yustyoking

A First Lady Appeal

  

            Dear Ms. Feingold,

            I know a soul sistah like y’all gonna enjoy the full-color, signed photo o me an my fambly enjoyin pork ribs. Mmmm, love them ribs! I wouldn send this here photo t’ whitey, they’s gettin a different photo altogether!

            But the miracle o micro-targeting keepin it jus between us sistahs, I thinkin y’all like this downhome’un. We black folk gotta hang together, cause nobody gonna take care o us but us!

            Now Rose, reason I writin is cause o my man, course, he need our help. Unlike that white boy Mickey Rodney who only care bout hisself, my fambly and I care bout the entire country! No matter our ages, backgrounds or stations in life, we want the country t’ do well an reelect mah husband! We CARE about this great nation! Sho nuff! Did I mention challenges? So how bout that vote, honey?????

            Mah husband know wha it be fo a fambly t’ struggle. He got a compelling fambly history. What with his momma bein a hippie an all. Y’all read bout it in his books. (Y’all pays retail, we preciate that! We be rich.) As a father, mah husband don’ want no limitations on his daughters: They grows up an be presidents. Tha’s the goal. Yeah, mah husband, he want it all!  

            Rose, I enclose a plastic card what says how my Blackie done in the last three years. Rose, people always askin: What y’all been doin? Well, here tis! From the first moment he enter the White House on Day 1, mah husband…

             He save Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase an a passel o other brokerage firms on Wall Street. He save Bank o America, AIG an some other too-big-to-fail institutions.

             He end America’s military involvement an brought the troops home from Mali!

             He kill Osama bin Lahtis.

             He expand health care, implement economic recovery, create 3 million jobs at a time when this great country of ours only lost 6 million.

             Yes, Rose, he a man— an all men is swine— but thanks to Girrl Power, the question be: Does we go forward an do a whole lot mo promises or do we go back t’ them Republicans an they’s do-nothin ways?

             Y’all choose.

             Husband can’t do it alone, Rose, ah askin fo a donation! Y’all give us $25, $50 or $100, we can make a whole lot mo promises! Tha’s what we do as Americans!  We promise

• Equal Pay for Equal Work
• Improving Women’s Health
• Protecting Women’s Right to Choose
• Ending Insurance Company Abuses
• Keeping Premiums Low
• Expanding Access to Care
• Closing the Medicare Prescription Drug “Donut Hole”
• Job Creation (again)
• Save the auto industry from collapse (again!)
• Create nearly 3 million jobs in the private sector (AGAIN!)
• Out-Educate the Rest of the World
• Out-Innovate the Rest of the World
• Level the Playing Field
• Make Everyone Do Their Fare Share
• Remain Focused on Iraq
• Remain Focused on Iran
• Remain Focused on al-Qaeda
• Remain Focused on the economy
• Remain Focused on Israel
• Remain Focused on the Taliban
• Remain Focused on Veterans an Their Famblies
• Remain Focused on getting reelected!

              So y’all see, Rose, there still be a whole lot t’ do! I ain sayin we gits it all done on Day 1. I ain sayin we gits it all done in the first week— or the first month— or even the first year of a second term. I simply sayin, Y’ALL DON’T REELECT US, WE CAN’T DO NONE O THIS STUFF!

              Tha’s all!

              So what you say, Rose? Y’all send us some money, we gonna use it t’ win!

                               From mah fambly t’ your’n!

                               First Lady Madeleine Diamond

                                                         *

                                              –  from the upcoming novel

 

Electrifying!

  

            “I hope to pass away like my grandfather. He died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming in terror, like the passengers in his car at the time.”

                                                           –  B.Y.U. humor

                                                        *

            Friday, June 29, is the hottest day of the year. The newscast reports temps of 104 degrees at the airport. At 9:40 p.m., I’m sitting in the living room, reading the newspaper and formulating my complaints about the president: He doesn’t know what he’s doing. According to Marc A. Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute, the current administration makes investments in ecological, “green” technologies, but the companies they loan the money to, all too often turn belly-up. Leaving us taxpayers holding the bag.

            Billions of dollars!

            Solyndra, whose out-dated technology cost taxpayers a cool $535 million in loan guarantees.

            The president’s people made a $33 million grant to Raser Technologies to build a power plant in Beaver Creek, Utah. The company now owes $1.5 million in back taxes and has filed for bankruptcy protection!

            ECOtality received $126.2 million in taxpayer money in 2009 to install electric car chargers in five states. The company has since incurred $45 million in losses. They themselves say that they don’t believe the company will ever reach profitability!

            Nevada Geothermal Power received a $98.5 million loan guarantee in 2010. With their cash reserves depleted, the company is in economic turmoil and may go under.

            First Solar: $3 billion in loan guarantees for power plants in Arizona and California. They just burned through $401 million in restructuring costs and fired 30% of the workforce.

            Abound Solar received a $400 million loan guarantee to build photovoltaic panel factories. The company halted production in February and laid off 180 employees.

             SunPower received a $1.2 billion loan guarantee and, in January, owed more than the company is worth.

             Brightsource: A $1.6 billion loan guarantee has been followed by losses totaling $177 million.

             Too many of these people either contributed bigtime to the current president’s campaign or are major donors to the Democratic Party.

             We’re seeing crony capitalism lead to dud investments. I’m tired of the president playing mutual fund manager. He’s no good at it! When I have shares in a mutual fund saddled with bad management, I liquidate my holdings.

             Other things that get my goat:

             The “McCain-Feingold” legislation, allowing campaign finance reform— cleaning up a veritable cesspool of politicians for sale to special interest groups— received only a tepid response from the current occupant in the White House.

             The 54,000 soldier “surge” in Afghanistan in 2009 – 2010 put over a third of the task force—20,500 Marines— in Helmand province, where they had very little work, instead of plopping them in Kandahar, where the insurgency is mushrooming.

             As Commander In Chief, the prez failed to back the State Department and Richard C. Holbrooke’s peace initiative, which could have made a deal with the Taliban and ended the Afghan conflict with “Dayton”-style accords. Instead, Mr. Passive-Aggressive, the president let bureaucratic infighting and one-upmanship overshadow a possible solution. Our boots on the ground continue to be killed while millions of dollars go into a wasted war effort.

            In this election year, the Democratic incumbent sides with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is little more than an American puppet. One of Hamid’s brothers runs “The Helmand,” a restaurant on North Charles Street in Baltimore featuring Afghan cuisine. A Pashtun, touchy and corrupt, Hamid himself heads a cantankerous regime in Kabul. It’s nice for Hamid Karzai that he has U.S. backing, since his fellow Afghans in the countryside feel no affection for him.

           Bailing out the banks, the Wall Street brokerage houses and the auto industry, our leader has let Main Street wither. As home values and share prices tumbled, the average American family lost 35% of their net worth in the last five years! The average wealth of a family of four is currently $66,740, according to the Census Bureau.

          My mom has three additional issues:

          We’ve got a “liberal” president who is a closet lackey of Big Business. The Republicans have a “Big Business candidate” who is a closet liberal.

           Now that the Muslim Brotherhood won the election in Egypt, no one in the U.S. Congress is petitioning for one penny of the Egyptian aid appropriation to be released. Sharia law is not the American way. With this president, however, you never know: He may decide the Muslim Brotherhood will like us better if we send them the one billion dollars in aid money.

            Our dear president favors the Canadian tar sands project. Extracting oil from the sands requires three times as much water as oil produced. Once used to clean tar sands, the contaminated water returns to the earth, poisoning the water table for generations to come. By 2030, drinkable, unpolluted water, H2O, will be the scarce commodity over which countries go to war. As such, the Canadian tar sands project seems both shortsighted and incredibly foolish.

                                                        *

             What I hear first is the roar. A jet plane? A semi? Opening the front door, I see wind and rain propelling tree branches up the street. I close the door and return to my chair and the newspaper, but the air conditioning is struggling. I get up and turn it off. Then the lights go out. They come back on for one second, go out, come back on, go out. Then they come back on for one final second, before dying for good.

              Ugh!

             A photog in my youth, I spent endless hours in the darkroom. I don’t have any trouble retrieving a flashlight from the basement in the dark, feeling my way. I unplug the dryer, the TV sets, the cordless phones and my computer. Then I take a seat on the back porch.

             The storm is called a derecho, a freight train of wind and rain tearing across several states. Words of Spanish derivation, where a tornado signifies turning air, a derecho blows “straight ahead.” We have a warm air mass hugging the ground and a cold front blowing in above it. Warm air rises, cold air sinks. As these air currents pass each other, the friction— on a molecular level!— generates electrical charges.

            For forty minutes, I sit and watch the sky alight in lightning bolts every five seconds. After only a minute, I go inside and get my sunglasses. So now I’m sitting in the dark, in sunglasses, watching the sky light up! Twelve times a minute. Four hundred and eighty lightning bolts. I am definitely freaking out, waiting for the alien spaceships to land!

             Since this is mom’s house, every room has a cordless phone. No electricity = no phone. I go to the basement, using the flashlight this time, and dig out a rotary phone I keep on hand for emergencies. I plug it in. The wind has died down, as the storm blows up the coast. I light two yartzeit candles, one in the dining room, one on the back porch. Candles in glasses are almost as effective as hurricane lamps.

            The phone rings!

           Mom has been to a show with her friends. They are now sitting in the foyer of the retirement community where the friends live.

            “Stay there!” I tell her. “Don’t try to go anywhere. Wait until the storm passes.”

             “The news reports say there are trees down everywhere, blocking the roads,” she tells me excitedly. “Driving here, the street lights were out at all the major intersections! The highways are a madhouse.”

              She is at one tony retirement community, but fate— and the power company— don’t play favorites. There’s no electricity there either! Mom’s talking to me on her cell phone. Aha! We agree that she’ll spend the night there.

              At one o’clock in the morning, I don my aquatic shoes and walk the streets. Every hundred feet, there is a tree blocking the road. They look shaggy, strange in the darkness. The only other people I meet are busy loading possessions from a pitch-black house into two cars. Thoroughly pissed off, they don’t look very friendly. I give them a wide berth. Wandering home, I am amazed to find the telephone pole at the top of the hill has snapped like a matchstick! The crossbar and the top third hang, toy-like, in the electrical wires.

             What a mess.

              In 2005, the Washington area got hit by two major hurricanes. Around here, during the second storm, an oak tree became uprooted mid-block and pulled down the power line. Our grid, a block long and three blocks wide, was without power for five days! On the third day, the Town Council sent politicians around to hold neighborhood meetings. A videographer tagged along, filming us with a large, professional-grade rig. “Yeah, yeah,” groused Morton Reilly, one of the most patriotic of my neighbors, “Is that so you’ll have evidence to use in court if we physically attack you?”

              The reps from the Town Council weren’t amused. “Look,” they reasoned, “your wiring can be transferred to underground culverts. No more storm damage. We’ve done the math. It is going to cost each household $1,000. It’s your call.”

              “That’s my vacation money!” complained Morton and three other family fathers. I just looked at them. So we never took the municipality up on their offer. The “cottage community of Oxburg” was built in 1927. Guess what? We have the same spindly telephone poles as they had then. (When we were kids, we watched every summer as the creosote tar preservative leaked out of the wood.) Except for storm damage, nothing has been replaced! Nothing.

              In the last ten years, the cable companies have shown up and strung their green cables and hung their signal boxes on the existing poles!

                                                      *

             Saturday morning, the sun is up, but the electricity is nowhere to be found. Mom gets home about 11 a.m., full of her adventures. “The streets are a catastrophe! I lost 30 minutes easing through intersections. The radio says to treat downed traffic lights like a four-way stop.” She has me close up the house, hopefully to keep the cool air inside. Right away, I notice that without the attic exhaust fan, the upstairs gets hot and musty, as a constant wave of dry heat radiates from the ceiling.

             We return to a more primitive existence. We plan before opening the refrigerator, so the minimum of cold air will escape. (In 2005, I got two bags of ice every morning and put one in the freezer and one in the fridge, mopping up smelt water several times a day.) We don’t try to do a whole lot. I spend most of my time on the back porch, cleaning up old papers and news clippings. Mom sits inside and sweats, complaining that my junk clutters the basement.

             “It’s too dark to sit down there anyway,” I point out, but she’s ornery and upset, so I let it go.

              While I eat lunch on the back porch, a cardinal flies across the lawn. He’s as bright red as a stop sign, with a black mask like a bandit. He comes hopping along the porch ledge, foraging. Since mom and I don’t chase away the animals, our birds, squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits have become very aggressive. They all but crawl onto my lap, not always a pleasant experience.  

               Pamela, next door, is abandoning her house until the power comes back on. Her hubby, the college professor, is out of town. “Can you,” she asks, “turn on the generator if it rains? We’ve got a new generator to operate the sump pump in the basement.”

              We go to look. I help her fill the gas tank. She shows me how to turn on the fuel valve, how to flip the switch, the “eco filter” I need to couple in after three minutes’ running time. My eyes grow large as I devour the two outlets marked “120 volts/20 amps.”

              “Sure,” I tell her, “but can I run an extension cord from our house, plug in my refrigerator and run the generator for an hour, just to cool down our fridge?”

              “Will an hour be enough?” she asks.

               “An hour will sure be better than nothing!”

               It’s while I’m positioning myself to pull the stove away from the wall to get at the refrigerator cord that I notice the yellow light streaming from the kitchen lamp.

                ???

               I rush to tell my mom, “The power’s back on!”

