the truth as we know it

The Truth As We Know It


On about the 1st of the month or so, my co-habitator, Sara Clare Ellington, (no relation to the Duke, actually Jewish) pulled the proverbial rug out from under my precious existence. It was the beginning of slip-sliding away. Seismic upheaval. Pangaea splitting off into disparate parts. The earth, my earth would never be the same.
Just when commonplace boredom had become something desirable it was ripped out from underneath my grubby little fingers. You wait your whole life for satisfaction, every living, breathing moment a means to that end and just when all seems monotonous yet comfortable the uprooting of everything becomes a somber reality.
Being an affirmed astrology buff, and then some, she let me know that, the planets’ coordinates were coordinating in such a way that they were extremely uncoordinated for us. Our co-mingling. Our co-existing. Calmly, I asked her if it was that time of the month. Brazenly aghast, she thought not. She proceeded to spew venom about her Gemini exiting my Libra and how everything we had ever stood for seemed like a bad dream. To me if it wasn’t that time of the month it was a reasonable facsimile thereof. Put it this way, I had been in the firing line of her furious feminine rage before. It was so-out-of-this-world that maybe to quote her, “It was interplanetary.” All I could think of was, Heaven Help us. Spewing the serpent’s oil or not, she sounded eerily similar to the blue-light-special announcer at a certain convenience outlet. As cold-blooded as she sounded and as eerily sick to the stomach as I felt, the image of some chunky big-breasted woman yelling out toothpaste and lipgloss specials to everyone so inconsequential that they were to the fate of the universe, truth and happiness and all, made me cheerily incoherent to the seriousness of her mouth transit. To keep one’s sanity sometimes one must remember the man code, only listen to what is absolutely necessary. Entire kingdoms have gone under when the code has been explicitly denied its place in the kingdom. Exactly why the man code was invented.
Sara Clare and I had been an item for quite some time now. Never did we appear in the society pages but that was most likely my fault. She came from a high-falutin’ family. They had it all, deep pockets, a most powerful group of allies, exotic palatial estates set up in several strategic points around the universe, personal guides and gurus that never left well enough alone and the feeling that anything was attainable if the laws of physics weren’t compromised. She was a member of the bourgeois. The ruling class. She had followed her dad, a prominent judge, a man with a scolding heart, deep penetrating eyes, the kind that ate right into your soul with their insatiable appetite, and classic highbrow unibrows, down the ivy league path and was still contemplating a life of jurisprudence, echoing her dad’s path though she disagreed wildly with some of his archaic political views. She loved him dearly. Her dad had painted her as an outcast when she hooked up with me. I was of the ostracized type. My music lorded over me. She had once loved me for it. But sometimes common sense overtakes the sanity of one’s soul as time meanders aimlessly through its cycle and it didn’t matter that they were multiple universes, chaos theory won out especially if you didn’t sit down long enough for the anxiety to pass. And I knew it as well as I had known it before, people that love, that really love, usually in the long run, get screwed.

In a time of incoherence, lightning struck! The dam burst! Floodgates dissolved! Falling into my arms, she cried inconsolably, her head draped over my shoulder, like the great hoary noggin of the albatross. The great squawking image of a flesh eater in all its glory. As she brooded I became her nesting place. Her calm in the storm.
What seemed like eons later when she calmly lifted her head and moved it away, relieved of her burdensome skull, I dryly commented on the news I’d heard about the salmonella scare. I was trying to ease her tension, set right the distraught applecart. I was trying to bridge the distance between us.
“Sara Clare, have you heard about the salmonella?”


Wide-eyed, her pupils dilating, she managed a horizontal bop of her head.

I continued. “It seems salmon, yes, salmon, as kooky as it sounds is

drumming up support for salmonella.”

Diligently I was attempting to take up time and space with scientific

meanderings which tied into the fate of the universe. In some way, sensing her

psychological disrobing of me, I suddenly realized, with an epiphanic leap of faith that 2 + 2 no longer equaled 4. I thought that what if in life and mathematics there were no absolutes. I shuddered at the thought. I imagined Newton disrobing with me. I wished that I had hardened my soul, as well as my flesh.

She sat silent. Catatonic. I wondered if I was losing her. I chuckled,

looking for a response. “Salmonella spawning, distributing p-o-i-s-o-n

to unsuspecting humanity.” And damn, the notion of global warming was

just becoming comfortable.
We both decided to sleep on the couch but it was too crowded (too close for comfort).

To the bed I marched (in playfully indignant repose) not as much mad as lonely. During a relentless dream about conformity, which included Michael Jackson, the pope and myself, a terrifying vision appeared in my cerebral cortex. A Roman dude blowing his trumpet, Michael Jackson dancing his soul away and the pope reading from a scroll about affairs was my REM reality. Through my unconscious mind raced the words, business affairs, art-a-fairs, foreign affairs…until out of the cool blue vast wasteland of neuron activity I screamed or so I thought…Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah. I rolled off the bed, inadvertently hitting my elbow on the sturdy oak floor. Damn that hurt. My mind raced like a madman. Before I could lift my body back up to higher ground, Sara Clare stood over me. There was evil in her eyes, or was she just extremely concerned about my health?

“You b - ch, she said!” Lightening flashed, a harmonic convergence of light and bolt lit up the sky; there were sure to be floods all over Manhattan.

“You what?” Puppy dog eyes and whatever else upwardly young mobile women were made of, stared back at me. Like a body—and—soul-- piercing laser beam.

“It’s okay Roger.” She ran her elegantly painted nails, the epitome of bright—bright-- magenta through her meticulously coiffed brown curls, the ringlets that cost more daniro for upkeep than many third world countries annual budget outlays. She seemed composed. Her storm had passed. As I neared consciousness I felt a dark cloud passing overheard. For a moment the music died like Don Mclean had rhapsodized.

“It was fun while it lasted. A real blast. You should get some sleep now.” She rolled her eyes, eyes that to me once seemed magical were losing their sexy cat shape, their luster, their appeal, their any and everything good, right in front of my face. All I could think was, my God, I hope I’m dreaming. And if I’m not, may I never wake up.

What was she telling me? This from a woman who said she was
more man than I’d ever be. I remembered thinking, I hope not, let me re-check your equipment. Damn, she had gone on to say about how she wore the pants in our family. I blamed it on women’s lib, suffragette in 1920, Gloria Steinem, the whole kit and caboodle of crazed
women’s - righters. Too much freedom. I blamed everything on too much freedom. She’d said she had more testosterone in her little finger, or pinky. Whichever it was. My mind was failing me. I’d said, like shit howdy, she didn’t. “Are you willing to be tested, I’d asked her? “D-O-C-T-O-R office in the morning.” I’d prove I wasn’t her bitch.
Of course when the morning showed itself, all had been forgotten like a bad dream. Still, I wasn’t exactly living nirvana.

Now half-awake, half-asleep, half immobile and totally zombified, I lay underneath my manly woman as she caressed my head. She took it into her hands like a baby’s bottom, tenderly caressing, rubbing her Flo-Jo fingernails through my receding brown follicles. I remembered heart and soul. I remembered solid gold. And then, I woke up. The bitch was heavy. Sweat beaded into little ringlets and dripped from my body. The phone rang. Unconsciousness absurdly rolled into a conscious storm.

“Hey baby, it’s Sara Clare.”

“Who? Who is this?”

“It’s Sara (I double D) Clare.” She giggled. I remembered her

effervescence. Her beauty. Her love for me. (Something about the rain in Spain.)

“Sara Clare? Really?”

“Rog, remember, what we talked about…like last night? You know?”

Memory wasn’t my strongest suit. Playing poker in the high school bathroom, fueled by marked cards had been my strongest suit until I had been emasculated by strong motherly women shortly after puberty had set in. The closest I came to a strong suit now was my Calvin Klein triple-breasted dark black suit that with a baby blue shirt in tow annihilated all pretenders to the throne. The truth hurts sometimes. Now I was enveloped by reminisces that mercifully my failing memory base would soon wipe out. Still tears closed in, remembering what can now be categorized as wasted time. Most of my misspent hours had been wasted on cooking flambé, Brie and salmon and pleasing her. The albatross diva squared. She had soared into my life with a dynamic flair and now I was the epitome of rotting flesh in her book. Big bird soar away.

“Vaguely. Is there something I need to know? “

“The ride’s over, baby. You see, I got me a new driver. Get the
concept?” I know it may be hard to fathom but Sara (I double D) Clare is moving on. Saying sayonara. Adios, amigo.”

I was the inventor of concepts. Was she kidding? I racked my
brain holistically day after stupefying day trying to turn water into wine, intent at upsetting the applecart, replacing string theory, its 13 dimensions or so and Galileo’s round earth hypothesis by the next time the sun rose, showed its face in the galactic mirror. I was a man on a mission. Unfortunately my magic wand wilted on the vine. My potions were impotent. And over time, geniuses become madmen, monsters with no luck, no money and nowhere to go. Still a concept was a concept.

“I’ll send someone for my things. Ta ta.”

A new chauffeur? Was my limo pushing up daisies?
Long had the Milky Way been my friend. In its circular, gaseous embrace, I’d been a pretty avid collector of earth dust. Some people had baseball card memorabilia. Not me. My psyche collected quickly-to-be-forgotten memories like a radiation belt eats and breathes earth dust. New York City, my home, my paradise, had become my prison. My penitentiary. My big house. I needed to exit the planet. Get out of Dodge. Six quadrillion miles from the nearest galaxy, and gas prices were breaking long-standing records I was in heartbreak state. Exxon was on the up and up (in profits). Cataclysmic. What was next, Superman didn’t love Lois Lane? Protector of the universe was really a welfare cheater?
Reconstructing myself, picking up my sanity piece by piece, I gulped down two pots of coffee. Into the New York night, I screamed from my 15th floor balcony. Bloody Murder! Certain that the cops would be knocking on my door any minute with intent to bust heads, I took my caroling back inside. Concepts, Superman, Hegel’s concept (in my view) was dead. Now the mother of all tragedies (thanks, Saddam) was doing its symbolic and putrefying dance around my head like a motherf –r. The albatross would be dining tonight. Existence (mine) was going through a cruel phase. Otherwise, things were looking up. I was a free man.


I had spent years being overly mothered, downright smothered by overbearing bosomy types. Mary Sue Angelides, after what she’d done to me, with such fervor, a religiosity, I’d simply and unequivocally referred to her as the anti-Christ. Back in junior high, she’d tricked me into the girl’s bathroom. All you need to know, it was a set up. The feminine mystique had done me in. It’s a wonder that more men don’t contemplate suicide or maybe they do. Maybe the doing is the hardest part. My college girlfriend Amoeba Ray Thompson, she of the notoriously hippie parents, left me for her own gender and a few oversexed professors. She bombed—out my world kinda like her hippie parents and their Molotov cocktails had done to establishment locales back in the time of peace and love. My history of love had been unnecessarily brutal. Romantic gentlemen might ring a bell in a girl’s heart, but ostensibly chivalry was dead; at least as much as Nietzsche’s God.

Men were the weaker sex and whenever they chimed in with veritable nonsense owing to such platitudes as courtesy, kindness and overbearing love it didn’t take a Rorschach test to figure out the results of such encounters. The brothers were doomed. Doomed from the start. And, amen, that’s the history of love, a four-letter word that can invoke miracles or crush you at the extreme essence of being and shit you out without a care.


The office, Gladstone and Bryant, interior snob decorators, informed me that Ms. Ellington had gone home for the day. I wondered, home, was it where the antelopes roamed? What did Ms. Ellington consider home?

I used to do comedy in the privacy of my home. My home. Laughed at my corny jokes. Booed. Hissed. Heckled myself. Seemed it was about time for Othello. Romeo and Juliet. Et tu Brute?

Once we had been two sensually and mentally entwined lovers, we had
leapt from innocence to nonsense and back again effortlessly like nomadic swans moving from lake to lake, flying the trapeze, laughing at fate, mockingly serene while hanging as trapeze artists are wont to do, upside down meandering from the Brooklyn Bridge of our sensibilities, our youthfulness never-say-die bravado emitting poetic singsongs to long-dead lovers who superimposed on the scene before us. Now was this episode of our life dead? Was our passion play finished? Dried up? Dried up like the prunes my grandmother ate to hasten indigestion? I think not. I dare not. We who embark into summer on heaven’s wings shall be there into winter as our sunset nears. Yes, I felt that in my heart. That was something I had read long ago and I held it neatly to my breast. I would not go calmly into the night. Dylan Thomas provided me inspiration.



Downtown at the 1st City café, a hip avant-garde, starbucks clone with mobsters, gangstas and radiant ladies, I mingled. Drinking my café latte. I soared. Like the eagle I flew. Not on major drugs but caffeine was calling out my brain cells, reveille, one by one. I’d ingested so much coffee. Essentially I was a coffee pot transporting a human likeness around. Life images flashed before my eyes. The neon lights of Broadway. I laughed, impervious to pain, energy had trumped pain moved it out of the defining light. Yet like most smoldering beasts, it boiled under the surface.

Ebony eyes floated my way, sashayed into my world. “Hey, man, you look like the man on the moon. You discovered the jitterbug? Some kind of human insect?”

My mind raced. Surveying the brownsugarlady, I noticed her full lips, her precious white teeth, her kinky fro (a testament to 70’s soul) and her body. It was packing. My mind raced. Sara Clare and buffaloes roamed, did the neutron dance inside my skull. “Funny (hesitatingly). Are you the definitive expert on cockroaches and other insidious bug types?”

“Man, you gotta be fool.” She sneered. Black mamba venom replaced her genteel, sexy-as-hell aura. “Just asking, why you so doggone fool jumpity.”

Pointing to the sign, tilting my cup toward her, I hoped that she got all of the fresh roasted correlations.

“Now you ain’t got no mumbo-jumbo. What ails you?”

Overtaken by pure knowledge of the universe we live in, Sara Clare and a faulty sense of exasperation, I removed myself from my stool and knelt in front of the god of the whole shebang. “O heavenly father, who thou art be in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”



When I awoke, I was knee deep in the excrement of a police holding cell. My arrest report said something about offensive religious artifacts edifying the general public in a secular society. Remembering the ebony queen like a lucid dream on the history channel, I barked like a dog.

“Shut the fawk up! Are you crazy, little ol’ man?”

Laughter reverberated in my consciousness. Are you crazy, little old man?

“Yeah dumb little ass, pumped up on coffee,” said another man of the law. He laughed.

“The new drug use, hey Sid?”

“Yeah, next thing you know, we’ll be sending a search party for Juan Valdez.”

