excuse for my lagging evolution because I believe that no matter what circumstances we are dealt in life, that at minimum, we are expected to rise above them.

I am inherently rebellious, especially towards authority, and what I despise the most are those in authority that abuse their power simply because they can. By my early thirties, I realized this penchant to fight the power was hurting me in the world of business and that a softer gentler approach could well benefit me economically. This caused me to enter the Dale Carnegie “How to Win Friends and Influence People” course three times, once as a student and twice as a graduate assistant, and I do believe that it helped me immensely. The most useful thing I learned was that most people were so busy worrying about their own problems that they wouldn’t spend much time worrying about me as a problem causer, unless of course, I gave them a reason to. In other words, there was no conspiracy against me, and assertions made about me during my earlier years that I was my own worst enemy were mostly true. During my Carnegie period I happened upon a book written by humanist Sydney J. Harris entitled: Winners and Losers (1973) and it has become something of a survival guide for me through the years. Harris died in 1986, and the book has fallen out of print, but it is always within my reach at home and I still refer to it often, although I have to admit that it frequently casts me to the “loser” side of the fence and I frequently feel convicted by Harris’s little gems accompanied by a humorous cartoon drawing. Out of 54, I’ll borrow three that are especially important to me:

A winner

respects those

who are superior to him,

and tries to learn

something from them;

a loser

resents those

who are superior to him,

and tries to find

chinks in their armor (p. 31).

A winner

knows that people

will be kind

if you give them the chance;

a loser

feels that people

will be unkind

if you give them the chance (p. 43).

A winner

seeks for the goodness

in a bad man,

and works with that part of him;

a loser

looks for the badness

in a good man,

and therefore finds it hard

to work with anyone (p. 79).

It bothers me to no end that, at age 68, that I still don’t know who I really am, and that if I don’t know by now that the odds are good that I never will. I see the writing on the wall. I know the time allotted for me to evolve is winding down. I get it. I’m the one incessantly writing that we need to seek to be comfortable in our own skins. So why do memories of things that I have done, and now wish that I hadn’t, make my skin crawl?

I hung on until I hit age 65 so as to take advantage of my Medicare benefits. Be careful of what you wait for because I quickly found out that I have Type II diabetes, heart failure, teeth rotting out of my jaws, and a prostrate as large as an orange. Nothing, however, beats me up more than I beat myself up. I’m willing to continue to weather the beating because I now have a reason to. My five-year-old step-granddaughter is the light and the love of my life and I obsess daily about what kind of an example of humanity I present to her. She’s living here at home with us due to the crystal meth addiction of her parents, which I resent, but try mightily not to let her become aware of, because I know from experience that a child will always wonder about how their life may have been different if only their parents would have been different. We only get one of each, and to denigrate them in her presence would be petty and small and would never serve to make her a well-rounded person. It would, in fact, contribute to severely damaging her self-confidence and self-image. I’m just not down with that. So in deference to, but also as an offering of redemption to the behavior of my own parents, I’m determined to have a positive impact on her life. I want to put a good and morally well-adjusted person out into society, and the only problem with that quest is that I might not live long enough to actually do it. But, as for today, I am alive, and the task is to do the best I can for her. So be it.

Sleep is elusive these days. The ghosts of my past stand at my bedside looking down upon me more in withering disgust and condescending pity than in any form of respect or admiration. I toss and turn as my dream life scrolls my shortcomings, failures, and contemptible traits before my disbelieving eyes. The jury is still out as I awake with an electric jolt, look skyward, and ask, “Who am I?”

Author’s note:

This piece first appeared at the Int. Human Rights Arts Festival (Fall 2020).

It was then included in Reflections on the Cusp of Eternity (2023).

Book Promo: "Reflections on the Cusp of Eternity" 3:34

As a staunch advocate for complete unequivocal federal marijuana legalization, I bought this book expecting it to be completely about that, but it turns out that this book is so much more. Before we get to that, however, liberally paraphrasing and occasionally injecting personal opinion, here are the lowlights concerning America’s federal marijuana prohibition:

· Infamous historical figure Adolf Hitler, early on in his reign of terror, was quoted as saying, “If you tell a lie frequently enough, it will be believed.” Across the Atlantic America’s first Federal Bureau of Narcotics Chief, Harry Jacob Anslinger, took this advice to heart and lied before Congress as to the perceived evils of marijuana, thus getting The Marijuana Tax Act passed in 1937 which effectively outlawed marijuana. Proponents of pot have been paying the price ever since as law enforcement has been goring itself at this trough for the last 85 years.

· During his ill-fated time in office President Richard Milhous Nixon ignored the findings of his own Shafer Commission that found marijuana to be basically harmless and passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, and to give it some enforcement teeth, established the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, and the DEA, as well as the lower local law enforcement agencies, have been picking the low hanging fruit of marijuana convictions right on up to today.

· Ronald Reagan instituted the forfeiture laws which allows law enforcement to seize all assets of suspected drug dealers, and cops can confiscate any cash exceeding $3,000 from suspected marijuana dealers/users. Due process notwithstanding, marijuana arrests and seizures have been the cash cow of law enforcement and they are in no hurry to see the laws change that would require them to do any real work. Any army that sustains itself on plunder will always find any reason to do it.

· Enter Joseph Robinette Biden who perpetually insists that, ”The evidence still isn’t in on marijuana,” even though it has been in for well over forty years, and to back up his misguided stance, the Biden Administration has conducted a witch hunt to cast out anyone that they can prove had previously used marijuana.

· The current “state’s rights” marijuana feeding frenzy is, in reality, a house of cards riding atop a Trojan Horse because even if all 50 were to allow legalization, our federal government has numerous avenues to overturn them and cast the country back into the dark ages of marijuana prohibition.

The reason why this book is so much more than the standard fare of rants about the unfairness of it all, and that marijuana users are a higher class of people than down in the gutter low life drug addicts, and as such deserve a hall pass, is that Margolin champions a more humane approach concerning all drug users no matter what drug they use. And she laments the societal stigmatization that keeps people from exposing themselves as drug users. She compassionately makes her case in her ninth chapter entitled: No One Needs to Die at the Viper Room:

I was sixteen years old when River Phoenix died on the sidewalk outside LA nightclub the Viper Room in 1993.

The coroner’s report confirmed all rumors: River Phoenix had died of a drug overdose after ingesting a speedball (p. 101)…

I was bewildered. How could such a sensitive and talented person, who ate tofu and advocated for animal rights, who publicly frowned on drug use and claimed it wasn’t for him, take enough drugs to kill himself many times over? How could it happen in front of so many people he was close to (p. 102)?

After stumbling out of the club and lying down on the sidewalk River Phoenix showed signs of extreme distress for a full ten minutes before his brother Joaquin worked up the nerve to call 911. When the ambulance arrived only four minutes later he was already dead. He was 23 years old. Why didn’t anyone present act any sooner? States Margolin:

It may seem odd to write about celebrity overdoses in a book calling for drug law reform, but the lives of celebrities highlight a key problem that comes with prohibition. People will rarely seek help when they are afraid of the consequences for their personal or professional lives (p.104).

Concerning the “opioid epidemic” which started to receive national media attention in the late 90’s and then became all the rage when President Donald J. Trump declared it a crisis on October 26^th, 2017, Margolin sets the record straight on who was most to blame and what most helped to mitigate its impact in California:

It seems like a coincidence that the pressure on medical marijuana doctors happened at around the same time as the beginning of the opioid crisis, consider this: the same pharmaceutical companies that funded the research defending the safety of prescribing opioids like OxyContin also bankrolled antimarijuana propaganda as more and more states voted to legalize the plant (p. 191).

In fact, California’s medical marijuana program saved the state from the worst of the opiate epidemic, which claimed almost forty-seven thousand American lives in 2018 alone. When you include deaths from heroin overdoses, that number grows to sixty-four thousand dead in one year because of opioids, more than any other cause of death. Meanwhile, there is no recorded case of anyone ever dying from a marijuana overdose (p. 193).

America’s Drug War is, and always has been, a thinly veiled front for insatiably power hungry law enforcement, politically ambitious District Attorneys, and presiding judges adhering to the plantation mentality. Not only is it patently stupid, at its core it’s an amoral industry trading in human flesh. Beyond that, it’s an abysmal failure because it will never stop what it claims to be about – illegal drug use, and know that oftentimes the only real difference between illegal drugs and legal drugs is the label on a prescription bottle. The heart wants what the heart wants, and no amount of legal posturing will ever stop that. Margolin says as much right from the start in her preface:

The war on drugs is bullshit. No matter how many antidrug laws policy makers enact, people will always find a way to alter their consciousness (p. xii)…

Prohibition doesn’t work. It’s time to legalize everything (p. xiii).

What our society needs the most is a massive dose of perspective. As much as the power brokers (translate: primarily old white men) don’t want to hear it, Allison Margolin is right in stating that the only real solution is to legalize all drugs, and then the insane profiteering goes away as does the Drug War, and then America, as the country that is supposed to care about all her people, can address the real issues as to why a miniscule portion of the overall population become addicted to certain drugs.

Allison Margolin fights the good fight, and this book deserves to be distributed far and wide amongst stoners everywhere. The only suggestion that I could add would be to provide a more imaginative cover. My pick would be to clamp handcuffs on the peace symbol because that would just about say it all.

Of course most of this stuff didn’t actually happen. What little that did is greatly enhanced and embellished for that is what sells books. Most of the names of the characters depicted herein have been changed to protect the guilty, and hopefully, render me innocent when the lawsuits hit.

Except for the sex thing, growing up Catholic wasn’t too bad. It occurs to me that I needed discipline and regimentation during the young formative years of my life. Catholic services with its lean to the left, lean to the right, stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight pageantry provided the direction I needed to make it through the horrors of the teen years and on into adulthood. The sex thing, however, stunted my social growth and quite possibly caused me to be the most politically incorrect person on the planet. It started in first grade with the study of the Catechism, which is somewhat akin to the Boy Scout Manual minus the helpful survival tips. Of the seven deadly sins laid out before my disbelieving eyes lust stabbed at my heart.

I started having wet dreams two months prior to my confirmation and believed with absolute certainty what the priests and penguins were telling us. We might be able to fool them some of the time, but we could never fool God who knew the count of every hair on our head and our deepest innermost thoughts. So, He knew who and what I was thinking about that caused those nocturnal secretions even if I didn’t. Was it the prettiest girl in the school, or the ugliest, or worse yet, was I pervert or a homo?

My aunt had purchased a facts-of-life book from the local Christian bookstore and was uncomfortably wading through such things as petting, permissiveness, going all the way, and the 100% chance of catching a debilitating venereal disease if we dared. There were no pictures or descriptions as to what, “going all the way” actually meant, but it did produce babies, so evidently, it was a complicated scientific act only to be entered into between man and wife.

Then, after much experimentation, I stumbled upon a successful method of masturbation and was quite relieved to learn that you didn’t even need a wife to have fun, which was good because I probably wouldn’t be married for at least another decade. Not that I didn’t want a girlfriend. I would kneel in the church pews with my hands over my eyes after communion every day during enforced mass and peek around the edges of my fingers at the passing blue plaid shirts, dark blue knee socks, and prim white blouses (some perky with the first hint of impending womanhood), and say to myself, “Yes, yes, no, definitely not, in a pinch, if nobody found out, yes, oh God yes, no, never, maybe, yes, yes, yes,” as they innocently and ignorantly passed by.

Catholic households of the period were remarkably devoid of any visual aids that could provide masturbatory fodder. There was always the trusty old Sears Catalog with its begrudgingly revealing black and white women’s underwear (lingerie was such a risqué word back then) section. Entire women were never shown in a full-length shot. Bras were shown neckline to navel. Panties; navel to thigh. Stockings; hips to ankles. I had to be creative and employ mix and match pornography. A bosom here, with a torso there, joined to the legs on page 97, attached to any number of faces in the makeup section, and you could create your own dream girl.

