Lenore Jane, my perfect light.
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Volunteers for the Universal P-funk Block Party
I'm going to make this as easy as possible. Here is the number to a link for donating to an animal cruelty case: (707) 822-5124. Here is the case:
https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2017/apr/17/cat-found-partially-skinned-alive-eureka/
The above number is accepting donations for a cat named, Joseph, who was tortured by some dickless fuck in Eureka. It takes all of 5 minutes to grab your wallet, call that number (707)822-5124, and donate five bucks to a very good cause. Joseph does not have wealthy parents, and he needs medical help right now. Today, tomorrow, this is not news. He needs surgery and care for the next few months.
When I heard about this case, my heart dropped. Donating what little I could made me feel so good. So proactive. The worst that could happen has already happened, but its not over yet. There is always hope as long as people are mending what needs to be fixed.
The Sunny Brae animal hospital is the same place that I got Lucian at when he was a little kitten whose mother was hit by a drunk driver and killed, but he came out just perfect. This is the good stuff. Please help a good cause. Here is their website:
http://www.sunnybraeanimalclinic.com/
They rescue stray animals, abused animals, and they place them in good homes.
Other ways to help stop animal cruelty are to find local politicians supporting animal rights causes, and spread their good word. My neighbor in Maryland helped to pass "The Shadow Law", which made it a felony to abuse animals. Campaigning for these good causes creates a high that no drug compares to because its real; so in a round about way, if you want to get high, grab your debit card and call that number.
https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2017/apr/17/cat-found-partially-skinned-alive-eureka/
The above number is accepting donations for a cat named, Joseph, who was tortured by some dickless fuck in Eureka. It takes all of 5 minutes to grab your wallet, call that number (707)822-5124, and donate five bucks to a very good cause. Joseph does not have wealthy parents, and he needs medical help right now. Today, tomorrow, this is not news. He needs surgery and care for the next few months.
When I heard about this case, my heart dropped. Donating what little I could made me feel so good. So proactive. The worst that could happen has already happened, but its not over yet. There is always hope as long as people are mending what needs to be fixed.
The Sunny Brae animal hospital is the same place that I got Lucian at when he was a little kitten whose mother was hit by a drunk driver and killed, but he came out just perfect. This is the good stuff. Please help a good cause. Here is their website:
http://www.sunnybraeanimalclinic.com/
They rescue stray animals, abused animals, and they place them in good homes.
Other ways to help stop animal cruelty are to find local politicians supporting animal rights causes, and spread their good word. My neighbor in Maryland helped to pass "The Shadow Law", which made it a felony to abuse animals. Campaigning for these good causes creates a high that no drug compares to because its real; so in a round about way, if you want to get high, grab your debit card and call that number.
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
Making Fun of Myself
I read this a while back. I stopped being a veggie when my boyfriend and I got together. He is a very good cook! But before him, I was a vegetarian most of my life and a raw food vegan by default (My ex-fiance was one.) Since I'm on the subject, I will add a side note that will probably never come up again to be added in any blog. That is, in Humboldt county it is so damn near impossible to get a job, the raw food vegan store in Blue Lake has a strange rule. The first time you can work for them for free. After one time, you HAVE TO PAY TO WORK THERE. My ex-fiance is one such sucker.
"Cardinal Knowledge”
T. C. Boyle
I’D NEVER REALLY THOUGHT MUCH ABOUT MEAT. It was there in the supermarket in a plastic wrapper; it came between slices of bread with mayo and mustard and a dill pickle on the side; it sputtered and smoked on the grill till somebody flipped it over, and then it appeared on the plate, between the baked potato and the julienned carrots, neatly crosshatched and floating in a puddle of red juice. Beef, mutton, pork, venison, dripping burgers and greasy ribs, it was all the same to me—food, the body’s fuel, something to savor a moment on the tongue before the digestive system went to work on it. Which is not to say I was totally unconscious of the deeper implications: Every once in a while, I’d eat at home—a quartered chicken, a package of Shake ‘N Bake, Stove Top Stuffing and frozen peas, and as I hacked away at the stippled yellow skin and pink flesh of the sanitized bird, I’d wonder at the darkish bits of organ clinging to the ribs--what was that, liver? Kidney?--but in the end, it didn’t make me any less fond of Kentucky Fried or Chicken McNuggets. I’d seen those ads in the magazines, too, the ones that showed the veal calves penned up in their own waste, their limbs atrophied and their veins so pumped full of antibiotics they couldn’t control their bowels, but when I took a date to Anna Maria’s, I could never resist the veal scaloppine.
And then I met Alena Iorgensen.