               It’s 6 p.m. I go next door and tell Pamela. She’s packing to leave. Grabbing flashlights, we descend to her basement and throw the power switch from “generator” to “mains.” Nada. Nothing. “Shit!” I exclaim, embarrassed that we have power and she doesn’t. And for using an expletive.

              Disappointed, Pamela heads to her sister’s place in the District. “She still has electricity.” I promise to keep an eye on her place and start the generator if it rains.

              Strange brew. We have electricity. The neighbors on Algonquin don’t. How do I know? Mike McGraw’s generator is still noisily chugging on his driveway, spewing gas and producing wattage. Mike is admirably handy with electric saws, weed whackers and power mowers. He lives by the light of the orange, outdoor extension cord.

              The deal is, we’re all supposed to be on the same grid! Our backyards face one another. There’s already dissension over speed humps. So the natives aren’t happy when mom and I return to civilization and electrification, leaving most of them stuck somewhere in the Stone Age: Living in their basements to keep cool. Going to bed at dusk and rising at daybreak because they lack artificial illumination. Throwing out tons of defrosted food.

               It turns out the crews from Pike, who came up from Georgia to help in 2005, split the grid in two. Now there are haves and have-nots!

               Some locals even lack potable water. How do you boil the water when you have no electricity?

                                                       *

               The Town of Oxburg, being a separate municipality, has a contract with Mepco, the Maryland Electrical Power Company, one of the smaller entities in the electricity business. When I finally get through on my cell phone at 10 p.m. on Saturday night and tell the young lady about the snapped telephone pole, she replies, “Mepco isn’t responsible for telephone poles. The municipality owns those.”

                I’m ready to strangle her.

               “But the three houses closest to the pole are still without power!”

               “Oh! Well! Power outages are our province. I’ll file your report.”

                On Sunday afternoon, July 1^st, the Maryland Electrical Power Company holds a town hall style press conference at the local elementary school. This is the same locale where I spent last year battling my neighbors twice a month over speed humps. I oppose speed humps! I lost. Being back among the toddler-size furniture of the library makes my skin crawl. Jim, the black dude representing Mepco, starts by explaining in rudimentary detail how electricity runs through substations to utility wires before entering our homes.

                 I hear myself groaning. I consciously force myself to clam up.

                After a halting opening statement, Jim turns out to know his stuff: “Right now, we’re working on getting the substations up and running. After that, breaks in the utility wires can further delay us getting that electricity into your home!”

                I couldn’t have said it better myself.

                He takes questions from the audience.

                Groan! “Please, God,” I murmur. “No speeches! Please, God!”

                The first question comes from an irate middle-aged woman with an executive demeanor: “This is the United States of America!” she declares.  “Founded in 1776, we are the leader of the world. Here in the nation’s capital, I would expect an infrastructure that is capable of carrying the most basic goods and services to the people! What are you doing?! How dare you let this power outage drag on for days! Someone must pay for this incredible incompetence! What am I supposed to tell my children? That we are powerless in the nation’s capital? Are we back in the 1970’s, when America was viewed piteously by the rest of the world as a helpless giant unable to bring our enemies to heel?

               “This is unacceptable!

               “Mark my words! Heads will roll!”

               Oh! I am thinking. Someone made a speech.

               Jim does what he can to answer.

               Next questioner: “Uh, as I understand it, this thing that hit us,” he says, “is called a derecho. The Washington area has been attacked. We’ve been blown out of the water. We’re shut down! We’re on an emergency footing!”

               “Yes?” asks Jim.

               “So when are we going to war with Mexico? Intern the illegals and let’s get on with it! How much longer are we expected to wait?!”

                “For the power to come back on?” Jim suggests helpfully, trying to stay on message.

                                                       *

                Over a million and a quarter people have been without electricity. By Monday, only (only!) 350,000 households remain without power. A khamseen, a warm wind, is blowing throught the region, making people act crazy.

                                                       * 

                Tuesday, July 3^rd at 7 p.m., the last of my neighbors in Oxburg get their power turned back on. We eat late, as usual. Mom asks me if I intend to run the dishwasher.

                “Thunderstorms are predicted. I’ll wait for the weather to pass.”

                When I finish cleaning the table and the kitchen, I sit on the back porch, watching the lightning approach. It begins to rain. A blinding white flash lights up the night, followed by a hollow ka-pow! Ah, folks? The same neighbors whose homes were restored two hours ago…? Their houses go dark. I turn and look at our kitchen door. Yellow light streams from behind the venetian blind! This could get ugly.

               Another flash of light, another explosion. Our power goes out!

              “See,” I murmur. “What did I tell ya?”

              This time I hook up the old-fashion rotary phone and dial the 1-800 number pronto. Cars driving down the hill light up the neighborhood. I pop open the front door and sit on the floor in the living room. On hold, listening to an endless chamber music recital, I see three white utility trucks drive by and turn onto Algonquin. I hang up, grab my aquatic shoes and walk down the hill to have a look. I find a snazzy dude talking beside his car with one of my neighbors.

              “Seen any utility trucks?” I ask, introducing myself.

              “They drove thataway!”

                I walk to the end of the block. A man and a woman are pulling into their driveway. I ask them.

               “Up on Chancellorville. There are three trucks. They’re working gangbusters,” the gentleman drawls in a southern accent so thick, I can barely understand him.

               What I find is a telephone pole containing a full substation rig and a lot of guys in white hardhats, shaking their heads. “We’d just finished,” one explains. “We intended to mount a metal cover tomorrow morning. It never occurred to us that it might rain and short-circuit our handiwork!” He doesn’t apologize, but by the time I get back home, we have electricity. The rest of my neighbors are back on-line within fifteen minutes.

                I run the dishwasher.

                                                       *

               People in the Washington, D.C. area are going nuts. We’re not turning into zombies and werewolves, but still… Pepco has notified the District, Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties that power will first be fully restored by 10 p.m. on Friday, July 6^th! A full week after the storm. It turns out, Pepco has been doling out dividends to its shareholders instead of doing the upgrades they promised the public after the debacle in 2005! Dominion Virginia Power tells Virginians that they will be back on-line by Wednesday, July 4^th. The National Guard is clearing debris. Crews from neighboring states have joined in to saw up fallen trees. 

                We’re in the middle of a heat wave. Electric signs on the Interstate say “COOLING SHELTER NOTICE, DIAL 211.”

                Look, I grew up here! Scorching summers were part of living in the Washington area. We didn’t have no A/C in the 1950’s, we had electric fans. When it was hot and muggy, everyone suffered equally. The idea that people are forced to seek malls, libraries and other locations with A/C in order to survive is quietly frightening!

                Ain’t no air conditioning after the apocalypse, people! We killin’ the planet, weather gonna get extreme. It’s hot in Hell! Get used to it!

                                                       *

                 We spend July 4^th across the street, with Billy McCluskey and his family. I take snow crab legs, corn, potato salad, cole slaw and ginger beer to their house. Then I help my mom cross the street. She walks with a cane. Ninety-one years old, she’s definitely slowing down. “What’s this?” she asks. “Everyone has an American flag out front but us!”

                 “I didn’t know you wanted one!”

                 “Yes, but look! Everyone but us!”

                 “Don’t you see?” I ask her. “They are competing! They’re showing off. ‘My flag is bigger than your flag! My flag flies stiffer than yours!’ I can come back to our house and hang out an American flag, if you want.”

                “Do we have one?” she asks.

                “We have several! Gifts from the veterans’ organizations you’ve contributed to. Of course, all our flags are manufactured in China!”

                “Oh, yeah?” she grunts. “Forget it!”

               Billy tells me to stop fretting over the economy: “To paraphrase Ronald Reagan,” he suggests, “it’s a recession when your neighbor is unemployed. It’s a depression when you are unemployed. And it’s an economic recovery when the current bum in the White House is unemployed!”

                He explains to me that the U.S. remains a major shareholder in General Motors. “If we sold our shares today, we’d take a financial loss of $40 billion.”

                “Ouch! ¡Ay, caramba! ”

                 “To paraphrase Ronnie Reagan…”

                 “Again?”

                 “This administration is spending like drunken sailors. Only that’s an insult to drunken sailors, who, at least, spend their own money! “

                 As mom and I return to our house, the sky lights up. “We’re watching the Oxburg Towne Fireworks Show,” I point out.

                 “A waste of taxpayer money, if you ask me!” she retorts.

                  We’re in a recession.

                   A silver cluster is followed by a yellow shower. “Welcome to Bosnia-Hercegovina!” I suggest.

                                                       *

                   According to the newspaper, Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, the head of the U.N. observer mission in Syria, feels the violence has reached “unprecedented” levels.

                  In Libya, after 50 years of Gaddafi, the country is truly a neophyte democracy: There are 2.8 million registered voters. They are electing representatives to their 200-member National Assembly. There are 3,700 candidates, 142 parties. Amidst a welter of posters, pamphlets and TV ads, most voters admit that they have no idea what the candidates stand for. Members of the former regime are ineligible to run. No risk of Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, becoming Prime Minister!

                Meanwhile, in Mali, Islamist rebels are tearing apart the ancient Sufi shrines of Timbuktu. The rebels are ethnic Tuareg fighters from Libya. 

              Everywhere I look nowadays, I see the new “It” girl.

              Katy Perry.

               This is a lady I discovered while watching Saturday Night Live in 2010. She sang “Teenage Dream.” Not completely dense, I understand that Lorne Michaels specializes in booking all the pop genres, including gangly girl-women like Sweden’s Robyn, Lily Allen from the U.K. and our very own Ms. Perry. Musically, I love SNL. It introduced me to Sweden’s The Sounds. It also drives me crazy on occasion, featuring bands that are heavy on attitude and short on material. Nothing is as embarrassing as a great band— Coldplay, anyone?— who have ground out some smashing songs— performing on SNL long after their creative juices have evaporated.

               Ouch!

              After seeing her on TV, I buy a copy of Katy’s Teenage Dream CD. This is a 25-year-old who dresses like she’s eight-years-old. Dressy-uppy party clothes. She sings about “shots” of hard liquor, beachwear and guilty pleasures. For the 18-year-old and younger demographic. Little ‘tween daddy’s girls see her and Kei$ha as role models. (God help the next generation!) We had the Beatles and James Dean. 

               Gen-X had Madonna. Britney Spears.  Even Paris Hilton… sorta. The lady could pout, but she couldn’t sing! It’s Katy’s turn. She gets a front cover and an article in Parade Magazine. Forget Jan Wenner’s Rolling Stone and the other music mags, this signals that Katy has now arrived. Mainstream. Bigtime. Middle America, come look upon your daughter!

                On July 4^th, I watch her performing live, across the East River from Manhattan, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as part of the Macy’s 4^th of July Fireworks Spectacular on NBC. Dressed in a sparkly, sequined American flag outfit that does no favors to her chunky figure, she belts out tunes that drive the midshipmen wild. Later that night, there she is again— her hair dyed purple— on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Either teleportation has reached unprecedented levels of development without my knowledge or the Kimmel broadcast, from the West Coast, was pre-recorded.

               And she’s just as cute and amazingly empty-headed as you would expect from someone in the pop industry. Aside from her natural beauty and her chops as a performer, Katy exhibits a serious case of arrested development. Must everyone in America be young all the time? When I was a kid, I dreamt of becoming a rock star! Ho, ho, ho!

                Mishegoss.

                July 5, 2012 is another scorcher. That night, neighbors up the hill— who have fireworks left over— put on a display for the rest of us. Red and green  explosions rip the darkness. Bam! Bang! Zoom! Pow! I feel like I’m back in a war zone.

                                                        *

Oh, Mama!

  

            Now what brings me here— to Golden, Colorado of all places— for a campaign speech? Shazam! Air Force One brings me here! That mother costs $179,750 an hour to operate, but… guess what? When you’re president and you have a national debt of 15 trillion dollars, who cares?!

            I am NOT a profligate spender, but the American people want to meet their leader! I am obligated to crisscross the country holding campaign rallies. I do not shrink from this responsibility, I welcome it!

            We’re here at the Coors Brewery. My forebears weren’t German, but I heard that if we tour the plant, afterwards, they’ll serve us free brewski in the “fresh beer room.” If you ask for “clear beer,” they’ll serve you pure mountain spring water. I also want to buy T-shirts for Sasha and Masha in the gift shop. School kids love T-shirts, the more outrageous, the better!

            My staff and I are also here to highlight the wildfires currently taking place in Colorado. Eighty-six square miles of mountain forest, 181 homes gone up in smoke. We know how it feels, folks! This campaign is wild. I’m on fire!

            If you can’t stand the heat, go fan yourself under the A/C vent!

            Finally, why Colorado? Obviously, because it is next to New Mexico!

            If you’ve read my deeply stirring personal narrative, Who Yo’ Daddy?, you know that I was born in the vestibule of a hot air balloon over the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico. It clearly states on my birth certificate, “Elephant Butte Reservoir,” since it was over that particular section of the mountain range the balloonists think I might first have come into this world. My mama knew her water could break at any time, but her college prankster roomies insisted on blindfolding and spiriting her away on a hot-air balloon ride. As a birthday present.

         These things happen.

         Let me just clear up this whole question about El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico!

         The balloon expedition started off in El Paso, intending to head north. As any balloonist can tell you, basically you are at the mercy of the winds. Did they drift over Juarez, where the hot Mexican breezes lifted their aircraft to new heights, the trade winds grabbed them and scooted them back up north? Yes, and a thousand times yes! I wasn’t born in Mexico! ¡Yo quiero Estados Unidos de América!