Seventh grade was the zenith of my physical life. I was the third largest kid in my class, a promising if undisciplined athlete, and as fast as I have ever been leading me to believe that the Heisman wasn’t out of the question and that I would go early in the NFL draft. Upon entering eighth grade God would play His first in a long and never ending series of cruel jokes on me. My classmates, most of whom I hadn’t seen over the summer, were catching up. Some had passed me by, and I was now the seventh largest kid in my class. Not to worry though, I could survive the year on reputation alone while I waited diligently for my next growth spurt, which never came. I’m as large now as I was then. Eighth grade went by uneventful except to say that my buddies and I advanced our carnal pursuits from spin-the-bottle to blindfolded Zorro-like make-out sessions in a dark closet during house parties. There’s nothing like thirty classmates banging furiously on the door to make you feel amorous and intimate.

In the spring we suffered through our final May crowning, bid the Virgin Mary farewell, and bolted from Saint Mary’s of the Angels Catholic school like race horses coming out of the gate at the Kentucky Derby. What promise life held. High school, glorious Archbishop Walsh High School was upon us. All eight Catholic grade schools in the area would be contributing eligible female flesh to an expansive freshman pool next to a larger pond already stocked with older women from the three higher grades. I felt like a betting man who felt like the luck was with him. I couldn’t wait to get into high school. Things would be different then. While we had all had the hideous horrors of sexual relations pounded into our heads by the penguins, we also knew of the miracle on Earth known as confession, a Catholic creation of the finest making, and a virtual get-out-of-jail-free card which we intended to play to its fullest.

The summer of ’66 was magical with all the joys of sweet anticipation. We were stepping up our game and spent many an hour at Cynthia Hogen’s house learning how to dance with a woman. Cynthia was a plump and bubbly representative of her gender who was known to have quite a personality, which meant nothing to us except to say we were grateful when she promised not to tell the other girls. I was jacking off nightly with the regularity of Old Faithful while listening to WLS out of Chicago while all my classmates were listening to WABC out of New York. Already swimming against the current was I. Lou Christi would sing:

When I see lipstick

To be kissed

I can’t stop

No, I can’t stop

It’s like lightning striking again

And again, and again…_a

That pretty much summed it up. When I hit high school in the fall I was going to go on a lipstick kissing, swashbuckling, girl-grabbing rampage.

I went out for football with designs as being a swivel-hipped elusive halfback, and an electrifying punt returner. Punt returning is the most tenuous profession a man can enter into. That ball stays up there forever while tacklers thunder down the field with blood in their eyes zeroing in on their target with the full intent of sending him to the hospital or the grave. I soon learned that it was better to hit than to be hit. The coaches could see by the glare in my eyes that I was obviously insane so they put me at middle linebacker. I would tighten up the sum of my 135 pounds and propel myself into the hole like a low flying cannon ball. I was bouncing off of running backs like a pinball off a bumper cushion, flying into wide receivers that dared come into my zone like a Kama Kazi during the last days of World War II only to be repelled like magnets joined together by opposite poles. When I could manage to hold on, I’d slide futilely down their legs in a last-ditch effort to bite at their ankles. I’d nobly jump into blood alley drills and get promptly blasted out.

Double session practices were taking their toll. I was eating like a condemned man and still dropping weight. My shoulder muscles screamed in agony when I lifted weights at home. My legs had apparently turned to lead as I staggered in cleats through wind sprints up the rocky farm road that ran by our house.

Practices took a turn for the worse as the head coach became more sadistic by the day. We were cut off from water during the hottest days of summer. He would hook up a hose with a sprinkler attached at the opposite end of the field from where we were drilling and let it water the turf, but we knew what he was really doing. Then the three toots of his “water break” whistle would blow, and we would charge en masse towards it. I’d dash out ahead and get to it first. Get perhaps a gulp in before they piled on top of me, punching at my rib cage, gouging at my eyes, twisting my neck like a pretzel. Mercifully, we started going to scrimmages against other schools. When we won, a radio could be played on the return bus trip. Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” inspired team camaraderie as the seniors belted out the lyrics, while the under classmen kept the beat, and the freshmen were only allowed to come in on the “sha, lah, la, la, lah,la,la,la,la,la,lah,teh,dah,” parts.

At last, the first day of school arrived. I looked upon the corridors of flesh on the hooves with shock and awe. It was better than I could have possibly imagined. Girls to the left, girls to the right, girls all about me, girls everywhere you looked, girls probably where you couldn’t look, girls, girls, girls! Then I discovered something about girls that I had never here-to-fore given a passing thought to. They were impossible to talk to, or rather; I found it impossible to talk at all. I stood there like a blithering idiot, the fluidity of the English language going bone dry before it left the tip of my tongue. Hissing sounds and hysterical laughter filled my head. My ears rang, my heart pounded, my throat tightened, and I’d try to force words from my person, like exhaust fumes being expelled from a piston pounding gasoline engine. The words wouldn’t come. I would have been better off to have played myself off as the class mute and attempted to use hand signals. With all those readily available new girls, I was stuck talking with the ones I already knew. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also established a comfort zone whereby I was able to regain my breathing and put on an air of sophistication as I shuffled through a series of mirror-practiced stances and poses desperately hoping that I would stumble upon the one that did the trick.

In short order, I learned the school was in the midst of a radical social upheaval. Musical tastes were creating divisions and schisms in the student population as far reaching and pronounced as when Martin Luther defied the Pope in Rome. We had all been weaned on the Motown sound being but a short distance from Detroit as the crow and airwaves fly. I grew up with the Four Tops, Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Sam Cook, Jackie Wilson, Sam and Dave, Aretha Franklin, and the late great Otis Redding. While we delved into the records of the British invasion in the privacy of our own homes, and tried to elevate our stream of consciousness without our parents noticing, the Motown sound still dominated at public get-togethers and sock hops. But the tidal wave of music from across the sea kept pounding at the shores of America and eventually broke through coastal bulkheads and flowed inland all the way to Olean, New York.

By my sophomore year, I was forced to choose – the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. There was no question about what the consequences of my decision would entail. The Beatles meant acceptance of the masses, the pinnacle of which would be in-crowd parties featuring make-out sessions with the cheerleaders and the other popular chicks. Choosing the Stones meant traveling a dark and dreary road of seedy parties with troubled teenagers who were no strangers to the detention hall sparsely populated with girls of questionable reputations and even less popularity. The backbeat of Charlie Watt’s drums drew me down the road less traveled. Warnings from priests, penguins, parents, coaches, cheerleaders, and teammates all went unheeded. I was a rebel who didn’t know why he was rebelling, but it just felt right, and when you’re young, you invariably go with your feelings.

Other, more compelling feelings were erupting from within with a volcanic and cataclysmic hormonal urgency. I wanted to get laid, needed to get laid, had to get laid, and wasn’t getting laid. Jesus, God almighty – when was I going to get laid? I had polished my confessional carnal acceptance speech to the luster of an academy award coronation. By the time I got through with it any mere mortal priest would be putty in my hands and truly believe that I was sincerely and irrevocably sorry for having squandered the sanctity of my virginity in such an irresponsible, irreverent, and reckless manner. Punishment would be swift and harsh, of course. The usual two Our Fathers and three Hail Mary’s would be upped to several circuits of the rosary, rounding the stations of the cross, and a full forty-five minutes on my knees at the altar. I was prepared for whatever they could dish out. The immovable object of my virginity was about to meet the irrepressible force of my desire. I, and my friends were on a collision course with destiny the result of which would be that we would never be the same again.

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In helped keep us sane. Go-go dancing Goldie Hawn and Judy Carne were female saviors. We could go on for hours the next day discussing the subtle carnal meaning of a fifteen-second dance routine.

Finally, Lee Walden and I got up the nerve to sneak into the Palace Theater to see the Marquis de Sade. Hopes soared due to the length of leg and depth of neckline displayed on the posters outside. Then there was the Marquis; tying women up, whipping them, thinly slicing their shoulder blades. It was an awful visual experience but we kept on watching because there were bare breasts being displayed up there on the big screen. I tried to mentally block the Marquis out of the frame but he had a spellbinding effect. The women oohed, ahhed, screamed, and cooed seductively. I was completely befuddled as the imagery repulsed me, but the flesh paralyzed my eyes. I was more confused about sex than ever, and all I could think was I don’t want to do that.

My summer job at Leo’s Grocery store brought some clarification to the sexual confusion as Lee Walden and I would sneak Playboy magazines into the break room and diligently read the Playboy Advisor section where the advice ranged from: do her, don’t marry her, leave her, don’t tell her, there are other fish in the sea. What sea would that be? Olean was on another planet far from any major water bodies. The men’s room reading material leaned towards the darker more edgy side of sex. The staff was dominated by World War II and Korean War Veterans, who were drawn like moths to a flame to Agrosy and True magazines. The women depicted therein toted guns and knives while ammunition belts crisscrossed their breasts. In tattered uniforms, ripped blouses, with a trickle of blood oozing down their thighs, they held enemy prisoners at gunpoint while American soldiers wrapped their arms around their mid-drifts as if to say, “job well done.”

I forged friendships with an eclectic lot. Joe Weld’s father owned the clothing store in town, virtually assuring that we were the nattiest dudes in school. John Hartford was the class artist, a definite plus when putting up posters announcing a party. Lee Walden was a dentist’s son, a fact which caused the girls to kiss his ass, and me to hang close in hopes of catching his discards. I, as we have already determined, was an aspiring athlete with less talent than heart. I was cursed with the lack of size, but blessed with speed which would be sorely needed before that fateful night was out.

Joe McMahon was from Rockaway Beach on the seaside side of Coney Island. Big city life had its drawbacks, and he had run into a bit of trouble stealing cars and joy riding about, the type of thing I was convinced was routine to bored city kids, a fact he verified by saying, “I was set up. Everybody does it, but somebody wanted to get me.” His mother sent him to live with her sister who was head penguin at St. Bonaventure Nursing Home until the heat died down. We looked upon Joe McMahon as the class James Dean and were certain some of that big city cool could rub off on us through proximity. He invited me over to the place and showed me his bedroom on the third floor just down the hall from a gym/assembly hall. The gym had wood floors, a stage area, and a one-room office. It had fallen into disrepair and needed a massive cleanup and paint job. Joe lamented the fact that his taskmaster aunt had appointed him head and sole member of the redecorating committee, and then it dawned on me as to why he had invited my straight-laced butt over there. He needed help and hoped that I could rally the troops.

Joe, God bless his heart, didn’t see the big picture. This was twenty-four hundred square feet of space a stone’s throw away from our high school yet a lifetime away from the faculty who spied on us with the deftness of the KGB and reported our every errant move to our parents who waited in baited anticipation always on the alert and at the ready to dole out punishment in the form of car removals, groundings, and early curfews.

Growing up Catholic entailed any number of subversive parental actions designated to quell raging hormones and basic freedoms. We were fresh from defeat and licking our wounds as the parental units had recently gone over the deep end of harsh barbarous oppression and called an emergency school night meeting in the cafeteria whereby they determined by unanimous vote to ban the playing of the Rolling Stones (“Satisfaction”), Led Zeppelin (“The Lemon Song”), and Eric Burdon and the Animals (“House of the Rising Sun”) on school premises, and in our homes. They were on to us and wanted to send the message that they weren’t going to sit idly by and watch their offspring go straight to hell in a rock-n¢-roll hand cart. We were incensed by this obvious travesty of justice, and direct violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

And, by hook or by crook, we were determined to get even. The cold war often referred to as “the teenage period” was officially on. Now was the time to find a place for ourselves where we could be ourselves free from Catholic tyranny, and in an irony of all ironies, that place would be in the Catholic nursing home where Joe McMahon currently resided.