It was a year ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving--I remember the date because it was my birthday, my 30th, and I’d called in sick and gone to the beach to warm my face, read a book and feel a little sorry for myself. The Santa Anas were blowing and it was clear all the way to Catalina, but there was an edge to the air, a scent of winter, and as far as I could see in either direction, I had the beach pretty much to myself. I found a sheltered spot in a tumble of boulders, spread a blanket and settled down to attack a pastrami on rye I’d brought along for nourishment. Then turned to my book--a comforttingly apocalyptic tract about the demise of the planet--and let the sun warm me as I read about the denuding of the rain forest, the poisoning of the atmosphere and the swift, silent eradication of species. Gulls coasted by overhead. I saw the distant glint of jetliners.
I must have dozed, my head thrown back, the book spread open in my lap, because the next thing I remember, a strange dog was hovering over me and the sun had dipped behind the rocks. The dog was big, wild-haired, with one staring blue eye, and it just looked at me, ears slightly cocked, as if it expected a Milk-Bone or something. I was startled--not that I don’t like dogs, but here was this woolly thing poking its snout in my face--and I guess I must have made some sort of defensive gesture, because the dog staggered back a step and froze. Even in the confusion of the moment, I could see that there was something wrong with this dog, an unsteadiness, a gimp, a wobble to its legs. I felt a mixture of pity and revulsion--it had been hit by a car, was that it?--when all at once, I became aware of a wetness on the breast of my windbreaker and an unmistakable odor rose to my nostrils: I’d been pissed on.
Pissed on. As I lay there unsuspecting, enjoying the sun, the beach, the solitude, this stupid beast had lifted its leg and used me as a pissoir--and now it was poised there on the edge of the blanket as if it expected a reward. A sudden rage seized me. I came up off the blanket with a curse, and it was only then that a dim apprehension seemed to seep into the dog’s other eye, the brown one, and it lurched back and fell on its face, just out of reach. And then it lurched and fell again, bobbing and weaving across the sand like a seal out of water. I was on my feet now, murderous, glad to see that the thing was hobbled--it would simplify my task of running it down and beating it to death.
“ALF!” A VOICE CALLED, and as the dog floundered in the sand, I turned and saw Alena Jorgensen poised on the boulder behind me. I don’t want to make too much of the moment, don’t want to mythologize it or clutter the scene with allusions to Aphrodite rising from the waves or accepting the golden apple from Paris, but she was a pretty impressive sight. Bare-legged, fluid, as tall and uncompromising as her Nordic ancestors and dressed in a Gore-Tex bikini and hooded sweat shirt unzipped to the waist, she blew me away. Piss-spattered and stupefied, I could only gape up at her.
“You bad boy,” she said, scolding, “you get out of there.” She glanced from the dog to me and back again. “Oh, you bad boy, what have you done?” she demanded, and I was ready to admit to anything, but it was the dog she was addressing, and it flopped over in the sand as if it had been shot. Alena skipped lightly down from the rock, and in the next moment, before I could protest, she was rubbing at the stain on my windbreaker with the wadded-up hem of her sweat shirt.
I tried to stop her—“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s nothing,” as if dogs routinely pissed on my wardrobe—but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“No,” she said, rubbing, her hair flying in my face, the naked skin of her thigh pressed unself-consciously to my own, “no, this is terrible, I’m so embarrassed. Alf, you bad boy. I’ll clean it for you, I will, it’s the least--oh, look at that, it’s stained right through to your T --shirt--”
I could smell her, the mousse she used in her hair, a lilac soap or perfume, the salt-sweet odor of her sweat—she’d been jogging, that was it. I murmured something about taking it to the cleaner’s myself.
She stopped rubbing and straightened up. She was my height, maybe even a fraction taller, and her eyes were slightly mismatched, like the dog’s: a deep earnest blue in the right iris, shading to sea-green and turquoise in the left. We were so close we might have been dancing. “Tell you what,” she said, and her face lit up with a smile. “Since you’re so nice about the whole thing, and most people wouldn’t be, even if they knew what poor Alf had been through, why don’t you let me wash it for you--and the T--shirt, too?”
I was a little disconcerted at this point--I was the one who’d been pissed on, after all--but my anger was gone. I felt weightless, adrift, like a piece of fluff floating on the breeze. “Listen,” I said, and for the moment, I couldn’t look her in the eye, “I don’t want to put you to any trouble. . . .”
‘‘I’m ten minutes up the beach, and I’ve got a washer and drier. Come on, it’s no trouble at all. Or do you have plans? I mean, I could just pay for the cleaner’s, if you want. ...”
I was between relationships--the person I’d been seeing off and on for the past year wouldn’t even return my calls--and my plans consisted of taking in a solitary late--afternoon movie as a birthday treat, then heading over to my mother’s for dinner and the cake with candles. My aunt Irene would be there, and so would my grandmother. They would exclaim over how big I was and how handsome, and then they would begin to contrast my present self with my previous, more diminutive incarnations and finally work themselves up to a spate of reminiscence that would continue unabated till my mother drove them home. And then, if I was lucky, I’d go out to a singles bar and make the acquaintance of a divorced computer programmer in her mid-30s with three kids and bad breath.