          See, I speak Spanish. And I’m not even Mormon!

                                                     *

            I grew up in Denver. At 5,280 feet or a mile above sea level, the air is thin. You learn to navigate despite the constant dizziness, I can assure you.

            This training has stood me in good stead for my time in the White House, where the atmosphere can seem pretty thin at times. Not a whole lot of air, if you catch my drift. Too many Republicans using up all the oxygen in the room!

            Thank God for the lobbyists and super PACs! As I always say, the next best thing to a blood transfusion is a cash transfusion! We make a fuss about the little guys contributing bupkis on the Internet, but that’s just for show. The real money comes from where it always has: Industry!

            Oil drilling off the coast of Virginia. The Keystone XL pipeline bifurcating Nebraska. America runs on oil, people!

            Lockheed Martin. Boeing. Sikorsky. Those military aircraft don’t build themselves, y’know!

            Let’s give a shout-out for Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, shipboard cruising and cruise missiles. Long live the Predator, and not just in the movies!

            Hey, Axl! My Chief of Staff. Who writes this stuff?

           We don’t have that kind of industry here in Colorado, but our intellectual property is right up there alongside Silicon Valley. Why, we got the Sundance Film Festival ! Of course, it’s in Park City, Utah, but… same difference! Those kiss-off’kas in Venice don’t have a Sundance film festival, I can assure you!

            Venice, California, my ass!

            But don’t let me seem divisive. Let us focus on the issues that unite us!

            We have to kick-start some life into the economy. Prime the carburetor, pop the choke, pull the ripcord and make that mower go! That’s me, “Start ‘em up Blackie Diamond” ! My opponent— Mr. white guy Mick Rodney— can’t say that! His only experience is buying and selling companies for 20 years, turning around businesses, creating and promoting wealth.

             Ha! How namby-pamby!

            Has he ever given a speech that stirred millions?

            No!

            Has he ever stood on the steps of the Capitol and taken the presidential Oath of Office?

            No!

            Has he ever stood before both branches of Congress and given a State of the Union address?

            Never!

            So you see, the man is totally unqualified to be president! He hasn’t honed any of the essential fundamentals: Talking with your head thrown back. Climbing the embarkation ramp of Air Force One. Looking into the eyes of Dmitry Medvedev and seeing his soul!

           Been there, done that.

           ‘Nuff said.

                                                     *

          It’s an election year. Your campaign contributions are important to us. If you notice product placement in this speech, we haven’t been subtle enough.

          Allow me to thank the TelePrompTer Corporation for servicing us on such short notice, when we suffered equipment failure. Traipsing around the country puts a lot of wear and tear on all of us.

           I can’t find the men’s room without a teleprompter.

           Also, thank you, Old Navy, for coming to my wife’s aid when she experienced a wardrobe malfunction. I’ve seen her breasts. No biggies.

           Thank God there are all these retro cable TV shows glamorizing smoking! I need all the help I can get.

           Congratulate me! The other day, I played my 100^th round of golf as president! I’m no Titleist, but I feel it was a Top-Flite achievement, TaylorMade for my wife’s crusade against child obesity.

             I also sip Knob Creek Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey to protest the war in Sudan and the shelling in Syria.

             I think it was Calvin Coolidge who once said, “The chief business of the American people is business.” Personally, I like him better as “Silent Cal.”

            But that ain’t me!

                                                       *

           So let’s get down to brass tacks!

           The whole recall thing between Republican governor Sidney McCormick and Democratic challenger Wesley Magnet. I could say, “Gee, I was too busy to visit Wisconsin.” Well, dissembling ain’t my way! I didn’t go, because it was a lose-lose situation: If I went and supported Magnet, and Magnet lost, everyone would say, “See, Blackie Diamond is the Kiss of Death, a Natural Born Loser!” If, on the other hand, Wesley won, the pundits and commentators would have said, “There’s Blackie Diamond throwing his weight around, meddling in state affairs that are none of his business!”

           So, I did what I felt was best and played possum.

          As for that newspaper headline, “Diamond embraces gay supporters,” I wish to clarify that our fellowship was in spirit, not in the men’s room.

           Now for the big stink! My statement, “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs are doing just fine.”

            Nobody is happy with the economy, least of all me! My point is, in times of austerity, since we must choose where to put our limited resources, mercifully the private sector is holding its own!

            I’ll never be able to satisfy 90-year-old FDR Democrats who wanted the federal government in 2009 to create alphabet soup agencies and make-work programs like in the 1930’s. That’s not my way. I bailed out the economic institutions which I feel are the bedrock of American industry, both on Wall Street and in the auto industry. The turnarounds were successful. The companies survived. They also paid back their TARP loans. Unfortunately, the employment rate and the national economy still lag behind the growth levels reflected on the stock market. It may take ten years for a full recovery. ALL I CAN SAY IS, the seeds are firmly planted.

             Marginal progress is being made in the black community and on Main Street.

            This country can do anything we set our minds to. We put a man on the moon. Jane Fonda is still making movies!

             Our rocket is poised on the pad. We may not have lift-off tomorrow, but I believe it’s gonna happen.

             I dare to hope!

             I know the middle class is suffering. Here’s a tip from the extensive fundraisers I have attended in the run-up to this election: Try the quiche.

            Ever since I made that gaffe about the private sector, every news service photo of me frowning has been unearthed from the archives and flashed on a screen somewhere! Maybe it’s a victory for Marshall McLuhan’s global village, but I feel bruised.

                                                       *

             Since I am over six feet tall, I get to lord it over people.

             I am Commander In Chief. I LOVE being Commander In Chief!

             I’m not Richard Nixon, I don’t walk around the White House talking to the portraits on the walls. I do, however, give a little wink to any pictures of George Washington. Commander of the Continental Army, first president, it is thanks to him that a civilian like myself gets to play top dog! You’ve seen the photos! I travel the world and American soldiers at bases everywhere adore me. So I must be doing something right!

             Foreign policy: The Pakistanis have lost patience with America’s tendency to lose patience with the Pakistanis, who never do anything about clearing out the Taliban sanctuaries, other than losing patience.

             Dudes, lose the sanctuaries!

             Must I drone on about this? Hint, hint! 

             So! Domestic politics: Did I pander when— overnight— I suddenly reversed government policy and decided NOT to deport all illegal Hispanic college graduates in the Class of 2012? No and Hell no!

              It’s the right thing to do!

              Let ‘em have a few months off! They deserve a vacation, just like everyone else! There’ll be plenty of time in December and January to deport them!

             Now, if I said I liked the brown man— that would be a clear case of pandering. This little transaction is wholly other than that! Here we are horse-trading “time off for good behavior” against votes in November. A fair trade, an honest trade. Nothing more, nothing less.

            “You vote for me, amigos, I don’t kick your kids out of the country!” At least not until after the election.

            It ain’t perfect, but it is what it is!

                                                        *

           The audacity of the pundits to claim I don’t have a plan for the economy. Hello-o! Didn’t you hear my hour-long speech in Ohio? Audacity is my department! The audacity of hope. The audacity to believe. “Yes, we can!”

            Leave the audacity to me, brothers!

            Don’t listen to the naysayers, who claim this is a leaderless, rudderless presidency. During the first three years of my administration, the number of instances of child pornography on the Internet has sunk dramatically!

            Vandalization of public telephones has been all but eliminated… together with public telephones.

             The children of this great nation of ours have received the maximum allotment of snow days!

            The sale of medical marijuana has quadrupled.

             The Arab Spring has made way for the JC Penney Summer Sale!

             Weejuns are out, sandals are in.

             The internment of Japanese-Americans is but a memory.

             I don’t know what yardstick others are using, but I see real progress being made in at least a seventh of this great country of ours!

             Meanwhile, people can’t get enough of E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey.” In a time of sinking aspirations, any stimulus to the erogenous zone appears beneficial.

                                                        *

               A tribute to the wife is always in order! Let me congratulate mine on the new book she’s written, Growing Organically. That’s a great book! We believe in growing green. Composting. Using night soil— which we city boys used to call “turds.” Same thing!

             Planting a kitchen garden is easier than you think!

              You separate out the seeds and stems and plant them, aerating the soil extensively as you go. Water thoroughly. How green is our kitchen garden? Very! Green, weed, Mary Jane, cannabis, pot. By any other name, that organic product remains equally sweet!

              You’ve heard of hash browns. Our recipe calls for using real hash.

             Grow them gardens! May your green thumb thrive! We may not be able to righten the economy, but given enough organics, we can render ourselves unwilling to sweat the small stuff. And I mean that in a good way!

             As for the snakeheads, well, if we learned to eat catfish, we can learn to eat anything!

                                                       *

            Did I send Harvey Kaufman to Vietnam to sign a “peace treaty for perpetuity” with the Vietnamese? Let’s do that Q & A in December, just in case it becomes a hot campaign issue. Thanks!

            The euro is down the toilet. So is Bashar al-Assad. What to do? Live organically!

            Country singer Ted Barf says that if I am reelected, he’ll either be in jail or dead. Ted, I know how you feel! Every time you come out with a new album, I’m ready to barf!

             The good news is, neither of us has yet left the country!

             Is this nation big enough for two performers with outsized egos?

             Maybe.

             The pundits say I can’t win reelection as long as our economy remains on the skids. They say the economy can’t rebound, unless the Europeans pull out of their economic nosedive.

             Nothing could be farther from the truth! Listen to me, my fellow Americans!

              Elections aren’t won and lost over an adding machine! They’re decided by the decent people of this country, voting for a do-gooder president who only feels compassion for you and wishes you the very best!!!

              America’s got talent!

              America is exceptional!

             What did Churchill say? “Democracy is the worst form of government, excepting all others.” Since nobody speaks Churchillian English anymore, let me translate that: Democracy has its flaws, but other ideologies suck even more! 

             Hi, kids! Mr. Winston Churchill was a rotund, funny sort of man who smoked a cigar and led Great Britain through a four-year military struggle called The Second World War. Sometimes, when we politicians are trying to establish our place in history, we quote Mr. Churchill.

                                                     *

             If you want a president who stirs the hearts and minds of the electorate, vote for me!

             If you want a businessman for president, that’s the other guy.

                                                     *

              For those of you who missed any part of this speech, I’m sure it’ll be on YouTube. Or visit our website, http://www.MyWhiteHouseMeMeMine.org

              In addition, I have another 125 speeches scheduled between now and Election Day.

              My rod and my staff, they comfort me.

              Thank you for your attention! We just killed another hour and a half on the campaign trail. Credit goes to Mr. Farnham, my seventh grade Public Speaking teacher at Woodbridge Junior High School in Denver.

              Hi, Mr. Farnham!

             God bless!

                                                       *

                                                                   –  from the upcoming novel

Father’s Day

 

              “I’ve watched you,” my mom remarks. “You say you don’t suffer fools. Then you treat everyone else as though they are idiots. When you don’t have many friends, you feel lonely.

             “Isn’t it time to be a little less judgmental?”

            It’s summer, the sun is shining, I shouldn’t be in crisis. Yet my world is spinning out of control. One method I’ve learned, is that when your world is falling apart, act as though things are normal. The long-term problems still need attention, but meanwhile, temporarily, you can get through the day.

            Gritting my teeth, that’s what I now do.  

                                                      *

            I ain’t nobody’s father, but I’ve gotten myself into a predicament and I don’t much like it. A four-day wonder, there are so many lessons to be learned, I’m writing about it.

            In the Army, when training us as field negotiators, the brass told us, “Human consciousness is infinitely flexible. The only limitation in your thinking is what you impose, what you bring to the table.”

            Today we call that “thinking outside the box.”

            Since I don’t naturally subscribe to society’s conventions, I sometimes feel like a mousetrap about to spring or a hand grenade about to explode. Anything that pulls the pin, can set off an explosion.

             And let’s face it, I dress like a kid: shorts and a T-shirt, white socks and tennis shoes, clean-shaven, my hair a wry stubble uponst my head.

             I look whatever age the viewer chooses.

            In Oxburg, if you walk along The 1812 Hwy, crossing South Concord on the way to the library, you come to the Woodley Hills neighborhood. This is still brick cottage country, but no two houses are the same. Individually contracted during the 1950’s, these modest two-story dwellings include orange-colored Mexican adobe villas with curved Spanish balconies, whitewashed Tudor homes, Cape Cods with wide, lacy verandahs facing the sidewalk, and redwood follies from San Francisco. It’s all residential. Suburbia.

            The Oxburg Community Swimming Pool is undergoing renovation. Since the Board of Directors is busy keeping up with the Jones’s, our 75-meter pool no longer suffices. Now we need 100-meter lanes. The contractor, Gary Lee — a local boy I went to school with— is pulling his hair out. Torrential Spring rains delayed pouring the concrete. “You do want to let it cure a little,” he complains, when I walk over there to see what’s up. “Everybody expects you to have the pool open by Memorial Day,” he explains, the two of us surveying a newly created Olympic monstrosity awash in a sea of mud.  “In Oxburg, Maryland, in 2012, that just isn’t going to happen.”

            “So be it.”

            “Such reasonableness,” he marvels. “Everybody else is threatening to sue!”

            It’s 7 o’clock at night. I leave him there, surveying the wreck of the OCSP. I’m carrying a blue cloth pouch, headed for the library, which is open until 9 p.m.

