For a Chinaman or Sumerian, 250 years can go by like a heartbeat. That long ago, an amazing thing worth celebrating took place in the Independent Municipality of Concord Vine in southern Massachusetts. A fidgety gentleman of the name Paulo Riviera, lantern held high, rode his black stallion by night down the cobblestones, shouting “The British are coming! The British are coming!”
Sure as foretold, by next morning a delegation from the Royal Assessor entered the rather crabby confines of the village and called to meeting the burghers thereof.
“Wine and ale shipments leaving the Port of Boston are to be further excised to finance the war on the Continent,” exclaimed Adolphus Middlemarch on behalf of King George, holding his wig atop his balding pate with a palsied hand.
“Aye, but not bloody likely!” slurred the same slovenly-dressed Paulo, now smelling markedly of gin. Cravat askew, his clothing in disarray, he pushed through the assembly and bumped up against the magistrate. “Haven’ you read the pamphlet which I have written titled Common As Dirt?” he demanded.
“Who is this man?” howled Adolphus, deeply offended.
“Don’t pay him no mind, he’s the town drunk!” explained Hiram Walker, the mayor, apologetically. “We put up with him ‘cause he’s an excellent blacksmith. Does like the sauce, though, must be said.”
“All right then, now about these stamps,” exclaimed the magistrate, pushing aside the cantankerous smithy, who was promptly sequestered by a pair of redcoats.
“Hardly seems fair,” complained the townsfolk. “We’re right heavily taxed, as is.”
“Es una indignación,” insisted Paulo, swaying like a larch in a typhoon. “Have you tried Concord Vine’s signatura claret?” he added consolingly, under the needling of the redcoats.
Say whast man will, Paulo was a patriot, one whose backstory deserves mentioning on this Semiquincentennial. Loaned out as a boy to the pristine Slocum Plantation on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, it was the hope of Paulo’s Andalusian immigrant parents that by helping him learn a trade, they would ensure their son’s future. Which they did. Assistant to the plantation blacksmith, Paulo became an excellnt artisan. All might have gone well, save the Slocum family’s second daughter, a striver and mischievous lass who bedeviled the Young Man incessantly. “My braids require your steady hand!” she could declare on a humid August afternoon, appearing in the doorway of the smithy, while crickets chirped in the fields and thunderheads gathered on the horizon.
“I c’n shoe yo’ horse fo’ yo’,” invited the boy, climbing up the ladder into the hayloft behind her attractively swaying buttocks.
“Aren’t you the tease!” she giggled, her apple cheeks blushing red as a Macintosh.
“Here now!” he protested as one of her clawlike hands latched on to his britches and pulled him atop her. “Wayload!”
Protests to no avail, she had her way with him, leading to a life of sloth. Such was oft’ the fate of our young and obstreperous nation.
Also, pirates steered their frigates into the bay, rowed ashore their longboats and plundered the plantation. Not a born militiaman, young Paulo raced to the main house, drew a sword from the Slocum family arsenal and rushed an equally junior rapscallion among the stinking pirate horde. Poor Paulo got his butt sorely whipped by the mercenary intruders, while the Slocums sought refuge further up the bay at the estate of Geo. Washington and family in Westmoreland County.
Let this be a lesson to us! Although a fairly mundane part of Colonial life and ranked high in the history books, such doings steer not our daily discourse in the halls of Congress. Light a sparkler for freedom! Blow the state budget on fireworks.
Some readers are downloading the 8th edition of Peace Now? Very Funny from this blog. Here is a newly edited 11th edition on pdf for your enjoyment. The writing is more descriptive and some repetitive material has been removed.
Nothing will ever be the same since October 7th. Written in 2016, this is a tale from a gentler time.
The Palestinians want all the land of Israel, full stop, dooming every attempt at the peace process. And amidst their foot-dragging, an Israeli game of attrition has developed where, for every year that passes, less and less of the “Occupied Territories” remains available for a Palestinian State.
Jewish writer Barry Lipowitz has decided to write about that, in a major apologia to the long-suffering Palestinians. By being born after some great Jewish writers and before some others, sandwich-man Barry has the good fortune to be christened “the greatest Jewish writer of his generation.”
He has moved to the Big Apple, home of the big publishing houses and magazine headquarters, who pay him major coin for his brilliance.
So, gathering a coterie of like-minded leftists, he and his Israeli wife Erit depart for the Promised Land, desperately determined to confirm their personal convictions, even in the face of daunting evidence to the contrary.
Unfortunately, this novella is based on a true event.
Flying into a brick wall, a small black bat fell at my feet. It seemed like an ill omen. Something ethereal in the bat’s nature made me suspect that this flying rodent consisted of more than met the eye at first glance. Having had some experience in the vivisection of inert bodies as an anatomy student at the University of Uppsala, I gently raised the creature in my gloved hand and stared into one of its glassy eyeballs.
“New life!” I cried aloud in the inky white fog of a London night. The scuttling of rats rose in reply. Eerie footsteps and murky shadows populated a street dripping in condensation. The wings of the bat fluttered, its tiny teeth gnawing on the black leather of my glove.
I was in London for a fortnight’s sojourn at the behest of Professor Otto Penn, renowned physician at Eep’s College, Brixton. When landing at Heathrow, I had been required to declare all items above the threshold of £135, then sign a promise that I would not undertake employment while in the U.K. and finally swear that I have never had any dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, Esquire.
Having left Stateside my betrothed Lenore in the provincial backwater that we call home, I hoped that my recently completed monograph on the derivation of the Irish banshee might win me a teaching fellowship at Eep’s. A laboratory assistant at a glue factory, I wouldn’t mind coming up in the world. Memories of Lenore’s hot, prickly breath made a havoc of my thought processes.
What with both ICE and the Border Patrol on the warpath, God only knows what will happen when I try to return to the States. Airports have become dangerous places. I can check my credit rating, but how do I check my ICE rating? Has some protest march I participated in during college left an indelible signature in the Border Patrol database? Am I on a Watch List and, if so, whose? Has a contribution to the ACLU gotten me listed as a domestic terrorist? What if my next door neighbor’s dog is a subversive? I don’t want to end up in a detention center in Bayou Blue, Louisiana just because my neighbor Bill’s Pekingese has been spying for the Chinese Communist Party. Scary stuff!
Fortunately, although an American down to my bootstraps, my family has a wee connection to the British Isles. Humble brag, one of my maternal great great uncles designed the loos on the battle ship HMS Dreadful.
I know myself to be something of a throwback. Every Victorian drama requires a mad scientist who electrocutes inanimate objects with the hopeful conjecture “It’s alive!”
Administering the Kiss of Life, exhaling into the bat’s jagged mouth, it fell from my hands. Growing in shape and bulk, a mysterious figure four feet in height dressed in a black peacoat took its place on the flagstones, its face a pale blur. Scared shitless, a rash of goosebumps ran down my back. I could feel my hair standing on end. “What the fuck?!” I wailed.
“Have no fear,” commanded this strange apparition.
“Fuck you ‘have no fear,’” I complained. “I got plenty of fear.”
“I am but a weary traveler,” he insisted. “Thee has no idea the extent of my afflictions,” he assured me. “Among other things, I am tormented by the curse of spasmodic recollective memory. Fragments of the past come upon me unbidden, mocking and plaguing me, laying siege to my soul, filling me with ennui and regret. Think of it! Now consider that for 600 years, I have occasioned such emotions.”
I must say, he did look mournful, standing there in the shadows. I found myself unable to look away from his baleful stare, pointy ears, weird nails like spikes and frightful comb-over. There was an Old World slovenliness about him. He stank of sloe gin.
His Mitteleuropa accent assured me that he did not come from any shit-hole country. Still, one can never be sure. He may own a yacht off the coast of Africa.
“Ah, thee be American!” he cried gaily, spreading his claw-like hands in a welcoming gesture.
“Yes,” I admitted, “I am.”
“I could tell thee a tale about a world leader who is sucking the lifeblood out of his country,” the fellow exclaimed, wagging his head playfully, “but I won’t.”
What to make of him? Was he even 9/10th’s of one percent real or simply a bad hallucination brought on by a bout of indigestion?
“Have thee ever considered mindfulness?” he queried, swaying from side to side so violently, I felt compelled to steady him with a hand. “Close thy eyes,” he suggested, “put thy hand over thy heart and imagine all of the enemies thee can vanquish with a swipe of the longsword. Hacking off their limbs! Hacking off their heads!” he shouted with glee, his eyes aglow like two burning embers.
“I think most people are focused on peace,” I objected.
“Oh, yes, peace,” he croaked, as if discussing an inferior brand of laundry detergent. “Naturally, peace speaks to the soul of the populace, but, really, it is no part of human nature. Human nature eggs us on to conquer and subjugate. That’s the way of it.”
“You seem a bloodthirsty lot,” I felt impelled to point out.
“Now thee confuseth me with the Ottomans,” he insisted.
“People need to stick together,” I replied warily, the corporate motto at my place of employment. “All I am saying is give peace a chance.”