“Yeah,” Sid’s buddy laughed.

My only concern was escaping prison time. I wasn’t superman. I was bleeding reality. I was wondering what happened to get me here.



“That’ll be $450. Four and a half clams.”

“You sure that’s what I need?" I held the 45. It felt good. It felt snug in my hand.

“Listen! Are you killing somebody or just shooting at white rabbits when you’re at Alice’s?”

“Shooting white rabbits of course.” I played along with his reference to Jefferson Airplane.

“Well do you wanna blow them to smithereens? Or have soup?” He laughed.

“I guess, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Okay, four and a half clams and the baby’s yours.”

She was a baby all right. Silver metallic. Rabbit killer. What had I bought myself into?


When the dude with the mojo showed up, I was constitutionally ready to take up arms. Read him his rights.

“I don’t want no trouble, dude. Are you, Cayce? Roger Cayce?”

“Spitting image. In the flesh.” I cocked my rabbit-killer. “Wanna see a profile? My myspace is a dousy.”

“Sara, just wanted me to remove her things.”

“I’m sure you already have.’

“Hey, dude, Rog, she said you two were completely over. Really, that’s what she said. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

“The shit comes out in the wash. Ever heard that old wife’s tale, uh? Excuse me for asking, but who the hell are you?”

“Dave, Dave, David Geffbron.”

“One of those Daves, huh. Damn sure, I’d killed them all. Damn sure.”
I blew on my virgin gun barrel and rotated the chamber. It was as fresh as an unspoiled flower. “Okay, what the hell, she’s gonna be on my history channel, Dave. Get her stuff. It’s yours. All yours. I sincerely hope that you have testosterone on back order.”

“What?”

“Never mind, you’ll get the picture.” I had a theory brewing about him getting the picture. For sure, the level of difficulty would be low. No, Ansel Adams would he have to be. He would get the picture.



A few weeks later, I know because the man on the radio called it the 21st of June, Dave rung me up. It was the first day of summer. Love season. Birds and bees time. And Sara Clare now possessed my 27-inch surround sound Zenith. And I was a bird without a bee. “Yeah, what is it? Wanna purchase the Roger Cayce love guide.”

“What in the blue-fucking-moon, are you talking about?”

“Calm down sadist, and tell me why you are further wasting my time.”

“Your girl, I mean, my, you know, what I mean, Sara, I think she’s doing me wrong.”

“Well, brother, she has a track record you might say.” Under my breath I sneered and giggled.



Somewhere on the dark side of Jersey, where the seediest of the seedy plant their seed, Dave Geffbron, a card-carrying member of the Jewish nation and I something less desirable in humanity’s version of the Oscars, of the high and mighty, of the princes and princesses caste waited on a JAP, a Jewish American princess and silently swore that she and he (whomever he be) would rot in hell.

“Never in my wildest dreams, did I think, we would be in this together.”

“Yeah, Dave, you’re definitely a rocket scientist.” We were so close like two peas in a pod. I was missing good TV, being here with him. She had dumped me long ago. What was I doing here? I guess one night off the couch, no matter how seedy this place was, wouldn’t kill me. And my virgin 45, was ready to pop its cherry if need be.

“Oh, shit, lookee here, see that, “ said Dave.

“Yeah spongebob, I think I do.” I had no idea what good ol’ Dave was looking at, alluding to. As the hoary mist oozed in like an uninvited ghost
on musty sea-salt legs, I really believed that Dave’s mind was sort of an alter-ego to its regular self. Heaven help me if I’m wrong, but I believe that his mind was hallucinating. A smorgasbord of dark smoky bitter-sweet Heinekens, white wine shooters and the taste of marijuana lay heavy on his breath, giving me the inkling. Was I in the clutches of a madman?

After an eternity-like ten minutes had passed, we ran with soft, furry rabbit feet and stealthily climbed the stairs to an old shanty of an apartment. I could have sworn that the earth rotated around the sun two or three times or maybe it was the company I was keeping. The building looked like something out of the dark ages. I had a fear that a bubonic rat was going to appear. I surmised that I had been visited by enough plagues to write the book on them. At the door, we listened. Our rapt ears stood at attention. Male bonding in the time of imminent threat to pride was at our disposal, was our destination. Whether we liked it or not? We were in this together.

“What do you think they’re doing in there, Rog?”

Giggling interrupted the silence. Sea salts sailed from the cumbersome sea. Out in the deep ocean depths, sea cucumbers, seahorses, sharks, jellies and a mind-bogglingly large number of other creatures went along on their merry way all unaware of our place in the Universe. A chill settled over my bones.

“Shit, Rog, what the hell’s she doing in there?”

“Probably knitting sweaters.” Long ago the chastity belt had been removed. Innocence had been tarnished, tarred and feathered. Princess no more. The shift into overdrive had come all too sudden. But the shock had worn off.

Upon my last facetious remark, Dave, on his own, with little or no corroboration on my part, smashed the door in. It flew from its hinges, a flightless bird. We leapt over it.

“There.”

“There.”

We rolled to the sounds. Breasts of Sara Clare stared hard-core into my eyes, a titman’s dream in a better place, a grander time.

“Holy shit, Rog, that guy…”

The presently encumbered lover stood naked before us. One hand clutched his privates undignified; the other was on his head.

“Don’t shoot. She told me it was over. You guys were in the book.”

“No shit, Sherlock. How long did it take you to solve the mystery? " I queried.

“What? Holy shit.”

Into the wall, I sprayed some chicken pellets laced with salmonella.

“Damn, don’t shoot!”

“Damn, cowboy, you aren’t a scared little wussy after all, are you?”

Laughing uncontrollably, we, I, almost split a gut.

“Now get the hell out of here and take your tee-pee with you, “ exhorted Dave.

“Sara Clare, don’t you think you need by this time, a whorehouse license or a pipe-fitting inspector?”

“Are you guys, crazy? Roger, have you gone bonkers? Got a screw loose?”

“You could say he’s got a screw loose. Ha ha ha.” Sara Clare grabbed her clothes and ran off naked into the night. Her pale round white butt was blindingly beautiful as she lit from the house.

“Let’s get outta here.”

“Okay, Dave, whatever you say. Ha ha ha ha.”

Sara Clare’s luminous derriere had illuminated the moment and sprinkled cosmic dust on the whole shebang connecting the parts which are essentially space, past, present and future. It had been a welcome surprise to see her ass even if the moment came with her running from the scene ass-backwards. It beat loneliness to a pulp. And all my virgin barrel did was watch her naked ass run away into the deep, distant night, keeping its virginity intact and my ass out of deep shit. In my universe chicken pellets burst no cherries.



One hell of a nightmarish week it had been. Time to get back to the business of selling a little real estate as well as pan handling for joy. It would be easier than ever to sing crippling love songs as true love or so I thought had become hellaciously unrequited. You just never know, the truth one day may be unfashionably so not the truth after a night’s sleep. Still I hoped to wake up after a hard night’s sleep and realize that it’d all been a dream. A ghouly, ghastly affair, nevertheless a dream.

Looking for some Cubans underneath the bed to smoke my cares away, I discovered some official looking paperwork and a DVD. “What’s this?” I muttered.

(1) I, Sara Clare do solemnly swear on this day July 1, 2006, my freedom from Roger Cayce.
(2) No longer will, Roger Cayce touch me physically, mentally, or bind me to him in any way.
(3) No longer will I be referred to as his baby.
(4) Under the emancipation act of this date I declare myself a totally unencumbered individual living in this here, our United States.
(5) Rog, our relationship is absolved.
(6) And if you don’t like it, it’s tough doo doo.

All I could think was, I gotta call the sanitation department. I’m knuckle deep in this. Maybe I would’ve killed the suckers involved if I would’ve read this (Philadelphia) New York freedom riot act before embarking to a seedy New Jersey location. But I hadn’t. God spared me, I guess. Hallelu-jah!

After grabbing some chips and caramel soda, I plopped myself down onto the couch and turned on my new black Motorola. The DVD from under the bed was just more of Sara Clare. Sara Clare griping. Sara Clare beefing. Sara Clare stewing. Sara Clare personified. Take a listen.

“Rog, if you have already read my emancipation proclamation, this is all I got to say, babe, the reiterating blues, it’s over baby. Get over it! Get on with your life. Stop wasting yourself. Once, we had something. Now, in retrospect, I sure as hell don’t know, remember, or even care what it was that something we had. It’s over, baby. Kapoof. No more Batwoman and Robin.” She laughs. “No, Superman you’re not. Maybe you can find a bitch to wear the pants for you, maybe not? But remember this, it’s not me.”

It occurred to me, the Abraham Lincoln Emancipation Proclamation echoed in my brain. Guess the bitch was a tad too unoriginal. At least, Abraham’s dig at justice freed the slaves. Hers was a tad immoral. And in essence, it freed no one.

“But remember this, but remember this, it’s not me. We might’ve had something but whatever it was, it isn’t. Get on with your life. Get on with it. BITCH OUT!”

With that she raised her fist in a black power salute, maybe in effect, an affectation of the recent power outage, and then saluted me with a devilishly-evil shit-eating grin, taking up space on a elusively sardonic face. She sure as hell would live in infamy. Yes, infamy, damn right! I gave my own black power salute to her screen presence and morphed from there into the proper military salute with the middle finger exposed (for all to see) and mouthed, my own creative ending that had burned like a raging inferno in the depths of hell for a considerable amount of time.

“BITCH OUT!”

work in progress - comments

the internal pool affair

Sean Grayson liked, no more like loved to sit out by the old city pool on East Elm Street on the northeast corner of Lake Lock and imagine what it would be like to be a high-roller, a man who commanded attention, beautiful girls, and the finest things money could buy. Sean was a thinking man. He was a dreamer with both eyes fortuitously positioned in the future.

Sean had tired, become downright weary of video games. He’d skied, both slalomed and free styled. He’d maddened all of the Maddens. Played catch the froggie with his baby sister, Harmony Delight.

He’d tried to play the beginning-teen role. Even though he was a male and his sister the opposite gender, Mars to her Venus, he’d provided her a good role model. Once high on raspberry Kool-Aid and caramel-butter-scotch ice cream he’d tried on mom’s gowns over his overalls of course both impressing and delighting his little sister. Her squeals of delight proved that she had liked the show. Yet he tired of such things. Entertaining baby sisters was hard work. Still his mom had him babysitting every Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday night; his imagination, his creativity once had proved par for the course but it was now stretching thin. During these times, he learned something more important than life itself, it was hard pleasing a three year old. Harder than digging ditches he figured. Digging ditches didn’t require your ultimate undivided attention. Ditches didn’t require a new routine every 15 seconds. They were just ditches. Little sisters weren’t ditches.

Sean tired of the neighborhood kids. J.D., the jock that could both chew gum and talk at the same time was a triple threat, obnoxious, rude and conceited. In his mind’s eye, Sean saw a lucrative future in professional sports for J.D. If anything he had all of the attributes necessary for mega-stardom. He would be a perfect role model for naïve little innocents who hung on every superstar’s word. Kenny was deceitfully kind. In essence, he was always on the take. He would sell his own mother for a new X-box. He was the most likely to succeed. Ironically he was the type that grew up to be a politician, a used car salesman or a mobster, always on the take. The kind that every community dreamed of installing a sign in reference to which you would first notice upon entering the town that such and such was born here. It was a shame but deceitful types ruled the world. But you loved them anyway, always vying for their attention, their approval. Shrinks, he knew, owed their living to these inglorious humans. The signs didn’t care whom they promoted, not being living, breathing things; they just didn’t care. Kenny was due his sign, his universal cause for being.

Such sign would seek to placate the viewers of such a symbol, to ease the indignities of all who did live/had lived or might live within the small town and who had never amounted to anything. And the sign would keep on propping up the inglorious ones' fame making it easier for him to withstand the coming—down—to earth—stage that foreshadowed death. It was kind—and slightly evil to say—the sign had a dual purpose.

Small towns had to build up their egos in some way; that was a fact of life.

Signs they never proclaimed, 999 dispossessed citizens, 14 lunatics, 698 child molesters, assorted pedophiles and countless losers and whatnots. Towns had their pride and then their identities, which usually tended toward the dark side because as you know, from the hairs on their heads to the soles on their feet they had more secrets than 1,000 television movies could ever hope to unfold even if given many lifetimes to do so. And that’s a given. A certified fact of life.

Back to the friends, Ben was likeable but usually would brainfart something out too honest for his own good. Sean figured Ben, he wouldn’t make too good of a politician.

Politicians were like most people but then some, their will to please the people, as unknowing as the citizenry were, was just a cool and calculated ruse to get what they wanted while the getting was good, the opportunity was ripe for ignominious behavior as the citizenry with their hearts and minds out to lunch were sitting ducks on the fault line; the politician man was never out to lunch, was always on the take passionately pleading his case all as a part of a master plan which fed his evil and sadistic egotistical makeup. Ben would’ve never been able to keep a secret, keep his trap shut to save his life so accustomed he was to brainfarting. There was hope for him though if his Achilles heel became an Olympic sport.

Until some new more savory kids moved to Lake Lock, Sean knew that he would rather be alone more than anything else in the whole wide world. Being with yourself, surrounded by your lonesome, content with your thoughts, wishes and desires made life one magical mystery tour.



One Sunday after church, Sean had hurriedly changed into his Hawaiian print shorts, a favorite tee-shirt, grabbed a p & j sandwich and high-tailed it out the door. Absentmindedly thinking, he plopped-down onto his beach cruiser . Sean considered himself a thinking man. Maybe that’s why he felt more comfortable being alone?

People were like obstructions; they hindered your reality, if you stopped yourself long enough to notice them and their associated quirks, assorted idiosyncrasies and illogical patterns of behavior you often lost sight of who you were. Losing sight of who you were was a tried-and-true, not-so-novel concept to the myriads of people that schlepped their way through everyday-existence hanging precipitously close to the edge of losing everything including their minds' at just a moment’s notice. It was a shame that they didn’t notice it, just like it was a shame that they continuously swept global warming, world hunger and urban blight under the rug. Disease and pestilence and all of those other horrific things were not laughing matters. It was a shame. A crying shame.

It was no mystery to him, like it was to others; Sean’s mind maneuvered around the universe and all of its wonders and its sad tragic stuff, too.

Tracking the lives of others didn’t make the earth spin on its axis, didn’t make the whole ball of wax go round and round but too many people thought that it did. Too many people thought so much about the lives of others that they never had time to invent a life for themselves. And they died, regretting that they had ever lived because they really hadn’t. Sean, by contrast, was cloaked in self-awareness.