            Since they cannot swim, teenagers fill the streets. Otherwise, they’d be horsing around at the pool. Walking along South Huron Street, I pass two schoolgirls who are busy chattering. I nod my head in their direction. They nod back, but hardly give me a second glance. There is, however, a young lady— she looks about 10 years old— walking toward me. She’s still half a block away, but she’s pegging me with her stare. Red warning lights are flashing inside my head. The curly blond hair, the white blouse, the skimpy white tennis shorts, white tennis shoes and oval face are what I like, but, of course, not in a 10-year-old. Her arms and legs are thin as noodles.

            We, too, nod at one another. She ducks down a side street, a cul-de-sac, staring meaningfully across Huron Street. I follow her glance and see a family father, his gray suit jacket thrown over his arm, briefcase in hand. He and I give each other an understanding look. He heads into his house.

            I’m watching my step as I walk across the street, but let’s face facts, I am dawdling. My young friend walks about 20 feet down the hill. Suddenly, she turns around, facing me. Now I see the tiny breasts pressing at the white cotton blouse. That her face has a sculpted, craggy look to it. I find this irresistible, the wedge of a nose, the hooded eyes, the bushy blond eyebrows, the perfectly round chin, the bow mouth, bent down in a smirk. “Hi-i-i-i!” she calls.

            Jesus, Joseph, Mary and all the saints!

            “H-H-Hi!” I shout back, kind of frozen to the spot.

            “Where are you goin’?” she drawls in a sweet voice, dancing around on the sidewalk, a step left, a step right, a step left, rolling her hips like a prowling pussycat. She waves a hand.

            Young girls are walking time machines, transporting us backward to the days of our youth.

            I walk down the hill, approaching her, expecting every grown-up in Woodley Hills to come jumping from their houses like a Jack In the Box, screaming “Pedophile!!!”

            It doesn’t happen.

            “I’m goin’ to the library,” I tell her.

            “You can’t go to the library now,” she says. “They’re closed!”

            Looking into her blue eyes, I dumbly nod my head and say, “Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. Yeah, you’re right. They’re closed.”

            “Stay here and play with me!” she says, both hands raised, palms to the sky, like an Indian princess.

            Good grief! She plucks a basketball off the lawn and coltishly, amateurishly, shoots at the basket mounted on a frame in the street.

            And yes, I have a decided erection.

            “Take off your sunglasses,” she says. “I can’t see your eyes!”

            I take ‘em off and stow them in my blue pouch.

           “What’s your name?” she asks.

            “Kevin. What’s yours?”

            “Kevin?” she asks, giggling. “What a dumb name! My name is…Tracie.” She draws out her name until it sounds about 20 letters long.

            “Gosh… Tracie. That’s such a beautiful name,” I breathe.

            I park my pouch against the white picket fence and fall into her rhythm: She shoots baskets, usually missing her shot. I retrieve the ball and hand it to her. Those little hands of hers keep brushing against mine. Whether that depends on the contour of the ball or not, I don’t ask.

            Chatting endlessly, she frowns, she giggles, her eyebrows rise up and down comically. This is a very young girl. I am transfixed.

            What’s the attraction? Not all, but most of the single women my age whom I have met are extremely bitter. Veterans of bad marriages and even messier divorces, they are man-haters. They want nothing to do with the vermin called “men.” After running up against their implacable fury, even the narcissistic attention of a self-absorbed teenager seems attractive. Never mind that Tracie is experimenting with her sexuality, testing to see how much sway she possesses over others. My right to choose or reject involvement at least gives me the semblance of control over my situation. Granted, I am pretty desperate.

             “How old are you?” she lisps.

             “I’m 38,” I lie.

             “Gosh!” she says, all wide-eyed, stopping to stare up into my face. “I’m… only… 13! You shouldn’t… be… here…talking… with me! “

             “Yes, but… I… I… I want to,” I stammer.

              This is SO WRONG!

             “What’s in your pouch?” she asks, throwing the basketball into the air and catching it, looking at me sideways.

             “Oh, that’s my gear,” I reply.

             “Show me!”

            So I take out my sunglasses in their black plastic case.

             “Let me try those!” Tracie demands. They are way too big, sliding off her nose, but they do give her a Lolita aspect. She hands them back. “Give me your ball cap!”

             I’m wearing a bright burgundy Nationals cap with its stylized “W”… for Washington, D.C. I hand it to her and she tries it on. It’s much too large. Tipping it back on her head, she looks like a swimsuit model!

            “I’m gonna keep this!” she chortles. “What else you got?” Smiling like a pixie, she holds out her hands. “Gimmee!!!”

             Gimmee.

             She appropriates my pen, my clipboard, my half-used roll of quarters. She lets me keep my reading glasses and eyeglass case, my Kleenex and my thumb drive.

            “How many quarters are these?” she asks.

            “I don’t know. There are $10 in a tube. I’ve used about half. I guess… twenty quarters maybe. Five dollars.”

             She stacks my former possessions in a neat pile on the grass by the fence. Looking into the yard, I see a sundial and a green plastic garden chair lying on its side. “Got any money?” Tracie murmurs, gazing off into the distance.

            “I’m sorry. What?” I ask.

            Looking right at me, a radiant smile blooms on her face. “DO YOU HAVE ANY MONEY?!” she whoops. You know, just loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear and maybe folks living three miles away.

           “What— but— uh— “ I stammer.

           “Just open your wallet and give me what you got,” she suggests, as if this is the most reasonable request imaginable.

           I do. I open my wallet.

           Surprise!

          What a joke!

           I have two dollars in my wallet.

           Five bucks went, as a tip, to the auto mechanic who changed the oil in my mom’s car. The ten and the twenty went to the typewriter repairman who came by our house and announced that my Aunt Mini’s Smith-Corona was no longer repairable. “This is a 20-year-old machine,” Tom, the repairman, explained regretfully, examining it atop the picnic table on our back porch. “The solenoid has given up the ghost. They just don’t make them anymore. I’d have to have exactly this model to pluck the part from, if I was going to replace it. I don’t have that!”

           “Well, now I know what to tell my Aunt Mini,” I concur.

           Tom charges corporations $99 for house calls. The go-to guy for typewriters, he can no longer afford renting a shop. I give him $30. “I’m paying for your expertise,” I tell him.

            Leaving me $2 in my wallet.

           “Why don’t you have any more money?” Tracie whines, snatching the two one dollar bills from my hand with grubby little fingers.

           “I gave the money away. In tips.”

             “You dummy!” she declares. “You could have given that money to me! Where do you live?”

             I explain that it’s a 20-minute walk.

            “I want your phone number! Gimmee your phone number! Gimmee!” she insists, her hands out, palms up. Thrusting out her lower lip, she glowers at me threateningly.

            I give her my business card.

           “Is this your home phone number?”

           “Yeah. Yes.”

            “Tra-cie!” I hear an angry woman’s voice shout from the house. “Get in here!”

            “That’s my mom,” she says simply, gathering the things from the lawn— my ball cap, my pen, clipboard and roll of quarters. “I gotta go inside now. I’ll call you!” she tells me, sulking.

             I walk home, my pecker immensely sore from pressing against the inside of my cargo shorts.

             This is nuts!

             I expect an angry call from Mrs. Tracie, threats of calling the police, the usual folderol and brouhaha.

            Another surprise. When my phone rings, it’s Tracie herself. “I have my own cell,” she chirps. “I can call anyone I want, as long as I don’t text or send pix. That’s too expensive.”

           “Wow! Well, yes. Okay.”

          “Tomorrow, you’ll come here and bring me money!” she says, a simple, declarative statement.

         “Well, okay, yes, I guess I will,” I admit, pulled by the undertow of her voice.

          “I’ll call you in the morning and then you’ll come here. We’re going to the mall.”

           “You and your mom are going to the mall?” I ask.

           “Why do you want to bring my mom? You and I are going to the mall!” she insists.

            It’s the White Flint Mall. It’s five miles away. “We’re walking to the mall?”

           “Why do you want to walk? That’ll take forever! Listen to me! I’m telling you to bring your car, so we can go to the mall!”

            She’s never even asked me if I own a car. Apparently, in Tracie’s world, all adults have cars.

            “That was so neat, meeting you today,” she laughs. “Did you have fun?”

            “I always have fun with… you… Tracie!”

            “Uh-huh! Yup! I gotta go! Bye!” she says and immediately hangs up. Her mommy, no doubt, asking who she is talking to.

             The next day, I take her to the mall, my cock a hot, pulsing misery, my shorts hopelessly distended for all to see.

             And she’s your typical 13-year-old: We drink malted milkshakes at a soda fountain. Tracie has me buy her tank tops. We get ice cream. She buys sunglasses. (I pay.) We eat hamburgers. At the drugstore, she buys magazines (“Twenty ways to a brighter complexion!”) and DVD’s (Cars 2, Madagascar) and CD’s (Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, REO Speedwagon’s Greatest Hits). I pay for everything. “Go to the bank and use the ATM machine!” she orders.

             “The ATM machine?” I ask.

             She waves her hands at me like I am an idiot. “Money!… Money?! “ She’s exasperated.

             She wants $100 in fives. Ignoring the ATM, I go into the bank, fill out a withdrawal slip and ask the teller for $100 in fives. “I need them to tip, please,” I say. They know me here. “Please make them reasonably crisp bills.”

              Smiling, the lady teller, a Latina, provides me with good bills.

             “How we doin’?” asks Tracie in a whiny voice, appearing at my side. “I got tired of waitin’ in the car!”

            “We’re doin’ fine,” I tell her, turning to go, bills in hand.

            “HE’S GONNA GIVE THAT MONEY TO ME!” she informs the Latina teller and anyone else at the White Flint Mall who might be interested.

            The teller gives me a sickly smile and shrugs.

           “Sorry about that!” I tell her lamely.

           As they say in Sweden, “If you play with fire, you get burned.”

           “Let’s, y’know, GO!” whines Tracie.

           This is why adult men don’t have relationships with young girls.

           I drive her home.

           “Basketball! Time t’ play basketball!” she informs me, jumping from the car, running across the lawn and grabbing the ball.

            Another half-hour spent chasing her rebounds.

           “Let’s go to the library! They’re open now!”

           We do. She finds some books, summer reading, in the children’s section. Twilight. Vampire stories for kids. “Have you read these? They’re really good!”

            “No, I haven’t read them,” I reply, aware that I myself am associating with something of a vampire here.

           “You should read them! They’re really good!”

           “Oh, yes! I will! I will!”

                                                        *

             I feel like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch writing Venus In Furs: Ostensibly, he presents his story as a warning to avoid masochism. Immersing themselves in his tale, however, both writer and reader share the voyeurism of vicarious pleasure.

             “Where have you been all day?” asks my mom. She’s got a point. It’s summer. Even if I’m not screenwriting for Hollywood at the moment, there is still a lawn to mow, bushes to trim, a basement to clean, cars to wash.

             “I was helping a friend,” I say, not wanting to elaborate, but also not wishing to lie.

             She gives me that crabby, skeptical look of hers. The Feingold variety of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

            Next morning, I mow the lawn and wash her car.

           “Who is this on the answering machine?” mom asks. “You know I don’t hear well. It sounds like a child.”

           Well…yes. It’s a message from Tracie. “It’s Thursday morning! WHERE ARE YOU? Get over here! If you get this message, come over and HONK YOUR HORN three times and I’ll come out. COME OVER HERE!”

           “Actually, it’s for me. My buddy Bob’s daughter says he needs help with cleaning out his garage. I told you, yesterday. It’s the same chore. We’ll be finished by tonight,” I tell my mom vaguely, hating to make things up.

           I get to Tracie’s. Parking next to the basketball stand, I honk three times.

           Nothing.

          Five minutes later, I honk three times.

           Like a genie popping out of a bottle, smiling from ear to ear, dressed again in skimpy white shorts, white tee and white tennis shoes, she comes walking across the backyard. She jumps into my car. “Drive!” she commands.

            “Where?”

            “Don’t ask,” she frowns, a mercurial shift in temperament. “JUST DRIVE!”

             I do.

             “Let’s go to Baltimore!”

             “Wha-at?”

             “I want to go to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore!”

             So, I gas up the car and drive us to the Inner Harbor. Summer, picturesque, we visit the tall ships participating in the “Sailabration” event commemorating the 200^th anniversary of The War of 1812. I can’t fault Tracie for wanting to be there, even I find it impressive, if touristy. We buy matching “War of 1812” T-shirts, eat peanuts, wander around the harbor, get ice cream and wile away the afternoon.

             I try to stay abreast of the youth culture, but Tracie’s age group is something else! Her fave band is called Ice Cream Sundae. Their CD is entitled “We’re Just As Sweet” (Rainfeather Records, 2011). Preoccupied with ice cream, karate, videogames, television cartoons and nightmares, Nashville Cats they are not. 

            “It’s a shame your pants stick out so much,” Tracie observes, chocolate ice cream smeared artistically across her mouth. Using a napkin, I wipe it away.  “Otherwise, everyone would think I’m your daughter.”

           “You are my daughter.”

           “That’s good, because no one else cares about me at all!” she tells me, sliding into a funk.

           “I’ll do anything for you, Tracie!”

            “Good! Otherwise, nobody shares anything.”

            This new, frowning, difficult Tracie is someone I have not previously encountered.

            “Let’s go to your car.”

            We get to the parking lot. We climb in the car. A Honda Accord, it has bucket front seats. “Oh, look at the sea gull!” Tracie exclaims, leaning across my lap to peer out my driver’s side window, digging her sharp little elbows into my groin.