“Don’t make me list the unappetizing catalog of military misadventure carried out within the last decade,” he insisted, burping a mouthful of breath that smelled like swamp gas. “There is always someone attacking or bombing their neighbor somewhere upon this sorry globe,” he observed. “Thee need fight like hell or thee won’t have a country anymore. No politician should be elected to high office if they have not studied Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Nothing compares to the gory, glorious warfare we waged 600 years ago upon the field of battle, our barbarity fully on display for all to see. VladȚepeș I was christened in the popular mind, ‘Vlad the Impaler,’ a glutton for dead meat. Anorexic, a banquet of food lies before me, yet I cannot eat. Blood I crave and blood I shall have,” he chuckled, falling flat on his face.
“I say,” I commented, helping the midget to his feet, “I fail to see the connection between bats and you.”
“Creatures of the night,” he grumbled in a voice like thunder rolling down a Transylvania mountain top. His peacoat reeked of mold and sawdust. “I am the greatest vampire in history! Everyone knows Count Dracula, ‘Son of the Dragon.’ That’s me!” he howled. “In Romania, they think I am a hero. They make vampire fangs, keychains and shot glasses in my honor. Suveniruri, jucarii. Souvenirs, toys. Look me up online!”
As he spoke, he began flickering like a faulty lightbulb. Once… twice… and then… poof!
He was gone.
I waited around in the dank night, hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm, but it didn’t seem like he would reappear. Well, I thought, that’ssomething I can tell my grandkids about, one fine day.
I was filled with equal parts relief and trepidation. As I turned to go… blink!… there he was again, clear as a video on YouTube and twice as real. Shivers went up my spine and, let’s face it, I experienced a sense of irritation and major disappointment that I hadn’t shaken loose from his companionship. It began to feel as if I might spend the rest of my life standing on that chunk of pavement. And not in a good way.
“The hour grows late,” he said, as if nothing had transpired, leaving me to ponder whether he even realized that his spectral image had, in fact, shorted out. “So much to do and so little time before sunrise.”
“So what brings you to England?” I wondered, making the best of a bad situation.
“I have purchased an abbey,” he exclaimed expansively, seeming to grow an inch or two in height. “Downton Abbey it is called, but I think of it as Rundown Abbey. Sadly neglected by the previous owners, it needs a lot of work. Still, I expect to make something of it. I am renaming it Vlad’s Hideaway. I have already had the name affixed across the front of the building. So far, the earthmovers have only demolished the east wing. I live in a suitcase— well, a coffin, if thee must know— so, by necessity, I call wherever I hang my coat home. However, buying a property gives me somewhere to exhibit my store of gold objets d’art. Gold ornaments are only worth having if one can flaunt them.”
“I really wouldn’t know,” I insisted.
“More is the pity,” he lectured me. “One can never get enough gold. Thee knows the old saying, ‘Me, impotent? Hogwash! Just behold the golden trophies upon my mantelpiece.’ Klemens von Metternich said that. Or was it Napoleon?”
Listening to him rant, without a doubt, I found Vlad to be a man of deep conviction. “I suppose you are supernatural…” I guessed.
“Eh! Supernatural,” he grimaced, his mouth turned cruelly down. “That and four pounds ninety-five will get thee a salted caramel milkshake at Wimpy’s. I do not drink… wine.”
“I say, are you rich?” I blurted, surprising myself. “Where does your money come from?”
“I thought thee knew,” parried Vlad. “I have made a fortune in real estate. One never loses money in real estate, old boy.”
“Do tell,” I quipped, keenly aware from the cinema that I mustn’t let my guard down for even a minute, lest I find the vile creature at my throat.
“As the world goes kaputt, I would like to secure my position in the structure that remains,” he explained, sounding like a stockbroker.
“Apparently, 600 years have given you opportunities to acquire multiple talents,” I surmised.
“Yes, yes, I haven’t been asleep all the time,” he confirmed. “I donate money to blood banks across the globe. It never hurts in times of trouble to have a reserve.”
He paused, seeming to parse his words. “Every hundred years, I reboot the system,” he claimed. “I could tell thee more, but we do not yet know one another all that well.”
Evidently, vampires don’t share.
“Question: Is it true that you have a harem of female vampires?” I wondered, titillated by the very idea. One sees so much speculative nonsense at the movies.
“Like the Muslims and their 72 vestal virgins awaiting every martyr in heaven?” he grinned. “I think not. If thee seeks the Bride of Dracula, her name is Miruna and she lives on a goat farm at the base of Mount Moldoveanu in the Transylvanian Alps. The altitude raises the level of hemoglobin in the goats. She drove me crazy. We are estranged,” he declared with chauvinist distaste. “All that I got out of that relationship was an exceptional stamp collection.”
I checked my watch. Time to go.
“Doth thou wish to join the Eternal Order of Vampires?” he proffered, taking my drift. He made it sound like a gym membership.
“Who, M-M-ME?” I stuttered. “No way, José.”
“One does feel duty-bound to ask,” he all but apologized. “European custom.”
“I am so done here!” I stammered, breaking into a cold sweat. “Really, I am not the type.”
“Blood types!” he rejoiced, clasping his hands emphatically. “Don’t get me started on the merits of the various types of blood. Type A for kings, type B for queens, type AB for aristos and type O for commoners,” he recited categorically, as if he were listing paint samples. “Bloody confusing until one gets the knack,” he acknowledged. I got the feeling he was trying to sell me on the whole concept of vampirism.
“No, no, no,” I insisted, stamping my foot, which made him look down his nose at me and laugh. Was I afraid? Damn straight I was afraid! “Make a habit of flying into walls, do we?” I asked, now doubly curious.
“I am a vampire,” he sighed, shaking his head woefully. “Alas, when I suck the blood of someone who is hammered, the alcohol enters my bloodstream, poisoning my organs. It is toxic. I become intoxicated. Thee has thyself witnessed the result.” He stared at me cross-eyed. Raising his gnarled hands with their grotesque nails, fingers splayed seductively, he intoned, “Look into my eyes, deep into my eyes,” which I did, only to wonder at their bloodshot condition.
“Ach so?” I asked.
“Well, maybe not,” he muttered.
As bad luck would have it, one of London’s urban foxes chose that moment to come trotting around the corner of a near-by building. Sensing us, the red fox froze in its tracks, but it was already way too late. Down on all-fours, Vlad had become transformed. Coiled like a puma, a feral monster, he emitted a low, ferocious growl, drooling a pool of saliva onto the flagstones.
“WAIT! STOP! NO!” I screamed, but my entreaties fell on deaf ears. The vampire leapt through the air and pounced upon its prey. Amid horrendous yelps and the crunching of bones, the fox was not so much killed as physically obliterated. Never will I be able to erase the frightening image of the vampire, crouched on the ground, glowering at me dementedly from the edge of the building, the dead fox hanging lifelessly from its maw.
In shock, I collapsed onto the pavement and lay gasping as vampire and fox disappeared into the darkness. How long did I lie spread across the flagstones, an oily blackness tinging my sight, my throat a dry and aching hole, my heart thumping hollowly in my chest? Who knows.
About the time I struggled wearily to my feet, Vlad returned, standing erect and assiduously wiping his mouth on a sleeve of his peacoat.
“There’s a nip in the air,” he commented. “Still, rain makes the grass grow.”
The casual banality of this utterance was so unexpected, I found myself doubting my own senses. Didn’t he just attack and drain a pint of blood from a woodland creature? Did he or didn’t he? The night had become surreal.
“I consider myself a connoisseur,” he bragged. “I have traveled the world tasting the blood of yaks, mountain goats, musk ox, bison, water buffalo, elephants, dolphins, mountain lions, lions, snow leopards, marmots, grey squirrels, voles and hummingbirds. Hath thou ever tasted the blood of the horseshoe crab? Quite the treat. It is blue. A remnant of prehistoric times, the crab’s blood is copper-based. You should try it.”
“I find the idea of me drinking blood thoroughly repugnant,” I confessed.
“Warm blood, chilled blood, a blood aperitif. Blood daiquiris. Blood red tomato juice,” he bantered. “The Belgians have the right idea, a different glass beaker for each kind of beverage, fitting the glass to the libation. Blood pudding! Thee will eat blood pudding, but thee won’t drink warm blood. How quaint!”
Giving me a defiant look, Vlad turned on his heels. “Beastliness, brutality, cruelty, depravity, inhumanity, savagery, wickedness,” I heard him curse as he hastily walked down the high street. As if drawn by a magnet, unable to resist, I followed in his path. Reaching a pub, he peered through its green glass window. “I shall drink the blood of yonder drunken sods,” he declared, pulling me past the doorway into the barroom proper.
“More blood?” I asked helplessly, but to no avail.
Hot and noisy, the air was thick with the smell of ale. As Vlad made his appointed rounds among the patrons, a fulsome blond trollop with a painted face waylaid me. “Love me!” she cried gaily, grabbing my codpiece in a vice-like grip. Her eyes, blue orbs all but drained of color, stared hungrily into mine, a playful smile flitting upon her lips. These goings-on pleased me. Having been through hell, I felt I had earned a respite. Quaffing a lime and lager, feeling young and virile, I decided to postpone a return to my lodgings.