I shrugged. “Plans? No, not really. I mean, nothing in particular.”
ALENA WAS HOUSE-SITTING A ONE-ROOM BUNGALOW that rose stumplike from the sand, no more than 50 feet from the tide line. There were trees in the yard behind it and the place was sandwiched between glass fortresses with crenelated decks, whipping flags and great hulking concrete pylons. Sitting on the couch inside, you could feel the full reverberation of each wave hitting the shore, a slow, steady pulse that forever defined the place for me. Alena gave me a faded UC Davis sweat shirt that nearly fit, sprayed stain remover on my T--shirt and windbreaker and in a single fluid motion flipped down the lid of the washer and extracted two beers from the refrigerator beside it.
There was an awkward moment as she settled into the chair opposite me and we concentrated on our beers. I didn’t know what to say. I was disoriented, giddy, still struggling to grasp what had happened. Fifteen minutes earlier, I’d been dozing on the beach, alone on my birthday, feeling sorry for myself, and now I was ensconced in a cozy beach house, in the presence of Alena Jorgensen and her spill of naked leg, drinking a beer. “So what do you do?” she said, setting her beer down on the coffee table.
I was grateful for the question; too grateful, maybe. I described to her at length how dull my job was, nearly ten years with the same agency, writing ad copy, my brain gone numb with disuse. I was somewhere in the middle of a blow-by-blow account of our current campaign for a Ghanian vodka distilled from calabash husks when she said, “I know what you mean,” and told me she’d dropped out of veterinary school herself. “After I saw what they did to the animals. I mean, can you see neutering a dog just for our convenience, just because it’s easier for us if they don’t have a sex life?” Her voice grew hot. “It’s the same old story, species fascism at its worst.”
Alf was lying at my feet, grunting softly and looking up mournfully out of his staring blue eye, as blameless a creature as ever lived. I made a small noise of agreement and then focused on Alf. “And your dog,” I said, “he’s arthritic? Or is it hip dysplasia or what?” I was pleased with myself for the question--aside from tapeworm, hip dysplasia was the only veterinary term I could dredge up from the memory bank, and I could see Alf s problems ran deeper than worms.
Alena looked angry suddenly. “Don’t I wish,” she said. She paused to draw a bitter breath. “There’s nothing wrong with Alf that wasn’t inflicted on him. They tortured him, maimed him, mutilated him.”
“Tortured him?” I echoed, feeling the indignation rise in me--this beautiful girl, this innocent beast. “Who?”
Alena leaned forward and there was real hate in her eyes. She mentioned a prominent shoe company--spat out the name, actually. It was an ordinary name, a familiar one, and it hung in the air between us, suddenly sinister. Alf had been a part of an experiment to market booties for dogs--suede, cordovan, patent leather, the works. The dogs were made to pace a treadmill in their booties to assess wear; Alf was part of the control group.
“Control group?” I could feel the hair rising on the back of my neck.
“They used eighty-grit sandpaper on the treads to accelerate the process.” Alena shot a glance out the window to where the surf pounded the shore; she bit her lip. “Alf was one of the dogs without booties.”
I was stunned. I wanted to get up and comfort her, but I might as well have been grafted to the chair. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “How could anybody--?”
“Believe it,” she said. She studied me for a moment, then crossed the room to dig through a cardboard box in the corner.
If I was moved by the emotion she’d called up, I was moved even more by the sight of her bending over the box in her Gore-Tex bikini; I clung to the edge of the chair as if it were a plunging roller coaster. A moment later, she dropped a dozen file folders in my lap. The uppermost bore the name of the shoe company, and it was crammed with news clippings, several pages of a diary relating to plant operations and workers’ shifts at the Grand Rapids facility and a floor plan of the laboratories. The folders beneath it were inscribed with the names of cosmetics firms, biomedical-research centers, furriers, tanners, meat packers. Alena perched on the edge of the coffee table and watched as I shuffled through them.
“You know the Draize Test?” I gave her a blank look.
“They inject chemicals into rabbits’ eyes to see how much it’ll take before they go blind. The rabbits are in cages, thousands of them, and they take a needle and jab it into their eyes and you know why, you know in the name of what great humanitarian cause this is going on, even as we speak?”
I didn’t know. The surf pounded at my feet. I glanced at Alf and then back into her angry eyes.
“Mascara, that’s what. Mascara. They torture countless thousands of rabbits so women can look like sluts.”