Losing sense of who you were he knew was not a good thing. Without direction and focus you could find yourself eating out of garbage cans, sleeping in cardboard boxes on oil-soaked streets and quoting Shakespeare without an appreciative audience in areas where humanity (aware of its so-called creature comforts), feared to tread. His mother, Adelaide Geneva Johnson always preached these truths to him.

She walked around saying, and that’s the gospel truth. If you lose focus and direction, what have you got? You’ve got nothing! No-Thing. And that’s the gospel truth.

Adelaide, he liked to think all grown-up and call her by her given name, (at least in the privacy of his own head), probably knew a lot about focus and direction? Doesn’t losing yours make you some sort of inner Guru? The Gospel Truth anyone? Adelaide had lived through a brief failed marriage with Ted Sanders, Sean’s biological dad. Whatever that meant? He felt that the telling of that story was better left to science. When time came for Ted to pick Sean up (not literally lift, mind you), Adelaide would say, your biological dad is coming to get you. Whatever that meant? Always at that time like clockwork, Sean would fantasize about biology, DNA, dominant and recessive genes, Mendel’s butterflies, Crick and Watson, but he wouldn’t know it. The subconscious world just had a way of bending your ear, coercing you into listening. And it’s listening was better rumination if left untouched by logic. He just wondered if biological was a good or bad thing. And he would try to sort it out, by lock, stock, or barrel or by some other rudimentary algebraic equation. The logical mind unfortunately was always fighting the subconscious part of the mind and since the beginning of mind had done so. Sean, he had a reputation to uphold as a thinking man, even if the reputation’s only solid foothold was mired in the recesses of his cranium.

Adelaide cleaned houses for rich old ladies and their rich old husbands, too if the husbands were just old and not yet having a meeting with their maker. She wiped arses if they, the owner of such arses, were in decrepit shape. A shape where the bones were no longer enamel-tough. A shape that required a cement mixer theoretically and its namesake to bring them back to operational type condition. A shape that hopefully needs no further defining here. Adelaide, she cooked their meals, washed their clothes and wiped their arses if it was outlined in the addendum further defining, detailing and augmenting the job description.

It was just funny about Adelaide and her, ‘gospel focus,’ because She (oftentimes) wiped arses for a living. And besides she couldn’t mapquest her way out of the bathroom. She was like the pokey little puppy except it wasn’t the time gene that was malfunctioning but the directional gene.

Removing the sights and sounds of dilapidation, Sean rolled his $5 special beach cruiser, the one outfitted with the rusted, burnt and bent back chrome through his hood. The cruiser, he’d purchased at some old-dope-fiend’s garage sale, it (the sale) being a preamble to the dope-fiend’s nodding out, was essentially a true and trusted friend, his pony and accomplice in a adventure, both real and imaginary.

Funny, but black people he thought had planted hood in his mind. They were still working the fields, tilling the soil albeit in a much more desirable way. They were good at shortening things, making up words, starting trends; at least that’s what Adelaide said the newspeople reported. They said it like the gospel truth she said. Sean knew nothing about black people as far as he knew. Most likely they were from another planet. Once he thought he caught a glimpse of their planet on the television. It was called Soul Train. He had tired of X-box and Madden and the usual suspects, J.D., Kenny and Ben as usual were in his doghouse so the TV had become his escape of sorts.

So he had watched these black people get down on the TV. He often wondered if they were really black. He correctly knew that he wasn’t white. Paper was white; he wasn’t. He would argue with you to the death on that one.

The day was kinda hot. The kind of day where it seemed you had layers of sweat. If you bothered to wipe away the existing layer of sweat, another one cropped up and on and on down the sweat-happy line, the line disappearing somewhere into infinity, kissing the horizon, and doubling back just in time to not miss a beat. Like clockwork, perspiration was a given and like shark’s teeth, there was nothing irreplaceable about it. He figured it was a sure sign that evolution was still in operation and was sharpening its teeth in anticipation of more of the same as it traveled down destiny’s highway.



The pool was cracked, dried up; it looked withered, weathered; undeniably it was on its deathbed, badly in need of resuscitation. Old lady Johnson, his grandmother, had said that a couple of kids died there in the sixties. She’d said, it was a shame that no one knew mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, those sorts of things.

Sean thought that old lady Johnson’s DNA was mighty strong. She’d passed down the gospel truths to Adelaide. Quite possibly she’d passed down the inability to get from one side of the town to another (she was called wrong-way Johnson). She knew just about everybody. It’d been rumored because of her comings and goings that she’d ended up on the doorstep of most every family known to God and man simply due to her ineptitude in remembering from what direction she’d ventured; gaining a lot of friends in the process plus a reputation for being about as direction crazy as a blind goose without any noodles to speak of.

According to old lady Johnson, the LakeLock pool sitting not-too-pretty on its northeast corner had an illustrious past. Kings and queens had bathed there. Basked in the glory of the almighty sun. She’d said tanning contests were huge there in the fifties and early sixties. Back in those days you’d have been laughed out of town if you had a farmer’s (redneck) tan, even if you were otherwise cool. Attending Sunday school, raising money at the bake sales for starving children or recovering alcoholics, even coming from a prestigious family could not remove the stigma afforded such ill-conceived tans. There was just no honor in the tan associated with narrow minds and even narrower hearts, even if most occupiers of such tans were just humble denizens of the land tilling its soil and sowing its benefits.

He wondered if his grandmother knew much about civil rights? Of course all of the tall tales about tanning contests and undesirable tans could’ve just been a thing of legend. Idle gossip could have transpired, been transformed into truth, feeding on imagination and boredom, two entities that in separate but equal measures could create certainty out of far-reaching speculation. Beauty parlors, barbershops, bastions of truth or places where imaginations ran wild, where hair was curled and clipped, where many a reputation was soiled or stripped, therein lays the answer to truth as we know it.

Old lady Johnson said back in the heyday of the hippie movement (obviously at a time when people waved a lot), a couple of small children drowned while their flower child parents were off experimenting with illicit drugs. Spacing Out, she called it. She never failed to mention that these types of people didn’t live in Lake Lock. She thought they had come from StoneRidge, a snooty rich enclave from across the county line, which separated rich from poor, money from no money, haves from have-nots. Sort of our own personal line of demarcation, by necessity borrowed from Pope Alexander VI, whoever that was. As far as she was concerned, they were illegal immigrants. They needed, she would say, to take their sex-loving, drug smuggling, flower powers to ‘Frisco’ or some other weird enclave where strange people congregated and thought with poisoned drug-addled minds that living was all about pleasure and deranged hippie-making love. She wondered about the dysfunctional parents who had contributed to such a fine mess of young individuals----------lost souls, who participated in socially- inept lives, who lived distortions of proper living and celebrated free love like it was their personal Jesus.

These people she went on were so loved-in, peaced-out and stoned-out-of-their minds that logical things like personal responsibility, paying bills and capital punishment never entered their thought process. These types of people were so brainwashedly sick that war as a means of effecting peace never entered their equations. Memories of those insidious peaceniks she would say burnt at her soul. God knows that was true. Her aura was half-fried. Adelaide (bless her heart), always concurred. What else was she to do; she wiped old people's arses for a living?

She would say these hippies all free-loving and doing their illicit drugs had spaced out while two of the young 'uns' were losing their right to lives, liberties, and their own pursuits of happiness. Theoretically it was believed that one tried to save the other. End result was that both perished while their parents sashayed to the high heavens in their drunken stupor. That's what the paper, The Golden Globe and Chronicle had said.

When someone pulled the pair from the water, it was told that the hippies meditated. Prayed to some of their pagan Gods. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation might as well have been a foreign language because history says that no one initiated the action. With those unfortunate events coming to pass, the pool was closed; the luxuriousness of it all lay waste to a sordid past. Its waters were now considered cursed.

In the seventies some skateboarders were seen cavorting inside of its dry walls. They too were presumed to be visitors form StoneRidge. They were run out on a rail. Quite literally they were chased down the railroad tracks. The citizens of LakeLock had memories such as elephants did.

Legend has it that the pacific citizens of LakeLock had exacted vengeance on StoneRidge and its residents for their prior misgivings and so the skateboarders high-tailed it like screaming banshees. Their hairs stood up and saluted as they ran in shit-fear down the tracks. The thought of the re-invention of tarring and feathering ignited their travels. It nipped at their heels. Like mad dogs they yelped. Like consumed prey they saw their outlaw lives flashing before their very eyes.


Sean lay there on one of the rotted out chaise lounges, relics from the tormented sixties, still in existence, though unwieldy shaped. He imagined the raucous parties. He imagined the drunken free-loving longhaired illegal immigrants. He imagined the hippie girls strung out on flower power, daisies in their hair, beaded earrings strutting down their lobes. He pictured them wearing native-American clothing. Clothing that Pocahontas and her fellow Indian maidens would wear if they were in a western or a Disney movie. Images of dead children did not enter his mind. Images of that ghastly sort were off limits. The elephants were held at bay.

LakeLock's pool, both its location and entity had been dead and buried long ago. It's ghosts presumably haunted the perimeter; even swam in the waterless pool. He figured ghosts don't need no water. It was a no-man's land. It was off limits. Its exterior consisted of a shiny, new, chain link fence as high as a basketball goal. The fence's intent was to keep out intruders. Immigrants. Ne'er do wells. Triangular signs with big black lettering, with the haunting words Keep Out spelled out for all the world to see were affixed to the top of the chain-link. Another sign ominously spelling out Danger-Beware juxtaposed itself to the keep-out-ones. Some signs speaking the same language in Spanish also posed on the chain-link. This narrator doesn't speak Spanish so no translation is available.

Sounds of reverie, beautiful young ladies in pool wear lounged around Sean as he took in eyefuls of delights. Their giggles permeated the warm, tropical air. Their cocktail glasses clinked their armor. Hanging above the estate was a sense of camaraderie and belonging. A belonging that was a preamble to free love. At least in the sense of good will toward men.

Sean on the spur-of-the-moment had renamed himself Dabney Duchryche for this occasion. Dabney bathed, utterly basked in the (after-effect), glow of his own personal paradise. His fantasy island. Hula girls, sporting seductively slanted eyes and soft, sexy hips adorned by native dress, smiled and shimmied to their shake, rhythmically beating to the dance of the 'Sun Gods.' Sean, 'the Dabney Duchryche version', or short, ;The Duke, ' smoked a Cuban and toasted the fine, rhythmically dancing creatures. He toasted those who had exquisite DNA combinations. My, I would guess he was thinking, if he could think in such a manner, how he would, he'd like to (see), become acquainted with one of the marvelous double helix configurations.

Here in this vast wasteland of sun, Dabney, 'The Duke', could be anything that he so desired to be. And that was the gospel truth. He could be away from the neighborhood, that year by passing year slipped further into the abyss of small-town urban decay. Away from the one factory that still remained (standing), the others stripped bare, robbed of their dignity, their rightful place in history. The one that remained alive; standing, in all its haughty grandeur belched smoke incessantly and ill-willingly like the dinosaur it was. Sean figured from all the smoke it exhaled that it must smoke Cubans by the cartful. Out here he could be somewhat detached , away from its insidious, noxious odor. Out here he was free. Out here he was the summer's breeze.

Those twin monsters of family and neighbor, both friend and foe alike, had no say about Sean while he pranced his wares as 'The Duke'. Inside he laughed at the thought of old lady Johnson, up in years, yet still sharp enough to lay claim to the spotting of an illegal immigrant. Sean knew at precisely this moment that he was that illegal immigrant.

Party girls toasted to the sun and its killer rays. They giggled like innocent, little girls who haven't yet felt the weight of the world on their shoulders. They smiled at Sean. 'The Duke' returned the favor.

Internally he knew that it was all a momentary illusion. He would grow out and up. He would forget the cheeriness, the carefree nature of childhood. He would come home every day to a wife and 2.5 kids. He would without hesitation and with no reservation and extreme determination pay the mortgage. Bringing home the bacon would be his motto. On his forehead it would be inscripted in bold yet invisible typeface. Possibly Blue Highway. He would grow fat (pot-bellied) and weary. He would tire of the world, its pathetic losers and its insouciant people. He would unknowingly join their rank-and-file.

Driving down indifferent highway, the insouciants, himself included, wouldn't bother to inform or if you will educate themselves of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and its proletarian technique. In their haste and waste, they wouldn't give a rat's arse about anything. Living the haunting melodies of a life-unfulfilled, he would grow tired of sex, love and unadulterated kindness. And not necessarily in that order. Eventually things such as everything, the whole kit and kaboodle would come to a head. And stand on it. He would figure out how to mapquest his existence. To leave his legacy. How to leave no stone unturned. Then he would die. But not before, time willing, he would figure out that without a straight-and-narrow course, a rock-hard focus and a sharpshooter's direction that getting done what needed to be done in the right way was virtually impossible.

In his haste but wise meandering he would sign up for self-help seminars and trumpet their objectives and honor them with platitudes. Entering yoga poses uninhibitedly he would start to chop away at the unhealthy duo of body fat and mind inebriation. Vegetables would become his primary palate. He would enter vegetarianismhood. He would do without/disavow people in the hood that disagreed with his views on this and that. He would espouse and announce to the world that everything he believed in at this day and time was the gospel truth. He would lament the fact that the last dinosaur, (the candy-making, i.e., confectionary) factory would close and urban blight would further darken the local economy.

After four days, Sean had advanced from beet-red to crab reddish-brown to brown as a pinto bean, His neck wasn't a redneck variety, more like a special exotic brand of premium roast chocolate. It now was the pedigreed version of the noble, exotic cocoa bean that caused shoppers to gasp and gawk awkwardly at their outlandishly high price.

For four marvelous high-heaven days, he had dined with kings and queens. Girls had showered him with more-than-sisterly affection. Honors had come his way. He was the most tanned of the most tanned. A member of the outdoor tanning hall of fame. The tanned elite inducted him into their brown-as-a-bean circle. He'd never run into the hippies who lost themselves in bliss with such a blast and utter ferociousness that they forgot about others and the safety of them. The utopia he had discovered was all his own.

All of the neighborhood, J.D., Kenny, Ben, his sister, Harmony Delight, Adelaide, old lady Johnson and Ted Sanders had scoured LakeLock with a fine-tooth comb leaving no hair unturned. Tire tracks had been sampled. Witnesses had been enlisted for their testimony as to his whereabouts. Still no one had seen hide nor hair of Sean. No one knew that he had fallen off into the deep end, waded into the pool of self-obscurity and/or self-discovery, totally destroying Sean for a brief sacrificial moment in time and re-surfaced for a brief moment as 'Dabney The Duke.'