Joe McMahon’s aunt, Sister Mary Whatever, was a kind-hearted soul obviously ill-suited to the savage, truculent, brutish, beastly, fiendish, and diabolical behavior of our teachers, mentors, and parents. She was an easy mark when Joe and I sat down to explain why a private sophomore club was absolutely essential to our growth as well-rounded human beings poised on the doorstep to adulthood. We needed an outlet for our youthful frustrations, a place to call our own; a place where we could do informal readings, and discuss the classics, and occasionally (say weekly) hold a harmless yet necessary dance whereby boys and girls could socialize in a healthy wholesome atmosphere. In other words, we needed a hideout from the persecution, coercion, enslavement, dogging, harassing, pitiless, ruthless, fascist adult world that surrounded us and threatened to turn us into what it already was unless we could become free and independent thinkers with enough moxie to someday run the country. Our intellectual, social, and religious growth was at stake. This was an issue as vital as national security. We, meaning Joe, myself, and our friends are the living embodiment of Gene Pitney’s “A Town Without Pity” and it surely isn’t very pretty. We need someone and somewhere to run to and that person appears to be you. Then I looked her dead in the eye and asked, “Can you help us Sister Mary Whatever? Can you?” She had that stunned, deer in the headlights look that could evolve into anything when she came out of it. Strike while the iron’s hot John. She’s wavering. Close the deal. Close the deal!

“Sister, think of what this would mean to Joe here. Imagine what a boost it would be to his self-confidence. Just think of how it would elevate his stature among his classmates. This is good constructive behavior we’re talking about here.” She suggested that we pray in unison for God’s blessing over this youthful venture, and when we said “Amen” the Utica Club was born. I had sent away for promotional posters from the Utica Club beer brewery posing as a tavern owner on the letterhead. These were our first and only decorations until John Hartford went to work. He, Joe Weld, Lee Walden, the instantly popular Joe McMahon, and myself stood on the hardwood floors of the Utica Club pondering just what it was we had gotten ourselves into. It would take five days of after school and weekend labor to remove all the boxes to storage, paint the walls, polish the floor, and clean the rarely used bathrooms down the hall. Then we would have to hack trees, bushes, and other forms of persistent undergrowth away from the fire escape, which we would use as our primary source of ingress and egress into our new club complete with our prestigious private office.

We delegated responsibility, and I was voted president, which I came to learn, meant head of the after-party cleanup crew (which usually consisted of one person) and sounding board for member and on-site resident complaints (which were numerous). Our good fortune and the generosity of Joe McMahon’s aunt were not lost upon us. We felt as if we had just stumbled upon a pirate’s chest full of gold doubloons. God was not the condescending totalitarian dictator over our hormones that we had come to believe Him to be. He could be benevolent and understanding, and who among us could not agree that He certainly had a sense of humor? We threw ourselves into shaping up the Utica Club. John Hartford painted floor to ceiling banners and posters, which were interspersed with the Utica Club beer posters. We acquired a stereo, small refrigerator, small cash box, and strobe light. We found desks and cabinets for our office in the nursing home’s storage room, and Joe strung a phone line down the hall from his room into the office. We were up and running within two weeks and plotting our first party.

We threw a half-dozen events with each growing in attendance of girls from other surrounding high schools. I’d learned at an early age that if you want a good party you worked your guest list, and if you wanted a great party you only invited girls. They would get the word out, select the guys they wanted there, and they couldn’t very well pass us over as we were the hosts. The Utica Club became a Saturday night hot spot and virtual heaven on earth. We assessed a dollar a head cover charge and only collected from the males and homely girls, and our treasury grew to a whopping $147.00 at the end of six weeks. Then something totally unexpected and supremely wonderful happened.

I was apprehensive when Sister Mary Whatever called us into her office, and I expected the worst. She informed us, that while our music was a little loud, that we seemed like good kids, and the oldsters at the home actually looked forward to seeing our get-ups when we came in on Saturday nights. Everything was fine as far as she was concerned. As we collectively exhaled a huge sigh of relief she asked for a favor – if we didn’t mind. A contingent of 35 young ladies from various all-girl Catholic high schools in the Philadelphia area were due to arrive in two weeks’ time. They were touring various Catholic facilities in the northeast to see what the nun-hood was like, and if they might indeed be feeling the calling. The nursing home was on their list. They would stay for three days and leave after mass on Sunday. Would we, as the founding members and sole officers of the Utica Club, be kind enough to host a friendly get-together/going away party? I looked over at Lee Walden. He was captain of the math team, but even I could manipulate the numbers swimming about in his head to utilize some basic deductive reasoning, and arrive at a logical conclusion. Five of us. Thirty-five of them. A seven to one ratio. They couldn’t all be ugly. We each stood a one in seven chance of meeting up with a big city babe who would be leaving the very next day. Whatever was to happen or not happen would leave with them. God is good. God is very, very good.

As president of the Utica Club I was pleased to inform the good sister that, being the fine upstanding young gentlemen that we were, that we would gladly host the soiree, and could assure her that a good time would be had by all.

Back in our office we schemed on how best to proceed with our windfall. We voted unanimously to keep it under our hats until we could further assess our options. I lie in bed that evening listening to WLS underneath the crucifix and across from a paint-by-numbers rendition of de Vinci’s “Last Supper” that my grandfather had given me. The bible was in the book case kept company by the rosary and cloth necklace from my confirmation. Guilt is the greatest of all Catholic emotions, and I was dealing with a lot of it. Was I acting in God’s will? Would He be pleased with my hoarding of this mother lode? Was it a disservice to these young women, who were after all, contemplating a career in the nunnery, to plot an act that would certainly be a career killer? Then Lou Christi came over the air waves shortly followed by the Stones with “Satisfaction.” Are you an idiot or what? This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. They’re imprisoned in all-girl schools with a chance to get out of class and into the real world. What do you think they were going to say? “No, I don’t want to go on a two week bus trip, miss class, and possibly meet some great guys. I’d much rather stay here exclusively surrounded by members of my own sex contemplating the Popes of the middle ages, the wisdom of Solomon, the virginity of Mary, the reasons why only men can become priests?” John, think about it. If it were you, what would you do?

At lunch in the cafeteria the next day my cohorts and I planned our next move with the secrecy of CIA agents, and the urgency of the holy crusades. We fully believed in Ogden Nash’s classic saying of, “Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.” Funds were withdrawn from the treasury for Hartford’s older brother to buy two cases of Iron City Beer, four bottles of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, a fifth of Canadian Club, an ice chest, and two dozen Trojans. Security was an issue. At first we thought of telling everyone that the usual Saturday night party was cancelled due to remodeling operations, but we abandoned the plan. Better to not make anyone suspicious. Better to just downplay the event by not posting notices, handing out flyers, and calling every girl in the school who would talk to us like we usually did. We would just let events run their course and see what developed. We, after all, were the hosts of this rendezvous with destiny, and as such, would enjoy the lofty status of kool dudes. So why worry about competition? Besides a few of my lower echelon teammates and Holly Welch of the cheerleading squad, none of the really important kids ever showed up. Forty was a large number of partygoers and festivities always wound down uneventfully by the 10:00 p.m. curfew. All things considered, why worry?

Joe McMahon was a bit of a braggart, but up until the Thursday before our Saturday night dance we had held him in check primarily by encouraging him to skip school. He needed Harvey Liechtenstein’s chemistry notes for a poorly disguised pop quiz that was to occur that afternoon, and all he had to negotiate the deal with was an invitation to the party bound to end all parties. Harvey had never been to the Utica Club mostly because we failed to invite him, and when he asked about our fliers we told him nobody of any consequence ever showed up. McMahon, much to our chagrin, laid it on thick, too thick. He promised Harvey that he would get laid, which to a nerd in a Catholic high school, is like granting a cure for cancer to the terminally ill. Harvey was a pathological liar and exaggerated everything about his meaningless, uneventful, and dolorous life. We knew that if we didn’t corroborate McMahan’s story to Harvey that everyone would simply figure that this was just another one of Harvey’s tall tales.

Girls? On a bus you say? Wild lasses from Philadelphia? Coming here? Preposterous! We should be so lucky. The evening is just going to be with these same tight-assed Catholic girls who won’t put out until their married. I doubt that anybody who’s anybody will even be there. The only reason I’ll be is because I’m president of the Utica Club and I can’t let my friends down. It’s just my little cross to bear. Between you and me, I’m thinking about resigning. Thirty-five girls from Philadelphia you say? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, wouldn’t that be nice?

The rumor spread throughout the school like wildfire and then emanated like the shock waves of an earthquake through the greater community at large. That evening the phone in our home was ringing off the hook. Lee Walden drove over and we discussed cataclysmic scenarios in the driveway under the suspicious eyes of my parents at the window. That morning we were rounded up and herded into the principal’s office, sent to separate rooms, and put through the typical forms of interrogations, light beatings, and vicious threats. Finally, Father Blackheart, the Prefect of Discipline, got Sister Mary Whatever on the phone. “Yes these wonderful boys have generously agreed to throw a party for these visiting girls. There needn’t be any concern. These girls are extremely devout, and are, in fact, considering entering the nun-hood. What is all the fuss about?” “Alright you boys, she doesn’t know you like I do. If it gets back to me that anything improper went on out there you can expect swift and serious reprisals. Now get out of here!”

This thing had become like a runaway locomotive. We had no idea how to put on the brakes. At lunch John Kasivic sat at our table. Although a sophomore classmate, he was the star guard on the varsity basketball team while I rode pine on the junior varsity bench. He never talked to us. Now he was all laughs and smiles wrapped up in the apparent rapture one feels when instantaneously acquiring five new best friends. What he really wanted to know was: was it worth his time to show up at this party or not? Give it to him straight, what was up? No John, nothing’s up. These girls want to be nuns for Christ’s sake. Porkers. Bow-wows. Beached Whales. I really don’t even want to go myself but I have obligations. If I was you – I wouldn’t waste my time. All I could mutter was, “It’s not very promising. These girls just want to be nuns. I doubt if any of them will be good looking.”

Reports coming back from McMahon, who shared their dinner table, were to the contrary. Babes with boobs. Blondes, brunettes, red heads. At least a dozen real knock outs. Already asked where they could score some booze. Already wanted to know if any cute guys were going to be at the party. What are your friends like Joe? Tell us something about your friends.

Upon receiving those enraptured reports, I called the good sister and successfully negotiated a one hour time extension to an eleven o’clock curfew. The party was to start at seven so we arrived at four not wanting to suffer the most hideous of all teenage indignations, that being to be seen with your parents dropping you off.

Once certain thing about nursing homes is that they are never located very far from a cemetery and after Hartford’s brother dropped him off, he bolted up the hill for the predetermined hiding spot with the booze and rubbers in hand. We weren’t total wastrels. We had promised the good sister that we wouldn’t bring alcohol on to the premises, and so far, we hadn’t. Our anticipation mounted with each passing minute as we lounged about our private office feeling like the cat that had just swallowed the canary, like the mouse that had gotten all the cheese. Time passed like a slow motion replay, like the slime of a snail over dry concrete.

Holly Welch was the first to arrive with a couple of lower ranking members of the cheerleading squad. They asked if we would put up a refreshment table so that they could arrange the chips and appetizers they had brought. “We wouldn’t want our guests from Philadelphia to think we were uncivilized now would we?” the lovely Holly said. A few of the usuals drifted in. Just as Walden was about to play one of those God-awful Beatle records, a sound resonated in the corridor; a sound growing more deafening and provoking by the second. High heels on linoleum. Thirty-five pairs of high heels clacking with Nazi-like goose-stepping efficiency up the hall. Thirty-five pairs of high heels click-clacking on a collision course with fate. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. My fingers tingled. My friends stood frozen in time, mouths agape, eyes bulging out of their sockets. A din, a clamor, building to a crescendo. Click, clack, click, clack, left, right, left, right. Click/click/click/clack/clack/clack! They burst through the door with the igniting excitement of a flame touching lighter fluid. The air went out of the room. We were mesmerized, awe-struck, stupefied, dumbfounded, shocked, and amazed. We were also paralyzed as they proceeded across the dance floor in skimpy miniskirts, alluring black velvet choke collars, and skin-tight sweaters. At this exact point in time I solidified my belief in God. Manna was falling from heaven. We were on the threshold of the promised land. Holly elbowed me in the ribs and I found my voice. “Hello ladies. Welcome to the Utica Club. I hope you enjoy your evening. If there is anything, anything at all I can do to help you…”. Holly stepped in front of me and started gibbering in cheerleadereese. They all crowded around her giddily jumping up and down and exhibiting other such girly-girl behavior. All that is, but one. She was standing off to the side and staring directly at me with smoldering icicle eyes searing right through me. Was she the leader of the pack? Or the lone wolf? Whoever she was, she was hot.