            “Vurry nice,” I mumble, in pain.

            “What a strange-looking bird!” she insists, crawling over the shift knob and onto my lap. She presses her behind against me, shifting back and forth, her backbone resting against my chest, a head full of blond hair and hairspray stuck in my face. “Oh, look, look, look!” Tracie cries, waving her spindly arms, her hands flailing the air, rhythmically rocking atop my swollen organ. What she’s looking at, her head swiveling in every direction, God only knows. “Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! You’re such a bad man!” she concludes, sliding off me.

             Madly stuffing tissues into my pants, I sit in the front seat of my car, helplessly ejaculating.

             “What’s the matter?” Tracie asks innocently, batting her eyelashes at me.

              This is why adult men don’t have relationships with young girls.

              When we get back to Oxburg, she wants to buy cough drops at the pharmacy.

             “Do you have a cough?” I ask.

             “No, I just like the way they taste!” she replies, your typical kid.

             Friday morning, I have to pick her up at 10 a.m. When I arrive, she tells me the plan for the day: We have to drive, she announces, to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “They have Civil War stuff. I want a Civil War hat and a musket and whatever else is neat.”

            This is why adult men don’t have relationships with young girls.  

            By Friday night, I’ve had more than enough joy from my little companion Tracie. “You take up all my time,” I complain, peering at her in the haunting pink glow of sunset. We’re sitting in my car.

            “I know! That’s why we’re friends!” she grins. She’s so cute!

            Unbelievable! I’m rock hard again. Do they make an anti-Viagra? “I have a lot of chores to do over the weekend!”

            “Yeah, I got a lot of stuff to do on the weekend, too,” she agrees. “I’ll call you!”

             “I love you, Tracie,” I tell her helplessly.

             “Oh, no, daddy! Don’t say that! I don’t want to hear it!” she shouts, becoming hysterical. Wrenching the door handle, she kicks open the passenger side door and flies from my car, a white wraith in the twilight.

              This is why adult men don’t have relationships with young girls.

              Now I’m persona non grata. She won’t have anything to do with me. Not only has she told me to keep away, she’s threatened to report me to the authorities.

            We all know what that means. It’s over.

            She was driving me crazy, but I miss her terribly.

            Forget my lack of commitment, fooling around with youngsters. This unwillingness to even engage with someone my own age shows a pathological lack of self-confidence.

             Pedophilia is a burdensome affliction.   

                                                        *

 

Law of the Land?

  

                Canadian residents must answer a skill-testing question correctly to win.

                      – Universal Studios 100^th Anniversary Celebration Sweepstakes

                                                        *

                Times are changing and not for the better. Too many drivers, way too many cars, you can’t find parking anywhere in Bethesda, Maryland or Washington, D.C.

               Montgomery County has a towing problem. Hiding behind federal law, the local politicians let the marketplace determine the rules. “Federal statutes regulate towing,” they claim. “There’s nothing we can do about it!”

               This is pure bullshit. They could change the zoning laws and, overnight, drive the towing businesses clean off the face of the map! Instead, they see us drivers as scofflaws and cheats. We elected these creeps, yet they support a punitive parking environment. This is a lazy solution to a difficult dilemma. Hey, in New York City, you have underground parking five stories deep. If the county was willing to float the bond issues and invest the time and money, underground parking would work just as well here. What, our soil is so fragile, you can’t park cars underground? Pul-lease!

             This has resulted in a boomtown for tow truck operators and a crisis for drivers.

             I hoped and prayed it would never happen to me. Abuse brings out The Hulk in me. I felt sure I wouldn’t react well. Whether confronting a driver by the side of his truck or a proprietor at a reclamation center, I suspected the blood on the dance floor would run ankle deep.

            I already drive my neighbor crazy, storming around my house cussing at the top of my lungs. (A perk of living with a 91-year-old mother who is deaf as an adder: She doesn’t hear me.) I warned the neighbors I suffer from PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but they decided to thumb their noses at mom and me. They petitioned the Town Council for speed humps. I detest speed humps. At bi-monthly meetings, six months in a row, my closest neighbors treated me like shit. I ate a lot of crow. Well, payback is a bitch! Why should I show them any consideration?

          As far as I’m concerned, you send us off to war to defend your precious freedoms, you have no right to complain when we come home damaged goods.

                                                       *

          Leaving the post office, I see that some fat, baby-faced bozo has my car halfway up his ramp. Clank, clank, clank rattle the chains, rrr-r-r-r-r goes the electric motor.

           “Throw it in reverse and lower my car to the pavement,” I tell the dude.

           “People usually thank me for towing their cars when they break down!” he insists, standing at his winch. He’s dressed in blue overalls and a tan cloth jacket covered in grease stains.

           “Yeah. You’re Mr. Good Samaritan,” I tell him. “But that’s not what you’re doing here. There’s nothing wrong with my car. This is predatory, swooping in and plucking people’s cars from parking lots.”

            “The signs say ‘One hour parking. Towing enforced,’” he points out stolidly. “What’s your fucking problem?”

            “I wasn’t in the post office an hour!” I rant. “Yes, the service counter is slow, but they’re not that slow.”

           “Says you! I say different,” replies the driver and turns away. End of discussion.

            We have an escalating case of towing.

            “You haven’t shown me an I.D. You certainly haven’t shown me a permit,” I tell him. He looks unimpressed. “So you own a tow truck. Big deal! In the best case, you’re a car thief. Worst case, you’re an extortionist.” Deep in my C.I.A. lawyer mode, even I hear how icy my voice is becoming. “Lower the vehicle to the ground. Now! ”

            “I’m just doing my job, mister,” he replies in a gravelly voice.

            “And I am telling you for the last time, you don’t want to mess with this particular vehicle. Find another customer. Return the vehicle to the ground. For your own benefit, do it right now! ”

             Who am I kidding? He doesn’t get it. This guy hears complaints all day, every day, 365 days a year. He’s impervious to threats, entreaties, arguments. Angrily, he goes to the cab of his tow truck and brings me a business card. “You call that number,” he says, “you pay the $168 fine, you can come reclaim your car.”

             “I have a card, too,” I say, “but if you make me show it to you, I’m going to put you under arrest.”

             “You can’t arrest me!” he scoffs.

             My little bro’ Timothy, an Air Force pilot, argues that every responsible citizen should be required— by law— to carry a gun and know how to use it. “Why should the criminal be the only armed person in an encounter?” asks Tim.

             I take out my Glock and hold it in both hands, pointing it at the ground.

              “You don’t scare me! I’ve seen this shit before,” insists the driver. “You won’t shoot me! That gun’s crap!” Never-the-less, his face gets red as a beet, spittle flying.

               “Your vehicle has six tires,” I point out. “I have nine bullets. If my car isn’t on the tarmac in 30 seconds, you are going to be in need of a tow truck.” I release the safety on my gun.

               “You can’t do that,” he mutters.

               “Watch me.” I march to the front right tire of his truck. I take a stance, two-handed, pointing down, with the muzzle of the gun six inches from the rubber. “Lower my car, winch man! NOW!”

                “Fuck you, mister!”

                “You’re under arrest!” I reply. “A citizen’s arrest. It’s against the law in Maryland to steal people’s cars.” BLAM! I shoot an exclamation point into the right front tire. I expect it to puncture and deflate, but the force of my bullet causes a loud, pleasing blowout. The noise is deafening. Bits of black rubber fly everywhere. You can feel the shock wave.

               His mouth hanging open, the schlub says, “You son of a bitch!” and reaches inside his jacket. I wheel, pointing the gun at his face.

              “Keep both hands where I can clearly see them! You are charged with resisting arrest. If you reach for a weapon, I will shoot you! Make no mistake about that!”

              Around us, people are running in every direction. I can see people crouching behind the fenders of their cars, frantically dialing their cell phones.

              “Can I be of assistance?” a man’s voice asks, making me jump. Slowly, he comes up from behind me, his hands held wide of his body. He has a full gray beard and wears a black leather bomber jacket covered in military patches. Good old POW / MIA, I think, finally somebody around when you really need them!

              “I think the police will be here momentarily,” I opine, keeping my gun squarely in the tow truck driver’s face. “In the meantime, I need you to stay clear of my line of fire while you carefully frisk this dude. It looked to me like he was going for a gun.”

              I see my compatriot is dressed in shabby jeans and cracked brown boots. He looks as old as Methuselah and as worn as dried leather.

              I’d be lying if I don’t admit that the two of us begin to have some fun with the driver, who now holds his hands high in the air, sweat streaming down his pudgy face.

             “What’s your name?” I ask my helper.

             “Stan,” he says, pulling a stiletto from the inside of the driver’s greasy cloth jacket.

             “How ‘bout you, driver?” I ask. “We haven’t been formally introduced.”

             No response.

             “Hello-o! You bring a knife to a gunfight?” I comment. “What… is… your name?”

             “Wilbur Simmons,” he croaks, tilting his entire body sideways toward his black tow truck. “Wilbur Simmons Towing” is painted brightly in white letters on the door of the cab. Streaks of vermilion provide a bold, eye-catching effect.

              “Nice paint job,” I tell him.

             A police cruiser roars into the parking lot, roof light churning. “Drop your weapon!” blares the hailer before anyone even exits the vehicle.

            “You’re not stupid enough to try anything, right, Wilbur?” I ask, lowering my weapon. Pointing it at the ground, I put up the safety.

            “Tow the wet sprocket,” comments Stan.

            “That’s a rock band,” says Wilbur, looking confused.

             Two police officers approach, their hands hovering over their holsters. They are not happy. They impound my Glock, inspect the blown tire and take a statement from Wilbur. “They were trying to rob me!” he claims.

            “What’s the deal?” asks an officer. His silver nameplate says “Hollister” in meticulous black letters.

            “I was just trying to get my car back, Officer Hollister,” I tell him, looking him in the eye. I am also shaking like a leaf.

            “You nervous about something?” he asks. He seems very young.

            “It’s the… after-effects of an… adrenaline rush,” I gulp, taking deep breaths. “It’ll subside.”

            Hollister’s sidekick goes to the cruiser and checks my gun permit on the computer. “Sir!” he calls. “Would you please approach the vehicle?”

            “What’s up?” I ask, coming over to him.

            “You did a really dumb thing,” he admonishes me. “Pulling a fire-arm on a registered tow truck driver. Discharging your weapon in a public place.”

            “Yeah. Yes,” I say, correcting myself. “You’re right.”

            “We have to charge you with reckless endangerment and disturbing the peace.” His nameplate identifies him as Officer Payne.

           “Okay,” I agree.

            Payne returns my gun license and Glock. He watches me put up my weapon. I have a brown leather holster clipped inside the waistband of my cargo shorts. I cover it with my shirt.

            “The thing is,” he lectures me, “your actions are counter-productive. If public citizens pull guns on tow truck operators, all operators will begin arming themselves.”

             “Yeah. Yes,” I agree. “Sorry about that.”

             “Don’t ever do that again!” Officer Payne swears angrily. “You will go to jail!”

              “How we doin’ ?” drawls Stan, sauntering over. I see that Officer Hollister continues interviewing Wilbur Simmons. “That dude thar is making up quite a story!” Stan tells us.

               “That’s a stupid thing to do,” says Officer Payne. “Stay here!” He goes to confer with his coworker.

              The upshot is, I have to pay a fine and agree to a court summons to discuss my behavior before a judge. The officers ask if I will pay for the tire. “No thank you,” I tell them. “I’m sure Wilbur has insurance.”

             They tell Wilbur that since he’s in the towing business, he can pay for his own tire. “While you’re at it,” Hollister adds, “how about returning this citizen’s automobile?”

              I take Stan to lunch at a sandwich shop. He regales me with tales of The First Gulf War. “Everyone has their favorite conflict,” he tells me philosophically. “Usually, we fixate on the time we came of age. Young. Idealistic. The First Gulf War was mine.”

             “Some wars never end,” I observe. “Behold, another speed hump on the road through life.”

             “I’m a biker,” Stan concurs. “I hate those things.”

                                                       *

Walking with a Ghost

  

            Since it’s Flag Day, I go to the basement, crank out the red banner with the yellow hammer and sickle, and hang it from the flagpole in the front yard. I can’t say I give it full military honors— after all, I’m wearing shorts and a tee from Ocean City, Md.— but I do give a quick shout-out for… The Soviet Union!   

                                                     *

            Well, Chairman Johnson T. Johnson and the goddam Town Council have finally carried out their threat. They’ve torn down the old Wrigley Clubhouse. That hurt. That clubhouse was an indelible part of my youth!

            My mom’s bridge league, doused in perfume, billowing cigarette smoke,  played tournaments in that clubhouse.

            Not only is the building gone, but columnist Hugh James is running a series of stories in the Metro Section of The National Herald, chronicling the misadventures of the resident ghost. This is adding insult to injury! I know the incorporeal yet incomparable Margaret Pierce. Yes, she’s a ghost, but she was a buddy of mine!

             It’s summer and this is a summer tale.

            As kids in the 1950’s, the closest swimming pools were in the District. Locally, all we had was Pierce Creek. We lay for hours on beach towels on the verdant grass lawn of Wrigley Commons, the towering bulk of Wrigley Clubhouse on one side, the creek on the other. Every few minutes, we ran over to the muddy banks and took a dip in the crystal clear water, splashing at and chasing the fish with our hands. The fish were a local variety of pike, up to six inches long.