Hope was virtually given up and placed back on the shelves in the useless abstraction category. The townspeople were already planning a funeral, a last rites event for Sean. Old lady Johnson wanted to meditate on the matter first. Hold a prayer vigil. Leave no stone unturned.

On the 5th day, Sean scaled the 10-foot chain-link, brown as an illegal alien from across the border who made an obscure living in the fields of plenty, intending to metamorphisize back into everyday, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, no-one-would-ever-notice-me, Sean as if nothing had ever happened. Yet his whole being, his every last molecule would disagree with the assumption that he was the same being as before. By the pool, he had experienced a life-changing transformation. Same DNA. Different Sean.

As he climbed onto his rusty, trusty, cruiser, his stallion in waiting, a police officer walked up. With intensely red eyes and coffee-stale breath the inquisitor looked at the boy and then looked down at a picture that he held in his hands. Sergeant, O'Dooly'han looked back and forth from the picture to the boy to the picture to the boy to the picture. Sean stared back at the stare-crazy officer in blue.

"Your name, sir?"

"Dabney. Dabney Duke." Sean swallowed. An enormous lump had gathered in his throat.

"Excuse me, have you seen this young man?" The officer pushed the picture too close to Sean, violating his personal space, he believed. "Name of Sean Grayson, I believe. Been missing for days, possibly weeks?" Sounds of desperation echoed in his voice.

Dabney (Sean), didn't crack a smile or even take in oxygen. He held his breath. Like he was thinking. Thinking real DEEP. He painted the most elegant stroke of nonchalance that had ever been painted in the universe. The universe's. That's what he was thinking.

"Don't reckon I have."

The man's eyes peering out from the steely blue uniform questioned Sean or Dabney if you will, for all he was worth. Sean wondered if he was a human lie detecting machine.

"Well if you see him..............you best run along, your folks probably looking for you."

Dabney didn't know if that was true or not. On the northeast corner by the rusted-out pool with cracks in its crust he had become a man. He had outlived IF. The boy in the picture no longer existed. During his poolside sabbatical, the madly-yellow Earthian sun had blessed him with immigrant-brown skin. It had fried his youthful brain showing no MERCY. In his pseudo spiritual awakening, realization after realization had whapped him up side the head. Enlightenment, nirvana, something new and pure and wholly wonderful had occurred out there in his personal wilderness. His Shangri-La.

In a few days he had learned what it takes most men lifetimes to comprehend. It was like the defiled pool air so distraught with its own memories had done him in. A rite of passage had taken place. Man had replaced boy. And still as strange as it seemed and probably because life was so utterly bizarre, yet inordinately fascinating, he still didn't know in which direction he was headed or what adventure he was taking up next. He just knew that boyhood and lounging by the pool, smoking Cubans and hitting up pretty ladies in their poolside best was a relic of a very distant past. If he knew one thing, it was that.

Somewhere as sure as night and day encompasses 24 hours of a typical Earth day he could hear the shrill yet melodic voice of old lady Johnson in all of her dotage say, and that's the gospel truth.

You

Used to stare at you across the gymnasium, eyes locking, smiles connecting; a thing of beauty.


The cultural divide flows between us like a river never crossed. I'd never been in love before, okay recently, I'd tried out the puppy version; the one everybody says isn't real. It passed, but concerning you and my love it took some time some pain no one should ever have to feel. Not being able to let you in on the secret for so long, that's a shame. The psychiatrist couldn't unlock the secret to my pain. (He talked biorhythms; his personal mumbo-jumbo. I'd read of them. I doubted his intelligence. ) Over time I did the trick myself; unlocked the chamber of secrets.





Oh how I wish we could go back in time, you and I, youthful again, the whole world bright and new again. Things would be different now or would they be? The world has gotten a little bit kinder but still there are barriers, strongholds to be defeated, (overturned). They relish my pain. Don't they know it? Would they curse me or would they feel my pain? Say it's ok?





Simple pleasures like seeing you in your athletic attire, the little fold of fat on your legs, fat has never looked so sweet, checking you out in your leopard print dress, oh that was too much (laughs). ( I am a man of simple pleasures).



Seeing you in the theater on Main street it'd been a while, tried to touch you but you held me at bay forgot to tell you I'd loved you or I did love you, the memory fades now. The elephant takes a backseat.



Finally in the prime of our lives, no longer wet behind the ears, you, husband, 2 kids, getting you alone for a brief second, making up for lifetimes never shared it's simple, you make do with what you have, that's the way of the world. Couldn't we ever learn they kept us apart for so long, my life has been embittered, my life has been one long, strange, faulty dance, in that moment I tell you, remember when, you listen closely, back then in the famishment of youth I loved you, you smile, you ask me if I still do, for a moment disregarding the hub and kids, you're curious, we're still young. Is there a plan behind your question? Do you want out? What are you feeling? I tell you how much pain and suffering I went through holding this in so many years; I know that's all water under the bridge. Why couldn't I have been revolutionary? Was I born too early or too late? No one, including you, could understand the pain I went through, how it redirected my life put my (existence) on a false course.



Hey, it's even hard for me to fathom how sick my body felt, how I would rather lay on the bed, than go outside and play. The illness wasn't a Godsend, more like the devil's macabre medicine. It wasn't something you'd want to send anybody. Anyway I'm here, I see you, it looks like you're doing well. Does anybody ever really know how someone else is doing? It's often hard to figure out how you're doing, yourself.





Which brings me to this conclusion: Oh so long ago I told you how I'd felt. Now in my aging state I wonder how you took it all in? How did it make you feel? Did it awaken the little girl in you? I hope that you were happy then, happy now. Happiness is a good thing, not the surest or easiest thing to accomplish but it's mighty damn good when you get it right.



Yes, I loved you, more than you'll ever know, just like you'll never understand the pain I went through, you'll never really understand how much I loved you; comprehension is a weird thing, comprehending the strength, vitality, power and pain of such love is a herculean task, it would take centuries, it would take undivided attention, it would take tapping into another's soul, so I don't slight you because you don't understand, you just wanna know if I still love you.



I guess a piece of me always will, a portion of heart was taken away secretly in the night back when it all began, never did I know it, did I realize it but it must've happened, if dreaming about you now is any indication, there must be a reason, forgive me, I won't ask for my heart back, I don't take back what I give, a gift is done, don't call me a thief, call me human, with watchful eyes, checking out your chesire smile, your natural floating hair, you were so pretty then, so youthful and free, guess I could say I was lucky to have known you in that time, no matter how shallowly I knew you, how interminable it was, I had a slight knowing. Life must be filled with slight knowings? Most are just strangers passing, a smile, a glance, not a second thought but some cut to the core, leave their imprint, change a life. Wouldn't it be nice to get back a moment, time wasted, discard the pain, going backwards in time? Discarding the pain could become a pasttime of mine. You only get one shot at this life, you gotta make do the best you can , reliving the moments, if you could change them reverse the course of your years on the planet. But in the here and now, we both know things such as time are so irreversible. Time heals all wounds, they say. I say, give it time; you ask me back then in the midpoint of our knowing, do you still, (love me)?



Out of the presence of your husband, your kids, on the surface, I have to answer no. Yet, don't think that I haven't, even if now a part of me doesn't want to go there for psychological reasons. If here and now, face to face, your lips moments away from mine, memories leaking from the subconscious flooding all semblance of rhyme and reason, chaos inventing chaos is possible if I answer, "Yes, I do." Just think of all the pain that would still be percolating inside of my soul, desire burning out the last vestiges of my sanity. Just think. Just think it would be unbearable. Maybe it would have been better if you would have been my puppy love # 2? It would've been easier this traversing of the universe. No telling if I would've had the same amount of inspiration but I ask you what has it gotten me, (procured) me anyway?



Pain without matyrdom is too much pain, (laughs). Really if I still loved you in the way that I'd loved you, when our eyes locked back when we were pupils, when our smiles and laughter connected, it would be so unbearable to be standing here now. I grant you a (pardon). I had to release myself. It took some time, screwed my life up, confused, distorted my path. When it, the love ended, it was good, a miracle blessing, because a body, mind and soul can only take so much pain, so much abuse. And you know what they say about psychiatric pain, no one knows how you feel, what you're going through, you're just labeled a slacker, so good riddance to that ill will.



And yes, if I loved you in that way any longer, believe me, write it down, I would either be dead or certifiably insanely crazy. Maybe I am certifiably insanely crazy. My legacy might be the volumes of craziness' literature that shrinks write about me. Guess you can see why I had to give it up, the love of you, you, because of the implications, the situations, the confrontations beyond our control back then in our tender years full of unsavory fears, now in our middle years, they, (the implications), still lurk and we've added more but yes I still love you enough to picture you in my dreams, think of you at this very moment, wondering what might've been how our lives could've better been captured on film and I hope you understand what it was that brought me here, I had to tell you and I hope you'll understand.



You'll never know what I went through and God Bless You that you don't. You'll always have a sliver of my heart and please I ask, protect it, keep it safe, out of harm's way. It's been there before in harm's way; it's felt the wrath of the uncaring. So in this moment of thought and sincere reflection, I guess I Love You and because of all of the years and tears, I hope and pray that I don't wake up tomorrow dreaming of You.

Short Story 2

A Hippie and a Diplomat

I smoked pot in Amsterdam and conversed with the local diplomats over the nature of heroin. It seemed that too many people were having problems due to the destructiveness of the horse habit. Drugs long having been accepted in Dutch society, the discourse among the elected officials was quite unusual. Probably these same gentlemen had generously partaken of the substances they now condemned. Their reasoning was that society was going to pot. They didn’t mean pot as in marijuana, mary jane, etc., but it was funny because as the Dutch laws became more restrictive to harsher drugs this tended to happen. The lighting of marijuana cigarettes (pot) was at an all-time high.

Myself, a product of the Sixties, still a possessor of the shaggy do, a la George Harrison in his Beatle days smoked pot daily. Morning, afternoon and night. First thing in the morning I would roll some cannabis and heat up some tea, both for chasing the wheat donut. Trying to be healthy, high and motivated all the same time.

Morning was the best time. Every time I lit up, my mind conjured up fabulous images. Orgies of the unconscious. It invented thought so colorful and pure, far beyond the limits of normal imagination. Bummer was, every time I recalled the cancer warning signs: shortness of breath, nausea, dizziness, clamminess, lack of appetite, insomnia, fear struck a chord which resonated loudly, ambivalently, discordant. But by either the next day or the next sitting, I’d usually forgotten the ill effects of my pal, mary jane. She was too much fun. Besides who’d give a shit if some old hippie up and died from the green green grass of home. I was out for a natural high induced by good old cannabis, of course. With all the crap the world dumped on you, she proved beneficial. With her, life became magical for a while. Even if the magic existed only inside of your head, all the insults, the idiots, the disappointments, the heartaches were totally washed away, annihilated, cleaned up by your best friend. Mary jane.

Back in the Sixties I’d come out of Berkeley, Mr. Nerd. Yes, I’d participated in the war-ins and a couple of Civil Rights shindigs. Religiously I’d listened to the Supremes, Joplin, Hendrix, Otis Redding, The Buffalo Springfield, Morrison. All of this tended to raise my social consciousness a bit. Still I wore thick glasses, dressed awful, and even worse, I was the studious type. Mr. Nerd.

I’d gone nude at Woodstock, fondling the au natural chicks with my lustful eyes. What a time it was! Everybody’s mind was exploding with orgiastic delight.

In the early Seventies I’d participated in love-ins, communal type get-togethers of swapping chicks like some people swapping glances. This was when I first experienced drugs. Some redheaded babe with the kindest areolas turned me onto hash, turned me on so I could tune out. I fucked her. Doors music filling up every breath, every space in the room as we engaged in tribal lust, doing it like animals burying the civilization inherent in the outsides of our universes. I was tripping. I didn’t know it but some psycho-cosmic individual of the party set laced the lime-green punch with lysergic acid. LSD. Talk about high. For days we stayed up, me and the redhead with the areolas off and on getting it on, paying homage to the physical self, screwing the morality of the square-minded rulers of the world, conservative as they were from sea to shining sea.

During a space of seventy-two fucking hours, I remember standing in the street, nude as God had created Adam, picketing for free love. Up with love down with war. Some of the more conservative ruling class walked by calling me commie, freak-o bastard, homosexual, tripped-out sonofabitchin’ alien. I had removed my glasses. I couldn’t see shit.

I was so loaded, so sexed out, so fucking mad about the absurd existentialist view that society was taking on during this time that I stood there a wise-ass grin on my face and literally shit in the street. Hoping to soil the souls, the attitudes, the egos of the upper crust.

Accumulating pain seems to be a coming alive point in life. If you’ve got enough pain you’re definitely alive. During this time I found out I had plenty of pain, but every day mary jane made life a little more like being in the funhouse. A carousel ride for the mind. You’d never find me at one of those psychoanalyst freaks. I’d be the first in line when the pot-laced brownies got passed out though. Like my mother who committed suicide during a car crash always said, “Clean your ass out.” Of course my dad died the same day. Mutual suicide? So much for the holidays. My brother and I spent them at an old nun’s home tearfully reciting, ‘Hail Marys.’

For a while between Berkeley and Oxford, the site of my graduate studies in Diplomatic Relations, the doe-eyed, redheaded chick, actually Kimmie with the redhot areolas, and I, we lived together. We partied. I worked in the public library. She was a consultant for a low0cost housing commission. We fucked. We partied some more. Life was treating us fairly nicely. But we were always tired. After two years we woke up, she woke up nauseated, I was kinda happy but unsure, so I too became nauseated.

With the growing of her belly she became overly emotional. I became withdrawn. The third card in a two-card deck. As her belly grew rounder and rounder, she stopped doing chemicals, smoke, whatever, I stopped seducing her, though I still loved her. Then a thin line of animosity sprouted and began to blossom, widening the gulf between us. I still loved her and I loved the child or love had made. Still the vision of free love had become clouded over by the dark clouds of reality. Feeling a little too weighted down by reality, I quit the library, packed my bags kissed her areolas goodbye. I left her a note professing my love, promising I would be back to see this out. Be one happy family forever.

I love you because you melt me like sunshine. Brighten up my cloudy days. God knows like shit I don’t want to leave you. I’ll probably cry a few rivers after today, but Jehovah have mercy on my soul. I’m like the wandering village idiot. I’ve got to find my peace. I’ve got to find my mind. Even though, I say goodbye, I say hello.

Love, Jamie

Your friend forever.