I found the nerve to nonchalantly amble over to her. “What do you listen to Philly?” I managed to expunge from my quivering lips. “Rascals. Doesn’t everyone?” She walked with me over to Walden whose knees were knocking and whose facial expressions most resembled that of a man in the throes of a cardiac arrest. He regained composure and started to set the Beatles record onto the stylus. I grabbed the record as if it were the rip cord to a back-up parachute and whispered, “Rascals. Now!” “John, everyone’s requested this.” “Lee are you crazy? Rascals. The first few songs have to be the Rascals.” “But why?” I quickly tilted my head towards her, and the light bulb went on in his head. He fumbled through our pile of phonographic records digging deep for the limited library of Young Rascal tunes.

She shouted over the driving beat of “Micky’s Monkey” that her name was Toni. Stated during “Land of a Thousand Dances” that no, she had no intention of becoming a nun. Did I think nuns dressed like this? I didn’t know what to think. My head was spinning like a top in an anti-gravity chamber. She pulled me close during “Groovin’” and I was all for it. Holly and her partner bumped into us. He said, “excuse us.” Holly wasn’t digging it. Her glowering eyes said, “eat shit and die.” Toni’s swaying body told me that tonight might just be the night. One in the hand is worth two in the bush Holly. You and your cheerleader entourage have treated us like lepers since the first day of school. How do you like it when the shoe’s on the other foot?

Joe McMahon was tapping firmly on my shoulder. Toni’s body was melting into mine. He grabbed my arm and shook it. “What! What is it Joe?” “We got trouble John. Big trouble.” Toni’s body seemed to tingle at the hint of danger. “What Joe?” “We’re being overrun. There’s a line of kids around the building. Cars are parked illegally in the street. John you got to do something!” “Me? Why me?” “You’re the president!” “Oh God! Tonight? You’ve got to tell me that tonight?” “Well…it’s true.” “Toni, please excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

We told Harvey that women found doormen to be irresistible sexy beasts and assigned him the task of collecting the cover charge and even intimated that pretty girls slide while bow wows hide – get rid of them. Use any excuse you can, but whatever you do, don’t let them in. I sprinted down the stairs to the front door where Harvey was pinned against the wall by a couple of jocks from another school who were threatening to insert the rubber entrance stamp up his nether region.

“Time for a break Harv. Time for you to go upstairs Harv.” I knew his tormentors from jungle ball sessions at the YMCA. “Just let us in Krieg, and there won’t be any trouble.” I was more concerned with the group of guys behind them. The juniors had showed up with some of the more pathetic seniors tagging along with them. We hated those bastards, who were always cutting in on our action, with a passion. I instantly instituted a five-dollar a head cover charge. The jocks in the front were none-too-pleased. “Kinda` steep Krieg. Suppose we don’t have it?” “Can’t pay. Can’t play fella’s.” “All we got is a flask of Jack and three bucks.” “Give me the Jack. Keep the money. You might need a cab.” “Thanks for nothing Krieg.” I maintained order for the next hour, but failed to maintain a head count. The walls were vibrating when I shouted, “We’re at capacity! I’m locking the doors for the next hour. Somebody leaves, I’ll let somebody else in.” The crowd moaned but was surprisingly well-behaved as I closed and locked the front door in their faces.

I scampered back up the stairs in a mindset of grave trepidation. I almost knocked Holly over when I reached the top of the flight of steps. She read me the riot act. “These girls are supposed to be nuns? Are you sure they didn’t get mixed up with the bus to hooker camp? John, this party is completely, and I do mean completely, out of control!” Seeing her like that, so angry, so vulnerable, gave me a sense of self-confidence I had never shown before. At school I didn’t talk to her unless she talked to me, and even then her cheerleader entourage would cast a disparaging look of disgust my way. “What’s the matter Holly, you jealous? Can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” “John, what are you talking about?” “Oh, come on Holly, you never give me, any of us, the time of day. You act as if you’re the queen, and we’re your loyal subjects.” “That’s bull! I’ve come to every single one of your parties. You’ve never asked me to dance. None of you have.” On any other night, I would have gotten on my knees and begged her to dance, but tonight the most titillating and dangerous girl I had ever met was just twenty steps up the hallway. Self-confidence spilled over into arrogance, “Doesn’t look like you’re going to get that dance tonight Hol.” “Not ever mister. You’ve just blown it with me. Whatever chance you might have had is over.” She stomped down the steps, unlocked the front door, flung it open, and left. A flood of teenager’s stormed through it and swelled up the steps. I dashed back towards the dance floor as they swept me along in front of them, a surging torrent of testosterone and estrogen about to heat up and boil over. A bubbling caldron of sexuality, need, and terror on the brink of eruption. And that’s when depression set in.

Toni was plastered against John Kasivic. I was doomed. How could I compete against such a fine figure of manhood? I accepted my fate. Holly sure as hell wasn’t coming back. Time for a backup plan. I scanned the outer reaches of the room for whatever dregs that hadn’t yet been claimed. The results of my hasty recognizance efforts revealed that it would require my becoming outrageously intoxicated in order to get through the rest of the evening, and hatch my lustful plans with any one of the dubious selections that were left. God’s sense of humor had taken a cruel turn, and I didn’t quite know what to make of these events, but He wasn’t done with me yet. Then His almighty hand parted the skies and lifted me to new heights. My heart soared like an eagle. Mary Ellen Tisdale, the head cheerleader, and foxiest girl in the school had showed. John Kasivic’s girlfriend was making a beeline right for him like an enraged hornet. I was sure going to enjoy seeing him try to wiggle out of this one. He kept his cool, I have to give him that. He introduced Toni to Mary Ellen, and all three of them danced together while Toni’s eyes darted about for an escape route, and Mary Ellen’s ears released steam. I sauntered over, took Toni’s hand, and triumphantly walked away with her. She seemed eternally grateful for my act of daring-do and bravery. The kind of gratitude that is usually and more appropriately expressed with sexual favors. I had to act fast before she changed her mind or any more star athletes appeared. I looked around the Utica Club, and pandemonium had broken out. There were well over three hundred people in the room. Walden’s replacement disc jockey was playing “Under My Thumb” by the Rolling Stones. We had clearly arrived at the tipping point of the evening – make it or break it time. On the responsible hand, I could stay and try to restore order, and on the hormonal hand, I could leave with Toni. It was a coming of age moment, which required quick decisive action which I immediately swung into by scurrying her down the fire escape. “Want to get drunk?” I asked her as our feet hit the ground. “Does the Pope shit in the woods?” she jokingly replied. We laughed and skipped all the way to the graveyard just like in Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” except Toni’s eyes were blue, her hair medium length and blond, her body killer.

When we arrived at the hiding place my cronies were already there. The cooler was tipped on its side. Beer and wine bottles were in disarray around the headstones. Joe McMahon was pulling on the fifth of Canadian Club a would-be sister of mercy passed out at his feet. “Well, it’s nice to know my friends wouldn’t start the party without me,” I blurted in mock indignation. “Where the hell have you been?” Walden asked barely managing to lift his head from the ample blossom of a future Mother Teresa. “Joe here put me to work.” Hartford and Weld laughed while their nun-to-be escorts nodded in bewilderment. My pupils had dilated to the point where I could see the outer periphery of our make-shift camp site. “Is that Harvey? My God, he’s with…” “Heather,” Toni interjected. “Heather goes for the bookish types.” Despite their futile attempts at establishing a semblance of privacy, their position half behind a bush and half in the open revealed that Harvey and Heather had gotten to know each other in a very conjugal way. “Hey Joe, do you think you could spare me a few swigs of that CC?” I asked as I took the flask of JD from my coat. Turning to Toni I suavely asked, “Which would you prefer my sweet?” She yanked the flask from my hand as if retrieving a purse I was trying to steal, twisted off the cap as if it were the head of a chicken headed for the pot, put the bottle to her lips, and inhaled it. I mean to say, that she finished it without stopping. She rose to her feet, stumbled forward, let out a whoop and fell unceremoniously on her ass. I took this as my signal to move in, and crawled into her willing arms. I managed to get her bra unhooked, and then reached down to see if there really was lightning underneath her skirt. She was willing, and I was glad, but fate intervened. Her chest heaved up and down and I knew it was time to jump ship or drown. I pulled away as she turned and hurled. Spittle hung from her lovely red lip-sticked mouth, but she maintained consciousness, maybe even seemed to feel a little better. I was beginning to feel that with no mention of current events, and a little CC mouth wash, that perhaps we could salvage this romantic evening. That’s when the call went out, and life as the founding members of the Utica Club, as we knew it, ended. “Fuuuzzzzz!!!”

I helped Toni to her feet, no small endeavor, the result of which she acknowledged by hurling again. We crept through the graveyard back towards the nursing home hiding behind trees and bushes until we could witness the carnage that was befalling our friends and classmates. The oldsters had their noses pressed to the windows in glee as teenagers scampered down fire escapes, slid across the hoods of police cars, darted down the hill to the highway, and ran out onto the blacktop frantically waving down motorists in an all-out attempt at escape. When a cop grabbed one kid, three more jumped him. I was beaming with pride at how my friends and classmates shone in their finest hour. Bedlam was in full swing at the Saint Bonaventure Nursing Home, the least likely place in the entire county for something like that to occur. We gazed down upon the scene of our own making and came to the only logical conclusion. “We’re going to have to make a run for it,” Walden stated through snits of laughter. “I have to take Toni back,” I said. “Why?” Heather asked. “She’s been in worse trouble than this. What do you think they’ll do? Execute us at sunrise?” “That’s right,” said Weld’s girlfriend of seventy-five minutes. “You boys high-tail it out of here and we’ll distract them.” Toni got it together enough to brush a kiss against my cheek. We had all had the foresight to tell our parents that we were staying at each other’s homes, which was something we knew with a certainty we would never be able to do again.

I held the lovely, thoroughly inebriated, yet still stunningly beautiful Toni in my arms and stated, “The one that got away. Good luck to you darling.” Hartford, ever the artist with a flair for the dramatic, quoted the Louis Untermeyer poem:

You to the left and I to the right

For the ways of men must sever

And it may well be for a day and a night

And it may well be forever.

The girls giggled and Weld’s girlfriend said, “We’ll give you three steps boys.” “Where to?” Walden asked me, the certain to be defunct president of the Utica Club. “Walsh, we can hole up there until morning, grab a shower, and go home to face the music,” I replied. “Face the music,” Harvey repeated my statement, “do you really think we’ll get in trouble?” “Yeah think?” Heather said winking her eye. “Does the Pope shit in the woods?” asked Toni. All I could do was laugh. Then we all laughed hysterically until we cried. I hugged Toni one last time and said, “Okay fella’s, it’s time to do our Johnny Horton routine.”

And they ran through the briars

And they ran through the brambles

And they ran through the bushes

Where a rabbit wouldn’t go

And they ran so fast

That the hounds couldn’t catch ’em

Down the Mississippi

To the Gulf of Mexico. _b

Actually, we ran three miles to Archbishop Walsh High School. I, being the only one who hadn’t gotten drunk, (or apparently laid) that evening, scaled the fire ladder, and opened the escape hatch on the roof of the school. I let the guys in through the side cafeteria door and we slept on the tables. The same tables our parents would be pounding in anguish and fury at the year’s second emergency meeting in two days’ time. What was wrong with these kids? What’s gotten into them? What are you teaching them at this school? What are we paying this outrageous tuition for? Why they’re twice as bad as those public school kids. Has everybody gone mad?