I thought the characterization a bit harsh, but when I studied her pale lashes and tight lipstickless mouth, I saw that she meant it. At any rate, the notion set her off, and she launched into a two-hour lecture, gesturing with her flawless hands, quoting figures, digging through her files for the odd photo of legless mice or morphine-addicted gerbils. She told me how she’d rescued Alf herself, raiding the laboratory with six other members of the Animal Liberation Front, the militant group in honor of which Alf had been named. At first, she’d been content to write letters and carry placards, but now, with the lives of so many animals at stake, she’d turned to more direct action: harassment, vandalism, sabotage. She described how she’d spiked trees with Earth-First!-ers in Oregon, cut miles of barbed-wire fence on cattle ranches in Nevada, destroyed records in biomedical-research labs up and down the coast and insinuated herself between the hunters and the bighorn sheep in the mountains of Arizona. I could only nod and exclaim, smile ruefully and whistle in a low “Holy cow!” sort of way. Finally, she paused to level her unsettling eyes on me. “You know what Isaac Bashevis Singer said?”
We were on our third beer. The sun was gone. I didn’t have a clue.
“Every day is Auschwitz for the animals.”
I looked down into the amber aperture of my beer bottle and nodded my head sadly. The drier had stopped an hour and a half ago. I wondered if she’d go out to dinner with me, and what she would eat if she did. “Uh, I was wondering,” I said, “if ... if you might want to go--out for something to eat--”
Alf chose that moment to heave himself up from the floor and urinate on the wall behind me. My dinner proposal hung in the balance as Alena shot up off the edge of the table to scold him and then gently usher him out the door. “Poor Alf,” she said sighing, turning back to me with a shrug. “But listen, I’m sorry if I talked your head off--I didn’t mean to, but it’s rare to find somebody on your own wave length.”
She smiled. On your own wave length: The words illuminated me, excited me, sent up a tremor I could feel all the way down in the deepest nodes of my reproductive tract. “So how about dinner?” I persisted. Restaurants were running through my head--would it have to be a veggie? Could there be a whiff of grilled flesh in the air? Curdled goat’s milk and tabouleh, tofu, lentil soup, sprouts: Every day is Auschwitz for the animals. “No place with meat, of course.”
She just looked at me.
“I mean, I don’t eat meat myself,” I lied, “or actually, not anymore”—since the pastrami sandwich, that is—“but I don’t really know anyplace that ...” I trailed off lamely.
“I’m a vegan,” she said.
After two hours of blind bunnies, butchered calves and mutilated pups, I couldn’t resist the joke. ‘‘I’m from Venus myself.”
She laughed, but I could see she didn’t find it all that funny.
Vegans didn’t eat meat or fish, she explained, or milk or cheese or eggs, and they didn’t wear wool or leather--or fur, of course.
“Of course,” I said. We were both standing there, hovering over the coffee table. I was beginning to feel a little foolish.
“Why don’t we just eat here,” she said.
THE DEEP THROB OF THE OCEAN SEEMED TO SETTLE IN MY BONES as we lay there in bed that night, Alena and I, and I learned all about the fluency of her limbs and the sweetness of her vegetable tongue Aif sprawled on the floor beneath us, wheezing and groaning in his sleep, and I blessed him for his incontinence and his doggy stupidity. Something was happening with each beat of the surf--and I was ready to go along with it. In the morning I called in sick again.
Alena was watching me from bed as I dialed the office and described how the flu had migrated from my head to my gut and beyond, and there was a look in her eye that told me I would spend the rest of the day right there beside her, peeling grapes and dropping them one by one between her parted and expectant lips. I was wrong. Half an hour later, after a breakfast of brewer’s yeast and what appeared to be some sort of bark marinated in yogurt, I found myself marching up and down the sidewalk in front of a fur emporium in Beverly Hills, waving a placard that read HOW DOES IT FEEL TO WEAR A CORPSE? in letters that dripped like blood.
It was a shock. I’d seen protest marches on TV, antiwar rallies and civil rights demonstrations and all that, but I’d never warmed my heels on the pavement or chanted slogans or felt the naked stick in my hand. There were maybe 40 of us in all, mostly women, and we waved our placards at passing cars and blocked traffic on the sidewalk. One woman had smeared her face and hands with cold cream steeped in Red #3, and Alena had found a ratty mink stole somewhere--the kind that features whole animals sewed together, snout to tail, their miniature limbs dangling--and she’d taken a can of crimson spray paint to their muzzles so that they looked freshly killed. She brandished this grisly banner on a stick high above her head, whooping like a savage and chanting, “Fur is death, fur is death,” over and over again till it became a mantra for the crowd. The day was unseasonably warm, the Jaguars glinted in the sun and the palms nodded in the breeze, and no one but for a single tight-lipped salesman glowering from behind the store’s immaculate windows paid the slightest bit of attention to us.