P.S. You were always more than a piece of meat.

I hitched a ride on a tour bus to the outskirts of that oh-so European city nestled among the Americas, San Francisco. Old Victorian homes book rising and falling beyond the horizon within the boundaries of the golden gate. For a while, on a cold August evening, it rained, poured on my ass as I stood bewildered, thumb outstretched, heading south on the five reaching into my spirit.

Wet water drenching me cutting through my bones I shivered cried my own downpour undone by the melancholy. Words like song lyrics cut into me the past screwing with my sensibilities the unreality of the situation undercutting all reality. Then colder than shit, trance-ridden like a yogi I stepped into the cab of a Sixty- four GMC truck, a black dude and a white chick with a handsfull of tits welcoming me into their ship. I sailed onto the ship of fools. Ready for the ride of my life.

“Hey man, what’s up?” The white sister looked into my eyes lustily setting a place for me in the truck.

“You’re looking cold, brother.”

“Me and my man thought we’d rescue you from the precipitation.” She laughed and smiled into my eyes.

“Thanks for the welcome wagon.”

“This rainshit. Raining hippos and elephants eh brother?” The soulbrother laughed and gave me one of those looks you better not mess with this white chick, this is my piece of ass, my friend.

“Groovy.”

The oreo couple smiled at me, their eyes descending into a vacuum, a subterranean black hole. These cats were carrying. They had to be up to something. They were as loaded on mind-altering substances as the Black Hills were with quartz and granite.

“Hey brother, what are you doing on a night like this? Need your head examined?” The dude once again spoke and swam right into a volley of laughter. His laughter bouncing off hers bouncing off the fake laugh I managed to conjure up bouncing it right back to her crisscrossing the molecular chain of air back to him. I could tell they were too partied-out to know what was going on in my head. I’d been there. I’d been exactly where they were and I knew they were somewhere beyond the physical reality of this time and place.

“Need to have your head examined,” the white soulsister repeated his line, thinking it so funny. Laughing so hard she spit on me involuntarily, sex acts being played out in monotone. I shifted uneasily in my seat. The brother drove on as the woman nibbled on his shoulder, then his chest. I stared out the window trying to hide my embarrassment at the events happening beside me, thinking of Kimmie, my last joint, our last time together, how fucked up I’d become.

Hey man, you like to drive?” The dude was arcing his back, his eyes squinting tighter, dipping like the setting sun below the horizon. I believed she was giving him pleasure now, but I didn’t dare look. Things of this nature were private things to me. I didn’t get off watching others go for joyrides.

We bounced off the road, the truck slowing, unnerving us as it dropped off the shoulder. Out into the rain the oreos sloshed, quacked, in webfooted motion like ducks under the bursting sky. Into the bed of the truck they dove; they made it their own. Nesting.

Dumbfounded I stared out the window noticing the shapes of raindrops, the shapes of things passing into the night. I daydreamed as the rain poured from the sky washing away the earth which harbored us. Behind me in the truckbed, animals in heat sent out love calls, imitating the wildness of nature as the showers cascaded down their backs.

“Hey.” The dude was rapping on the window, eyes glazed. The rain had stopped. He passed me a joint. I looked surprised. Accepting the offer naturally I took a couple of tokes starting to feel the full effects of mary. I smiled silly, passed the joint back to the white chick now sitting beside me. They sat there under a blanket, faces lit up like angels, her butt pressing out from under its hiding place, the whiteness of her thighs illuminating the dark black night.
They laughed and he passed another joint to my fingertips. We smoked. We smoked like we were getting paid to do this. We smoked like it was another form of making love. We smoked like there was no tomorrow. We smoked time away.
The brother coughed, spit out the window. Phlegm-driven, we smoked on. “Hey man, think you could drive us to our habitat?”

I couldn’t imagine the road, the lines between the shoulders, the lines in our faces, but I’d been down this road before so I said, “Yeah.”

He gave me directions to somewhere in Oakland. They fell into the back. I moved over, eyed the gas pedal, the brake. It was an automatic. I was fucked up but I could drive this vehicle in the third dimension if I had to. I drove away listening to Sly and The Family Stone.



“It’s a family affair. It’s a family affair.
One child grows up to be somebody who just loves to learn.
Another child grows up to be somebody who you’d just love to burn.
Both kids are good to ma. Love is thicker than the blood.
It’s a family affair. It’s a family affair. It’s a family affair.”

By the time I’d arrived at their L-shaped, green and white three-bedroom, I felt as if my body was being overtaken by a foreign element. Later I learned I’d been introduced to Mr. PCP. He’s not a pretty boy.

Inside were various twosomes and a couple of extra chicks. Including myself, only three of us were white. Already fucked-up to the max, I was coerced into popping some L. Mild stuff they said. Joint after joint and a hash pipe made the rounds. The earth revolved in the room on the axis of our minds.

I napped for a few minutes. They seemed like years. I was awakened by a black chick, a full-on afro nestling under my chin, her lips reaching mine musically nibbling on my lower lip. We made love. Psychedelia filled the room. Day-glo posters emanating off the walls. Flashing lights like UFOS flying through our space and time continuum.

In the morning I wakened, vomit stuck to my shirt. Feeling like three-day-old bread I rolled over on the couch. In the back everyone was still asleep except for one couple. They moved piston-like under African print bed sheets, oblivious to everyone and everything else. Loving in a hyper-conscious state. I noticed the chick I’d been with. She was lying next to some other fucker. Bliss spread like a sunny billboard across his face. It seemed funny because I felt like shit. I moved out into the sunshine of my life mumble-singing under my breath, “It’s a family affair. It’s a family affair.”

Hysterically I laughed. A dog walked by pulling a man like a plowhorse for all he was worth. Feeling numbed by the twists and turns the winding road of life takes us down, I stepped into a little coffee shop, Randy’s. I polished off some coffee. The overweight waitress made eyes at me staring thorough her purple-orange eye shadow trying to penetrate he impenetrable haze I was languishing under. I felt sick.

Noticing a telephone, I asked for change and dialed away searching for Heaven. “Hey, Mike, I’m lost, like lost in space. I need your help. I left my woman, lost direction. Man, I’m fucked up.”

Calling my brother had been a good idea. Mike had a common square head on his shoulders. I needed sanity. He was the carbon copy.

Mike reacted like all good brothers do, he listened, he scolded, he overreacted, he re-listened. He wired me money. I picked up my money from a Western Union outpost. Then I hopped the Greyhound. I needed to seek sanity. Mike said I could hole up with him in San Diego for a while. I visualized. No drugs. No chicks. Just Midwestern middle-of-the-road type boredom living. I thought I was ready. I checked my secret pocket for my joints. They were still there. A little moist but secure.



“Hey, brother, you been overdosing on us, eh?” My brother sounded Canadian. Turned out he had grown his hair, gone to Canada, come back, changed his name, become a new individual. Though underneath all the camouflage he was still the same brother I knew from before. The basic Mike.

“Here’s your bag.” The busdriver grinned a shit-eater and tossed my duffle-bag with the good-natured gall of a drill sergeant. He knew I wasn’t military material. Get-down-kick-some-ass-in-your-face-go-to-war material. I saluted him with an icy stare.

“Hey slim, Jamie, don’t let the guy get under your skin.” Mike patted my shoulder and led me away. Led me away like the dog had led the man after I’d seen the sunlight beyond the darkness back in Oakland. My brother, my rainbow.



“Now that you’re out canvassing the country, you’re draft material. Lt. Material. They don’t care…they really don’t if you don’t have a shit-kicking bone in your body.”

Looking through a glass of milk, I lowered my eyes ashamed of what I’d become in such a short time. I ate Mike’s donuts. I drank his two-percent milk. I connected with him. Brotherly love.

I stayed with Mike the rest of the summer. Sober the most of the day. Lit up in the evening. Sometimes with Mike. He’d come a long way.

I wanted to become a diplomat, a communicator. I applied to Oxford. My grades pulled me through, they accepted my application. I was leaving the states. I was going to get my masters. My thesis would be the history of diplomatic relations between foreign powers and little struggling under-sufficient nations.

Funny, just before I left, my brother saw the evil in his potsmoking ways. He almost convinced me to give up my good ol’ faithful mary jane. He lectured me about the evils of her, trying to get me to adopt the boring two-martini lunch nature of the diplomat instead. “If you don’t quit you’re nothing but a pothead,” he said. We argued for days over cheap wine, foregoing sleep, filibustering ideas, morals, inventing new religions. I finally convinced him I was a convert to the Rastafarian religion just in case I came upon some good English stuff. But unfortunately brother Mike had planted the seeds of doubt in my head, and a mighty internal battle would now have to be waged on my interior battlefield.



When I’d first arrived, I’d cut my hair to impress the educators. They thought the non-existence of hair made me a neo-nazi. The administrators painted a picture of me that was imprecise, certainly inconclusive regarding the nature of my being. To hell with them, I grew back my hair with a vengeance.
I studied my ass off. Ate multitudes of donuts. Subsisted mostly on coffee and those donuts. Didn’t have sex for a whole year. Smoked a joint occasionally with a few philosophical (not to be confused with black) brothers. I was still waging the battle my brother had ignited. The tedious nature of life, I bored myself to death sometimes. But mostly sober, I read Plato, Descartes, all about the big bang, evolution, the Bible three times, Confucius” sayings. I had disciplined myself. In a way I had become a military man. I was educated like the elite. Only difference was my hawk’s nose didn’t sit snot-high in the air like a tormentor above the shit-kicking masses.

Education is a hell of a muscle. The best tool to chip, screw, tighten, loosen, bolt, whatever. It’s a tool you gotta have. At least I do. My dreams realized I became a diplomat. A kind of foreign correspondent.
During this time of transition, out of boredom I began to smoke again. How miserable life had been.



As I sat there majestically puffing on my weed, snowcapped mountains surrounding me, my freezing mind expanding, I smoke out with ambassadors from ten little-known countries, some from Africa, Asia and Europe. Sat there we did on top of the Himalayas spacing out on the subject of third world domination. I agreed with them about the wrongful imperialistic nature of some countries I hesitate to mention. I agreed with them about the awfulness of the Vietnam War. The war effort made me sick. I puked anti-war feelings. They puked with me. As the smoke circled around our heads we did our jobs, conversing defiantly, disagreeing with the moral nature of the good old U. S. of A. The whole war thing left a bitter taste in our collective mouths.

We compared notes on the best grasses around the world. The drug trade. Its ifs ands buts. We’d done this many times before. I’d turned the stiff-shirts on, being the connoisseur of these things. The loose cannon. They knew fine wines, high society bitches. I knew moral decline, orgies in the back of trucks, drug slumber. Sometimes I felt as if I’d masterminded the whole damn scene. Cannabis was my friend. We sang.

“Cannabis was my friend.
In every doorway, more and more each day
In every vision I see, the hemp that gets to me
Will be with me to the end.
Cannabis is my friend.”

It kind of gets to you the first time you hear a big-time official say, “I’m fucked up.” But I’d heard the sentiment expressed many times before, though in different ways. Different expressions that I’d helped teach them. Basically I’d helped them to loosen up. I, being the master.

“I’m totally wasted. Smashed out of my gourd, man. I’m leaving this plane of existence, sublimating myself into the next realm, beyond consciousness as I speak.” The China guy always had this Confucius type thing they felt he had to reveal. Confucius was like a Superman to some of the inhabitants of the Chinese culture.

“I like ze out there, shadow of the moon, blowin’ in the wind. My mind, it’s cosmic man.” Some of the Europeans you couldn’t understand. Just wished they would shut the fuck up.

I just repeated the same ole thing, “Some monster man jumped like a monkey ass-high onto my back, stole the oxygen from my lung center and parted the molecules of my mind, my existence. In other words, I’m fucked up.” I took just like I gave. I took a little of each from all kinds of wisdom. Made myself into a roundabout marshmallow smorgasbord pie. Gooey, eclectic, and open-minded.

These gatherings proved quite beneficial to the world as a whole. Once when a European country was about to invade his Asian neighbor, I called a joint gathering of the smoking diplomats club. Between tokes of some fine Bolivian grass I’d hastily procured from the Bolivian embassy, an agreement was reached. The two countries remained peacefully apart. Another time, a wanted killer was fighting extradition to the U.S.
The murderer was hiding in the Andes. I invited the Peruvian diplomat to a private smoke-out. We smoked until an agreement was near. He called his leader. After arranging prostitute delivery for the diplomat and his president, the deal was consummated. My friends got their jollies off and the killer was extradited.

I smoked in the Andes with fur traders, fishermen, and my diplomatic friends. We got high-we loved to get high in high places. Then we rode our souls down to the Amazon and swam like fish on native rafts with the builders of these rafts swimming the swim of life with us. With the native peoples, we smoked on long, thin peace pipes, ran around in flowery, tiny native garments. Made love to the native women unspoiling our nakedness under the pale yellow eyes of the moon.

I smoked pot. My stash emptying out on the shores of the Mediterranean. The diplomats, hangers-on, and I, we took journeys to the Pyramids. Fried our brains like greased bananas. Dreamed up theories, pure conjecture, about the massive structures that lay before us in the path of our eyesight defying the laws of physics, the laws of nature. We dreamed of mummies. That we were mummies. We smoked the stash until our asses were blue in the face.

My cronies and I, we tended to change our posts together. Occasionally someone would be a year or two behind the others. This only happened on a couple of occasions. For example, the Frenchman Andresor Gibaud stayed in Guam a little longer than the rest of us. Keeping a mistress on the shores it was a little harder for him to leave.

We smoked together as we spaced ourselves around the globe. I smoked, we smoked, in Africa. On the plains. Astride our jeeps, in our minds astride wild horses, our zebras. We counted the animals with accountant’s eyes. We smoked. We smoked the terrains like great white, brown, black, red hunters. We dreamed we were animals. Giraffes, elephants, ostriches, hippos were our alter egos. We got inside the primitive nature of man. Wondered why man was so primitive. So primitive in his desire to inflict pain on others. Was it just his way of creating jobs? We wondered. We contemplated. We spaced. We laughed. We cried. I made love on the plains not a woman in sight. In my mind I became an animal lusting like a wild beast.

I smoked pot in all the finest places. Cannabis (mary jane) was my friend. I had pals. We smoked. I smoked. We smoked here there and everywhere. We conducted business for our countries and the world, hastily but competently. Smoothing over relations with many a disturbed ruler. Caressing the egos of many a tyrant with the best smoke money could buy. In the halls, the boardrooms of our profession we made deals, we smoked over agreements. We were professionals. We were addicts. If our constituents found out how fucked-up we usually were they either be disgusted or want to join us. Still we discussed the matters at hand, world matters, with intelligence, vision and creativity. At least before the sleep-inducing nightcap.