Although I knew I couldn’t summon the courage to do so, I prayed to God in heaven that I could just be at that meeting. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself climbing up onto one of those tables and screaming at the top of my lungs. “We’re mad alright! We are furious, outraged, and disgruntled!! What the hell do you expect? You’re the ones who are forcing us to grow up Catholic!!!”

Postscript

After watching her huff and puff for two weeks, I slipped an apology note to Holly Welch in study hall. After another forthright she seemed to calm down. The note must have meant something to her because she always treated me well after that. Catholic girls are like elephants, however. They never forget, and we never got together. She went to the left, and I went to the right, and our ways did sever forever.

Sister Mary Whatever let us set foot back into the Utica Club one last humiliating time to clean up the hellish mess, and apologize to the oldsters who were sad to see us leave as we were the most fun that they had had in years.

Father Blackhart punished us without mercy until graduation day where, in one last act of rebellion, I refused to kiss the Bishop of the diocese’s ring.

Toni did write me one letter inviting me to Philadelphia. I never wrote back. Upon introspection, that girl was just too wild for me.

Joe Weld runs a clothing store at a casino in Las Vegas, Nevada and routinely dates showgirls.

John Hartford is a famous artist. He started his business with the $1,000.00 in cover charges I had left over from the party.

Joe McMahon was on a bus headed back to Rockaway Beach the day after the party. None of us have seen or heard from him since.

Lee Walden is still one of my very best friend’s. He drops me a line from time to time.

None of the thirty-five girls from Philadelphia actually became nuns. I like to believe that we saved them from that, but the truth is, that when you grow up Catholic, you know better.

I finally got laid during the summer between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college under auspicious circumstances. I don’t know what she saw in me. I wasn’t the small town hero that I had set out to be, but I was champing at the bit to move on. By nineteen, none of that seemed to matter. There was a stupid and awful war being waged in Vietnam, and I had to go off to college in order to stay out of it. Perhaps it was her dire set of circumstances. The wagging old tongues said she was still married. She said her divorce was final, and that was good enough for me. She certainly was lonely and willing. I got what I needed and got out of town while the getting was good.

Growing up Catholic wasn’t too bad, except for the sex thing. In the ensuing years, whenever I returned to Olean, my parents would wax poetic on my Catholic high school years stating, “We don’t know why we ever sent you to that school. Nobody whoever went there goes to church anymore.”

Songs Quoted:

a). “Lightning Strikes Again.” Lou Christi

Reprise Records – 1964

b). “The Battle of New Orleans” Johnny Horton

Columbia Records – 1960

Author’s note:

This is the kickoff piece to the upcoming story collection entitled: Life, Love, and Other Disappointments. Below is the back cover come-on for further explanation.

Is romance dead? Is love truly just a four-letter word? The current divorce rate in the U.S. runs at 43% for first marriages, and surprisingly at 66% for second marriages, and shockingly at 73% for third marriages. Clearly the third time is not the charm, and many of the multi-betrothed are failing to learn from their past mistakes. As bad as it is for those that tie the knot it’s even worse for those who don’t. These are those poor souls who just can’t get out of their own way, want too little or too much from a partner, are immobilized by their fear of commitment, or are quite simply star crossed in their pursuit of ever elusive love. Throw into this dysfunctional cocktail a stiff shot of life itself, and it’s a wonder that anyone makes it to the finish line unscathed. So there you have it: Life, Love, and Other Disappointments. These are all of our stories. Beginning at age 15, and ending at age 75, there’s a 60-year arc in these stories illustrating, above all else, that life is for the living, and that love truly is the spice of life.

In the foster home kids came and went. All had the same story that their parents would be coming for them soon. A few were right, the majority were sorely disappointed. After a year she finally got my brother and me out and said she would be coming for my three sisters, all being molested in other foster homes, as soon as she could. She never came for them. I ran away at age ten, and was brought back by my grandfather who took me in for a short while. Then I was shipped off to live elsewhere, and although it was a stable and nurturing environment, in truth, I couldn’t wait to leave.

In the fall of 1970 when I entered the State University of New York (SUNY) at Cobleskill, on the first day of initiation, they marched us into an assembly hall and various speakers expounded upon how we could go about learning the ropes and have a successful college experience. They weren’t having much impact with me as I had already read all that in brochures and was eager to catch the campus bus into town and see what the local bars had to offer. Then the Dean of Students took the podium and got straight to the point. “Look to the right of you,” he said, and paused for dramatic effect, “and now look to the left. One of you won’t be here next semester.” I thought he was simply trying to scare us. Don’t be ridiculous, that would mean that one-third of the entire freshmen class would drop out, flunk out, or get kicked out. He wasn’t kidding, however, as I nearly flunked out that first semester and both people I had looked at in that assembly hall were gone. There was a lot of turnover, and the lesson wasn’t lost on me that I could be next.

In the fall of 1974, I was working in Buffalo, New York for an architectural firm straight out of college. They brought in this guy 39-40 years old. The gossip was that he had had a nervous breakdown. In a word, he was, and I’m being kind here, goofy. I thought, How could anyone let this happen to them? Over the course of the next thirty-five years I was to learn. I don’t remember his name, or know whatever became of him as he didn’t last two weeks, but I’ll never forget him. He was the first casualty I was to see in a career that more resembles a battlefield than a professional journey.

In the summer of 1978, upon landing a job as a landscape architect in training at the largest architectural firm in the state of Arizona I quickly learned just how expendable I was. They rode us hard and put us up wet, and if anyone complained they were shown the door which they better exit through fast to avoid getting a swift kick in the ass. I lasted for over a year and in the winter of 1979, I went out on my own. The guys who stayed there looked old before their time, beat down, and resigned to the fact that their lives would suck, and by all accounts suck they did. To hear them tell it, their lives sucked donkey ears.

In 1987, back in Phoenix, at age 36 I was climbing Squaw Peak (the name now changed to Piestewa Peak) daily and doing triples at least twice a week. It was balls to the wall on the way up the mile-and-a-quarter 40 degree incline, but I took my time relaxing coming down, while enjoying the natural and female scenery. I was in the best physical shape of my life. Just starting to come down the trail one day I passed a contingent of three firemen attending to a climber with a broken leg who was screaming in agony. There was nothing I could do to help, or so I thought, and they didn’t need any more Lookey-Lous than they already had, so I went on my way. At the three-quarter mile marker there was another fireman bent over and wrenching, and beside him was a stretcher which I instantly realized was for the injured climber. I grabbed it and told him, “I’ll take it up there. You continue when you’re able.” His grateful eyes said it all as he just shook his head yes. When I got back up to the other fireman the leader asked, “Where the hell is our guy?’ I replied, “He’s okay, but he’s sick, so I decided to help him out.” “Bastard had too much to drink last night,” he spat out in disgust. I silently turned away and went back down the trail. The sick fireman had toughed it out to the mile marker with his chest heaving and the embarrassment showing on his face. “The man’s going to be okay,” I reassured him. “Thanks,” he replied.

In the winter of 1993, my first and only wife left me. She was disappointed that I was sticking with a career that had seemingly turned on me, saying that she would have more respect for me if I worked at a gas station and at least brought home a weekly paycheck. It was simply a period of economic downturn, and I had already seen others in 1982 and 1986 and 1991. I knew it would pass, and besides, we had her paycheck that we could easily get by on if only we were to tighten our belts for a while. It was humiliating and exhilarating (could it really be this easy to finally be rid of her?) all at the same time as I walked through our apartment complex and loaded up her car with the last of her possessions “The man is supposed to provide,” she screamed at me as she was slamming the car door.

In the spring of 1998, I went back to SUNY Cobleskill to receive a “Distinguished Alumnus” award. My first book, entitled Desert Landscape Architecture had recently been accepted by an academic publisher and was due out in 1999. I felt that I was finally starting to get some recognition as an expert in my field. That didn’t last long. At Cobleskill I communed and commiserated with old friends and classmates, and was happy to receive my award after traveling 3,000 miles to get it. It’s utterly amazing how far someone will travel to pick up a $1.98 plastic plague knowing that it could well be the only one that they will ever get.

In 2002, I declared bankruptcy because of failing at my construction business after nearly five years of oppressive toil and extreme stress. I knew it would kill me if I tried to continue on with it, so I got out while all the while hating myself for doing it. There are those periods in life when you just have to live with yourself even when you don’t like yourself. The popular saying is that if you last one year in business it proves nothing more than you have guts, and if you last five years that you are probably going to make it. I didn’t.

In the summer of 2004, I spent ten days in the hospital with stomach pain which they were unable to resolve, but it thankfully subsided, and I was released late on a Friday afternoon. Once again riding through the streets of downtown Olean, New York, when I stopped at a red light, I glanced over at a young man in a beat-up pickup truck stopped in the opposite lane apparently anxious to be on his way. He looked to be in his early twenties. Just a rawboned square-shouldered farm boy with long unkempt hair and reddened cheekbones from working hard in the sun all day. He was most assuredly heading out to a local bar to blow some of his paycheck and dance his ass off while trying to get lucky for the evening. It was like looking at myself in a mirror during the prime of my life. Silently I wished him well as we made eye contact and quickly nodded to each other. Then the light changed, and his tires squealed away, while I slowly rolled away thinking: That was me. That was me a long time ago.

In 2012, I walked away from the profession of landscape architecture and started growing marijuana to take up the financial slack. I learned a tremendous amount about this noble species, the coyote of the plant kingdom, the trickster. It was at times a peaceful, and at other times a tenuous existence, and I read and researched as much as humanly possible about how I could have a legal operation. For four years I operated under the collective business model which existed in a gray area of legality, but I dutifully paid my taxes to the State Board of Equalization, and the cops left me alone. I voted for legalization in California in 2016, even though legalization did not vote for us small growers, and the Board would not take our money anymore. So, I became an outlaw overnight which was pretty much portended when Riverside County passed fatwa 925 (death to all growers) the previous summer. I continued to grow. I loved growing, and everything about being an outlaw: prepping the soil and cloning in the spring, planting and fertilizing in the summer, harvesting and selling in the late fall, making water bag hash and heat pressed rosin in the winter. The County Sheriff rolled me up in the fall of 2019, chopped the crop, and left us destitute. Nothing happened for a year, and then they descended upon me again under the inauspiciousness of a failure to appear warrant that I never knew about. They put me in leg chains, and made me sweat it out in court for the span of another year before wrapping it up with much to do about nothing. When it was finally over, all I could think was, I can’t believe that this has happened to me – again.

Back in 2015, I grew restless. The ghosts of my past (and present) were pressing in upon me. My shortcomings as a quasi-stepfather, my failed contracting business, my dissatisfaction with the career of landscape architecture, eight books that weren’t selling, the stress of growing marijuana while thumbing my nose at law enforcement. I decided to go back to New York, look up old friends and acquaintances, and return back home taking the Northern route that I had followed while driving out to Washington State University (WSU) in the late summer of 1972, while fleeing my recent marijuana arrest and conviction (a plea bargain deal requiring that I not go to college in New York State), and shouldering a heaping helping of Roman Catholic guilt. The Great Lakes states, the great plains, the Rocky Mountains, the coniferous forests of Idaho and Washington State. You would think I would have learned back in ’98 after going back to Cobleskill that you can never step in the same river twice. Washington State University did not welcome me with open arms, the design lab had moved, the last of my professors had retired and could not be found, they even charged me for a parking pass. I was relieved to leave.

In the late summer of 2021, I again drove back to my hometown of Olean, New York to attend our fifty-year high school reunion, after the Coronavirus pandemic had delayed it by one year. Who says that you can’t go home again? I have a lot of retired friends that have gone home to die. Not me buddy! Old friends, past girlfriends, broken-down old teammates, and yet in most ways we were the same people now that we had been then. Do people really ever change, or do they just reinvent themselves as a different version of who they always were? Although I like to say that I can’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror, I know in my heart that I’m the same old me.