Leaning heavily against me, coyly unbuttoning her blouse, a mammary protrusion of salty white flesh filled my mouth. “Ucksayeyemayipplesnay,” she commanded in a well-rehearsed cadence of pig Latin. What can I say? I did as requested.
Later, untangling me from the arms of the trollop, Vlad declared “Come, it is time for second sleep” a concept with which I am only too familiar. An overactive bladder, I only get four hours of shuteye before being forced to rise from my bed and visit the lavatory.
Outside on the pavement, Vlad looked me up and down, as if considering whether to share a particularly ribald joke. “Illegitimi non carborundum” he declared, disappearing in a cloud of ill-smelling grey smoke. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
That’s right, annex Antarctica! It’s Christmas Eve and freezing cold in my House, so I have some Perspective on this issue. What looks like a maxi-chunk of ice is in fact an integral part of America’s Defense Posture. For entirely too long, this vital link in America’s chain of World Domination has been blithely and willfully ignored. Fortunately, there are Republican politicians who truly understand President Donald J. Trump’s fixations and they are willing to go that Extra Mile in understanding just how essential Antarctica is to our National Security. Let us take a Voluntary Position to make Antarctica an integral part of the U.S.A. Any Sleazeball Democrat bleeding-heart Antifa scum who opposes us should be tried for treason! Congress must ratify the selection of a Special Envoy to the icy south, rather than throw out the baby with the bath water. Yes, it’s cold down yonder, but if it is worth doing, it is worth doing right!
Five different species of Penguins be damned. They have been Ripping Off America entirely too long! Yes, they are cute, but they are also totally worthless when it comes to manning machine gun nests or firing HIMAR anti-tank missiles. We have run tests. Nor do they spend anywhere near 3% of Antarctica’s GNP on their own defense. All that penguin guano is chock full of nitrates which could be fertilizing soybean fields in Iowa. It’s shameful that we have let them hitch a Free Ride on America’s coattails for far too long, but we are Good People and, as the Ice Shelf melts, we will save their sorry asses from oblivion.
Don’t let the Southern Elephant Seals fool you, they are all Radical Left Lunatics!
Instead of getting their house in order, the whale, seal, petrel and penguin denizens of Antarctica’s frozen wasteland have depended on International Treaties that claim Antarctica as a nuclear-free zone and pacifist redoubt. No one wants to live there! You have to pay people to overnight. Poo-poo on your international treaties, you softies at the U.N. You typically Fuzzy-Headed Bureaucrats! It is time for you to put the horse before the cart and ensure the survival of the Snowy Albatross. Read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge for details. As Coleridge wrote, “I fear thy skinny hand!”
Redemption is at hand! Redirect the Seventh Fleet. Ship Heavy Weapons to McMurdo Sound and preserve the ice sheet. What’s not to like? The driest, coldest place on the planet, they have nine months of winter and a volcano. We already have a footprint in the region: There are burger bars, pizza ovens, stir-fry and burritos in the cafeteria at McMurdo Station. Grab your moon boots and an AR-15! We must protect the civilian population of research scientists and our $110 million yearly investment. We can use Christchurch, NZ as a staging area. If Pakistan can sell more than $4 billion in military equipment to Libya, what’s the problem? Besides, if we don’t do it, China will label Antarctica as the Final Destination on the Silk Road and invade. We have the aircraft and we have the storage lockers, it is only the will to Invest in Antarctica’s Future that is currently lacking in Congress and among the American people. This will change! I am certain of it.
In October of 2021, during one of their most productive periods, Swedish rap duo realPfft released “Fettuccine Western.” Their take on Sergio Leone’s glorious spaghetti westerns, the vocal may sound like it was recorded off a DVD, but that’s actually Clive channeling Clint Eastwood. “Hang him by his bootstraps! Lazy varmint!” When it comes to theatrics, Clive is always available.
Hi! Waiting for TuneCore to finish distribution of realPfft’s latest hit song, I continue to curate their back catalog. My blog gives me daily reports on which music files you readers are downloading and what countries you come from. This allows me to direct your attention to sometimes forgotten gems. I woke up this morning and thought, “Classic! That’s a great instrumental. Why aren’t I showcasing it?”
Taking his inspiration from Mason Williams’ April 1968 hit “Classical Gas,” Mutte has created his own symphonic pop masterpiece. It’s a classic.
In 1967, the same Mason Williams created an art installation titled “Bus.” A life-size color photograph of a Greyhound bus in 1:1 scale, this unusually large poster mural measures 10 feet by 36 feet.
In celebration of Williams’ artwork, Kuny— who does realPfft’s cover art— designed, photographed and labeled his “Classic” box. Dimensions: 4 inches in height by 5 ½ inches wide by 3 ½ inches deep. Kinda puny, no? Signed prints are available.
I live in Oxburg, Maryland. A local boy, I haunt the Lost Seagull Café. If you are hungry and drive far enough north on Rockville Pike, there it is, next to a Greek deli in a strip mall, one mile short of the broadcast antennas. Don’t let the Chekhovian name fool you, the café is Russian-Jewish. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, I miss the old days, thirty years ago, when Chevy Chase was one of the places in Maryland where you could pump quarters into a mechanical kiosk at the bus station and purchase an English-language edition of the Yiddish newspaper Forverts. Our synagogue even had a stack of free Russian-language newspapers parked by the door.
I drive a silver-colored 2004 Toyota Camry XLE with a moonroof. It has real leather seats in gray, a CD player and a stitched leather shift knob. A people’s car, Toyota must have sold half a million of them.
Pulling into the parking lot, I have to brake hard to avoid hitting a single lonely demonstrator, his sign proclaiming “Genocide is a Lie!”
You walk into the Lost Seagull, the bell mounted atop the door goes tinkle, tinkle, thud! The staff is a handful of Russians, with accents from St. Petersburg, the Caucasus, Murmansk and Vladivostok. Their parents, Soviet refuseniks harassed by the KGB, left Russia to rid themselves of Moscow’s meddling. Atop the cash register, a sign in Hebrew lettering says Eydish geredt, “Yiddish Spoken.” And behind the register, a line of matryoshka nesting dolls alternates with Alenka brand Russian chocolate bars. Plaintive balalaika music plays in the background, but so softly, it’s virtually inaudible. The same cassette tape plays over and over 24/7. You need to travel to Maryland’s Eastern Shore to find anything quite this authentic.
I choose a smallish table near the back and order silver tea, which is boiling hot water for people arriving with their own teabag. I intend to leave a big tip, which is why they let me do this once a week. Nobody ever said that the water in Maryland tastes like wine.
I’m a music publisher for a Swedish rap band, a bedroom recluse trust fund babe in Chicago, a Calypso combo from Trinidad heavy on steel drums and 160 other equally desperate music artists. They create tracks in over two dozen genres, things like heavy metal dance music, country indie pop, jazz rapper funk, techno trance nu metal, Ladino punk rock, Latin sludge metal, electronic body trap, psychobilly aggrotech, unblack crust punk, beatdown microhouse, melodic brostep dream pop (think a male Katy Perry) and a host of other equally esoteric styles. You may not know how to describe it, but you’ll know it when you hear it. Music publishing is what I do.
We are online and off, Backpack Giant Music, LLP, a subsidiary of Large Egg Entertainment. (Previously Large White Eggs Entertainment, but modified to alleviate cringy references to white supremacists.) The music business requires constant prodding to get anything done, it’s not for the faint of heart, no one ever got rich hoping for a miracle. Let’s be clear, the songwriter owns the track. My job is to sell it, licensing songs to films, adverts and streaming media. I also defend ownership of the copyright. Preferably, a buyer will purchase an artist’s complete catalog, rather than a single hit song. His or her past, present and future output. Plastic pick to guitar strings, sticky fingers to piano keys, drumsticks to batter head, scratchy pencil to notebook paper, humming and strumming, music is born! Everybody in the publishing biz is looking for the next Taylor Swift, but — a unicorn in a haystack — it is difficult to find her. I am neither starving nor loaded. I make a living.
I share the business with Barry Guildenstern, who can trace his lineage all the way back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His specialty is club dance music, supplying tracks of electronica exclusive to his brand to DJ’s all over the planet. With a stable of computer nerds supplying endless product, Barry runs the biz as a subscription service, guaranteeing him a monthly income.
In the Stone Age, Barry and I were journalism students together at Moosegrave College. Recently, he decided to write a book titled Jews in the Music Business. When he went to do interviews, every music person hearing the title promptly threw him out on his ear. “Nobody wants to paint such a bull’s eye on his back, you klutz,” Saul Wasserman told him. Since the start of the war in Gaza, we Jews have become even more circumspect. “What, me Jewish?” I tell people. “Never heard of it! We’re Russian Orthodox and I have the liturgy to prove it. Payem paruski?” As for Israel, right or wrong, I support the homeland, but even I find the Israelis guilty of criminal negligence when it comes to October 7. How could they have let this happen??? AGAIN! I’m still smarting from losses in the 1973 war with Egypt.