My life was one big toke. Still throughout life I assumed my profession with the air, the nature of a professional.

I hardly ever saw my family or what was left of it, Mike. Last time I had seen him was ten years before. We went to Mexico discussing the politics and philosophy of philanthropy. He’d made money in oil, before the crude died its slow domestic death.

Down in Mexico, we drank cervases. He was against my good old faithful companion, mary. Stiff-shirted collar and tie, beady eyes, he lectured me while I sang. Sang about the experience the night before, newly-purchased guitar on my hip accompanying me in two-chord. Harmony.

“Rolled some senorita down Mexico way
in between smoking Mexican grass
fondling her ____________
thanks for the experience however crass
thanks for the Mexican _____________.”

Black and Beautiful

Beauty doesn't come in any one-skin color. It comes in all. But I prefer the black girl. Ebony child of the Negro grace. Songbird of sweetness and soulfulness. Princess of artful movement. Black and mysterious as the night. Catlike as the wind. Sturdy as the earth. So full of spiritual loveliness, revealed in the elegance of song rising from deep within the magnificence of her breast. Giving us blessings. Songs of the spirit. Songs of hope. Songs of truth. Songs of yearning. Songs of freedom. Down-home spiritual blues composed in the fields of labor. The inexhaustible pain removing itself.

Brought forth from Africa, the homeland, the motherland, to be heard in the ghettos, after the chains had been removed, there still lie the chains. Still she burst forth with song, emancipating herself, her people, her existence. Singing of indignity. Singing of poverty. And singing of unity. Singing still for freedom. Singing with style and beauty. Always in key. Always in perfect harmony. Laden with rhythm. Earth-shattering soulful sounds.

Tried and tested. Beaten and raped. Yet forever inside her heart, a heavenly melody proudly vibrates, soulfully arranging, illuminating her charm. And she’s forever aflame with immeasurable amounts of courage and dignity, resourcefulness and hope. Unrelenting in her drive, in her desire, in her beauty-----------too wonderful, to describe. Almost too much to behold. She’s my girl, my woman, my lady, my honey, black and beautiful.
She moves with a rhythm. Talks with a sweet sound singing from her full-lipped lips. Laughs, spiritually, enthusiastically, displacing the sadness, the pain. Shakes sexiness from her tangled yarn of hair-black and beautiful to her numbered toes, but nowhere does sexuality exude more than from her well-defined roundness of hips. Round as the earth. Black as the soil. Black and beautiful.

I watch her dance the dance she dances. She makes me proud. She makes me long for her touch, her love, her soul, her all. And with her dance, she sings with those full-lipped lips, her colorful notes painting the sounds of the universe. Her soul echoes upon and kisses my own, and I give my love to the graceful creature, all of my heart and soul. She’s my queen, black and beautiful.

Her long, slender, black fingers caress mine own. Hypnotized by her mystique, I search her countenance, for traces of vulnerability. Her noble forehead and charcoal eyes hold deep secrets, secrets of generations before, 400 years of before. Breaking the calm, she cries out in anguish, reaching for something, something I cannot give. She searches my spirit, my soul, my eyes, my very essence. “What’s in me,” she asks? She listens. She perceives. She kisses me through the wind with her soulful passion, like the summer sun bakes me, warmly, comfortably. I long to hold her, hold her tightly, as tightly as the womb holds her child. Again she kisses me. Our lips as one bring us together, together filled with hope, yearning. Dreaming and believing that our togetherness is foreverness. I hold my Cleopatra, black and beautiful.


Remember this is poetry, an art form. There are redundancies, a lot of punctuation problems but this is my creation and since I know the rules, I choose to break them, just as I choose to do so in my own way in this thing we call life.

Short Story 1

the infamous saedy

Saedy Guttridge Livingston Matthewson the 4th was a diehard, a blowhard, a

chronic womanizer, a cheater of life and he did all of these things in mathematical

proportions.

Rumor had it, with a couple mil of his allowance he brokered a deal to attend

and graduate from Harvard with the highest honors, summa cum laude, while

socializing on the finest beaches of the Caribbean (French Martinique), the French

Riviera, et al with the debutante of the week. In essence, he would attend in spirit

but his personal mind and body would be living it up in much more desirable

locales. After all, someone had to do it. Of course to make it palatable for the

family name, a stand-in, a chair-sitter, a test-taker if you will, would wander the

hallowed halls of the Ivy League institution and would put in the required work

most diligently and most excellently and would bring home the sheepskin.

Somewhere Saedy would be waiting, mint-juleped, tanned and loved to the hilt,

yet he would be waiting.

Of course everyone knows Money Talks and Bullshit Walks. After Saedy’s

stand-in graduated from Harvard and then Princeton or Yale law, one of the

Matthewson family henchmen, of which rich, socialite-responsible families of the

jet set had in their employ (on the weekly payroll for future considerations), would

eliminate him, carcass, and trace, from the face, midsection and butt of the earth.

Of course, Saedy (pronounced Seedy) wasn’t as seedy as you might be

thinking. Yes, he would graduate from Harvard summa cum laude and from

Princeton or Yale law with top-notch success and considerations from prestigious

firms being proffered in the form of business-world love notes. The echelonic, as

he liked to call them would come calling, ringing him up, pleading with him to be

a member of their stable. And of course he would be romancing on the Riviera,

French, Italian, Mexican, or American (Laguna Beach) or the Caribbean (French

Martinique) and while romancing and drinking mint juleps and martinis (Oh what

a sacrifice, he would think!) he would be perusing Parisian-model-types in ultra

slim bikini wear, which were optional of course. But it isn’t like you think. Not at

all. Precisely not like you think. Because Saedy wasn’t that seedy. And especially

not with a name like Saedy Guttridge Livingston Matthewson the 4th. He might be

a diehard, a blowhard, a chronic womanizer, and a cheater of life. And of course

all of these things he would admit to and that he did them in mathematical

proportions. But, he would say, have faith in humanity. It’s not like you think.

Not at all. He (listen carefully) he would say, he did not, he would not, he most

assuredly could not just pay these fine institutions for their education. Firstly, it

was beyond his conscience. Secondly, it would so soil the family name, and the

rumors of bootlegging and drug-running back in the beginning of civilized

America had tried to do so with their Nietzschean will power so much already

that the mere mention or thought thereof (of soiling) was quite unconscionable.

In this instance he had told his father, Roderick Saedy Guttridge Livingston

Matthewson the 3rd, he was a conscientious objector when it came to that kind

of soiling. Maybe that’s when his father broke in and said that, reminded him

that… that’s what Wisk is for? Maybe he didn’t? Whatever. The whole point

of this utter ridiculousness is that Saedy would not soil the family name.

He would not accept an education without attendance. So, even though, the

mere thought of attending Harvard and either Princeton or Yale law was mind-

boggingly frightening, Saedy had no intention to be that seedy. Of course it’s

how you look at it, your point of view, because Saedy’s butt wouldn’t be the

butt leaving its cheeky imprints at Ivy institutions. Ivy league furniture would

never hunker down beneath him. And his mind would only venture there in

nightmarish daydreams. So it’s how you look at it.

The chair-sitter, the test-taker, if you will, would be taking on the identity of

Saedy the 4th. His body, his brain, in effect his soul would be bought for the

betterment of the Matthewson clan. The doing so, was not so much a time-honored

tradition, just a way of making major green work to your advantage. Saedy

Guttridge Matthewson the 4th had his behind pinpointed for other, more

delicious, or so he thought, locales. So buying your way to success, which

was definitely a time-honored tradition, was a great option for one of such brain,

provided that you sported the necessary moolah.

No doubt Saedy’s brain wasn’t exactly Broca’s; wasn’t exactly apportioned

for such high-life educational adventures. His brain was more like chopped

liver to Einstein’s transcendent apparatus. And, yes, thank God, by the grace

of God, the 3rd could definitely buy the 4th’s way into privilege, into Harvard

and Yale or Princeton law. And, Heaven knows (only Heaven knows) with

that kind of pedigree anything was possible.

Somewhere on an extremely desirable beach, while transcending the normal

blasé humdrum existence of the common man, Saedy pondered the possibilities that

would be his when he was so elegantly pedigreed. The presidency perhaps? King of

the world? I imagined, he smirked, probably peed his pants, as he was thinking that

one up? Because as everyone knows, Money Talks and when Money Talks, Bullshit

Walks. That had a nice feel, a celebratory ringing in his ears or could it be a French

mosquito, a loathsome creature, who didn’t know who in the hell he was messing

with?

Saedy turned over and his Parisian doll, who cost a mil a day but looked like

the debutante from Heaven squared, rubbed sunscreen onto his parched, scaly

back and purred like a tigress in his ear. She rubbed one angelic tanning-brown

hand through his follicles and massaged his scalp with undoing power. She was

undoing his stress. Oh what a stressful life he led. She was good at caressing

follicles, backs, whatever needed caressing, a soft touch. She had been plucked

straight from l’Ecole De Massage De Paris. It’s amazing what I mil a day could

buy! He knew.

“A little on the left. Right there.” She hit the spot with unerring accuracy.

A debutante with all that. He whimpered like a baby as she rubbed the lotion in,

soothing his much-maligned pores.

“P-u-u-rr.” She purred. Half happy, half sad, his lips met somewhere in the

middle. It’s a shame; the world would never know what he was feeling. His life

had been one crazy trip down one long and strange road.

Yes, it was so eerie to think about, but after his clone was done studying his

ass off, he would be eliminated for the common good. Of course, no one would

know, why, how, when, or where and that was all well and good. The not

knowing part protected both the Matthewson name and their money. And

protecting the family jewels (like name and money) was a small price for the

clone to pay. Protection you might say usurped the public’s right to know. And

protection overruled the clone’s right to a long life. All of which led to a good

conscience. The heirs to the clone of course would be compensated for their

misery. They would lead lives of royalty as the payoff, for his loyalty. They

would revel, ravish, in the finer things of life. They would have no worries

indeed.

Back when the clone, Sid (they decided to call him Sid), had put his John

Hancock on the dotted line and invariably (unconsciousably) sold his soul away,

the future was a foregone conclusion as to its getting here and Sid would

graduate Harvard summa cum laude (he promised he would) and then Yale or

Princeton law no problem. He had said, “Saedy, no problem, piece of cake.” He

had promised to do all that was asked of him and more.

Saedy had taken him at his word, his John Hancock, that graduating from

these fine institutions was no problem. No problem at all. He had been scouted.

Recruited. Sid had excelled in both lacrosse and water polo. Still he turned

down scholarships from both Duke and Stanford’s prospective teams because

passing up 2 mil once he’d been selected was too good to pass up. In fact he’d

only had to beat out one other candidate, Sid possibility # 2. Sid # 2 excelled in

many areas but rebelled when told that he couldn’t attend Duke, Yale or Penn

then Dartmouth for law. Another slight problem, he was black.

Not that it mattered to the family. Blacks were blacks. And the family was

liberal in a fairly conservative sort of way. Sid # 2 could have been whitewashed,

suburbanized. Of course therein still laid a problem, the Matthewson’s skin color

was far from black; there was no need to check their DNA to make sure of that.

Still the Matthewson clan didn’t think there was anything wrong with being black.

Before the rebellion, the 3rd could be both seen and heard walking around the

compound uttering, black is black, nothing wrong with that.

In the final analysis, the rebellion had done Sid # 2 in. Saedy was bothered for

a long time after that because it didn’t matter to him whether he gave 2 mil to # 1

or # 2. And he didn’t want to be perceived as racist or narrow-minded, things that

he most obviously was not. Once he even almost dated a black girl. She was

beautiful, charismatic and leggy. Nice attributes. Ones that he remembered fondly.

He almost asked her out. Didn’t that account for something (in the grand scheme

of things)?

Anyway Sid, the victor had proved mighty worthy anyways. He had scored

1600 out of a possible 1600 on the SAT. Colleges were drooling over him,

stocking his mailbox with impassioned pleas. He had the pick of the litter. But

when you deposit a check in a man’s account for 2 mil there is further proof in

the pudding, Money Talks and Bullshit Walks. Yes, I know, we’ve been there

before.

The Matthewson family machine hooked up the clone’s brain to all kinds of

monitoring devices, checked him for depression, venereal disease, skin cancer,

lucid dreaming (oh well), UFO sightings and showed him pictures of nude bodies

to see if he was sexually aroused by the proper gender. This was most important.

A Matthewson didn’t need a homosexual reputation. Cat scans ruled the clone’s

calendar, swallowing up his summer vacation. He was pumped up by the finest

physical trainers. Sergei Robovtevsky, Olympic medallist, was flown in from

Moscow at a high cost to pump him up.

Saedy Guttridge Livingston Matthewson the 4th was a diehard, a blowhard, a

chronic womanizer, a cheater of life and he did all of these in mathematical

proportions. All the clone had to do was to be a womanizer (carry on the

Matthewson reputation) and a handsome specimen of a man with Einstein’s brain

(attached). He was uplifting the Matthewson family (tree), if that was possible.

Maybe, all of the rumors of bootlegging and illegal drug running would cease and

desist, if the clone had it all? Had it all, but himself.

The clone (Sid) was a handsome devil. He looked like a God.

Like Apollo, Zeus, one of those mythological Greek Gods from antiquity. All of

the weight training with the invaluable, Sergei, just made him more Godly. He

wasn’t even allowed to get a natural tan. Saedy Guttridge Livingston Matthewson

the 4th didn’t want his namesake looking tawdry, wrinkled at the brow, uneasy-

looking in his skin which might become unnaturally leathery if the sun had

anything to say about it. So he utilized tanning crèmes from the dermatologist’s

extensive and expensive laboratory. There were some things that didn’t need

copying from the original. The guinea pig would fit the mold in enough regard

while still complimenting the original.

On a scale of 1 to 10, Saedy was a –25. The God-like clone was off the chart

in the opposite direction. No chart, no rating system, nothing had ever been

invented that could include Sid, # 1. He was that perfect. That beautiful.

Infinitely special he was. He was almost too good to be true. God had redefined

beauty on his behalf. The brain of Einstein and the looks of Hercules, even the

idea of the clone was almost sacrilegious.

Unfortunately such a perfect creature did not fit the Matthewson name. They

weren’t ugly in an ugly sort of way. More like diseased. The 4th’s skin wouldn’t

tan without help from many tanning institutions. His nose was the approximate

length of the Nile and then some. His ears were often called elephantine.