Today, August 30^th, 2024, in real time I call myself a writer. I have been writing for over 33 years. It’s the last of my careers, and it should have been the one I started out with and ended with. But I didn’t. I have two books being published by “conventional” publishing houses, I finally got an agent, and I put out chapbooks of poetry and essays myself that I dedicate to old friends before either of us pass from Mother Earth just so they know how much I loved them, even if no one else knows. I enjoy my time at the keyboard. I can still work out in the sun when I have to, although I’ve learned to pace myself. I still feel that I can improve at something, that I can be significant, that I have some intrinsic value, even in no one else does. Isn’t that the meat of it then? Believing in yourself whether you’re coming or going?

Author’s note:

This piece is to be contained in the upcoming poetry and essay collection entitled “Here’s the Deal!”

In a top secret sweep this morning, officers from the U.S. Department for the Prevention of Bland (USDPB) rounded up every literary agent in our fair city. Details are murky at this time, but reports of a mass prisoner release at Rikers Island only serve to heighten suspicions that the agents are being held there without bond. Department head, John C. Krieg, a failed writer who had to find another career or starve, has been quoted as saying, “This has been a long time coming.”

Dateline: June 19^th, 2023 New York City, New York, U.S.A.

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has been retained to represent the agents and he better act fast as food supplies at the facility are running low. At a press briefing held earlier this morning, and only attended by representatives of our nation’s Big Five publishing houses (as crazy as this sounds) Giuliani was quoted as saying: “There is only one solution to this problem – trial by combat!” Chaos amongst the attendees rapidly ensued as nobody knew just who was exactly supposed to fight who. Then Giuliani clarified his comment stating, “The agents, you dopes. Let them fight it out amongst themselves.”

Dateline: June 20^th, 2023 New York City, New York, U.S.A.

Tickets went on sale today at $59.00 per head for what is being billed as, “The Cranage on the Hudson.” ESPN and other sport networks are engaged in a bidding war to cover the event. All that is left to do now is to develop some iron-clad guidelines for how the battle is supposed to go down and make sure that they are followed to the letter. The agents were given a choice: Be released and pledge to be nice to any author that they were to meet for a period of ten years or go to battle. So far, only three sensitive poetry agents have been released, but the recidivism rate is expected to be high. All proceeds are to go to The Library of Congress.

Dateline: June 21^st, 2023 New York City, New York, U.S.A.

A lottery was held this morning amongst well-known yet highly disgruntled authors to determine who would act as Master of Ceremonies for this hysterically anticipated event. One Mr. Hardy Harhar of Hillbillyville, California, was the lucky winner. It has been widely circulated in conservative circles that Mr. Harhar, an otherwise peaceful and fun-loving grandfather, and card-carrying member of The Oath Keepers, is hot under the collar due to a recent rude and totally unfair rejection. When questioned by reporters he curtly said, “Get me on the next plane out!”

Dateline: June 22^nd, 2023 New York City, New York, U.S.A.

Mr. Hardy Harhar, the author of the bestselling and highly controversial rightwing classic, Why Assault Weapons Matter (2021) arrived at La Guardia Airport at 9:57 this morning. Immediately whisked away to Rikers Island, he met with USDPB officials to establish the ground rules for tomorrow’s barbaric event. Department head, John C. Krieg, could not attend the meeting having to oversee operations in the prison’s metal shop where he personally supervised the sharpening of spears, swords, switchblades, and daggers. The Carnage on the Hudson is set to begin at 10:45 a.m. tomorrow morning. Tickets are sold out, although scalpers are reportedly receiving $1,500.00 per head.

Dateline: June 23^rd, 2023 New York City, New York, U.S.A.

Inside the Riker’s Island Prison Complex courtyard today an indiscriminate and bloody slaughter of epic proportions and too ugly to look at (yet no one could look away) 4,733 literary agents met their end as a national television audience reveled in the massacre. At 10:45 a.m. Master of Ceremonies, Mr. Hardy Harhar, stood on his platform high above the combatants and onlookers and screeched into his megaphone, “Let the Games Begin!” First to expire were the two remaining sensitive poetry agents, then the lives of the speculative fiction agents were unceremoniously expunged because they never knew their asses from a hole in the ground to begin with, and were easy pickin’s for the goth horror agents who cut them to ribbons with apparent glee. Above the deafening din of battle expiring cries of “Wrong genre!” and “No platform!” were heard. In the end only the no nonsense nonfiction agents remained, and they savagely turned upon each other. Mr. Harhar, more in an act of distain than compassion, finally called a halt to the horrible carnage at 11:51 a.m. Only three agents remained and all looked like they were mere seconds removed from death. Undeterred, Mr. Harhar looked directly into the cameras and bellowed into his megaphone the one question that any author anywhere has been forced to ask at one time or another during their career: “Now, which one of these bastards do you suppose wants to represent my book?”

Author’s note:

This piece first appeared in Down in the Dirt in 2023. It is to appear in the upcoming poetry and essay collection entitled Separate from the Herd.

This town itself looks like the façade of a Hollywood set trying to convey to moviegoers at a glance the overall vibe that there is nothing but destitution and hopelessness, and that is on a good day. Only that vibe doesn’t end after two hours and get nominated for an Oscar for best set design. To those of us forced by economic circumstances, or the long arm of law enforcement, or both to exist here it is our penetrating reality day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out, until the day we die and some bible thumper takes up a community-wide collection to have us cremated so that we won’t rot where we dropped in the street. If it doesn’t seem like anyone has much to look forward to that is because there isn’t, and out of all of us, Madge has the least to look forward to but she just keeps on going trudging through that endless series of disappoints we all call life.

Everyone assumes, but can neither confirm or deny that Madge once had a husband, otherwise where did those kids of Her’s come from? Gossip is that she just showed up in town one day with those three little rugrats at her knee. She somehow acquired a cramped RV in the worst neighborhood in town and lived off the meager funds provided by a disability claim with Social Security. She worked odd jobs for cash here and there. The worst of the worst. Things like cleaning up rentals tenants had torn apart while whipping their shit all over the walls before splitting town. And that was one of the better ones. Now, she’s so broke down that she can’t even do that. Life for the poor is not known for its kindness.

I met Madge when the County Sheriff’s office dropped me off here with fifty bucks in my pocket and a warning that they were watching me. Once a convict, always a convict in their eyes. I had done my time for what the courts said was “domestic abuse” even though the bitch charged at me with a knife and tried to cut my balls off. What was she pissed off about? Beats me, but it was always something. Drama was like breathing to her – she just couldn’t live without it. I had to take the knife away, and she fell to the ground, crawled on her hands and knees trying to tackle me, so I had to kick her off of me and flee. The cops picked me up three hours later, roughed me up, and tossed me in the county holding pen. I then went to court in my orange jumpsuit which only served to scream, “guilty,” and was given a court-appointed attorney who only wanted to get me off his client list as fast as possible. He advised that I plead guilty to achieve a lighter sentence because there was no way that he was going to make any real effort to build a creditable case. Six months later I was released, given a probation officer to meet with every two weeks, and dropped off here with the aforementioned fifty stinking bucks. Disoriented and despondent I was in a state of total helplessness when this old woman comes walking up to me and asks, “Jesus, what did you do to be so lucky as to wind up here?” “I really don’t want to say,” I tell her. “As if I don’t already know. This is where the county always drops off convicts; well away from those rich bastards down the hill.” “Lady, this I don’t need.” “I can help you, if you can help me,” she says. So we walk over to her weed infested lot that her RV sits on with broken down shit strewn around everywhere. It was no palace, that’s for sure, but there was a wood storage shed she had managed to lay hands on that was in relatively good condition. So that was the deal, shape this place up in exchange for a bed in the shed if only I could make enough space to accommodate one. Nobody else had seemed to give two shits as to whether I was dead or alive over the last six months, so I jumped at her offer figuring that it would only be temporary, but at least it would keep me out of the elements until I figured out what my next move would be.

I gained a foothold in this town, just enough of a stake in the world to realize that although it wasn’t much, it would hurt to lose it. There was no work to speak of, especially not any for a convicted felon, thought to be dangerous. The only available jobs for someone like me were cooking meth out in the sticks or working for the pot growers. I know meth to be from the pit of hell so I had one option. I’ll give you only one of two guesses as to my line of work now. Enough said. Loose lips sink ships. Snitches get stiches. Cash tells no tales and leaves no trails. But I needed a cover to keep my probation officer from crawling up my ass. So, I became Madge’s in home caregiver, and they bought it. She would pay me by check, and when I cashed it I would hand the money right back to her. One hand washes the other. Every time I handed her back her cash she would say, “Aw life – isn’t it grand?” Don’t ask me why, but it was a sentiment that I most certainly didn’t agree with. My life sucked. It sucked horse cock with a cherry on top.

With no car to get around with, and certainly no truck to take all of the shit on Madge’s lot to the dump I had no choice but to make friends to get me down the hill for my probation meetings and help me get everything to the dump. Help? Please. Guys up here don’t “help”. They will watch you work, be your driver for a pretty penny, but any physical exertion is simply out of the question. So I acquired a few friends, just enough so there would be no sorrow on my part if I lost any of them, because that I was determined to do.

My friends amongst this rabble? Let me tell you about my friends. They are all in to smoke my chronic because it’s usually the most boss tits weed in town, but I’ve learned to keep any conversation with them down to a minimum because no matter what I say they are sure to challenge it with statements such as, “Oh yeah, who said that?” Now, I know that they don’t work, and don’t want to, so they have all the time in the world to stir up shit, as if it’s their sole mission in life. And the most important thing to any dysfunctional “unhoused” person in this valley is to hunt down and confront anyone they feel is “talking shit” about them without any concern as to whether or not said shit is true or not. I’m not falling into that trap. I’m not kicking that hornet’s nest of wanton stupidity. I don’t want to bust any heads that would send me straight back to jail. All of which leaves me more or less mute. What my so called friends are really telling me is, “If you don’t want to wallow in our misery with us, then shut the fuck up.” So I do. So even though there’s people on the streets and in the stores, it doesn’t much matter, and it’s a lonely existence I live. Lonely as hell.

I can’t even smoke the stellar weed I help to grow, and I live in mortal fear that my probation officer will smell it on me. I never touch anything at the grow without latex gloves on and I quickly installed an outdoor shower at the rear of Madge’s shed. It’s colder than hell in the winter, but I persevere. What moron ever started that saying, anyway: “Cold as hell?” What a goddamned oxymoron that is. I freeze my balls off, but it’s better than nothing. I have some clothes that I always wear at the grow and then smell-free clothes that I wear to my probation officer’s office. I’m no stranger to the laundry mat, that’s for sure. So I have a life. It’s not much of a life, but it’s the only one I got. I tell myself, things will get better, and then I ask myself in just what alternate universe was that likely to occur in? Next month the required meetings with my probation officer expire and I will see about things improving then. I’ll still be on the hook, under the bootheel of law enforcement for another four years but I won’t have to stare into that ugly prick’s mug anymore – unless I do something really stupid; and that I ain’t.

Life at Madge’s place, or home, if you can call it that, is turning into an absolute unmitigated disaster. Remember the three kids? You might not, but how could I ever forget the little bastards? Tommy is 15, Silva is 12, and Owen is 10 and they are all front row candidates for juvenile hall. They are constantly bringing the cops around, because of vandalism accusations and fighting and other totally unnecessary stupid shit, and that I most certainly don’t need. The cops have an ingrained ability to make any bad situation worse, and they are completely capable of doing anything. The only way to protect yourself from them is to never be around them. Believe me, they know it, and they like it that way. So these kids are a problem for me, no two ways about it.