I marched out there on the sidewalk--feeling exposed and conspicuous but marching nonetheless--for Alena’s sake and for the sake of the foxes and the martens and all the rest, and for my own sake, too: With each step I took, I could feel my consciousness expanding like a balloon, the breath of saintliness seeping steadily into me. Up to this point, I’d worn suede and leather like anybody else--ankle boots and Air Jordans, a bombardier jacket I’d had since high school. If 1’d drawn the line with fur, it was only because I’d never had any use for it. If I’d lived in the Yukon--and sometimes, drowsing through a meeting at work, I found myself fantasizing about it--I would have worn fur, no compunction, no second thoughts.
But not anymore. Now I was a protester, a placard waver, now I was fighting for the right of every last weasel and lynx to grow old and die gracefully, now I was Alena Jorgensen’s lover and a force to be reckoned with. Of course, my feet hurt and I was running sweat and praying that no one from work would drive by and see me there on the sidewalk with my crazy cohorts and denunciatory sign.
We marched for hours, back and forth, till I thought we’d wear a groove in the pavement. We chanted and jeered and nobody so much as looked at us twice. We could have been Hare Krishnas, bums, anti-abortionists or lepers, what did it matter? To the rest of the world, to the uninitiated masses to whose sorry number I’d belonged just 24 hours earlier, we were invisible. I was hungry, tired, discouraged. Alena was ignoring me. Even the woman in redface was slowing down, her chant a hoarse whisper that was sucked up and obliterated in the roar of traffic. And then, as the afternoon faded toward rush hour, a wizened silvery old woman who might have been an aging star or a star’s mother or even the first dimly remembered wife of a studio exec got out of a long white car at the curb and strode fearlessly toward us. Despite the heat--it must have been 80 degrees at this point--she was wearing an ankle-length silver-fox coat, a bristling shouldery wafting mass of peltry that must have decimated every burrow on the tundra. It was the moment we’d been waiting for.
A cry went up, shrill and ululating, and we converged on the lone old woman like a Cheyenne war party scouring the plains. The man beside me went down on all fours and howled like a dog, Alena slashed the air with her limp mink and blood sang in my ears. “Murderer!” I screamed, getting into it. “Torturer! Nazi!” The strings in my neck were tight. I didn’t know what I was saying. The crowd gibbered. The placards danced. I was so close to the old woman I could smell her--her perfume, a whiff of moth balls from the coat--and it intoxicated me, maddened me, and I stepped in front of her and blocked her path with all the seething militant bulk of my 185 pounds of sinew and muscle.
I never saw the chauffeur. Alena told me afterward that he was a former kickboxing champion who’s been banned from the sport for excessive brutality. The first blow seemed to drop from above, a shell lobbed from deep within enemy territory; the others came at me like a windmill churning in a storm. Someone screamed. I remember focusing on the flawless rigid pleats of the chauffeur’s trousers, and things got a bit hazy.
I woke to the dull thump of the surf slamming at the shore and the touch of Alena’s lips on my own. I felt as if I’d been broken on the wheel, dismantled and put back together again. “Lie still,” she said, and her tongue moved across my swollen cheek. Stricken, I could only drag my head across the pillow and gaze into the depths of her parti-colored eyes. “Youu’ re one of us now,” she whispered.
Next morning, I didn’t even bother to call in sick.
BY THE END OF THE WEEK, I’d recovered enough to crave meat, for which I felt deeply ashamed, and to wear out a pair of vinyl huaraches on the picket line. Together, and with various coalitions of antivivisectionists, militant vegans and cat lovers, Alena and I tramped a hundred miles of sidewalk, spray-painted inflammatory slogans across the windows of supermarkets and burger stands, denounced tanners, furriers, poulterers and sausage makers and somehow found time to break up a cockfight in Pacoima. It was exhilarating, heady, dangerous. If I’d been disconnected in the past, I was plugged in now. I felt righteous--for the first time in my life, I had a cause--I had Alena, Alena above all. She fascinated me, fixated me, made me feel like a tomcat leaping in and out of second-story windows, oblivious to the free fall and the picket fence below. There was her beauty, of course, a triumph of evolution and the happy interchange of genes going all the way back to the cave men, but it was more than that--it was her commitment to animals, to the righting of wrongs, to morality that made her irresistible. Was it love? The term is something I’ve always had difficulty with, but I suppose it was. Sure it was. Love, pure and simple. I had it, it had me.
“You know what?” Alena said one night as she stood over the miniature stove, searing tofu in oil and garlic. We’d spent the afternoon demonstrating out in front of a tortilla factory that used rendered animal fat as a congealing agent, after which we’d been chased three blocks by an assistant manager at Von’s who objected to Alena’s spray-painting MEAT IS DEATH over the specials in the front window. I was giddy with the adolescent joy of it. I sank into the couch with a beer and watched Alf limp across the floor to fling himself down and lick at a suspicious spot on the floor. The surf boomed like thunder.