A complex situation ensued, formed on the bridge of a moral dilemma.

Would the clone be recognized too much? Would he stand out so much, so that

when he was snuffed, waxed, eliminated and Saedy took back his identity,

(the 2 mil overriding any cause for concern about such things as fair play and

perseverance, right to life, limb and livelihood), would their differences be sorted

out? Would his delusion lead to a sorted conclusion? Would duplicity,

underhandedness and deception go hand and hand with Saedy Guttridge

Livingston Matthewson the 4th’s name? Would his act of duplicity, his lack of

attendance in finer educational institutions and his wholehearted attendance on the

finest beaches of the world soil his family name? One legacy he did not wish to

achieve was soiling the family name. Soiling was out!

The solution: reface either himself or the clone. It was one of the harder

decisions in his life. Saedy possessed a typical Matthewson face, the angular,

Nile-long beak nose existing on his face, the African elephant ears (biggest in the

land), and the beady black eyes that concealed family secrets under the classic

Matthewson unibrow. He contemplated hard on the face matter. He went face to

face with it, ironing out all of the details, the beauty of the clone, the exotic

ugliness of himself, the time spent with his likeness. All the imperfection that his

(face) daily exhibited was quite difficult to give up. Quite difficult indeed.

Yes, he knew, the girls would drool with no inkling of remorse, swoon

unabashedly and feign pregnancy at the clone’s feet in a moment’s notice just to

be the queen to his king. All of those things were a given. So having a face like

the clone could be quite advantageous. Not that he needed an advantageous face

with his mils in tow. And besides one’s own particular form of facial structure is

quite personal. Quite everlasting. And one property that you can always call your

own. Your very own.

Money Talked and Bullshit Walked. Money bought girls for him now no matter

what he looked like or how much b.s. he put out. The 2-mil question then, should

he change into the American Idol look or keep the classic Matthewson mug?

He drank martinis for 3 days trying to figure out what to do. Then he called

his mother, his ex-mom. She was divorced from the 3rd. She was in the middle

of a sex act and said she would have to call him back. She had run off, rebelled,

kinda like #2. Her leaving made him realize that rebelliousness wasn’t just a

black thing. It was a mom thing, too.

On the defensive when cornered by astute observational types, the types that

studied things such as astronomy, gene-splicing and botany and had a certain

unwieldy personal magnetism about them, he would blurt out, I can’t choose

my mother you know. I really can’t. Then he would run off to inebriate himself

beyond moral understanding, intending to die a slow death for the remainder of the

day.

His mother was employed at the Gold Mustang Ranch somewhere south of

Vegas. She was what you would call a legal prostitute. She didn’t approve of

illegal activities. The rumors of the bootlegging and the drug running, once she

had understood the gist of it was too much of a cross for her to bear, so off to the

Gold Mustang, the place where smiling faces left even happier than when they

came.

Sex acts were a serious thing to her. They were also most lucrative. Like I

said before, she didn’t do illegal things but once he had caught her smoking pot

in the restroom. This made him wonder if smoking marijuana was legal in 225

sq. foot pooping parlors in mansions like the Matthewson’s. He didn’t know.

He likely figured that money was talking again.

Yes, Money Talked. The 3rd had bought him everything that he’d ever

wanted. And then some. He never played in the sports leagues but he was

always the most valuable. The other kids generally looked on in amazement

and if they had cared, you could imagine hearing them say, “Where in the hell

did he come from?” At 11, the 3rd had bought him a Rolls Royce. And those

funny English rides weren’t cheap. He knew the purchase must have set the 3rd

back a mint. The 3rd had rented Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills for a weekend so

the 4th could tool around in his Rolls without fear of running down and over any

celebrities, and possibly damaging his English beauty. And no Matthewson proper

born and bred or not wanted to be fodder for the tabloids. The tell-all rags were for

mortal men not the types like Saedy’s clan. Even though, the 3rd believed Jefferson’s

creed about all men being created equal, in the long run, over a couple of bourbons he

would tell you his real belief, the rest of the world, Vanderbilts, etc., were most likely

trailer trash next to a Matthewson. DNA testing would someday prove him right he

would say as he polished off the bottle of bourbon.

When you are a shipping magnate, a businessman servicing the Far East and the

US and a cruise line provider and supposedly a past bootlegger and drug runner the

mint spent for the reddish candy-colored ride was probably one of many mints he

figured. Still Saedy had a cherished childhood. After all sitting around in private

school uniforms, playing games with your nanny and being ferried from one palatial

mansion to another often at the speed of light (186,000 m. p. s.) it seemed was a

dream in itself. Wasn’t it?



Saedy had found a regular love. She had tightly-woven shiny black ringlets of

gold, if that made any sense. To clarify, her hair was black but shiny like gold. Her

lips walked the tightrope between thick and thin. Her skin tone was olive, but was

reddish-brown ruddy, from being sun kissed day after day. She was Greek

A Goddess. Hera or Aphrodite revisited.

Saedy, to his liking or not, still had the Matthewson features of course. The

clone did, too. He had protested mightily but the threat of being offed, plus an

extra mil did him in. Saedy hoped he learned to adjust to the Matthewson beak

and overall exotic unattractiveness of a Matthewson face. He just hoped. The

henchman wouldn’t come calling until the Princeton or Yale law part was in the

book unless the clone, Sid, relented and went into depression over the Matthewson

face. It was no problem anyway; the henchman was paid weekly, always paid to

be on call for future considerations. It was comforting to know that his clan

utilized the talents of a grim reaper.

Two years into the Harvard identity, while the clone (was a member of the

crimson tide student body) the unfortunate happened. Sid between classes took

to pathologically perusing himself in crimson tide mirrors, in pub bathroom

mirrors, in the mirrors of any young ladies he took to de-flowering. He became a

fanatic, buying mirrors for their shapes, oblong, square, elliptical, and rectangular.

Even the trapezoid held court for a night or two, its strange shape curiously

comforting to one so distressed. Mirrors walled him into a paranoidal universe.

Looking deeply into their complexity of glass was a frightening experience, one

that was hard to live by, one that he would never forget.

The clone’s hawk-like nose, unworldly large ears, beady eyes and unibrow

had worked wonders for the Matthewson clan ever since they’d stored away as

freeloaders on the Mayflower burgeoned on by dollar signs which were brought

into fruition by unholy rum running and its partner in crime, drug smuggling.

Ever since they’d landed feet first and done their dirty deeds, they’d ruled the

world or at least their own little slice of Heaven. Because Money Talked. If you

lent your ear to the celestial grounds of the palatial estate in RossHaven, which

was graced by eucalyptus tress, aloe vera plants, palms and mulberry bushes, you

could hear the jingle-jangle of money. The sweet scent of success permeated the

air, its musky odor changing you forever once you fell within its grasp. Money

wasn’t necessarily the root of all evil but it was the root of the Matthewson’s. It

was their Heaven. It was their Hell. It was their Knight in Shining Armor. It was

their distant past. It was their future. It encompassed everything and anything ever

wrote, told or whispered about them. It was in effect both their legacy and their

curse and it would both bless them and haunt them until their dying days. And

then some.


Sid, the clone dived into a depression. The 3rd prodded on by the 4th (who

was idly passing time drinking mint juleps on the Aegean Sea with his black-

haired beauty) bought tons of Prozac for the clone. Prozac stock shot through

the roof, the price reached incredulous levels. Users of the anti-depressant

became more and more depressed because the drug’s price had risen so

horrifically high. Though drowning in sadness they weren’t able to launch a

major ad campaign or protest because simply put rising and shining out of

bed each day became a Herculean task. Roderick Matthewson (the 3rd) would

have purchased every known Prozac tablet in the universe if need be, because

Money Talks. Obviously, he had never read, heard of, neither seen hide nor hair

of the book, Listening to Prozac.

The good thing, looking at the bright side, was that Sid was able to finish his

final exams. On the brighter side he passed them with ease owing to his verve, his

passion for learning and his unquenchable desire to feel what 2-mil feels like

burning a hole in your pocket. He had already sold his soul; he might as well give

it his all. That was both his creed and his motto.

Summertime would be spent in hospitals. Many nights Sid cried in his sleep,

pulled at his nose, threatened to hawk off the famous Matthewson unibrow. A

private guard watched his every move because Money Talks. And of course as

you’ve been told before, Bullshit Walks. And money is, was and will forever be

the square root of the Matthewsons. Forgive me, determining if money is the root

of all evil will be discussed at another time and place.

Saedy saw Sid in the summer. Took a break from the monotony of waves

breaking, sun blazoning, girl-watching, vixen kissing, to try to cheer up his

namesake. Trouble was when Sid saw Saedy it was a horrible revelation, it was

like looking into a mirror of doom. Once he saw him, he realized all of the

possibilities for a good and joyful life had been thrown out the window.

Like soul mates connecting on the most intrinsic of levels Saedy felt the same

something that had extinguished the fire from the clone’s eyes. The twains met.

A semi-permeable angst took root. It was time to seize the moment and reverse its

downward spiral. Seizing the moment, Saedy momentarily flinched. Then

righting himself he stepped up to the plate and grasped the opportunity (it was an

opportune moment he figured). With the guard’s help, he called on the great god

of Prozac, the wonder drug, the best creation since Lassie to bring the clone back

to sanity. Of course, it was obvious; Saedy hadn’t read the book, Listening to

Prozac either. He figured upping the dosage, doubling it if need be, would do the

trick. If he ever thought about any dire consequences related to Prozac, he

inadvertently filed it under that noted truism he’d often heard but never attempted

to test in theory, if something doesn’t kill you it will only make you stronger. Of

course theories like that amounted to no more than a hill of beans to him. Deep

down he was a beach boy. A pleasure pioneer.

Sid’s revelation, he compared it to the one in the Bible. “It was horrendous, this

face, this face, this faccccccceeeeeeeeeuh,” Saedy recounted.

After having bought all of the mirrors in the world he thought, every shape

and size ever configured, mirrors that made you appear long, ones that made you

look short, tall, fat, skinny and those that pictured you absolutely as you were

meant to be in the moment, he realized what a waste of space in time it all had

been. What a futile exercise. What an exasperating experience! Before he

capitulated to sleep each and every night, he apologized to Uncle Albert (Einstein)

and Stephen Hawking. Before him stood his twin, in essence, his clone. Even

though, he, Sid was the clone. Of course the body bore no striking resemblance

but the horrendous image of a face, the hawk-like nose, the beady eyes, the

monstrously elephantine ears, the unibrow, which he looked at, drank in, was

him undeniably him because for 2 mil, he had sold his face. He had sold his face,

ultimately his soul and now he couldn’t believe his eyes. Looking into the face

that he mirrored, he blinked. He looked again. He determined that he was looking

at the most insulting thing in the universe. The insulting thing, the face, was not

only the most horrifyingly despicable thing that he had ever seen, but it was also

his face as well. Ditto. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Jack Kevorkian came to

mind. Unfortunately wily Jack was out of commission, out of sorts and he

promised never to execute his right to end lives again. And that wasn’t even half

the problem, he knew. An ex-football player stood watch. Stood watch morning,

noon and night. There were three of them. They were interchangeable. Each and

every one of them individually and collectively held his fate in their hands.

Because Money Talks and Bullshit Walks.

Another mil from the bankroll of the 3rd got Sid back into school by the fall.

Another mil kept a foxy brainiac or if need be a gorgeous, and stereotypically

dumb blonde on his arm for the remainder of the term. And the next. The next.

And the next following the previous next.

All of Sid’s angst made Saedy wonder about the clone’s happiness. During

this brief moment, he wondered if he, (Sid), deserved the henchman’s weapon

of choice. This momentary glimpse into insanity quickly passed before it became

a rude awakening.

Graduating second in his class wasn’t what the Matthewson boys would have

wanted but the Prozac vacation had taken a toll on his sophomore year. That year

he had received a b in physics. During that time he expected a call from Stephen

Hawking at any minute admonishing him, telling him never to think of him again.

And never, ever, ever, attempt to contact him on the telephone, God forbid.

Or at least until he had gotten himself straightened out. He knew all that he’d

accomplished was utter blasphemy on his part. To sell your soul and receive just a

b was utter blasphemy.

Saedy had lived a pleasured life by most standards. To say the least. Now he

was 23 and theoretically on the top of his game, getting ready to enter Yale or

Princeton law. They both wanted him. Bowed down to his throne. They offered

scholarships. Of course the money didn’t matter. The mere mention of money

didn’t faze him. They offered debutante after debutante. Hadn’t they seen his

remarkable face? Passing his free time wisely, he often wondered.

Problem was Saedy was immersed in a different life, different sordid

adventures. His clone had done all of the heavy lifting. Still the decision was in

the hands of the light weight lifter.

Saedy had grown paler than usual. He had tired of the beach. Too much

sun. Too much fun. Too many girls throwing themselves at you, for a mil of

course.

Inside his less than optimal brain, he wondered if he had done right by

himself. Maybe he could’ve gone to a JC and become a glorified mechanic.

Beverly Hills needed a quality garage and of course he knew he would forever

be getting manicures while his mechanics busted their balls, broke their nails,

and strutted around like grease monkeys because they were hands-on people.

He, Saedy, was the opposite of hands on, except when it came to the princesses

who felt the keen and observational touch of his manicured hands and longingly

waited for the object of their desire, the money clip, which eased each and every

heartache they could ever have, as long as its bounty never ran dry. And a

Matthewson had no common worry like lesser beings as far as money. The

Matthewson money tree was never less than fruitful. Never ran dry.

Sex wasn’t any good anymore. In retrospect, he didn’t know if it had ever

been. Topless models, pristine beaches, all of it was a lover’s dream.

Sometimes he wondered if it was a nightmare.




Cacy came over; they drank until the moon turned blue, until the tide brought

the turtles ashore, until they passed out like well-nourished babes.

For quite some time Saedy had been wondering about the meaning of life,

God, the universe, eyebrow malfunction and most importantly how well he was

doing across the water in law school. Still Cacy seemed to ease his mind. She

was blond, vivacious, stacked and possessed a silly little girl voice. 3 more years

of boozing, grooving and a Yale law graduate he would be. The finest firms

would be at his doorstep. His beck and call. But at the moment, all was well in

an essential sort of way as Cacy eased his mind, removed the doldrums, and kept

the boredom from eroding all forms of his sanity in the untidy little way that they

usually do. One last thought entered his mind before he crashed off into a

hopefully deep (guilt-free) Mathewson type sleep. Money Talks Bullshit Walks.