When late winter arrives it is very cold in the shed. I run an electric cord from Madge’s RV out the shed for a little space heater, and I’m getting by. The boss now lets me shower at work because he doesn’t want to lose me. Madge hits me up for $50 dollars for the electric expense, and I pay it knowing that she is just covering her expenses. With meetings with my probation officer no longer required, I put a notice on the billboard at the hardware store that reads “Looking for rides to Mount San Jacinto Junior College on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays – will pay for gas,” with an e-mail address that goes to my iPhone. I’m entering the land of the living very slowly, but I’m moving forward. I don’t care how long it takes but I am determined to get an Associate’s Degree in Legal Studies. It has always amazed me how a dumb son-of-a-bitch like my court appointed attorney ever got a license to practice law because the only thing he impressed me with was with how little he truly knew about it. Now, I know at age 27, with a felony rap against me, and no avenue to any real money that becoming an attorney isn’t in the cards, but legal assistant doesn’t seem completely out of the question. I can file bankruptcy requests and no-fault divorces, and the such, and charge reasonable fees allowing me to get by if I aspire to little more than getting out of Madge’s shed and into one of the decrepit trailers at the ghetto park in town. God knows there’s plenty of that shit happening in this town, and some folks wouldn’t have to spend so much on gas getting down the hill and throwing their hard-earned money away on second-rate attorneys like the Bozo the Clown who supposedly represented me. I would feel like Jesus Christ our lord and savior if I could spare anyone from all of that. An accreditation that would take a “normal” student two years will, at minimum take me five, but it would be moving forward very slowly ahead.

Then things took an unexpected turn for the better. My boss at the grow said he would allow me to use a small Kia Forte to make deliveries down in Hemet and it’s surrounds, and I could schedule them around my classes. Now I know what he’s really angling for – sales that can be garnered by the onsite campus weed dealer. It’s all highly illegal despite everyone saying, “Pot is legal now.” Like hell it is. The corporate big boys get to drink at that trough, but the little guys could never get in the game. He’s got someone greased, and I know it. I also know that I can get out of planting and trimming and breaking my back during the hot summer months if I go along with him. So, I’ll take my chances, but I’ll keep my cover and appear to live in Madge’s shed while sleeping most nights in the car parked next to it. I have to be in town, anyway, to stock up on product, so why tip anyone off that my circumstances have changed all that much from the wretched existence that I have been experiencing over the course of the last year?

I increase my credit hours and spend most of my days almost exclusively on campus. Even some professors are buying from me. I’m probably the worst kept secret on campus and it makes me paranoid as all get out. Everybody acts like this is poly/wolly/ding/dong okay, but I know that if I get rolled up, that as a two time loser, I’ll do some heavy time.

I actually like education and start taking a lot of electives concerning things that interest me. It will take longer to graduate because of that, but I’m in no real hurry. I get to use computers at the lab here at school, and I’m getting pretty goddamned good on them. It looks like I’m not as dumb as everyone thinks I am. I like the feeling that I know something, that I’m broadening my horizons, so to speak, One course that’s required that I fucking hate is psychology. Jesus what a steaming hot pile of absolute bullshit. My classmates and I are completely different, I guess because our younger years were completely different. Sometimes I feel that we must have lived in alternate universes. I’m the oldest guy in the class and these fucking crybabies make me feel even older than the eight or nine years that separate us.

My “childhood” was one of absolute terror and a fight for mere survival. The old man was a bullying son-of-a bitch who beat up my mom and knocked me around if I stepped in and tried to do anything about it. What a miserable piece-of-shit he was, and she accepted being a doormat which caused me to lose respect for her. The only way to cope with it was to spend as much time as humanly possible away from the house and out on the streets. But the street ain’t no bargain either, and I got in lots of fights which I usually won because I was bigger than most of the kids my age and had a reason to be meaner. As luck would have it, when I grew enough to become eye to eye with the old man, I kicked his fucking ass, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and tugged him across the front lawn, and threw him down on the asphalt street screaming, “Come back and I’ll fucking kill you!” That was the end of that prick. I was sixteen, and life at home was more peaceful, but my mom started drinking heavy, crying all the time over the drop of a hat, and acting like there was no reason to keep on living. And then she didn’t. I came home from school one day and found her overdosed on pills and vodka. She was dead. Deader than a doornail. I was put in the system and lived in a foster home for a year-and-a-half.

Let me tell you about Child Protective Services (CPS). Who are they really protecting? Maybe their image, whatever that’s supposed to be. Maybe their paychecks. But certainly not the kids they throw into those foster homes. There were six of us in a four bedroom home, and two of the younger girls were being molested by our “foster father.” I knew that to do anything about it just might wind me up in a worse home, so I bided my time. On my eighteenth birthday when the system just cuts you loose I ask him to step outside with me. I guess he saw it coming and refused. Then there goes another guy flying out the front door and getting a taste of the asphalt. Fucking asshole deserved worse than what I gave him. I hope those little girls enjoyed watching him bleed. He didn’t do a fucking thing about it, and those CPS pricks didn’t believe a word I said about him. Life went on as it always had in that place. It’s a fucking disgrace, but I had my own life to live. I worked whatever shitty manual labor job I could get, and that’s what I was doing right up until the time Veronica did her floor show for the police and sent me to the can. So my classmates in this stupid course can take their inner child’s and go sit in the corner with them and suck on their bottles. I just want to get through this jack-off course and graduate.

By the time I get back to Madge’s place it’s most usually late. I check in on her and oftentimes bring her groceries that I buy down the hill where they are much cheaper with the money she gives me along with a list. Those fucking kids are never in bed, the TV is always roasting, the RV looks like a bomb has hit it, and she just tunes it all out. As long the kids are happy, she’s happy, or so it seems. Madge hates confrontation and does anything to appease those little brats in order to avoid it. I figure that she must be an adult child of an acholic to be able to ignore all the dysfunction swirling around her. She’s taken to calling me Ronnie, although I hate that and would kick anyone else’s ass for doing it. This seems to delight her tremendously, and I just let it slide. I’m happy to do my part to brighten up her miserable life. Every time I leave she says to me, “Aw life – isn’t it grand?” And then she laughs and laughs and laughs. I walk out into the bracing chaparral air, and the town is quiet and peaceful, belying all the degenerate behavior that is happening out on the backroads, in the dark corners of the town park, at the Indian casino out on the rez. That’s all someone else’s problem, and I have enough of my own. Hell, if the police were doing their jobs and wiped out the meth labs this would be the greatest place on Earth to live. But they aren’t. What would they do with themselves if they ever accomplished those things they say they are accomplishing? I know that Tommy is dealing meth at the high school, but to stop him might cause the degenerates he works for to come at me. They’re a very deviant subset of humanity, probably the remnants of the Neanderthal’s reign. Very stupid but very violent. This would be trouble that I don’t need. Not now, not with my life starting to take a turn for the better.

Three years go by. I shower in the gym at school, and have demanded a bigger cut from my grow boss, and have saved up close to 100 grand. My life is better than I could have ever imagined it being, and I could afford better housing, but I tell myself that it’s smart to maintain my cover. I’m damn near invisible in this town, and I like it that way. More people know who I am in Hemet than they do here. But there’s a glitch. It’s March and I graduate in June. What then? I could leave, but it now occurs to me that something is tugging at me, something is holding me back. I never had much of a mother, and I’m worried about Madge. I’ve told those fucking kids a hundred times to lighten up with her or heads are going to roll, but they take it like it’s a big fucking joke except when I get really mad and drag them out of the RV for a firmer talking to. That gets those little asshole’s attention, that’s for sure.

Tommy is going to graduate high school as I’m graduating junior college with my Associate’s degree. He no longer will have his cover of youth and he will be of age for adult charges to be levied against him if he’s caught. No more of this folly of youth bullshit, this kid is stepping up into a new world, and a really shitty one at that. We have a talk. He doesn’t listen. Tommy thinks he’s a tough guy, but he’s just a bigger kid who always manages to pick fights with smaller kids that he knows he can beat up. I’ll just have to let him find out where he’s headed on his own; so I tell him that I’ve grown very fond of Madge and if he fucks with her we will dance, but otherwise steer clear of me and I’ll leave you be. Like I said, I got my own shit to deal with.

I fucked it all up, because Tommy was so dumb that he didn’t have the brains to pour piss out of a boot and he made enemies, especially with some of the other meth dealers who don’t like him cutting in on their action. I guess one of them decided that he needed to be sent a message. Madge was probably just coming home from one of her slow walks through town is all that I can figure, and it was dark out, not yet being spring. Hot, but not the blast furnace that define our summer days. Anyway, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s for sure.

Her head was caved in and she was covered in blood. She was motionless – dead, deader than a goddamned doornail, and there wasn’t a thing that I could do about it. The kids were in the RV lit up like a Christmas tree with the television blaring as usual, unaware of the evil that had been perpetuated right outside their door. Darkness was my only ally. To call the police seemed useless and would land Silvia and Owen in a foster home. Madge’s disability deposit was just days away, and they would need that money. What fucking good would it do to turn this tragedy into a shit show, a three ring circus, something that the cops love with their yellow tape everywhere and their blue and red bubble gum lights spinning round and round, while they lean over the hoods of their cars eating doughnuts while waiting for the detectives to arrive? None of that shit was going to bring Madge back to life, And besides, I knew who killed her. The best option was to dispose of the body. To bury her quickly. But where? It would be extremely dumb to put her in the car that would leave more evidence than Custer had Indians. Then the answer hit me.

The shed required all my energy to silently tip it over. Then I stripped naked and set my clothes far away from the body, the blood, the awful carnage. Then I dug her grave for at least three hours before dragging her limp body into it with the tears streaming down my face. Ever hear John Mellencamp’s “Jackie Brown?” That’s what was playing in my head while the volume from the TV drowned out any hint of noise from my sobs.

And giving the world more than it gave you
What ugly truths freedom brings
And it hasn’t been very kind to you
Is this your life, Jackie Brown? ¹

Well…that life was certainly over with, so I snuck to the hose and turned on the water so as to wash away any hint of blood and to smooth out the soil on top of her grave. I doused my body rinsing away any residual blood and put my clothes back on. The shed tipped back easily, and I adjusted it to rest exactly as it had previously been.

Madge’s purse was on the kitchen table where it always was. The kids were conked out. I got the debit card that her payments were loaded onto each month out and pocketed it and then went out back and quietly drove away with my headlights off until I hit the main drag through town. What now? I wanted to just run away but something was holding me back. Those kids had no shot without my help. Sure, the odds that they would turn out to be responsible adults were not good, but I wasn’t going to be the one to see to it that they wouldn’t get any chance at all. I wasn’t going anywhere. At least not until Owen turned 18, and I knew it.

Three days later, all the newspapers down the hill have headlines above the fold that read something to the effect of: MAJOR CRYSTAL METHAMPHETAMINE BUST IN HILLBILLYVILLE, CALIFORNIA! Care to guess who tipped law enforcement off? The world is better off without those degenerates, but I keep my eyes at the back of my head. Those miserable bastard excuses for humanity. Madge never did anything to hurt anyone. They fucking deserve whatever they get.

Madge was so invisible to most of these townspeople that nobody even noticed that she was gone. Her kids at least listened to my claim that she had disappeared because she just couldn’t take the way they treated her anymore. Anyone with half a brain would believe how utterly believable that was. If they didn’t want Child Protective Services to throw their little ungrateful asses into a foster home they better not cross me and they better not run their mouths to any well-meaning do-gooders at school.

Another four years go by. I did move into that shitty trailer in the ghetto in town. I got a hole-in-the-wall office in town and got pretty good at being a legal assistant, and business was pretty steady. The four constants in life are death, taxes, divorce, and bankruptcy. They all come sure as shit.

Tommy was so lazy that at 22 he just stayed in the RV taking his drugs and watching TV. Owen is graduating high school in the spring, Silva is out there somewhere fucking every degenerate in the valley, but she mostly lays low and knows better than to fuck with me.

I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs whenever I used her Social Security debit card and I never used it except to pay her landlord with a direct deposit into his account. As long as he got his money he was sure to never show his face and have anyone request a repair although so many were needed. I also used it to purchase a shit load of groceries for the kids early every month after the money posted. Then I let it build up just a little bit every month being careful never to max it out. I never yielded to temptation and dipped into it, and I take immense pride in that. I kept up with paying for her Post Office box just to support the rouse that she was still alive.