To show solidarity with the Palestinians, I have been bedding a raven-haired young lady from Rafah named Sandra, a graduate of Al-Quds University. A pharmacist, she works behind the counter at the local drugstore in Oxburg. Equipped with a wicked laugh and coal-black eyes, she is amazingly seductive and only slightly crazy. As long as I bring her Greek halva, she lets me climb into her bed. A political refugee granted temporary, tentative asylum, her refugee status hanging by a thread, who knows what kind of bomb-throwing student activism got her on an IDF shit list? At first, I felt guilty, an older man taking advantage of a young person in dire straits, but Sandra didn’t seem to mind. Until the day she announced that she needed to send thousands of dollars to her family in Rafah and I should give her the money. “I don’t have thousands of dollars in disposable income,” I told her.
A typically devious A-hab, she had an entire game plan worked out. “Hold a rock revival,” she commanded. “AC/DC, John Mellancamp, George Thorogood, ZZ Top, Bon Jovi. You’ll never get rich if you don’t give the people what they want. My cousin wants to lease a trawler and outrun the Israeli blockade of Gaza. With the Israelis holding the Global Sumud Flotilla under a magnifying glass, the way is now open for independent actors to strike! You can finance it.”
“I’m not going to finance it. It sounds like a lot of shenanigans in the Middle East. You Philistines are all alike. I met Yasser Arafat when I worked at —”
“Borrow the money!”
“Arafat —”
“Mortgage your house.”
“Uh…”
Samson and Delilah, the Jew and the Philistine, Sandra is only slightly crazy. As stated.
Half the equation has to do with our current domicile. A dour Russian by temperament, I am always going to feel a little out of step with sunny, boisterous, cantankerous Americans in a country of immigrants where John Brown is white and John White is black.
Barry, my business partner, has it easier. His new book is titled Zoroastrianism For Dummies. He hopes to get it published soon.
At the Lost Seagull, I eye the laminated Rosetta Stone of a menu, its items listed in Russian, Yiddish and Henglish. Across the top, in a cursive font, amidst a spray of flowers, a heading announces in English “Everything fresh daily.” There are maybe 20 items on the menu. Pirogi. French toast. Chicken Kiev. Blintzes. Apple strudel. Potato pancakes. Rugelach. Pickled pig’s feet. The margins of the menu are decorated with semi-erotic doodles, supposedly drawn by Marc Chagall. (Who knows? We weren’t there.)
I don’t want to say too much about politics during this sensitive period, but a shout-out is in order to Olga and Maxim who own and run the café. In interior décor, they don’t shy away from the 74 years of Soviet rule, but neither do they make a fetish of it. The occasional hammer and sickle grace the walls, but most often as part of something bigger, a portrait of Lenin, a black and white photo enlargement of a May Day parade from the 1950’s or a colorful and dramatic painting of the storming of the Winter Palace. Their family and mine share both the honor and the burden of Menshevik forebears. Social Democrats, our families chose the notoriously wrong side of history, ending up in Siberia and, later, Sweden, Israel and America. In Sweden, Yiddish is an official minority language.
It was that prick Vladimir Lenin who in 1903 coined the terminology Bolshevik (“the majority”) and Menshevik (“the minority”), nefariously distorting reality by claiming more popular support for his aggressive, aggrieved wing of the Social Democrats than he actually possessed. Lacking modern day polling, popularity was whatever he said it was.
And in spite of choosing the wrong side, we Feingolds haven’t done too badly. Before decamping to Australia, my South African cousins owned gold mines.
The café is filling up. “So what are you, a recluse, a bum?” demands Morrie Merlin from a large, round table in the center of the room. He is dressed like a Talmudic scholar in a boxy suit jacket in Hasidic black, baggy pants and an ancient tartan sweater. His beard is flecked with gray. A woven, beaded kippah on his balding pate, he waves me over. “You join our coffee klatsch,” he exclaims, “we offer you a special introductory rate. You pick up the tab three weeks in a row, then you are one of us.”
In addition to Morrie, there is also from my synagogue Professor Yuri Orlov who functions in Washington, DC as a shaliach, an emissary representing the Land of Israel before the multitudes. Apparently, this pays the rent. Also present at the table is Haim Shampoo. Haim is someone I know. Clean-shaven, with hollow cheeks and bloodshot eyes, he’s thin as a reed and blows the shofar on High Holy Days. People say he is CIA, but I wonder what his family name was before they changed it to Shampoo? A collection of old geezers, this gang seems to have oodles of time to loaf in the middle of the day.
The pretty waitress brings us blini and strawberries on a tray. I am salivating on the tablecloth. She is short, with a compact little body. Dressed in white, a silver cross on a chain nestles upon her ample breast. She has plucked eyebrows and flaxen hair tied up in a bun. As she plunks each dish onto the table — plunk! plunk! — there transpires a long, raucous discussion in Russian about which delicacies are fresh daily. My Russian ain’t that great, but I am led to understand that the chefs have been slaving away since 4 a.m. and “Everything is guaranteed fresh daily,” yadayadayada.
When my mamele, my mom Rosa, still walked among us, she spent her days in the kitchen with the TV tuned to RT, a channel which began its existence as “Russia Today.” They had a parade of gorgeous blond anchorwomen bitching endlessly about the evils of American capitalism. When I pointed out that their content verged on total propaganda, mom replied, “Sure! I know that, but I make allowances.” By the end of his career, even Larry King was broadcasting on RT. After becoming an ever more strident mouthpiece for the Kremlin, however, RT got banned by the U.S. Government.
Once we have enjoyed the blini and some potato pancakes in applesauce, we eat borscht. Beets and sour cream. Morrie is busy nattering in my ear, one hand on my shoulder like a crab’s claw. Here’s the deal: He and his crew are fundraising for starving Russian Jews living like peasants in small towns and villages back home in Rossiya. The recipients are in Russia, but this being a registered American charity — The Potemkin Kropotkin Undergarment Foundation — smart lawyers have found a way for the yearly Required Minimum Distribution from my IRA to be paid directly into their coffers. Money makes the world go ’round. “We have a website online,” Morrie assures me, waving his phone in my face, “but for us, vos iz dos far amishegoss?” he says in Yiddish.“What is this for craziness? Give me traditional fundraising, where you can still smell the mop sweat.”
I keep expecting him to break into melodious Russian, but apparently he feels at home with work-a-day English and the Yiddish of Hester Street, the pushcarts and New York’s Lower East Side. Maybe Yiddish is making a comeback among Millennials, but that’s not us. If Jews have a head start in life, it’s not that we are smarter than other people, it’s that we are the People of the Book and multi-lingual.
“Excuse me for asking, but how did you manage to register a 501(c)(3) charity with such an outlandish name?”
“Ah,” Morrie smiles, showing blackened teeth. “That is a story worth telling. We went into the IRS office and told the lady behind the counter, ‘Listen, this wild moniker shows that we have nothing to hide and that we are legit. We know this name is crazy, meshuggah, but historically, Grigory Potemkin and Peter Kropotkin were the greatest men of their era, so we celebrate their achievements. My Bubbe belonged to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. The I.L.G.W.U. As we say in Yiddish, “If my grandmother had balls, she would have been my grandfather.” If it’s in the name, there’s a reason why it is in the name!’ That spiel convinced the tax lady that we knew what we were doing,” he cackles. Pausing, he nibbles on a pastry. It sits like a brown stone in his incredibly gnarled hand. Either he has arthritis or he is 100 years old. “We take multiples of 18,” he proposes. I get it, $18, $36, $54, $72… Eighteen is chai in Hebrew which means “life” or good luck.
“I understand your philanthropic activity here in the States,” I remark, “but does any of the money make its way across the water to Ukraine?” Actually, I mean “Russia,” of course, but I can’t very well say “charity to Russia” at this time in a public setting in America. I would get pummeled with stones, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake. Thank you very much, Vladimir Putin. It’s not just that he wants to annex Ukraine. A former KGB agent, Putin wants to reconstitute the entire Soviet empire. He says as much in his speeches.
Sighing to beat the band, Morrie gives me a verbal mission statement: “We have high overheads and low ratings, this is undeniable. If a squeaky clean 2% in revenue reaches the worthy recipients, I feel it is all in a month’s woik. Our mission is tikkun olam, heal the world. We try. We woik four-hour days, three days a week. Twice that much on Sunday. Do I criticize you? No, I do not. Charity Navigator, CharityWatch and BB Gun Wiseguy Giving Alliance, these organizations that rate charities should be of themselves ashamed. It’s all politics and who you know. We contacted one such organization, openly and without embarrassment. I wondered how much, under the table, I should provide to get a pristine rating. Nu? If someone is getting it, someone is paying it. I don’t see any ratings bureaucrat standing in line at no soup kitchen. The young man hung up the phone! What a schmuck, I tell you. Yemach shemo, may his name be blotted out.”