“What?” I said.
“Thanksgiving’s coming.”
I let it ride a moment, wondering if I should invite Alena to my mother’s for a big basted bird stuffed with canned oysters and buttered bread crumbs, and then realized it probably wouldn’t be such a great idea. I said nothing.
She glanced over her shoulder. “The animals don’t have a whole lot to be thankful for, that’s for sure. It’s just an excuse for the meat industry to butcher a couple million turkeys, is all it is.” She paused; hot safflower oil popped in the pan. “I think it’s time for a little road trip,” she said. “Can we take your car?”
“Sure, but where are we going?”
She gave me her Gioconda smile. “To liberate some turkeys.”
IN THE MORNING, I CALLED MY BOSS to tell him I had pancreatic cancer and wouldn’t be in for a while, then we threw some things into the car, helped Alf scrabble into the back seat and headed up Route Five for the San Joaquin Valley. We drove for three hours through a fog so dense the windows might as well have been packed with cotton. Alena was secretive, but I could see she was excited. I knew only that we were on our way to rendezvous with a certain “Rolfe,” a longtime friend of hers and a big name in the world of ecotage and animal rights, after which we would commit some desperate and illegal act for which the turkeys would be eternally grateful.
There was a truck stalled in front of the sign for our exit at Calpurnia Springs, and I had to brake hard and jerk the wheel around twice to keep the tires on the pavement. Alena came up out of her seat and Alf slammed into the armrest like a sack of meal, but we made it. A few minutes later, we were gliding through the ghostly vacancy of the town itself, lights drifting past in a nimbus of fog, glowing pink, yellow and white, and then there was only the blacktop road and the pale void that engulfed it. We’d gone ten miles or so when Alena instructed me to slow down and began to study the right-hand shoulder with a keen, unwavering eye.
The earth breathed in and out. I squinted hard into the soft drifting glow of the headlights. “There, there!” she cried and I swung the wheel to the right and suddenly we were lurching along a pitted dirt road that rose up from the blacktop like a goat path worn into the side of a mountain. Five minutes later, Alf sat up in the back seat and began to whine, and then a crude unpainted shack began to detach itself from the vagueness around us.
Rolfe met us on the porch. He was tall and leathery, in his 50s, I guessed, with a shock of hair and rutted features that brought Samuel Beckett to mind. He was wearing gum boots and jeans and a faded lumberjack shirt that looked as if it had been washed a hundred times. Alf took a quick pee against the side of the house, then fumbled up the steps to roll over and fawn at Rolfe’s feet.
“Rolfe!” Alena called, and there was too much animation in her voice, too much familiarity, for my taste. She took the steps in a bound and threw herself into his arms. I watched them kiss, and it wasn’t a fatherly-daughterly sort of kiss, not at all. It was a kiss with some meaning behind it, and I didn’t like it. Rolfe, I thought: What kind of name is that?
Rolfe,” Alena gasped, still a little breathless from bouncing up the steps like a cheerleader. ‘‘I’d like you to meet Jim.”
This was my signal. I ascended the porch steps and held out my hand. Rolfe gave me a look out of the hooded depths of his eyes and then took my hand in a hard callused grip, the grip of the wood splitter, the fence mender, the liberator of hothouse turkeys and laboratory mice. “A pleasure,” he said, and his voice rasped like sandpaper.
There was a fire going inside, and Alena and I sat before it and warmed our hands while Alf whined and sniffed and Rolfe served Red Zinger tea in Japanese cups the size of thimbles. Alena hadn’t stopped chattering since we stepped through the door, and Rolfe came right back at her in his woodsy rasp, the two of them exchanging names and news and gossip as if they were talking in code. I studied the reproductions of teal and widgeon that hung from the peeling walls, noticed the case of Heinz vegetarian beans in the corner and the half gallon of Jack Daniel’s on the mantel. Finally, after the third cup of tea, Alena settled back in her chair--a huge old Salvation Army sort of thing with a soiled antimacassar--and said, “So what’s the plan?”
Rolfe gave me another look, a quick predatory darting of the eyes, as if he weren’t sure I could be trusted, and then turned back to Alena. “Hedda Gabler’s Range-Fed Turkey Ranch,” he said. “And no, I don’t find the name cute, not at all.” He looked at me now, a long steady assay. “They grind up the heads for cat food, and the neck, the organs and the rest, that they wrap up in paper and stuff back in the body cavity like it was a war atrocity or something. Whatever did a turkey go and do to us to deserve a fate like that?”