So the years flashed by, and my fortunes changed for the better. I eventually got the doublewide on the five acres not too far out in the sticks away from a paved road. In this valley that is the epitome of the American dream, and I’m living it baby! I never got married, so I never got divorced. There was no disgruntled wife to claim that I had ruined her life so now she was entitled to half of my shit. No kids to tell me that I’m the biggest asshole on the face of the planet and why the fuck did I bring them into this fucked up world? I started out alone in this place and I’m still alone. I’d rather be alone than ripped off, ridiculed, made a fool of, and sitting on a bar stool somewhere drinking away my disappointment in myself.

I think of Madge every now and then. As for her kids that she tried so hard to raise up right but who only wanted to party, party, party. Tommy’s doing 15 years in the big house on an aggravated assault rap after he almost beat a cop to death. I would have viewed that as poetic justice if only he hadn’t got caught. Silva’s living with a guy who is beating her so much that it wouldn’t be a surprise if he just went ahead and killed her. Owen hangs out at the park in town with all the other crystal-meth addicted losers. He still lives in the RV, even though I anonymously apprised Social Security about Madge’s supposed disappearance two years after he graduated high school. It’s just a matter of time before he gets some shit laced with fentanyl and fulfills the death wish of all addicts which is that the only way to really make the pain go away is to go away yourself. He’s got one foot in the grave and the other in hell.

Nobody’s found her body yet, and most days I just forget all about that business and live my life. Some nights I wake up in a cold sweat and fear that I’ll be found out, but I wasn’t the one who killed her, and I was the only one to cry over her grave. She tried so goddamned hard and got nothing in return. As far as I’m concerned the people in this town who did nothing but disrespect and laugh at her would have to stand on a high fucking ladder just to kiss her ass. Life isn’t fair. I learned that early on and never expected it to be. But like Madge, I just keep walking slowly forward. I refuse to stop until I am stopped, and if you want to know what to put on my headstone, I want only five little words that sums it all up: “Aw life – isn’t it grand?”

Song quoted:

1). “Jackie Brown” from: Big Daddy. Songwriter: John Mellencamp: 1989

Author’s note:

This piece is to appear in the upcoming story collection entitled Dysfunction IS What We Do Best.

It’s hard to live with yourself during hard times. It’s hard to like yourself, but if you don’t, how can you even begin to hope that anyone else will? If you don’t believe in yourself rare are the instances in life where anyone else will. If you’re like me, no one will criticize you more than you will criticize yourself. And for what? What good does all the self-defeating negative tapes that are on a perpetual replay loop inside your head going to do? Is that going to change the reality that you are living in right here in real time for even a second? The most soul crushing factor in your life will be your own anticipatory anxiety. It will rob you of any inner peace to say nothing of joy. At times like these, when the roof of the entire world is caving in on your head, get out of the house. Go do something, even if it’s as simple as watching the sun rise and set each day. So long as you are not actually physically hurting another human being, realize that you have a right to be happy. Whose life is it, anyway?

The money changers of the citizens will entrap you with their predatory loans. Know that taking out anything but a Payday Loan with a one-month payback is the fastest path to ruin. They will virtually eat you alive. Know this – when you are in a hole – stop digging. I know the fear. I know the desperation. And they know it too. That’s what keeps them in business. When you owe someone all they really want is their money. Ignore their calls and their insatiable quest to have you explain yourself and fill out their forms as they relentlessly meet out their shame hoping to wear you down. Your exhaustion only makes it harder for you to rise up and accept your circumstances and go on living. While the few friends that you have amongst the citizens will roll their eyes and admonish you for what they feel is your poor money management (translate, obvious stupidity) they don’t live the way that you have to. While they may intimate that they understand your fear, in reality they can’t even begin to fathom it. Their advice is useless when your most immediate problem is to get dinner on the table. A bank’s overdraft fee is most typically $34 while the payback for a $255 Payday Loan is $300. That’s a difference of only $15, and you do get the $255 to work with while rarely will your bank cover an overdraft of $255. Survival in the second- class economy requires some unconventional thinking.

Cars depreciate the minute you roll them off the lot. Homes on land that you own most always appreciate faster than their ongoing maintenance expenses, so long as you live there for over a decade. Each passing decade most usually represents a minimum of a 20% increase in value. That’s why homes are a form of an enforced retirement account – the basis in the logic of reverse mortgages. All a vehicle really does is transport you from one place to another, while your home is a roof over your head and a place to clean your body, do your laundry, and cook your meals. Believe in land, because as the great Will Rodgers stated, “They ain’t making any more of it.” Drive a piece of shit if you must. So long as it’s roadworthy and safe, that’s all that is really necessary in the second-class world.

Support those who support you. Forget about leaving a legacy for your children and grandchildren, especially if their apparent sole goal in life was to fight you tooth and tong as they were growing up (if they ever did). What you do for them in the present is more important than what you might be able to do for them in the future. Do not try to determine their futures for them and never fall victim to trying to live vicariously through them. You will find that no matter what you may want for them, that they have their own agendas and that is the path they will follow.

Beware the bible thumpers and other religious zealots, especially those constantly harping about your free will. If they truly believe in free will, then why are they trying so hard to convince you to do what they think is best for you?

There is a difference between pride and dignity. There is a difference between hubris and self-respect. If you can accept the basic reality that struggle will define all of your days here on Planet Earth, and that some will have it better than others for no other reason than that’s just the way it is, then you can attribute your station in life to nothing more than an accident of birth. All people might be created equal, but all people are not born equal. However, no matter how unfortunate your circumstances starting out, all people of substance are expected to make the effort to rise above them.

Forego expensive weddings and expensive funerals. The former won’t guarantee the survival of the marriage, and the latter is a patent waste of money. Death is not the celebration of a life as the funeral directors would love to have you believe, but the unequivocal end of it. When you’re dead, you’re dead, and all the pomp and circumstance of those “paying their respects” isn’t going to bring anyone back to life.

The best revenge against the condensation of the citizens is to live well while loving and laughing a lot. A fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage should define how well you serve any employer, and as Dylan sang, we all have to serve someone. Take solace in voluntarily serving those that you love the most. Gather your tribe around you, take pleasure in their companionship, fellowship, and displays of affection, or at the very least, their appreciation of you by simply hanging with and accepting one another.

Author’s note:

This piece is slated to appear in the upcoming poetry and essay collection entitled: Separate from the Herd

And Duffy the Dog

Had a conversation

With Harvey the hog

“Harvey,” they said,

“here’s some straw for your bed.”

“To keep you warm

“on this cold winter night.

“We’ll check in the morning

“to make sure you’re alright.”

________________________________

A little kindness never hurts

To help someone along

And it never hurts, either

To sing a kind song

________________________________

Mittens and Duffy

Went inside grandpa’s house

While Harvey hunkered down alone

In his straw bed in the shed

The worst winter storm blustered and blew

Harvey started getting cold at a quarter-to-two

Then to his surprise and delight

Mittens and Duffy appeared in the shed

“We’re here to be with you.

“We can stay warm together in your bed tonight.”

_______________________________

A little kindness never hurts

To help pave someone’s way

And it never hurts, either

To make someone’s day

_______________________________

When the mid-morning sun

Finally warmed everyone

Grandpa came to the shed

Fervently praying that

His animals weren’t dead

And there they were!

All cuddled and snuggled together

They were now best friends forever

So, grandpa let them all out just to be kind

And they all stretched out in the bright sunshine

______________________________

A little kindness never hurts

To help someone along

And it never hurts, either

To sing a kind song

______________________________

Mittens and Duffy and Harvey

All lived on for a very long time

Grandpa grew bent and gray, also

As all of their lives began to unwind

The passage of time can be so unkind

The three friends all passed away

Within the very same week

So, grandpa buried them all together

At the back of the shed just past the creek

They now have each other for eternity

____________________________

A little kindness never hurts __

To help pave someone’s way

And it never hurts, either

To make someone’s day

______________________________

Grandpa grew lonely

Missing his animals in the worst way

In sadness, he was just living day-to-day

When friends appeared in the driveway

He didn’t know what to say

As one had a kitten

And another had a young dog

In the arms of another was a small hog

Grandpa took them all to the shed, and they

Instantly lay down together on that straw bed

______________________________

A little kindness never hurts

To help someone along

And it never hurts, either

To sing a kind song

______________________________

A little kindness never hurts

To help pave someone’s way

And it never hurts, either

To make someone’s day

______________________________

A little kindness never hurts

It was so true yesterday

And it never hurts, either

To this very same day

_______________________________

Author’s note:

This piece appears in the upcoming If I Were a Song Writer.

In all honesty, I always thought the punch line was While the poor man pays the band. I suppose that doesn’t much matter as we the people pay our taxes and watch it go to things we vehemently oppose, and/or we amuse and entertain our overseers by playing along with them. They consider us rubes only useful to them at election time and thereafter we are unimportant to them as they carry out their fascist agenda.

There has been a massive wealth transfer from America’s middle class to the richest 1%, the billionaire class, the new American aristocracy, and it accelerates every time a Republican takes the office of the Presidency of our great nation. When we protest at the “No Kings” rallies they dismiss them as “Hate America” rallies and go on conducting their business as usual. They gas light us. They downplay what is really going on. They confuse and conflate issues to the point where we don’t know who to believe and start to question our own sanity. Have no doubts about it – they are traitors. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing, and they disrespect us to the point where they condescend to us and laugh at us behind our backs. Well…the reckoning comes in 12 days, and if you don’t exercise the one right you still do have you lose your chance at the most peaceful type of protest that there is. To not drive them out root and branch is merely an affirmation that what they are doing is okay with you. So, I will ask you, is this okay with you?

Now won’t you tell me if you can?
‘Cause life’s so hard to understand
Why’s the rich man busy dancin’
While the poor man plays the band?
Oh, they’re billin’ me for killin’ me
Lord, have mercy on the workin’ man

“Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man”

Travis Tritt: T_R_O_U_B_L_E (1993)

Written by: Kostas Lazarides

The very best conmen always hide in plain sight. They are so arrogant as to not even try to disguise themselves, which is the defining modus operandi of one Donald J. Trump, aka The Orange Fuhrer, The Mad King, the undeniable shit-stain upon the underwear of our great land.

While some of us most desperately want to cut off the head of the snake, the saner amongst us realize that our only legal option is to start chopping at its tail and continue chopping until we work our way up.

Suppose for the moment that the anticipated “blue wave” does indeed occur. What then? And I can envision scenarios where it might not happen, I remember thinking in 2024 that after experiencing Trump for four years and listening to him whine for another four years that there was no possible way that he could prevail in 2024, but he did, and he won the popular vote no less. We are living in the age of “anything can happen” and it is a testament to his magic over MAGA, which more closely resembles a form of deep hypnotism than anything else. He’s pulled off surprises before, and believe me, he can do it again. Do not underestimate the degree to which MAGA has drunk oversized glasses of his brand of Kool Aid.

And he can cheat, of course, which is his biggest talent aided and abetted by his uncanny ability to lie. Adolph Hitler’s most prominent line was: “If you tell a lie frequently enough, it will be believed.” This is their play book – lie and keep lying as if your station in life depended on it because it figuratively does. The power of the lie is not so much in its utterance, but in its repetition. Have you had enough of their plenteous lies? I know that I certainly have.

So, returning to the question of what happens if the “blue wave” occurs by winning the House and Senate. If we finally impeach him, we get Vance who is nearly as accomplished a liar as the Grand Poopah of lies, but with all the commotion inherent in unseating a president we can probably survive Vance and remove him in 2028. Yes, Vance is very smooth and composed and just as full of shit as his boss, but even I don’t believe that he would resort to the despicable depths that Trump so easily chooses. Patience is the order of the day. That and fortitude because no scenario is an easy fix, and any scenario takes times to manifest itself. But have no doubts about it; we the people can start to take our country back on November 3^rd. We have to start somewhere.

Our country needs us. Vote as if your freedom depended on it because quite literally it does.