“You want money, make me a bizness proposition,” I suggest, waving away an errant housefly that’s been divebombing the pastries. “I manage a rap band. What can you offer me musically?” I demand, purposely acting rude, since I feel I am being taken for a ride. My tea has grown cold in the cup. “Eeny meeny blini,” I complain. “Where’s the bourbon smash bar? Where are the go-go girls scantily clad in cowboy apparel?”
“Klezmer music,” he ventures. “Name the band Hamas. You’ll get boatloads of free publicity.”
“I hate klezmer music.”
“You can be influencers,” Haim suggests, swaying excitedly in his chair, shining as bright as a 60-watt bulb. “Online, every 24 hours is the start of a brand new day! With a band named Hamas, you can run a disinformatzia campaign. Blame October 7 on sleeper cells left over by Osama bin Laden. Blame Covid on drug traffickers from Venezuela. Demand a Congressional hearing!”
“Thanks, but not in my lifetime.”
“Gib mir your pen,” Morrie insists. On a paper napkin, he writes “polar bear, pivo, pajamas, pfft.” Handing me this geheimnisvoll document, he explains, “A secret word code I use at my bank. I prostrate myself before you. Let no secrets come between us!”
I groan aloud. “realPfft is the name of a rap band I represent,” I point out.
“That and tsvey dollar gets you mandel bread at the bakery counter,” he rumbles, hoping I’ll treat him. “What we do, we do to alleviate the suffering of the oppressed,” he declares and I get an itchy feeling in my boots that Bible-thumping is also part of his repertoire. “What kind of Jew are you, not to help your co-religionists?” he growls, furrowing his brow menacingly like an old-time prophet. “Isaiah 41:10, ‘Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.’ You gotta earn all that! Remember Job. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He who…’ whatever!” A born salesman, when all else fails, Morrie is trying the biblical approach, to shame me into making a contribution. Except, he’s panting and I’ve heard it all a thousand times before, Ethiopian Jews in Gondar, Armenian Jews, Jewish ladies in South America forced into prostitution, needy South African Jews, needy North African Jews, Friends of the IDF, Friends of the Magen David Adom Israeli Red Cross, the Hadassah women’s organization, synagogues in Prague, the Jews of Moldova, Jewish braille, Yiddish books. An accountant clever at tax deductions, my momma Rosa gave to thirty different Jewish charities. We kids used to say, “Isn’t it fantastic what an $18 contribution can do? According to these appeals, without mom’s money, the world itself will go under!”
I’m not a judge on The Voice, but dealing all day long with bad singers singing lame songs, I have developed a good ear and a jaundiced view of what comes out of people’s mouths. It’s an occupational hazard. I judge not only what people say, but how they say it. So far, Morrie has only reached 2 on the Richter Scale. “By relieving their bitter agony, you too shall dwell in the House of the Lord for all eternity,” he promises me. Is that all? Muslims promise that 72 vestal virgins await martyrs in paradise. “Your tax deductible contribution will be a wise, noble and lofty undertaking,” Morrie all but thunders, banging his hand on the table for emphasis. “I will swear with my right hand on the cover of a pornographic magazine regarding the righteousness of our cause. Truth, justice, mercy,” he mutters.
“Kevin’s being difficult,” Haim chimes in. “Show him the brochure,” as if this will quiet my misgivings.
Eyeing me stolidly like I am fresh roadkill, Morrie reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a well-thumbed four-color pamphlet. He throws it down on the table dramatically. On the cover is a photograph of some futuristic-looking building.
“Smells like something out of a bad sci-fi movie,” I suggest.
“Our research institute in Kazakhstan,” Haim chirps proudly. “Within spitting distance of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Ever been to Alma-Ata? Tashkent? Ever ride a camel on the Silk Road? You can hitch a ride to Mars.”
“Has anybody actually been to this institute of yours?”
“What? You expect us to go all the way to Kazakhstan just to inspect a building?” gripes Haim. “Go sit at another table!”
“Make a virtual tour of the facility,” I suggest. “I assume that your institute is where mad scientists are using A.I. to create the next golem and end all life on Earth,” I joke. The pamphlet’s text is in Russian and I can’t be bothered to translate it. Waving for the waitress, I tell her that I’ll cover the tab for the entire table. I am pretty sore, this has not been my idea of a relaxing afternoon.
History’s wheel is turning and, like it or not, we are part of a major churn. Olena, the new teller at my bank, is a refugee from Ukraine. Slava Ukraini, I keep expecting her to give me change in Ukrainian hryvnia.
“You don’t like what we have on offer?” Morrie asks, leaning to within an inch of my nose, a last desperate lunge at a solution. “Hokay! Instead, we have a virtually flawless plan to stop Sweden’s Greta Thunberg and her Turkish friends in Greenpeace from outrunning the blockade of Gaza.”
“Greenpeace isn’t trying to outrun the blockade of Gaza. The Global Sumud Flotilla —”
“We need a hundred million dollars or so to get an American destroyer located in James River, Virginia out of mothballs! Steam engine tech don’t come cheap.”
“Not my problemo.”
Obviously, we have all been reading the same newspaper stories about blockade runners.
Paying the bill, I don’t say goodbye, I just leave.
In the parking lot, where the cars are lined up in a row facing the building, four masked individuals in black combat gear surround me as I put my key in the car door. I gotta laugh. “No, really?” I demand. “Don’t tell me you’re from ICE?! I don’t even speak Spanish.”
“You got any identification?” an agent asks gruffly.
Pulling out my wallet, I proffer them my driver’s license and Medicare card. Oy vey is mir,” I laugh. “No hablo español.”
It turns out they tagged my car but misread the license plate. Same number, wrong state. “Not a big deal,” I assure them. “Anybody can make a mistake. Have a nice day.”
Halfway home, I have to pull over to the side of the road and puke. I am trembling with rage. I try so hard to be nice, but this country is rapidly going downhill. We’re in the midst of a government shutdown, but law enforcement still has the resources to hassle people.
Conflicts here, conflicts there, conflicts everywhere. This is so not good.
It’s award season and Donald Trump has announced that he wants the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump sees himself as a peacemaker and he feels that his efforts to bring peace to Gaza and a negotiated settlement for Ukraine qualify him for the Nobel Prize.
Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. Seeing the carnage of war, Nobel felt responsible. To counter the view of him as a “merchant of death” and to strengthen peace initiatives, he created the Nobel Peace Prize.
You can’t just announce that you want the Nobel Prize, however, that’s not how it works. You are awarded the Peace Prize if, in fact, you deserve it.
Not everyone is eligible. Among other things, you have to be alive to qualify, the prize is not awarded posthumously.
You also need to be nominated, but in Trump’s case, that is no problem since he has been nominated at least 12 times, most recently by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. The government of Pakistan nominated Trump for his work in brokering a cease-fire between Pakistan and India. In 2022, Péter Szijjártó, the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, suggested awarding the prize to Trump for the Abraham Accords. In the past decade, several American lawmakers have nominated Trump, some out of conviction, others to curry favor.
There are six Nobel Prize categories: physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, peace and literature. Some years, the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to an author, other years to a poet. “Song lyrics are also a form of poetry,” Clive Flatenbad of Swedish rap duo realPfft points out. “Therefore, Mutte and I as songwriters should also be eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature. We have released 140 songs. There’s probably some literary merit in our work somewhere in there. Huh, huh, huh?”
Fortunately for Clive, just because he is gauche doesn’t disqualify him for the Nobel Prize.
Clive’s argument is not completely outlandish since, occasionally, the Nobel Committee chooses a home-grown Swede for the Nobel Prize. “That’s me!” says Clive, whose father is Swedish and whose mother is British. “I grew up in Stockholm,” he insists. “Therefore, I deserve the prize.”
Competition is stiff and no motivation is off-limits. The band’s motto is “With realPfft in Modern Times,” a bastardization of Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf’s slogan “For Sweden in Modern Times.” (För Sverige – i tiden)
To bolster their argument, the boys point out that realPfft has received The Freilitzer Music Award from the district of Sjælland in Denmark in 2021, a grant from The Catherine C. Grant Foundation in the town of Bristol in England in 2022 and the Big Bellyacher Award for Good Housekeeping from the city of Tokyo in 2024.
Just as Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward qualified them for the Nobel Prize, the boys claim that the lyrics to their song Speed Hump qualify them for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sample lyrics: Don’t insult him/ Don’t insult me/ Spending coin/ To put bumps in the roadway… Any love, any love, give me, give me/ Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! / Papa done me, si si dumb need/ Papa done me, si si dumb needy… Pick me up, pick me up, give me, give me/ Pick me up, pick me up, give me, give me… In the roadway… Coin/ Spending coin… etc.
“Mutte has created many an audio effect at the mixing console. Give us the Nobel Prize in Physics,” Clive suggests, using a scatter-shot approach to the awards. “I’m a cough drop addict. Medicine! We have good chemistry. Chemistry! I know how to add. Economics! The cards are stacked against us, but the problem, as I see it, is too few categories. Where is the Nobel Prize in Choreography? Where is the Nobel Prize in Fashion Design? The Nobel Prize in Dumb Jokes? It’s like the Oscars. We could win an Oscar for videos by my younger brother Tim in the category Best Original Short Visual Representation of a Musical Composition by a Swedish Rap Duo Out of Uppsala, Sweden. Easy-peasy, we could win that Oscar! Hands-down.