             The fact that we had this recreational site depended solely on the beneficence of two families, the Wrigleys and the Pierces. In1923, Judith Wrigley, a second cousin to the chewing gum magnate, married Lucien Pierce. His family was in automobiles, most memorably the Pierce-Arrow. The Pierce family house was a Queen Anne-style farmhouse built in the 1840’s. Not counting the barn, the next nearest man-made structure was the MacFarlane farmhouse, built in the same period. Their place has been converted into the Oxburg Regal Hotel !

             This part of Maryland was all farmland. When the developer Julius Lapidus built “the cottage community of Oxburg” in 1927, there were no public buildings. Judith Wrigley Pierce contributed to the church building fund. The idea of anything beyond a community chapel and a firehouse never caught on. It became an up-hill battle for my parents to just get the schools built: first an elementary school, then a junior high and finally, Oxburg High. America after the Second World War wasn’t England, where people were actually starving, but money was tight and the county was ruled by landed bureaucrats. They saw no reason to provide anything for newly-arrived suburbanites. Upstarts. Northerners from places like New York! Since my dad worked during the war at OPA— the Office of Price Administration— my mom and he and their neighbors formed another OPA, the Oxburg Parents’ Association. They floated bond issues and built the roads, schools and sewage system.

              But no one felt that they could afford a community pool.

              Eventually, Lucien and Judith relocated to Bermuda. They left the family farmhouse to the Town of Oxburg, in perpetuity. This is an excellent reason for me to be pissed off, now that the Town Council has seen fit to tear it down!

             Anyway, the Wrigley side of the family put up the money to have the rock-strewn field closest to the house bulldozed and planted in grass. It was all Judith’s doing. Beneath her elegant breeding, she maintained the common touch. The Wrigleys also paid for renovations to the farmhouse, converting the downstairs into a meeting hall, modernizing the kitchen to 1950’s standards (formica counter tops, an electric refrigerator, a gas range) and converting the upstairs into bachelor apartments.

             Thus was born Wrigley Commons and the Wrigley Clubhouse.

                                                       *

             Some of my first crushes took place adjacent to the house, lying on the lawn, flirting with schoolgirls my age. They were so cute, with their pug noses and tiny hands. I wanted to eat them. “Gosh, look how fat you are!” they teased, wrinkling their noses, laughing and pointing at my swim trunks, as taut and erect as a circus tent. My organ swelled up like an archery bow. The only thing to do was to dart quickly into Pierce Creek and wait for the icy water to deflate my passion!

            Eventually, in 1970, the community got a swimming pool. I never used it.

            For the next 33 years, the Wrigley Clubhouse functioned as the Oxburg town meeting hall. A leaking roof, an infestation of rats and crumbling brickwork led to a major renovation in 2003.

            Retired from the military, I had just completed a year and a half working as a sales clerk in the Museum Shop of The Ethnicity Museum in Wash, D.C. Officially, I quit, but for all practical purposes, I got fired. For me, working in a museum was akin to a bull in a china shop.

             So, in August 2003, Gary Lee, the contractor— a dude I went to school with in Oxburg— said, “I’ve got a construction site with all kinds of equipment spread around. I need a night guard.”

             “At the Wrigley Clubhouse?”

             “Nowadays, they call it Wrigley Pavilion,” Gary explained, “but, yes, it’s the same place. You’ll be there from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., seven days a week. Bring a radio and a lot to read!” he joked.

             Back then, I still smoked cigarettes and drank prodigious amounts of coffee. I wasn’t the least bit worried about staying awake. Gary had his permits. It was a three-week renovation.

             “Can do,” I told him.

              Setting up a metal folding chair and a bridge table in the foyer, I stacked my typing paper, plugged in my portable typewriter, adjusted my table lamp and looked over my assorted snacks. Now all I needed was a muse! I prowled the house from the smelly basement to the dormer attic. I sat in the bell tower and watched fluttering bats winging their way among the trees. I smoked up a storm.

               The next night, I brought along a John le Carré novel. I was in business! In three weeks, I figured, I could read le Carré’s collected works.

               The first time I saw her, she was sitting on the stairs. She couldn’t have been more than 14 years old. A blond girl, her hair in ringlets, wearing a frilly summer frock of old-fashioned design. “Hello,” I said, a chill running down my spine. I could feel my hair standing on end. The thing was, I could look right through her! This was pretty scary. “Hell-o,” I repeated, rising from my chair. She was about 20 feet away, but her dark, hazel eyes bored into me. I figured if I approached her, she’d vanish. So I walked toward her. Her bow mouth bent down in a little frown. She did not disappear.

              “Art thou har to demolish me house?” she squeaked. Her voice kind of vibrated inside my eardrums, a painful sensation.

                                                       *

              “We’re renovating the house,” I said stupidly, coming within ten feet of her.

              She just sat there, shaking her head absent-mindedly. “Most people be afeared of me, on account I am a spook’um,” she announced.

              “Yeah, well, that’s neither here nor there,” I told her. “I’m a Buddhist. I’ve meditated myself into other dimensions. I’m not completely untraveled in space and time.”

              “Thou speaketh verily.”

               “Uh… um… okay,” I stammered, sitting down on the floor, at her feet.

               She kind of gaped at me, smiling. “What doeth thou?” she exclaimed. “Wouldst thou make cute upon my person?”

                “Well, I… don’t… know what that entails.”

                 “Thou… liketh me! “ she declared.

                “Oh, yes,” I told her truthfully. “Very much!” — I’m hopeless. I have a thing for young blond girls.

                “I should tell thee some things about my person,” she said, explaining that, at age 14, she contracted diphtheria and died. “It caused a rumpus among the young,” she told me, “and many perished.”

               “Wow! Okay. Yes, I guess they did.”

               “I be interred not so far yonder from this spot,” she continued. I had never seen anyone sit so serenely still before. “At Grace Episcopal, thou findeth my headstone.”

              “That’s off Georgia Avenue!” I blurted. “I know where that is!”

              “Thou shouldst go and take a gander,” she suggested.

               It’s hard to describe how I felt. The archaic language, her strangely tranquil attitude, her translucent body, all had me doubting my senses. I assumed some mold spores from the basement were giving me hallucinations. It wasn’t unpleasant, although the humming in my ears soon gave way to a dull ache.

                 “I want coffee,” I suggested, rising and walking back to the bridge table. Opening my thermos, I poured coffee into the cream-colored plastic cup that acted as a screw-top. I love having a brown plastic thermos manufactured in the DDR. Turning back to the stairs, I was amazed to see her standing, leaning on the banister.

            “Wouldst thou see my bed chamber?” she asked, leading the way up the wooden, spiral staircase.

            I was struck by an incandescent truth: Ghosts are lonely.

            What could I do? I followed her upstairs. She led me into a bachelor apartment.

            “In my time,” she explained, “the accoutrements were of period manufacture.” An enormous wave of energy or emanation pulsed out of her, enveloping the room in milky white. Passing through me, it made my skin tingle.

             Shit! We were in the same room, but the windows were open to a summer day. I could hear bees buzzing! Golden sunlight streamed through the gauze curtains. My hostess had assumed a very real appearance, looking as solid and animated as you or I. This was scary. “Come!” she called, pointing out the window. I walked gingerly over to where she stood and looked out at a rock-strewn field. Beyond the field, there was a woods and farther to the right, a farmer with a team of horses was plowing acreage. I reached down and took her small, warm hand. It was pulsing with life.

             She was so short! Only about four feet tall. Everything about her was petite. At 5’ 10”, I towered above her. We stood looking at each other. I leaned down… slowly… to kiss her. She turned her face coyly up to mine. As we kissed, I felt her eyelids rapidly brushing me on the cheek, like the wings of a hummingbird.

            We gave each other a very chaste peck on the lips. Even so, she blushed crimson.

            “What’s your name?” I asked.

            “Maggie. On my stone, it standeth my formal name, Margaret Pierce.”

            “Oh,” I exclaimed, trying to remember local folklore. “So you’re Margaret Pierce!”

            “Thou speaketh verily!… Come! Sit astride my bed. I have much to relate!” she declared, pulling me across the room and pirouetting grandly before me.

            What can I say? I let her deposit me on the bed. Sitting demurely on a corner of the duvet, her legs in white stockings hanging over the edge, she kicked her feet playfully and chattered endlessly. About school. About her playmates. Her sisters. Her parents. Her “crazy” cousins. About the pets around the farm: a goat, a lazy dog, a mongrel cat that caught mice in the kitchen and in  the barn.

            So I spent what turned out to be the rest of the night sitting on a bed in the 1880’s, listening to the archaic speech of a 14-year-old. I’d be lying to claim I wasn’t thoroughly enchanted. I was wild about the girl. I still am!

            Then, in a single mighty, milky emanation, I was sprawled languidly onto the floor of the Pierce house, at the foot of the stairs, a puddle of cold coffee staining my shirt.

            Of course, I went home, slept a few hours, and then hot-footed it to the cemetery at Grace Episcopal on Georgia Avenue! Walking among the gravestones, I couldn’t find hide nor hair of a Margaret Pierce. Disappointed, I started to leave. I actually got as far as my car in the parking lot. I’d already unlocked the car door, when an irresistible urge pulled me back through the gate and over to a small white stone in the very corner of the graveyard. I knelt down and examined the worn, barely decipherable lettering:

                                  Margaret Pierce

                                     1872 – 1886

                                  Beloved daughter

                                           R.I.P.     

              “It still doesn’t mean that all this actually happened,” I reasoned stolidly, blinking my eyes in the sunlight. Just the fact that I forgot my sunglasses indicated that I wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I went back home and got some more shut-eye.

              After a sumptuous dinner consisting of a steak sandwich on a bagel, a huge bowl of fresh veggies (tomatoes, celery, lettuce, cucumber, carrots, broccoli, green pepper, red pepper, yellow pepper, radishes and onion), orange juice, ice cream and coffee, I took my trusty book and headed back to work.

             “Wouldst thou not speak with me?” buzzed in both my ears about 8 p.m., as the sun sank in the west, casting shadows across the foyer. Carefully, I placed my open book face down on the bridge table and turned to the staircase. She was wearing some sort of ball gown, her head thrown back, peering at me through her eyelashes.

             Ouch! Me like.

              “Yes, please! I love talking with you!” I babbled.

              “Come!”

              Leading me back upstairs, we repeated the ritual, entering her room, the sudden, electrical sweep of energy, the transformation of the room— or our projection into another dimension. I still haven’t been able to figure out which.

             “That’s quite a dress for being in the bedroom,” I quipped.

              “Thou liketh it not?” she asked sorrowfully.

              “I LOVE IT!” I insisted, rushing up to her and grabbing her arms. She was so tiny, I simply lifted her scant frame up to my lips. With a rustle of taffeta, her arms enfolded my neck. A soft groan reverberated from her chest as— open-mouthed— we greedily drank of one another’s saliva, our tongues wrestling spasmodically.

             “I wants to tell thee more,” she breathed into my ear. Sinking onto the bed, I found myself enveloped in the folds of her gown. Our faces pressed against one another, she chronicled the world of ghosts, starting with her first awareness of her own existence, after a tranquil period of blankness following her death. “Then I cometh aback,” she explained, twining her fingers into mine. Every few minutes, she lunged at my mouth, extracting sweet, syrupy kisses, which I wildly gave. Her girdled thighs, as thin as my arm, played an endless game of pressing against my distended organ. Kissing me, she kept sucking the air from my lungs, and then blew her cool breath in my face, smelling of dust and musk. The combination of all these sensations, and the stuffiness of the room, left me breathless and dizzy.

              “I have to go,” I protested helplessly.

              “Thou needeth not depart,” she murmured, her pert little tongue scouring my ear. Her right hand took a firm hold on my cock. “Thou liketh stay,” she suggested in a saucy voice and began stroking me relentlessly. “Thou canst depart.”

             That last statement sealed my fate. She owned me.

             Again, come morning, a milky white force field pulsed mightily, depositing me back on the floor at the foot of the stairs.

             When Gary and the crew came to work that morning, I sat chastely reading my book at the bridge table in the foyer.

              “How’s it going?” Gary asked. “I hope I’m not boring the shit out of you!”

              “Naw, the nights go a lot faster than I expected,” I conceded, feeling guilty about not protecting Gary’s construction equipment. Mercifully, nothing was disturbed.

              Maggie’s doing? I had no way of knowing.

                                                       *

              “Thou mustn’t go,” she admonished me, licking me with her tongue, her blond ringlets bouncing against my forehead, her hands seemingly everywhere at once.

              “I have to look after Gary’s equipment,” I protested, amazed at the red, wool singlet she was wearing. Together with her black stockings and brown wooden clogs, she presented a farm girl’s eye view of a temptress.

              “They be afeared of me. Nigh come near,” she assured me, peeling off her singlet, revealing the tiny buds of her breasts.

              “May I suck those?” I asked.

               “Thou needenst ask,” she replied coyly, but I was already on the case.

               Then just before morning, she said, “Thou must remain in the house aday.”

               “I’m sorry. What?” I asked bleerily. These long nights were getting to me.

               “Stay. In this house. Until the ‘morrow.”

                “They’re renovating the house. There are WORKMEN here all day long. There. In the house,” I stammered, as she yet again used a tiny hand to caress me into a full erection. “I come back every night,” I bleated.

               “Thou shouldst stay,” she insisted, licking my neck with little darts of her tongue.

               “I want to be with you forever!” I found myself gasping.