The question was rhetorical, even if it seemed to have been aimed at me, and I made no response other than to compose my face in a look that wedded grief, outrage and resolve. I was thinking of all the turkeys I’d sent to their doom, of the plucked wishbones, the pope’s noses and the crisp browned skin I used to relish as a kid. It brought a lump to my throat, and something more : I realized I was hungry.
“Ben Franklin wanted to make them a national symbol,” Alena chimed in, “did you know that? But the meat eaters won out.”
“Fifty thousand birds,” Rolfe said, glancing at Alena and bringing his incendiary gaze back to rest on me. “I have information they’re going to start slaughtering them tomorrow for the fresh-not-frozen market.”
“Yuppie poultry.” Alena’s voice was drenched in disgust.
For a moment, no one spoke. I became aware of the crackling of the fire. The fog pressed at the windows. It was getting dark.
“You can see the place from the highway,” Rolfe said finally, “but the only access is through Calpurnia Springs. It’s about twenty miles--twenty-two point three, to be exact.”
Alena’s eyes were bright. She was gazing at Rolfe as if he’d just dropped down from heaven. I felt something heave in my stomach.
“We strike tonight.”
ROLFE INSISTED THAT WE TAKE MY CAR--”Everybody around here knows my pickup, and I can’t take any chances on a little operation like this”--but we did mask the plates, front and back, with an inch-thick smear of mud. We blackened our faces like commandos and collected our tools from the shed out back--tin snips, crowbars and two five-gallon cans of gasoline. “Gasoline?” I said, trying the heft of the can.
Rolfe gave me a crazy look. “To create a diversion,” he said. Alf, for obvious reasons, stayed behind in the shack.
If the fog had been thick in daylight, it was impermeable now; the sky collapsed upon the earth. It took hold of the headlights and threw them back at me till my eyes began to water from the effort of keeping the car on the road. But for the ruts and bumps, we might have been floating in space. Alena sat up front between Rolfe and me, curiously silent. Rolfe didn’t have much to say, either, save for the occasional grunted command: “Hang a right here”; “Hard left”; “Easy, easy.” I thought about meat and jail and the heroic proportions to which I was about to swell in Alena’s eyes and what I intended to do to her when we finally got to bed. It was two A.M. by the dashboard clock.
“OK,” Rolfe said, and his voice came at me so suddenly it startled me, “pull over here--and kill the lights.”
We stepped out into the hush of night and eased the doors shut behind us. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could hear the not-so-distant hiss of traffic on the highway, and another sound, too, muffled and indistinct, the gentle, unconscious suspiration of thousands of my fellow creatures. And I could smell them, a seething rancid odor of feces and feathers and naked scaly feet; it crawled down my throat and burned my nostrils. “Whew,” I said in a whisper, “I can smell them.”
Rolfe and Alena were vague presences at my side. Rolfe flipped open the trunk and in the next moment, I felt the heft of a crowbar and a pair of tin snips in my hand. “Listen, you, Jim,” he whispered, taking me by the wrist in his iron grip and leading me half a dozen steps forward. “Feel this?”
I felt a grid of wire, which he promptly cut: snip, snip, snip. “This is their enclosure--they’re out there in the day, scratching around in the dirt. You get lost, you follow this wire. Now, you’re going to take a section out of this side, Alena’s got the west side and I’ve got the south. Once that’s done, I signal with the flashlight and we bust open the doors to the turkey houses--they’re these big low white buildings; you’ll see them when we get close--and flush the birds out. Don’t worry about me or Alena. Just worry about getting as many birds out as you can.”
I was worried. Worried about everything, from some half-crazed farmer with a shotgun or an AK-47, or whatever they carried these days, to losing Alena in the fog to the turkeys themselves--how big were they? Were they violent? They had claws and beaks, didn’t they? And how were they going to feel about me bursting into their bedroom in the middle of the night?
“And when the gas cans go up, you high-tail it back to the car, got it?”
I could hear the turkeys tossing in their sleep. A truck shifted gears out on the highway. “I think so,” I whispered.
“And one more thing--be sure to leave the keys in the ignition.”
This gave me a pause. “But--?”
“The getaway.” Alena was so close I could feel her breath on my ear. “I mean, we don’t want to be fumbling around for keys when all hell is breaking loose out there, do we?”
I eased open the door and reinserted the key in the ignition, even though the automatic buzzer warned me against it. “OK,” I murmured, but they were already gone, soaked up in the shadows and the mist. At this point, my heart was hammering so loudly I could barely hear the rustling of the turkeys. This is crazy, I told myself, it’s hurtful and wrong, not to mention illegal. Spray-painting slogans was one thing, but this was something else altogether. I thought of the turkey farmer asleep in his bed, an entrepreneur working to make America strong, a man with a wife and kids and a mortgage . . . but then I thought of all those innocent turkeys consigned to death, and finally I thought of Alena, long-legged and loving, and the way she came to me out of the darkness of the bathroom and the boom of the surf.