Occasionally he called Sid, and he well, actually, did call him Sid. The

clone’s real name was Robert Joe Tarver. Robert Joe was from Minneapolis or

New Jersey or some other cold, ugly, desolate place that no one had ever heard

of. The two of them didn’t have much in common besides the face that

inextricably linked them together forever. Forever or until the world came

crashing down upon each and every one of us. Until the henchman, (he of the

weekly payroll for future considerations) would sharpen his axe, polish his

glock or have the guillotine U-hauled over to wherever Sid was at the moment

after graduation, aspiring to his future aspirations, having dutifully

completed his 2-mil mission of graduating Yale law at the top of his class.

It was no problem for the henchman. He was ready at a moment’s notice.

Only the henchman’s own death would delay his arrival. Delay his deed. But the

henchman always said he would be there. He lived for moments like these. Call

him grim if you like he would say, but he was the reaper. And he desired such

moments of infamy. Surely, as much as he desired breathing. All of the solitaire

he played in solitary made the moment of sudden infamy, desired and delicious.

Others, on the receiving end of his mass evil, weaponry bought for 1 mil, died,

succumbed to the wishes of the handlers of the 1 mil. He knew it was all bullshit.

But he had seen the phony contracts that the (lepers) he called them, had signed.

And he was a firm believer that if your John Hancock was on something it was as

good as gold. He had grown up poor. He came from a family of failed henchmen.

He was now rich. He would do the dirty deed. He had no problem doing the dirty

deed. He wasn’t a rat. His type of work was b.s. but as everyone knew Money

Talks. Sometimes money is a great vocalizer. If he listened intently enough, he

could hear it making sounds like the seashells supposedly do. Life-changing

sounds that usually corrupt, rot, eat at your soul. Long ago he learned that the

seashell wasn’t a singing urchin but in his line of work that didn’t concern him.

Time flew as the crow flies and Saedy took to the beach again, his love for

her waves, sun and sand not quite as unrequited as they had grown to be. She

welcomed him back into her nourishing sanctity with open arms. Saedy was

actually feeling good, wholesome again. Roderick (the 3rd) had upped his

allowance.

He guessed the shipping business was like the Dow Jones. It was on the up

and up. He’d brought in more girls. He’d gone to Brazil upon discovering

Brazilian girls. In all likelihood, he was surrounded by the most beautiful girls.

One concern he had, he hadn’t really found anyone to love. To cherish. To

walk down the aisle with. To spend his life with. The problem was he

engendered, his face. The Matthewson special. Well not only his face but his

body as well. And his ambition or lack thereof seemed to irk many women. A

martini in one hand, a mint julep in the other, a sadistic anguish painted on his

Matthewson face he found out, didn’t often work wonders for his love life.

Having so many eager, beautiful lovers had spoiled his success at attaining real

love. In certain cases, excess was too much. He learned one tidbit (smidgen of

wisdom). Too much of a good thing was too much of a good thing. Everything

perished including good times being seen as good times if everything was a good

time, a vacation. He was now 26. He felt like Abraham Lincoln must’ve felt

when freeing the slaves. Trying to please everyone just grated on your nerves, ate

at you. Like a maggot, it pursued you even after death. And for certain he was

sure, if he had died, he hadn’t gone to Heaven.

On the day of Sid’s graduation, he was there. So was the 3rd. Being the real

McCoy he was disguised, an outdated Beatles wig sat atop his head juxtaposing

past to future, beach-going romantic to hall-of-fame student, and life of

convenience to life of impending tragedy. When Roderick (the 3rd) hugged,

congratulated and offered up the best small talk that money could buy he was

actually hugging, congratulating a different man with the same face. The

Matthewson face. The distorted entity that DNA had seen fit to outfit the

Matthewson clan with. The man, who had done all of the heavy lifting, had

done everything that was asked of him, without question, without complaint.

2 mil and a few extra mils during the process had eased his conscience of course.

Upon further review, one fabulous California day, (the kind you see

prominently featured in travel advocating catalogues), the all sunny and bright

stereotypical kind, while Saedy and his father were celebrating over cocktails

and a stock market upswing they had come to a rash decision. They decided

they might give Sid a new lease on life. Outfit him with another couple of mil

and ask him to retire to a faraway island. If he needed a wife, they would gladly

throw in another mil.

Well that possibility, (the potentiality of absolving the henchman of his

supposed guilt, thereby emancipating both he and Sid) had been discussed by #3

and #4, and was potentially on the table, was still under consideration. But the

whole Two Tickets to Paradise thing being so Eddie Moneyish was luring them to

do the right thing. Too many martinis, their devotion to Eddie’s song and of

course his last name, the real kicker, was turning them into Abraham Lincoln

wannabes.

If the clone disappeared swiftly and became a Lilliputian-sized creature and

never dared to enter the light of the civilized world again, he might be spared.

The option was on the table.

Saedy stood there and listened to his father, serenade, praise, kiss, hug and

just bask in the glow of a worthy son. Saedy stood there with an attractive face

(actually a mask). If not a mask, how could he explain the twin effect? Any

common sense person knew that any righteous and sane God would never

approve of twins under the circumstances of such a face.

They exchanged goodbyes in the form of handshakes and until-we-meet-again

propaganda. All had seen the end. The Matthewson clan had the henchman at their

disposal. Their beck and call. Yet the faraway uninhabited island seemed like a

mighty altruistic way to decapitate Sid from their world. They would even suggest

a few cds, maybe chip in a book or two if they came to that seminal conclusion.

They figured even faraway uninhabited islands untouched by Edison’s brilliance,

had an agreement with natural lighting. Saedy was excited. He had sworn off

women. He had purchased thirty to forty Brooks Brothers pinstriped suits. Every

single last pinstriped one of them came with matching colorful shirts and

aerodynamic clip-on ties. Unbeknownst to Saedy, the colorful shirts didn’t really fit

his coloring, his personality or his charm. He had hired a Feng Shui expert to come

in and arrange his New York Park Avenue digs. His apartment was fengshued to the

max. In her oversight, she neglected to tell him that everything else about him, his

walk, his talk, his style, his savoir faire, wasn’t exactly in coherence, even remotely

harmonious to his bachelor pad. She had shrugged off, the telling, realizing that he

was one of the most hopeless cases that she had ever seen. She had crossed herself as

she went out the door, holding true to the Catholic tradition.

When she had interrogated him under the guise of doing her Feng Shui, she

had mind-listed both his accomplishments and his plans. That evening with a

cool 1 mil in hand, she had gone home to her husband, a Japanese investment

banker. Over sushi and sake, they had rolled open a can of laughter like the old

sitcoms had provided unknowing viewers. Difference was, theirs, was real.

Neither the Feng Shui expert nor the investment banker could believe that

Saedy Guttridge Livingston Matthewson the 4th was a graduate of Harvard

summa cum laude and Yale law. They both agreed that it was ridiculous.

What was the world coming to? The mere thought of such a happening was

absurd. A conundrum indeed. The two of them rolling around in all their mirth

had never agreed more. If you had known their own history of life, love and

tragedy, you would realize the enormousness of those implications, the

unquestioned substantiated fact that lay before you. Later that evening the

investment banker with the ironic name of Tokyo would confess an illicit affair to

his demure wife, Suki, knowing that life as he knew it, was certainly over.

Combining the elements of sushi, sake, intervening laughter and makeup sex,

their marriage removed itself from the rocks before it ever became lodged there.

Nine out of ten therapists would tell you that the laughter engendered by the story,

look, and life, of one ugly-faced Saedy Guttridge Livingston Matthewson the 4th

saved their marriage. The laughter violated one normally unalterable statistic.

Generally Suki and her newly acquired 1 mil would be seeking shelter elsewhere.

Compromising laughter indeed. One for the books.

What comes next is quite confusing. So please pay attention! Sid,

the clone, born Robert Joe Sarver from New Jersey, Minnesota or some other God-

awfully cold place, changed his name to Sean Colvin, and moved. In his haste, he

left no forwarding address. He created his own witness (get lost) protection

program. Of course he took the accumulated 8 mil with him. Haste not waste was

his new motto. On the diplomas, which he hadn’t given up yet, he changed the

name of the recipient to Sean Colvin after consulting with a priest who was

sympathetic to his situation and had knowledge of such matters, he, the priest,

himself, being a Yale graduate.

He didn’t know if the Matthewson family owned everyone. He hoped that

the priest was not a Matthewson property. He did know that Money Talked and

Bullshit Walked. Extremely afraid and overly cautious, he didn’t even dare

contact his family.

When Saedy went looking for his namesake, he was gone. Vanished. And

most disturbing to Saedy, the clone’s former residence didn’t look very Feng

Shui. He was disappointed in that. The registrar, the landlord, the sexy lady

next door who didn’t even tempt him so he fastidiously kept his mil in his

pocket, not a single one of them knew that Sid now Sean Colvin formerly

Robert Joe Tarver had been displaced. But he was displaced. He had

disappeared. Vanished into thin air. He was the orchestrator of the ultimate

vanishing act. And he thought only the potential black Sid had the rights to

play the vanishing man, owing to Ralph Ellison’s novel, The Invisible Man.

Saedy thought that it was almost like his namesake was guest starring in the

witness protection program. Still that struck him as silly because wasn’t he,

(the 4th), and the 3rd and the idle henchman all of them, his protectors, his

lifeline?

Saedy returned home and messed up his new bachelor pad (not that he was

looking for women) with martinis and mint juleps and even a couple of

Budweisers that a girl named Carly Sue had enlightened him with. In oddly

unfamiliar surroundings, curiously he felt oddly familiar even though Feng Shui

had set up shop. Realizing that until Sid was found he had to lay low, do

something oddly unfamiliar, something against his natural being, caused his and

the apartment’s undoing. Duplication of identity had been as harmless as a sunny,

peaceful spring day when the original and the duplicatee were on opposite ends of

the planet. Now the world had closed in on them. Saedy was supposed to be at the

front of the bus, his clone was supposed to be on a faraway previously uninhabited

island (a virtual Gilligan) in lieu of a henchman’s Maytag delivery.

They had decided to spare him the henchman’s gift of death. Maybe it was the

oddly familiar face or maybe a twinge of guilt had appropriated itself inappropriately

amongst the Matthewson clan? Maybe upon the 3rd’s last visit to his cardiologist, a

heart, a true and beating one had been discovered? Maybe it was all of the altruism

that flooded society’s airwaves? Maybe the Vanderbilts, trailer trash that they were,

had upped the ante? Maybe it was a combination of all of these things? Or maybe it

really was a few martinis and the gift of song? Whatever. But the offing they

decided would take on a different form. A passport would be needed; a private jet,

an uninhabited island, a few cds and a luscious beauty with no discernible future

would all be a part of the vacation package. Only one problem, the lucky recipient

of all of these things had gone absolutely incognito. Possibly the face had done

him in? Now he was as invisible as millions of species (mostly insect) that lay

undiscovered in the Amazonian basin, unfettered by praise, unknown and not

categorized by mad, fame-seeking scientists. The invisibility: This was all

supposed to come to pass but only after the sheepskin had changed hands.

Maybe the Japanese lady did Feng Shui redos and cleaning, too. She

probably did. He knew it especially well being a Matthewson that most everyone

had a price. How could he know that she, Suki, had never been happier? And all

because of him. In blind sight, he had saved her marriage. As he poured some

gin on the rocks, he never considered this. Should he? Of course he shouldn’t,

he is not all knowing. He is, was, and always will be a rich beach boy. He was

and is a diehard, a blowhard, a womanizer (in recovery though), and a cheater of

life. He knew that he did all of these things in mathematical proportions. Yet, he

was ready to step up to the plate. Take on the game of life. Be the best Yale

trained lawyer that ever partied down on the Riviera with bare-breasted babes

who bought into this game for a cool 2 mil? Once he located Sid, he would prove

his mettle. He would start the adult phase of his existence. He knew it was about

time.

The doorbell rang. Funny he thought, is it time for a Feng Shui redo? Is my

father bi-coastal today he wondered? Maybe some long lost lover was having

second thoughts about getting another mil? He considered that possibility. He

was mildly inebriated. He had been there before. He had lived a lifetime of

inebriation. His life had, up to this point, consisted of Saturday nights.

The masked man entered with a polite (wave of the gloved-hand) hello,

moments before his cursory goodbye. The shot didn’t ring out or echo as they

normally do because this guy was a pro. Have silencer will travel could have

been on his card.

Before the climatic or anti-climatic moment if you will, a steady stream of

here-in-the-now-death-time-video had done light-speed cartwheels in the mind

of a Matthewson. A universal first. Parties, beaches, all glamorous and pristine,

bathing beauties who easily could dominate the most attractive human lists,

cocktails du jour, rain in Spain, (how glistening it was), rides down Rodeo Drive,

trophies (for nothing earned) galore, everything imaginable to be had in the life

of a pleasure king flashed before the visual cortex of this man. While life had

been inordinately beautiful, beauty in the wrong, misguided hands had a way of

coming undone and sometimes it did so horrifically. The reaper had a way of

making things right. And for the rich and pleasured, the ‘do wells’, sometimes

the evening out takes a little too long especially for the paupers’ (the other half

of the universal divide) satisfaction. But in the end, usually the universe, in all

of her infinite wisdom, rights herself. Like a self-righteous mix of carbon,

hydrogen, molecules, atoms, quarks, and whatever else reigns supreme in the

primordial dust, it rights itself. The dead man upon the commencing of dying,

shit himself. Bullshit per se had come to a dying standstill and then some.

The masked man removed his disguise, intently studied the corpse and

simultaneously wondered if he had the right dead man in front of him and prayed

to God that he did, that he was at the right place, at the right time, and if so

everything else at this moment happening in the universe was inconsequential to

him. The deed was done; he shouldn’t worry, he thought. After all the person

behind the hit seemed pretty certain of the location. And Mapquest (a killer’s tool,

if you were a killer) did the rest. Oddly, he thought the apartment looked like it

had been a victim of Feng Shui and he had a right to that observation because he

was in the know about such things.

The next day the trash crew unknowingly removed a box that contained the

remains of a life that had been lived outside of it. The box. Nothing had ever

been wanted by this life that wasn’t bought and paid for. Nothing had been too

pricey. Nothing. It had been a life of self-satisfaction. Of ease. It had been a

life that had toyed with adversity. In fact had laughed in the face of it. It had

done away with trial and error. Cause and effect, too. It had been a life well

lived?



Yes, with wise, sound investments, a penchant for saving and a life-altering

decision, he had freed himself. The henchman, he would wait no

more, he knew… because Money Talks and Bullshit Walks.