               “Such an un-Christlike thought!” she admonished me, teasingly, pulling with both hands on my cock, stroke, stroke, stroke!   

               Those three weeks aged me ten years. She had me at “hello.” In the daytime, I was a nervous wreck. You know, the old bugaboo about the spirit that seduces you into joining her in death.

               Forget it! Not Maggie. She was vehemently opposed to anyone dying, especially me.

              We played and played and played. Even on the last night. But an hour before dawn, she pushed me away and said, “Let us look one uponst the other.” For an hour, we sat facing one another, sitting cross-legged on the bed, lightly touching each other’s fingertips, as her tiny eyes bored into mine like nail guns.

              “Thou art enamored of me,” she stated clearly.

              “Always am and always will be,” I breathed.

             “Good! I shall watch over thee,” she smirked.

              When it came time to go, I cried like a baby. She kissed away my tears and— blam! — sent me back to this mortal coil.

              That’s why I get a little pissed off when the newspaper publishes ghost stories about sightings in the Pierce family house. Where, without a home, shall she go? Wandering forever the void of other dimensions?

              Call me conservative, but I am not a happy camper!

                                                        *

               Give a listen to Tegan and Sara Quin’s “Walking with a Ghost” on Vapor Records/ Sanctuary Records Group, 2004. A great song! Also recorded by The White Stripes in 2005.

                                                         *

Hoopla Hoops

 

Hoopla Hoops 

or

Dreamin’ the Dream

by Blackie Diamond

            As a black man, I look at myself in the mirror most mornings and ask, “Who dat good-lookin’ son of a bitch?” At 6’ 6” tall, I know that I am truly blessed. When I was younger and first introduced to Anthropology (“I’d like to get her phone number!”), I realized that, “Hey, I have what it takes to become a leader of men. A tribal leader. I am very tall.” I have let nothing dissuade me from that course.

         At the same time, my voyage of self-discovery takes place through the lens of racial inequality.

         It is true that as a child of Denver, Colorado, I went to Fernwillow Mountain High School, a private school, on a full minority scholarship. That’s one of those scholarships that not only pays for tuition, books and school uniforms for weekdays and holidays, it also covers sports clothes, pocket money, gas money, the car and driver. Despite my protestations, Fernwillow insisted on providing me with a white chauffeur, just another example of racial injustice, my brothers and sisters!

            I have swallowed the bitter juice of inequality and spit out the seeds! (It might have been watermelon.) Take, for example, basketball. Shooting hoops. As I told my buddy Payback when I bumped into him in New York City in 2001, “Coach Malarkey was a Good Old Southern Boy racist pig. True, if I ever sank a jump shot, the team declared a national holiday, but Malarkey still should have put me in the starting line-up.”

            Payback, who was cadging alms from passers-by (“panhandling” our parents called it) on West 42^nd Street, pointed out that the coach came from Boston, but otherwise he agreed with my assessment. Payback also hit me up for a tenner. “I ain’t had no coffee, I ain’t had nothin’ t’ eat, I ain’t been to mah apartment all mornin’,” he explained. “A brother gotta eat, y’know!”

            Good old Payback!

            I know where he coming from! As a member of a disadvantaged minority, I too have suffered! At Harvard, surrounded by preppies like myself— except that they was white— as the first black editor of The Harvard Lampoon, I experienced the sting of racial profiling! Not a full-fledged burn, mind you, more like the acrid caress of jellyfish tentacles. (Summering in Hawaii, my family and I are familiar with such things.) You pour on the ammonia and the bath salts, but it still hurt!

            That’s why I became a revolutionary Marxist and male stripper in Los Angeles, California. With my antecedents, what else could I possibly do?

            Long live Angela Davis!

            Who say I ain’t black enough? I got street cred! I can sing Smokey Robinson. I do a mean rendition of Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay”!

             Long live the proletariat!

            Within the confines of the Constitution, of course. This is a country of law, after all. As a law student, you learn that the law is infinitely flexible. Like Silly Putty, it is whatever you say it is, as you shape it into a variety of permutations.

            When I tired of stripping, I became a community organizer in New York City for the Amway Corporation.

            In an effort to find my identity as a black man, I follow in the steps of Dr. King, frequenting a spa and clothes shopping exclusively at Nordstroms. I find they have high quality merch.

                                Recipe for Disaster

120 tears of a clown                         four fresh eggs                                 

14 oz. flour                                         2 oz. milk

10 oz. pot                                           one large bag potato chips

4 oz. water                                         one uptown friend

             Beat eggs and uptown friend until he reminds you that the two of you chased the ladies at Maxwell’s Plum. Add milk, water, clown tears. Sift in flour. Whip to batter. Fry pancakes.

            Smoke pot. Get “the munchies.” Eat pancakes and potato chips. Get in fight with uptown friend. Wake up that evening with splitting headache. Curse exploitative criminal businessmen polluting environment. Hate NYC. Send friend packing. Call ex-girlfriend. Get chewed out over phone. Go chase the ladies at downtown club. Get STD.

                               How To Become A Community Organizer

            Talk your way into a good gig ringing doorbells and glad-handing people for your candidate or organization. Express sympathy for the plight of others. Be very tall and sincere. Focus totally on self, but ask one serious question of each person you address. Stand endlessly, a concerned expression on your face, listening to their horse-twaddle. Write book portraying yourself as the victim of racism. Make friends with Oprah or at least join her book club. Run for Congress. Promise change. Become president.

            Playtime!

            Live the American dream.

                                                        * 

            When I saw that the founders of Amway was making all the cash moneys, I decided to get a gig like that for “Elvis.” Me! So I ran for Congress.

            The rest be history!

                                                       *

                                                                –  from the upcoming novel

A Visionary

  

            This morning finds me a little hollow-eyed, after sitting up all night composing this obit to Roy Brandenburg, a great local hero and writer.

            Yesterday evening, I got a call from Teddy Kalmar, informing me of Roy’s passing. He suggested I crank something out for the local country club’s on-line newsletter “HowGreenMyMoney.com”

            “I don’t know any other writers,” declared Teddy forthrightly. How could I say no to an entreaty like that???

                                                      *

            Roy Brandenburg was born in 1920 in Cecil County, Maryland where he spent his early years working on his father’s chicken farm. A precocious child, his first experience in publishing consisted of writing earnest homilies to Christian virtue, which the local pastor saw fit to post on the church bulletin board. The town of Eastfield had only a one-room schoolhouse, but young Roy made ample use of that one room.

            At the age of 14, after confirmation, his parents sent him to Baltimore County to live with his Uncle Cyrus, where he attended Livingston Parochial School for Boys. Excelling in the three R’s— readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmatic— he became Editor of the school newspaper. Unfortunately, a combination of prankishness, blatant interest in the female anatomy and an all-consuming thirst for comic books got him expelled in 1937.

            Becoming a copyboy at the Eastern Shore Clarion newspaper, he honed his writing skills and began churning out a series of short stories and novels that would continue until the present day. Refusing to be cowed, Roy rebuffed the epithet “unpublished author,” preferring to see himself as a “self-published author.” Driving his young wife Betty batty, as soon as Roy was able to scrape some moolah together on his day job, he would publish another novel through the so-called “vanity press.”

            A true visionary, Roy prophesied many of the innovations that grace our present day: Roy predicted the universality of indoor plumbing, which was not a given in the 1930’s. He envisioned the national system of highways. In his short story “Venusian Vulva,” he foresaw the rise of the porno industry. Our national fixation on hamburgers, coffee, cupcakes and automobiles all figure prominently in Roy Brandenburg’s oeuvre. “Never Enough Soap”— written in 1943 at the height of war-time rationing— portrayed modern man’s preoccupation with personal hygiene. Roy predicted the demise of pay toilets!

            The loss of the pointer finger on his right hand in a farm accident as a child kept Roy from serving in World War Two. Patriotic, he worked instead at OPA, the Office of Price Administration. His coworkers included a young Richard M. Nixon, who would later become 37^th president of the United States as well as a homeowner in San Clemente, California. Although not a surfer, Nixon enjoyed the ocean breezes.

            After the war, Roy continued in government service, working at GSA, General Services Administration, as a purchasing officer. The sheer volume of ballpoint pens (a relatively new invention), staplers, cellophane tape, typewriter ribbon, White-Out (also new) and other office supplies employed by the U.S. Government led Roy in 1953 to pen his seminal novel, “Beyond the Office In the Sky.”

             Affectionately referred to simply as “Office” by Roy’s readers, friends and coworkers, the cost of self-publishing this book so infuriated Roy’s wife Betty, she filed for divorce. “If a man cannot write well enough to interest the general publishing industry,” Betty declared in her deposition, “nor the magazines, newspapers, radio, television or film, I do not think it too much to ask that he stop squandering our life savings, time and again, on high-flying fantasies of writing the Great American Novel.”

            Within two years, Roy remarried, this time to Mavis Pearson, something of a sex siren in the town of Oxburg, Maryland. Naturally, this gave Roy much to write about during the remainder of the chaste 1950’s.

            Estranged from his first wife and their two children, Roy— accompanied by Mavis— joined the hippies in the 1960’s, living in New Mexico, Colorado and California. Finally tiring of communal life and sex orgies, the two of them returned to Oxburg in 1971, using Roy’s inheritance to purchase a cottage on North 1^st Street, which everyone knows, rests on the “wrong side” of The 1812 Hwy.            

            Undaunted, Roy churned out another 14 works of sci-fi flavored fiction— and innumerable short stories— in the intervening years. The Xerox machine was Roy Brandenburg’s indispensable collaborator. Among Roy’s futuristic predictions was the commercialization of Grape Nut Flakes as a breakfast cereal, the popularization of lobster, facial tissues as a mass consumer product, and newspapers delivered to home subscribers sheathed in cylindrical plastic bags. Roy presciently foresaw the spread of weed-killer, mountain bikes and slurpees as artifacts of pop culture. The eventual decline and fall of suburbia itself has become a recurring theme in Roy’s most recent writing.

            Cause of death is not known at this time.

            Roy Brandenburg is survived by his first wife, Betty Brandenburg Hutchins of Waldorf, Maryland, and two children from his first marriage, Paul Brandenburg of Buckeystown, Maryland (Brenda) and Susan Brandenburg Miller (Roger) of Washington, D.C., as well as five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

                                                       *

            Now it turns out that Ted Kalmar intended for me to write an obit about the well-known sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. I don’t want to say that my nose is out of joint, but, really, I expected to include this piece on my résumé!

            What’s worse, I double-checked ten minutes ago and found that— while creaking at the joints—my neighbor Roy is still alive!

            Please view the information I have imparted as material for future reference.

                                                                        –   Kevin

                                                         *

Radio Niche

  

            “Where you been all week?” asks my younger bro’ Timothy. Dig it, Tim the Air Force pilot— with his brown leather flyboy jacket—is stationed in Texas. He flies bombing missions all o’er the world. And he’s asking me where I’ve been!

            It’s a prescient question. I’ve spent the week preparing a script for a bit of “radio theater.” About 50% music and 50% talk, this format entails matching clever musical choices to commentary. You want the song lyrics to compliment the patter. For instance, when I bitch about the incredulity of government statements, I follow it with The Jefferson Airplane‘s “Somebody To Love.” The song opens with the lyric:

                               “When the truth is found to be lies,

                                 And all the joy within you dies…”

                                                                         ©  1966 Darby Slick

            Pretty neat!

            This time around, the topic is my dubious career as an undergraduate at Moosegrave College in Washington, D.C.

             I was the dude who spent a year at U. of Maryland 1965-66— mostly getting drunk— dropped out of school and got shipped to ‘Nam. Upon returning to “the world,” I enrolled as a journalism major at Moosegrave College. Expensive as all get out, with this tremendous reputation, Moosegrave’s School of Journalism included a ramshackle radio station. It had an AM side and an FM side.

             The FM half broadcast 1200 watts in the D.C. area, piggybacking on the antenna at WTOP. We was too cheap to buy our own. College radio, their FCC broadcasting charter allowed them to play classical, jazz, easy listening and talk shows.

              AM was on-campus only radio, a glorified public address system broadcasting through the electrical grid to the dorms. What a melange of angry young disc jockeys! Drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll radio, there were fistfights in the outer office, people so stoned on pot, they knocked the needle clear across the on-air turntable, and wild chatter. “Hairy and loose” was the industry judgment, and not in a good way.

             Guess where I worked?!

             Our call letters? WACK-AM & FM in Washington, D.C.

                                                       *

             “Fifty years and cookin’, this Spring sports a reunion of you and your soul mates from the glory years of WACK-AM,” read the invite, penned by “Lucifer Heart-Throb” himself, Gene Goldstein. “Come! Bring your Significant Other.

            “We’ll be checking hairlines.

             “P.S. Send $50 to cover the cost of the event. Thanx!”

                                                       *

              I have to give them credit. The FM station got a PBS affiliation in the 1990’s. Our dinky AM outfit has dwindled to the status of a podcast. Yet, we’re having a reunion! Location— and this is perfect— is the upper level of a concrete parking garage behind the Dalecarlia Reservoir off MacArthur Blvd. How fitting. We’re going to party on a concrete deck! At least there’s free parking.

              And the invitation includes one-hour shows on the website! So I write this inane script, dredging up the most embarrassing moments of my college career.