“We finish every day’s struggle in the studio by making a ‘V for Victory’ sign with both hands, shouting to one another ‘Peace, brother!’ That alone makes us worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize,” according to Clive.
“If Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize without creating peace,” reasons Clive in an open letter to the Swedish Academy, “we deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature without creating literature.”
Note: Since you need to be nominated by a public official in order to win, I, blogger Kevin Feingold, officially nominate songwriters Clive Gunnar Flatenbad and Mutte Anders Fjutt for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2026. May they live to be 100 years old! (Ja, må han leva i hundrade år, the Swedish version of “Happy birthday to you.”)
Standing on a street corner under an overhanging white-painted tin roof pockmarked with rust, Antonio of the Barrio was tired. Not bone-weary or battle-weary tired, but irritated, after spending all morning vainly trying to hook up with Carlos Fuentes, a bearded drug kingpin in the los Hipopótamos cartel. Also known as los Hipos, it was difficult to say if they were better known as hippos or hiccups. It made little diff in the drug world they dominated with curt, violent death. No policeman or circuit court judge in the vicinity of the barrio said “¡No, gracias!” to a greasy, sweat-drenched roll of Mexican pesos, when the alternativa was certain death.
II
Sitting on a cracked, wobbly cane chair in a smoky room loud with voices, trussed up in rainbow-colored frou-frou regalia, Valentina batted her eyelashes at him. A pale beauty with startling black hair and eyes as dark as gun barrels, she smelled of oregano, with just a touch of cinnamon. “Where you been, Antonio?” she asked in fluty, accented Spanish. “I ain’t seen you in maybe a month.”
“Ridiculous! I was in here yesterday,” he protested. “Nobody gets nothing for free around here.”
“¡Hola!” she exclaimed archly, hiking up her skirt.
“Muslos dulces,” he muttered, silently accepting a drink from the bartender. Muslos dulces, sweet thighs. Reaching across the counter, he brushed an orange cockroach to the floor with the back of his hand.
“¡Pendejo!” Valentina swore softly, twirling an unlit cigarette between her fingers flirtatiously and toying with a silver-colored lighter. She was calling him a jerk, an idiot.
“Venga conmigo,” he demanded, dropping bills on the counter. Come with me. “¡Vamos!” He led her out through the doorway to the street. There was a breeze and it was perceptively cooler outside, the sun an orange globe hanging in a sky as drained of color as a head of cauliflower. Everything smelled of dust.
He kissed her cheek as she pointedly turned her head away. “I’m no slut,” she exclaimed.
“When did I ever say otherwise?” he asked, a paragon of innocence.
III
He said buenas tardes to Valentina’s mother. She was built like a tank, with Valentina’s black hair, slaving away in their tiny kitchen, wearing a dirty apron. It never hurts to be polite. Besides, they liked each other. She was more forgiving than her daughter. The country had a woman president, Sheinbaum, a Jewish woman president. First they had Peña Nieto, then Obrador, now Sheinbaum, but nada had changed. Life as portrayed in telenovelas.
The gringo president was on the tele. “We are warning Canada and Mexico today that we are introducing a 240% tariff on fentanyl imports to this great country of ours,” he threatened. “A big, beautiful tariff that I dare say will steer our addicts toward consumption of home-grown Class Two substances. American substances for Americans,” he harrumphed, looking grim.
What could Antonio say to that? This could throw a real monkey wrench into the local economy. Where was that jerk Carlos when he was truly needed?
“Give me some money and I’ll get you guavas,” Valentina’s mother offered.
“They have guavas?”
“Sí, just now they have guavas,” she confirmed. Antonio gave her some money.
It was dark by the time he left Valentina’s hovel. At least they had given him dinner.
Still no Carlos.
Sitting in his own shack, Antonio was thoroughly fed up with Mexico, but where was one to go? Honduras? Colombia? That was just asking for trouble. Maybe Cuba if the Cubans weren’t such hardasses politically. There were some breath-takingly lovely women in Cuba. Poverty was the same everywhere.
¿Dónde estaba Carlos? Cabron.
IV
Without so much as a “by your leave,” los Hipos came rolling into the barrio in a caravan of six vehicles, American convertibles from the 1950’s with huge fins up the back, their tops down, open to the night sky, pink Cadillacs, two-tone blue and white Plymouths, cherry-red Chevies, treasure from the drug trade, renovated to optimum splendor. Dressed in red shirts and shiny black suits, the bandidos carried automatic rifles over their shoulders and cradled in their laps. Grinning but vigilant, they paraded throughout their domain, the air filled with the roar of engines and the metallic stench of gunpowder.
Carlos had arrived.
“¿Cómo estás?” he shouted. Perched in the first car, he called jovially to Antonio who had come outside to see what the noise was about. Waving him over, he asked “¿Qué onda?”
“I’m scraping by,” Antonio admitted.
“Come here!” Carlos insisted, pulling him in close where he could pass him a wad of bills without the whole world witnessing this unusual act of kindness. After all, they had gone to school together in their youth.
“The gringos are fucking round with the drug trade,” Antonio pointed out.
“This is not news,” replied Carlos with a barking laugh totally free of humor.
“Big baby Carlos / Size ten boot / He shoots first / Asks later,” played on the car’s tape deck, the opening lines of Carlos’ narcocorrido, his drug ballad, commissioned from one of the country’s top folksingers.
Shots rang out from two cars back and instinctively, everyone ducked. “¡Qué chingados!” Carlos swore in Spanish through clenched teeth. What the fuck! Hunched over, he jumped to the curb and released the safety on his rifle.
“No pasa nada!” someone shouted out and people began to straighten up and look tough again.
“¡Chinga tu madre!” Carlos swore. Fuck your mother. “So, el amigo,” he asked, “what can I do you for?”
“I’m not involved,” Antonio insisted. He saw no reason to defend his job in construction. Secretly, he was proud of being a good carpenter, but he didn’t expect that to carry much weight among gangsters. “Call me Jesús,” he joked. “My toolkit is full.”
“Let’s roll!” shouted Carlos and waved to Antonio as they continued parading through the crowded streets of the barrio.
Antonio couldn’t fault his friend. When he needed a loan, Carlos always helped him out, with never a dream of repayment. Antonio went back inside his hovel and connected his phone, fired up his laptop and logged onto the net.
Cryptocurrency was a bitch, but it only worked if you got in at the very beginning. A ponzi scheme, later investors were the suckers who padded out the value of the mythological coinage. Even America’s president had a cryptocurrency called $TRUMP, a presidential meme coin. So far, Antonio had never managed to ride one of those waves onto the beach of good fortune.
Behold! The Boeing 747 jetliner “gift” from Qatar was originally a sales proposal. The Pentagon offered to buy the aircraft, but Trump announced that Qatar would give it to him for free and there went the ballgame.
The gang who can’t shoot straight, with 365 days to choose from, Trump’s Pentagon has scheduled the Army’s 250th birthday celebration and military parade on his birthday, June 14th, displacing the 32nd annual Vietnam Veterans Memorial Weekend, souring veterans across the country. There’s irony in a draft dodger’s parade displacing a memorial service for those who valiantly served in Vietnam. People at the Pentagon say that the Army had no idea that the Vietnam vets hold a yearly memorial service at The Wall on the day before Father’s Day. Well, d’oh.
President Trump has signed an executive order calling for the establishment of a National Garden of American Heroes consisting of 250 life-size statues in marble, granite, copper, brass or bronze to be completed by June 1, 2026, which is cutting it close by anyone’s standard. The government is offering $200,000 for each statue, no abstract or modernist designs accepted. With only 69 fine-art foundries in the USA, China is the country best equipped and staffed to fill the order for that many statues in the realist style. As for the list of 250 heroes, Louis Armstrong, Elvis Pesley and Frank Sinatra made the cut, but not Frank Zappa.
Having experienced in his first term the bitter limits of presidential power, Trump’s modus operandi in his second term is to “flood the zone” with so many executive orders and presidential decrees, his opponents have little chance to keep up, much less mount any meaningful opposition. Since January 20, 2025, the president has signed 157 executive orders and 62 proclamations. Trump has even had his staff prepare a stack of executive orders in reserve, so he can announce them to fit current events or his mood. When an angry Egyptian man visiting America on an expired tourist visa threw Molotov cocktails at pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, Trump used the occasion to unleash a travel ban that had been sitting on a shelf in the White House for months. Presented as originally written, Egypt is not included on the list of over a dozen countries whose citizens are prohibited from entering the USA.
Antonio logged onto the website of minihaha.net, but in spite of the jazzy text, they weren’t offering employment. Storytellers. He could tell them a story or two! Spin a yarn with the best of them. Maybe write porno films. Whatever gets you through the night, as John Lennon said. It drove him nuts, waiting for his moment. He logged onto TikTok and recorded a video, handheld, jumping around the shack. “Hey, amigas, is your ol’ buddy Antonio of the Barrio here telling you that times ahead looking very bright for the well-endowed and we all know what that means, so don’ give up nothing and just keep plugging away because inna end, we gonna make it! Chin up, face forward and go for it! ¡Gen Z vive! See U later, alligator.” Okay, maybe it wouldn’t make him any money, but he was glad that he had said that. Give the gals some encouragement.
V
It was on a Friday afternoon as he took the bus back to the barrio from a building site downtown that his phone began vibrating. It was Carlos and he wanted to see him that evening. They met in the public park across from the Hall of Justice, a block down from the police station. “¿Qué pasa?” he asked, sitting down next to Carlos on a green-painted bench. A Mexican magnolia tree, yolloxochitl in Aztec, left stains on the sidewalk.
“I maybe getting tired of bailing you out all the time, so when I hear that A-rabs are gonna build an office tower in the city, I gonna hook you up so you got plenty of money,” Carlos explained, taking out a cigar from a suit pocket and slowly lighting it with a back and forth motion of his lighter. Blowing a cloud of white smoke, he asked, “You interested?”
“Yes, of course I’m interested.”
“ ‘Cause it ain’t what you think.”
“I assume it’s carpentry?”
“Carpentry, sí, but there’s politics mixed up in it,” Carlos explained obliquely, concentrating on his cigar. He blew a smoke ring and watched it dissipate in the wind.
Antonio laughed. “There’s always politics mixed up in everything, you know that. It’s Mexico!”
“Yes, okay, but I want to let you in on the secret from the ground floor.”
“I’m listening.”
“Good. When this building is finished, the A-rabs are gifting it to that President Trump. So he can put his name on it, lease office suites to Mexican businessmen and multi-nationals and make a ton of money.”
“Carpentry is still carpentry. Construction is construction. Commercial real estate—”
“ ’Cause we Hippos may plow some capital into the venture, too, you know. That’s where you could make a good bit of coin. You can be our gopher, our mule, carry freight for us between our people and the A-rabs. Big business is money laundering, not for the faint of heart.”
“I said I’ll do it.”
“¡Bueno! That’s a very nice decision on your part.”
As if he had a choice!
VI
It was a week later and the adamant honking of a car horn brought him outside where Carlos waited in a black SUV with tinted windows. Beckoning him into the vehicle, a gun tucked conspicuously in his belt, Carlos provided him with a briefcase on a chain, a handcuff, a key and an address. “The recipient’s name is Abdullah. Biblically, that means ‘Servant of God.’ Only not this hombre. Okay, pequeña piñata, my little piñata, deliver the goods,” Carlos suggested.
Antonio took a red, four-door taxi with a white roof to the address. The taxi smelled of garlic. In front of the building, a flash mob in striped yellow and black honeybee costumes was chanting “You can run, you can hide, but we don’t want your genocide!” They carried signs that said “No pests aside for your pesticide” and “Keep your greedy chemicals off my beeswax!” He didn’t make it halfway up the steps before a huge lummox with a brown moustache and bulging muscles, dressed in a Day-Glo yellow T-shirt, jeans and black leather boots, stopped him cold. “Are you with Agroquímica?” he demanded menacingly.
“Never heard of them.”
“Let’s see what’s in the briefcase.”
“Why do you think it’s chained to my wrist? This is more problema than you can even imagine.”
“Why? What’s in it?”
“Tons of money, sonny,” Antonio said, laughing. “I have an appointment with someone you don’t want to know. ¿Estamos de acuerdo?” Are we agreed?
So the brute let him pass.
Taking the elevator to the top floor, a security goon frisked him before leading him to Abdullah’s office. Wearing a flowing white robe and black headdress, Abdullah stood behind his desk, a rough hombre, his face as dark as a thunder cloud. Antonio wouldn’t want to meet him on a street corner. He uncuffed the briefcase, put it on the desk and pivoted it to face his host.
“Let us assume these are unmarked bills and liquid assets that by their very nature will not jump up and bite me on the ass,” Abdullah declared in boardroom English.
“I have no idea. I’m only the courier,” Antonio insisted. “Nobody tells me nada.” The last thing he expected was that Abdullah would refuse the money.
“Go back from whence you came and tell whoever sent you—”
“Carlos.”
“— that I beware of Greeks bearing gifts and other assorted improprieties.”
“You don’t want the money?”
“Go!”
Antonio went.
Standing in Carlos’ wood-paneled, gray-carpeted office suite on the eleventh floor of the Mercado Commerce Building, flanked by gun-toting goons on either side, Antonio got quite the dressing-down of Carlos. “It’s a simple enough process,” he explained. “You handcuff the briefcase to your wrist, you place the key in your shoe, you march to a taxi out front, you get in the taxi, you ride to the destination, you exit the taxi, enter the foyer of the office building, take the elevator to the top floor…” Apparently, nothing Antonio had accomplished up to now had been satisfactory. Listening to this near-endless litany of complaint, he considered the nature of their friendship. Antonio supposed that Carlos was charismatic, insightful, imaginative, discerning, broadminded, egalitarian, prescient, forthright, affable, chipper, somewhat baffling and quite possibly an admirable fellow. Antonio supposed. That didn’t make Carlos an easy boss.
VII
The man in the pin-stripe suit was a typical americano, very tall and slender with a scruffy beard. “I want what I want,” he insisted. A dealmaker, he had just flown in from Kuwait City.
They were meeting in Carlos office. When confronting gringos, Mexicans often feel vertically challenged. “Yes, s’okay,” Antonio stammered. “I can show you some great land on the Gulf of Mexico. It’s got—”
“Gulf of America,” the American interrupted.
“On the Gulf,” Antonio explained. “Rolling hills and the azure blue sea, ideal for golf and a sport center. Scuba diving—”
“Show me on a map.”
So Antonio got out a map, unfolded it and showed the coastline he had in mind. “I know it like the back of my hand.”
“It’s too far away!” complained the American. “For cryin’ out loud, I want something that’s convenient to the office tower. A five minute drive, ten maximum. You build something out in the boonies, people gotta fly in a helicopter to reach the damn place. Your poor people’s slum is a perfect location for urban redevelopment. Eighteen holes, beautiful fairways, sumptuous greens, low carbon footprint, goodbye to an eyesore. Everybody wins!”
“There’s plenty of fallow land further out, but still within city limits,” Antonio suggested. “It’s—”
“Exactly! That’s where all you people should move! We’ll keep the close-in real estate for high-end development,” exclaimed the American, ripping the map into quarters. “I’ve never understood why you indigenous people are so anchored to the land.” He seemed very pleased with himself.
VIII
“He talks of urban renewal, but what he wants is to bulldoze the barrio and build an 18-hole golf course,” Antonio complained.
“What a crock of shit,” swore Carlos, his face red with fury. “We’re nobody’s punching bag. We are los Hippies. Anybody fucks with us, he does so at his own risk.”
IX
It was a private petting zoo off the main highway. Zoológico demascotas said the sign, and if you didn’t know any better, you would think that’s all there was. Howler monkees swung from tree branches inside their enclosure. An aquatic tank housed stingrays you could pet. Three kinds of cattle mooed and meandered. Sheep and goats grazed the hills. There was also a blockhouse out back with rings set in the walls, chains, blood-stained chairs and a worktable containing many implements of torture.
“Listen, there was minimal damage,” Carlos babbled, driving too fast on the side road, kicking up a thick plume of brown dust. For 30 minutes, he had said nothing, and now this. “Are you listening? There was minimal damage.”
“How many people did you shoot?”
It seemed really important to Carlos that Antonio accept his version of events.
“Two. Security guards. We wounded the driver.”
“You can see where I’m not happy to be involved in this?”
“It’s business!” Carlos yelped. “Be a friend and help me out.”
“What do you need me to do?” Antonio groaned.
“What you always do best. Comunicación.”
“This thoroughly sucks!” complained the American as soon as he laid eyes on Antonio. “Even if you were going to kidnap me, at least put me up in a JW Marriott or a Holiday Inn. Someplace with a hot tub.”
“I’ll check on possible accommodations. How about a plantation out in the country?”
“Do tell!” swore the American.
Which was why they took him blindfolded for a three-hour drive to a hacienda well off the beaten path. “I want a hot shower!” roared the americano the moment they arrived, tearing off his blindfold and storming from the vehicle despite armed guards with rifles on every side. “I want a steak dinner with french fries! And I want my phone back so I can notify my wife that I haven’t run off with a hot-blooded señorita.”
“Cellphone traffic is hopelessly monitored by the americanos. Give us an email address and we’ll email her,” Carlos offered. “We have hackers who can ghost the return address.”
“Ass-holes!”
“Enjoy your stay!” Carlos replied, leaving instructions that the gringo was not to be harmed.
“I would prefer Club Med in Cancún,” insisted the American.
X
The Immediate Response Force of the U.S. military mobilized both air and ground units, utilizing the 82nd Airborne Division to conduct forcible entry assaults.
“This will be an excellent opportunity to deal a DEATH SENTENCE to the MEXICAN CARTELS who for so long have bedeviled America,” announced the president. “I am in constant contact with Mexican President Sheinbaum and there is no daylight between the positions of our two governments. We are in complete agreement regarding active force, regrettably necessary to free the hostage and return order to the region south of our border.”