              The time Heart-Throb himself left an unsealed letter to his girlfriend in New Jersey on a desk in the office. It was stamped and ready to go, but he forgot it, when a fistfight broke out in the parking lot. Something of a pugilist, Gene loved watching fistfights. So Boopsie— who is now my business partner in the field of screenwriting— slipped the letter under a blotter and told me about it. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” I said, going to my locker in the Arts building and getting a brown crayon. Stopping by the Men’s Room, I picked up a wad of pristine toilet paper. Energetically applying brown crayon to toilet paper, we prepared a little surprise for Madeleine in Cherry Hill, NJ. I stuck it in the envelope with Gene’s love letter. Licked and sealed the envelope. Getting in my red MG Midget, I drove to the post office on Massachusetts Avenue and mailed the letter.

                “Has anybody seen my letter to Maddie?” asked Gene.

                “Oh, yeah!” Boopsie piped up. “K.K. mailed it for you! He was goin’ to the post office anyway, so he took it.”

                “Oh, okay,” said Gene, at a loss to understand why anybody would do anybody else a favor… Ever.

               This is very embarrassing to tell about.

               Sure there were repercussions! Of course there were! “It was a joke! “ we told Gene, who was understandably furious.

              Too young to know any better, we all continued to work together at WACK.

              If I was a journalism major, why did I have a locker in the Arts building?

              “If you’re a journalism major,” Dean Williamson asked me, “why do you want to study fine art?”

               It interests me, you cretin! I was thinking, but I couldn’t get the dean to sign on by telling him that. “I want to become an art critic. For the newspapers,” I lied.

              “Oh… OH! That’s brilliant!” said the dean, signing my forms.

               There was the time I was to give a report before my Art History class based on my term paper, “The Nature of Concrete Art.” My thesis was, since any found object or industrial cube can now be mounted on a base and declared as Art, the only criterion for what is and what is NOT art is the intention of the artist. This was a very big issue back in the 1960’s.

                I wanted to read and explain the report to my classmates. Field questions.

                Two hours before my presentation, Daryl the Pot Head approached me on campus, waving a joint, and said, “Man, you gotta taste some of this Acapulco Gold!” He and his buddy, Billy the Burp, were already high as kites.

               “Naw, I got a report to give!” I explained.

              “Je-sus, man! Just one toke!”

              One toke led to another and by the time it was 3 o’clock, I was wasted. I stumbled over to the Arts building, pulled aside some of my classmates and explained my predicament. They were furiously disappointed.

              “Wha’? Wha’?” I kept mumbling. “Jus’ tell Professor Janning I’ll come ba’ an’ do it nes week. I gotta go home!”

              “What are we supposed to tell him? That you’re stoned?”

              “Stoma’ ache. Tell him I got acute stoma’ ache,” I mumbled. I drove my MG Midget home to my parents’ house, where I had a basement room. Every stop sign looked the size of the Empire State Building. I slammed on the brakes along a residential street when I saw an enormous pink rabbit on a suburban lawn. When I looked a second time, I saw it was a magnolia bush.

              That was the occasion I learned that I could not ingest pot if I wanted to accomplish anything in life.

              I still smoked dope, but only at parties or on weekends when I had leisure time to kill.

              Hey! I’m the guy who got cheated, when my dime bag mostly contained seeds and stems! In retaliation, I planted the seeds behind the carport among my mom’s mint.

             “Some weed is invading my mint plants,” complained my mom.

             “Oh! I’ll take care of it!” I offered, which amazed my mom. Otherwise, I never volunteered to do gardening chores.

            “Holy guacamole!” said my buddies, duly impressed. “Menthol marijuana! How in the world did you do that? You gotta market this stuff!” 

                                                       *

           “There are eight million stories in the Naked City” said the old TV show. Just relating eleven of them on a podcast, it took me a week to grind out an air-tight script.

            The anonymous note left on the windshield of my MG Midget: “I hate you, Kevin Feingold!”

           Spooning with my girlfriend who, fondling my privates, burst into tears because— in my comfort zone— I fell asleep!

            “I’m not stupid,” I wrote. “I know you can Google anything nowadays on the Internet. Yet, these tales of yesteryear are so— how shall I say— piquant, I seriously doubt you’re gonna hear this stuff anywhere else!”

            Boopsie and me playing a tape recording of the room-mate to a senator’s daughter. The roomy castigates her classmate for bad hygiene. In detail. Descriptively. Vividly. By name. The station got a phone call from the senator’s office, threatening to sue the station for libel and defamation of character! Dean Williamson was not amused!

           We were almost expelled for that little imbroglio.

           Moosegrave College… I couldn’t get a moose, but, yes, on a visit to NYC, I found a pawn shop and purchased a shaggy, mangy moose head that definitely had seen better days. Cost me $20. “It graced a barber shop for years, but the barber retired an’ his wife brought it in here,” the proprietor told me. He seemed relieved to get rid of the thing. “You want me to wrap it?” he asked doubtfully, his face a giant question mark.

           “Naw!”

             Driving home on the New Jersey Turnpike with a moose head in the passenger seat and the top down was a classical gas. “What is that?” asked the toll collectors, worried that I was an ax murderer on a rampage. “Oh! It’s a moose head!”

           We couldn’t sneak it into the college president’s residence, so we propped it on the office chair, behind the desk, in Dean Williamson’s office.

            The phone rang at the radio station. “This is Dean Williamson!” his angry voice echoed down the wire. “I’m not asking who did this!

            “Come and take it away!!! ”

            Nobody in authority liked my moose head.

            We mounted it on a wall at WACK. It was great!

                                                          *

             I drive to the college to do my podcast and kind of stare down the FM station. Two teenage boys, lean and muscular, wearing nothing but running shoes and black cotton briefs, come jogging down the street. A 19-year-old lass with a blue plastic helmet and a face full of freckles shoots past me on her racing bike, her ponytail trailing in the wind. I proceed to the fourth floor of the student union building and find the AM studio, amidst the plasterboard and plastic sheeting of summer renovations.

             Tommy, the engineer— a full head of wild brown hair and granny glasses— takes my CD’s, eyes my playlist and says, “Awesome! The Seeds, “Pushin’ Too Hard.” The Beatles, “Rain.” These are some of my favorite songs!… Listen! We have to do a public service announcement regarding the celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee. Can you fake a British accent? Mine sucks!”

             The broadcast goes beautifully. I have rehearsed with a small cassette tape recorder, so I know which words to attenuate and how to couch my phrasing.

             “The only problem, “ Tommy says, as the telephone rings off the hook, “is that I get so wrapped up in your stories, I’m afraid I’ll forget to push the play button!”

             After the program, as another dude takes over, I field a few of the phone calls myself. “Great show! You can go to Hell!” says one caller. Another asks if I am a pervert. A third really likes my choice of music.

              I congratulate Tommy for making it so easy to produce the show. “I was really worried that my board man wouldn’t dig my vibe, but you truly got into it,” I chuckle.

             “Oh, yeah!” he replies, asking for an autographed copy of the script. “Even my wife has texted me that she thought it was terrific!”

              As I leave the building, a young blonde with a chow haircut stands on the steps, smoking a very long cigarette, eyeing me provocatively. I can stop and fall desperately in love with her or I can go to the party.

              I get the hell out of there.

                                                          *

              Eighty people attend the event, all looking a lot older but not necessarily wiser. Same goes for me, of course. Baby boomers, we’ll never really grow up. Interestingly, everyone has a food obsession. If we’re not yakking, we’re eating!

                Y’know, I was gonna wear my Beatles tie— a black tie with silkscreened white portraits of the Beatles on it— but chickened out, thinking it ostentatious. Ha! People have full-color ties celebrating Elizabeth Taylor, the Challenger shuttle (yeah, the one that exploded), Paul Simon, Bill Clinton (“What’s the definition of is?” it asks) and even a tie dedicated to my old mentor Murray the K.

                Radio personalities are all egomaniacs, that’s what attracts us to broadcast our voices to strangers. The other jocks congratulate me on a great show. They call it “storytelling” and “personal narration” and “stand-up.”  Then they ignore me, busy chattering among themselves.

               This fucking crap about networking is so over-rated! I had hoped to make some commercial contacts, but I am sorely disappointed. Everyone of all ages brags about their own personal exploits, basking in the glow of their own perfection and— as the alcohol freely flows— they act silly and begin fawning on one another.

             A lady with an iPad is webcasting in real time, as if there’s an audience for a WACK-AM reunion.

             Under a red and white striped circus tent, the caterer provides hot skewers of barbecued lamb, beef, shrimp, green peppers and potato wedges that are scrumptious. We all feed our faces with abandon!

            Since I don’t schmooze well, I team up with Cynthia Howard, a Moosegrave co-ed who is summer interning at WACK-FM. We sign people in at the entrance table. Yeah, sure! Folk breeze past us. They commandeer our pens. They fill in their name tags with sobriquets like “Maestro Flash,” “Arnold the Magnificent,” “The 13,” “Kevin the K” (that’s me!), “Rigaletto” and “Thursday Afternoon Rock Show with Murray Hampton.”

            “You know,” I do remark to Beth Ambrose, a former Program Director, “with all the media out there now, it’s amazing that radio is as strong as ever! We really, obviously, fill a need!”

             “Still,” says Beth, who makes her living designing theater sets, “it’s not like in the old days. Now radio is definitely a niche market.

             “During my tenure,” she exclaims, “I tried to have the PGA Tour broadcast on FM, but golf doesn’t seem like a sport that is properly accessible on an audio medium. There are only so many times you can say, ‘Aaaagh! He missed the putt by inches!’ before the listeners change stations.”

             The party is fun, but I feel like a eunuch. As a younger man, I would have been tongue-tied and sweating, working together with a raven-haired beauty like Cynthia. Now, she just strikes me as entirely well-meaning and extremely young. Mellower, I look at women my own age and wish I could figure out how to connect with them. I seem to have all the presence of wallpaper. So I stuff my face, fill my belly and drink bottled water.

             The facilities are in a bar across the street. You take the elevator down four floors, walk across the intersection and slip into Billy’s. A lot of people stop there to imbibe hard liquor, which is why the proprietor agreed to let us use his restrooms.

             Otherwise, the caterer has laid on a stock of microbrews, Watershed Pale Ale, Burning Doghouse Brown Beer (the most popular brewski), Righteous Christian Lager. Watching my former coworkers get pleasantly plastered, I feel glad I have foresworn alcohol.

             We can’t get them to leave, either. “Can we start clearing tables and dismantling the tent?” the young people hired as servers by the caterer keep asking me, as our 5 to 7 p.m. event nears 8:30 at night, with no end in sight.

             “Tear it all down!” I heartily suggest, jumping up from my folding chair and lending a hand.

              Later, enjoying the solitude of the summer evening, I walk through the woods surrounding the reservoir. I come upon two baby skunks. “Where’s your momma?” I ask them, as they sniff my brown leather sandals. It feels reassuring to see I haven’t lost touch with nature. I am sure their momma is lurking nearby. I back away quietly, return to my car and drive home.

                                                         *

 

Republican Candidate 2012

  

            My14-year-old girlfriend Erin thinks both President Blackie Diamond and his Republican rival are sexy. “They’re so good-looking!” she exclaims. My attempts to explain that they are groomed for the camera fall on deaf ears. She’s 14, her hormones are infallible. Extremely flirtatious, she expects me to live like a eunuch and spend like a sailor. Spotting her walking home from school, I picked her up on a whim. Her body is curvaceous in all the wrong places, but she has flaxen hair, piercing sky-blue eyes and a face as innocent as a lamb. She’s the angriest person I’ve ever met. We’re two peas in a pod. Not recommended!

            There’s no accounting for taste.

            This year’s Republican candidate Mick Rodney, another very tall man, is no improvement over President Diamond. A white guy and a one-time ambassador to Cambodia, he’s as bad as Blackie. If Blackie believes in letting the tail of business wag the dog of government, Mick believes you should bob the dog’s tail, throw away the dog and keep the stump.

            “Now it’s true that I was never elected to public office,” Mick says at the start of every campaign speech, right after praising the wife and saluting the flag. “But just look at George Bush! He was never elected to public office. Not until the day he was elected governor of Texas.

            “Now let me explain my years at DooD Capital. We called it DooD because it’s a palindrome: The word works just as well going forward as in reverse.

            “Now it’s true that every business DooD ever touched, died. We at DooD were known for the Magic Touch of Death. It became almost an incantation, ‘Hey, DooD, where’s my business?’

            “And because our backroom was entirely staffed by Asians— and all our executives were Asians— and we took our orders directly from the Chinese, some people were under the mistaken impression that DooD Capital was a foreign company! Nothing could be further from the truth, I assure you. We did not require foreign expertise to render lifeless every company we ever bought.

            “America’s Got Talent! We did that all on our own.

            “Vote for me in November 2012!”

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            I’ve warned my mom that even if Mick is the Irish anti-Diamond— “He’s a mick, but in a good way”— once elected, he’ll start doing a lot of Republican things that we core Democrats dislike. “He’ll disband the Environmental Protection Agency, push deregulation and tinker with parts of the government we Dems fought long and hard to establish. The Spirit of Ronnie Reagan continues to stalk the land like a malevolent ghost, chanting ‘The less government, the better! Government is the problem, not the solution!’ As long as Reaganism remains the national religion, we’re screwed!”

            I side with libertarian Paul Rand when he says, “What my opponents need in these debates is a throat lozenge that raises I.Q. levels!”

            Mick’s tepid message fails to match his stirring oratory. Mick Rodney, turnaround expert . You turn around and, poof!, the man is gone!

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