He didn’t mention that the hostage was Don Jr.
American military personnel swept across Mexico, carrying out pinpoint raids at specific locations. Sadly, the cutbacks to America’s intelligence infrastructure made it extremely difficult for the armed forces to glean actionable intelligence.
“We just want a better deal on the golf course,” announced Subcomandante Insurgente Carlos for the Municipio autónomo rebelde Pancho Villa via Reuters and CNN. The American government immediately labeled the Rebel Pancho Villa Autonomous Municipality a terrorist organization.
Within a week, 100,000 Mexicans had been rounded up as potential suspects. Don Jr. was eventually liberated from his forced leisure and a relative calm returned to México.
XI
Sitting on the pitted concrete floor of a prison cell at CECOT Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in El Salvador, jammed fifty prisoners to a cell, Antonio stared at the dull gray metal bars, waiting for Carlos to come spring him. And waited.
And waited.
Waiting for Carlos, who could be anywhere… or nowhere at all. ¡Cabron!
MAGA! Magnificent Army Glorifying America. I’m stationed on the front line of the battlespace. We warfighters have a life expectancy of 15 minutes, but what do the statisticians know? They’d sign our death certificates without learning to spell our names. I’m in a Skyscraper Battalion. We use laser-guided slingshots to shoot down munitions-bearing drones before they can drop their dirty bombs on our primo targets. Fun in the sun!
The attack on the homeland sucked, as did our response: War, glorious war! Personally, I never had much use for San Diego. It was pretty, but also pretty useless. Tragedy beyond repair, a wall won’t stop this brand of wiolence. Troops, yeah. A wall? Not so much. The Atomic Age fanatics who blew away San Diego never even crossed the border.
So here we are. In the 1980’s, a punk band named D.O.A. sang the lyrics “Mesopotamia soup / Old meat pie / Middle East stew / I don’t wanna die.” C’est nous. That’s us. Dead On Arrival.
Shifting inland, we deploy in urban jungles where “Search and Destroy” means winging enemy soldiers. Next, we kill the wounded, douse their bodies in crude oil and use our butane lighters to light ’em up. A million miles from the Geneva Convention, burning the bodies is a standing order that takes up three full pages in the Soldier’s Handbook and includes color illustrations that look like they were drawn in crayon by a six year old. Brutality. Shades of Vietnam, I’m told. As the Sec State said to the Gen Assembly at the UN, “We’ll uphold Geneva next time we fight a war in Switzerland.” The bonfires are our version of Hindu funeral pyres: Cleanse the soul in fire, release it from the body and facilitate its journey to the afterlife. Which isn’t at all what the President and Vice President had in mind. Too bad. The billowing plumes of inky black smoke look totally awesome. Tip: Stand upwind and wear a gasmask.
Pill-popping madmen, the “emeny” is zonked out on the underground drug Captagon-C, “the Sword of Jihad.” Holy war. Their amphetamine of choice, Cappy makes them feel superhuman, but that’s mostly an illusion. It’s actually weaker than Adderall. There’s a huge black market in the multi-colored pills. Some say these secret labs hidden away on back streets generate revenue three times greater than the Mexican cartels, but the drug is so addictive, we steer clear, burying the pills in the sand when we come across them. There’s no quicker way to the brig than dealing drugs.
When not busy killing the enemy, we practice “Shop ’till You Drop” mercantilism. Clutching fistloads of the almighty dollareem, we purchase leisure wear in wholesale lots at the border— mostly Dnipro Brand sweatsuits and Floating Lotus Brand sneakers— which middlemen sell at retail prices around the souks. It’s “free money” in the sense that we don’t report our profits or pay any taxes. And nobody gets hurt, which you can’t say about the arms trade or drug pushers. “Sure beats working!” writes my mom, but her only experience of combat is when my dad worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He hated every minute of it and fought with my mom all the time. Our family life consisted of domestic combat, the stuff of daytime television soaps. Dead of a heart attack, daddy-o was a total loser. When he died, all I got was a lousy plaque.
“Loose lips sink ships!” they say, and that’s on a good day. Living in a statolatry, everyone worships the state.
Patriotic and a sucker for bling, I’d like to buy a Presidential Victory Watch, but I’m not payin’ $6,000. Sink that! I also find it amusing that when I go online and search “presidential signature watches,” I find thousand of people are unloading their used watch. War time austerity, aka poverty, is interesting that way.
Now that we have a centrally planned economy, a perpetual State of Emergency, military parades up the kazoo and mandatory enlistment, there is only a single luxury coupon on the last page of each red, white and blue ration book. Three inches by five inches, printed on pulp paper, it looks like it was ripped from the Sunday funny papers. My mom uses her monthly coupon to buy eggs.
I just got back from home leave and haven’t completed rotation, so I’m sitting in a “repple depple,” a resupply depot, waiting for transport back to my unit. Command may blackhawk me outta here at any moment. I am told that I’m a Holden Caulfield, but I don’t feel it. An inveterate diarist with diarrhea of the brain, I do want to put something into my laptop. Folks can read it aloud at my funeral: “He harbored a young man’s ambition. He dreamed the impossible dream. He wanted to have sex with J.K. Rowling.”
I bought my mom a porcelain nude filched from a sheikh’s palace by some sticky-fingered non-com and for sale at the black market in the poor end of town. Eight inches high, it’s a pearly white figurine of a spectacularly flat-chested lass reclining against a tree stump, satisfying her primal urges with a vibrator. War is known for unearthing the most peculiar vestiges of human behavior and this confab is no exception. I also bought her a 10-pack of boxed Swedish Safety Matches manufactured under contract in Nablus in the West Bank. She can use them to light the evening candles when the power goes out.
Four days travel and three days Stateside, there went my week’s leave. Anybody who knows me knows I had to come thousands of miles, crossing endless time zones, to visit Pollyanne, my hopeless love object. Bottle green eyes and chestnut hair, a face full of freckles and a Tennessee accent, her laugh sends shivers up my spine and dings my dong. A walking, talking clinical definition of an abusive relationship, she plays boys for idiots every day of the week. This has been going on ever since Middle School and she and I aren’t getting any younger. Also, I could die tomorrow. Having come halfway around the globe, I wasn’t surprised that Polly’s first reaction was to stand me up.
“Shit,” she said over the phone. “I got about a hundred of your text messages and emails while you were in transit and I thought, ‘What a funny bunny.’ I couldn’t wait to see you, but see, my gynecologist called and said I have a cyst, so I’m gonna have an operation and I’ll be laid up the whole time you’re visiting.” Giggle, giggle.
“Fuck!” I groan.
“Don’t swear,” she commands.
Why does this scenario feel so familiar? Life with Pollyanne is like looking for cracks in a tarnished mirror. She cares, but she only cares about herself. “What am I supposed to do?” I ask. “I brought you a tiara from one of King Hussein’s palaces. Should I come by and leave it with your mom?”
“A TIARA???” she guffaws, intrigued. “C’mon over, silly!”
So I get to sit on the floor at her feet while she curls up on the couch and fingers the silver tiara. A classic cockteaser, she laughs, wrinkles her nose, bounces her foot in my face, pokes fun at me and checks every few minutes to be sure I am thoroughly aroused. “I’d make out with you,” she simpers, confiding in a whisper, “but my mom is in the kitchen and she might think we’re being gross.”
“I’m sure your mom has seen plenty of teenagers make out,” I object.
Looking thoroughly cross-eyed, Polly replies, “But we’re not teenagers!”
Did I mention that she is 100% MAGA and mans a cash register at a checkout line at a local grocery? This girl gets around! At rallies, she is one of the cupcakes that T’s television people sit just behind the Prez to make it look on the TV screen as if his Supporters’ Club is composed almost entirely of 20-year-old mall chicks. There are wideos on TikTok of her glaring at the camera. Classmates claim that she wears tinted contacts, but I know for a fact that she’s naturally endowed. Her mama told me so and I’ve examined Polly’s eyeballs from the side and up close. And once she fastens those bottle green eyes on you, game over, you can’t look anywhere else!
“I’ll visit your grave,” she promises, “when they bury you in Area 51.”
“It’s Section 61 of Arlington Cemetery,” I correct her, only too aware that she’ll never make an appearance. My cock has swollen up like five pounds of salami.
Regional politics is not my specialty, I’m a grunt like everybody else, but I’ve picked up enough of the lingo to know that we are never going to win this war.
“I do love you,” she breathes, pulling me tight against her pointy little breasts as she French kisses me, her tongue down my throat, while ushering me out the front door. Was it worth the trip? Damn if I know.
I don’t feel lust in battle, mostly annoyance that they are trying to kill me while I try to kill them. We live in a cock-up world. Our commanding officer has a theory: “This war is nature’s way to cull the population now that climate change makes the planet more and more unlivable,” he claims. “This war is Gaza on a grand scale.”
With new wars popping up all over the planet, he may be right. We’ll see.
yustyoking 
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