I took the tin snips to the wire.
I must have been at it half an hour, 45 minutes, gradually working my way toward the big white sheds that had begun to emerge from the gloom up ahead, when I saw Rolfe’s flashlight blinking off to the left. This was my signal to head to the nearest shed, snap off the padlock with my crowbar, fling open the doors and herd a bunch of cranky, suspicious gobblers out into the night. It was now or never, I looked twice around me and then broke for the nearest shed in an awkward crouching gait. The turkeys must have sensed that something was up--from behind the long white windowless wall there arose a watchful gabbling, a soughing of feathers that fanned up like a breeze in the treetops. Hold on, you toms and hens, I thought, freedom is at hand. A jerk of the wrist and the padlock fell to the ground. Blood pounding in my ears, I took hold of the door and jerked it open with a great dull booming reverberation--and suddenly, there they were, turkeys, thousands upon thousands of them, cloaked in white feathers under a string of dim yellow bulbs. The light glinted in their reptilian eyes. Somewhere a dog began to bark.
I steeled myself and sprang through the door with a shout, whirling the crowbar over my head. “All right!” I boomed, and the echo gave it back to me a hundred times over. “This is it! Turkeys, on your feet!” Nothing. No response. But for the whisper of rustling feathers and the alertly cocked heads, they might have been sculptures, throw pillows, they might as well have been dead and butchered and served up with yams and onions and all the trimmings. The barking of the dog went up a notch. I thought I heard voices.
The turkeys crouched on the concrete floor, wave upon wave of them, stupid and immovable; they perched in the rafters, on s eves and platforms, huddled in wooden stalls. Desperate, I rushed into the front rank of them, swinging my crowbar, stamping my feet and howling like the wishbone plucker I once was. That did it. There was a shriek from the nearest bird and the others took it up till an unholy racket filled the place, and now they were moving, tumbling down from their perches, flapping their wings in a storm of dried excrement and pecked-over grain, pouring across the concrete floor till it vanished beneath them. Encouraged, I screamed again—“Yeeeeeee-ha-ha-ha-ha!” and beat at the aluminum walls with the crowbar as the turkeys shot through the doorway into the night.
It was then that the black mouth of the doorway erupted with light and the ka-boom! of the gas cans sent a tremor through the earth. Run! a voice screamed in my head, and the adrenaline kicked in and all of a sudden, I was scrambling for the door in a hurricane of turkeys. They were everywhere, flapping their wings, gobbling and screeching, loosing their bowels in panic. Something hit the back of my legs and all at once I was down among them, on the floor, in the dirt and feathers and wet turkey shit. I was a roadbed, a turkey expressway. Their claws dug at my back, my shoulders, the crown of my head. Panicked now, choking on the feathers and dust and worse, I fought to my feet as the big screeching birds launched themselves around me and I staggered out into the barnyard. “There! Who’s that there?” a voice roared, and I was off and running.
What can I say? I vaulted turkeys, kicked them aside like so many footballs, slashed and tore at them as they sailed through the air. I ran till my lungs felt as if they were burning right through my chest, disoriented, bewildered, terrified of the shotgun blast I was sure would cut me down at any moment. Behind me the fire raged and lit the fog till it glowed blood--red and hellish. But where was the fence? And where the car?
I got control of my feet then and stood stock-still in a flurry of turkeys, squinting into a wall of fog. Was that it? Was that the car over there? At that moment, I heard an engine start up somewhere behind me--a familiar engine with a familiar coughing gurgle in the throat of the carburetor--and then the lights blinked on briefly 300 yards away. I heard the engine race and listened, helpless, as the car roared off in the opposite direction. I stood there a moment longer, forlorn and forsaken, and then I ran blindly off into the night, putting the fire, the shouts and the barking and the incessant mindless squawking of the turkeys as far behind me as I could.
WHEN DAWN FINALLY BROKE, it was only just perceptibly, so thick was the fog. I’d made my way to a blacktop road--which road and where it led I didn’t know--and sat crouched and shivering in a clump of weeds just off the shoulder. Alenda wouldn’t desert me, I was sure of that--she loved me, as I loved her; needed me, as I needed her--and I was sure she’d be cruising along the back roads looking for me. My pride was wounded, of course, and if I never laid eyes on Rolfe again I felt wouldn’t be missing much, but at least I hadn’t been drilled full of shot, savaged by farm dogs or pecked to death by irate turkeys. I was sore all over, my shin throbbed where I’d slammed into something substantial while vaulting through the night, there were feathers in my hair and my face and arms were a mosaic of cuts and scratches and long trailing fissures of dirt. I’d been sitting there for what seemed like hours, cursing Rolfe, developing suspicions about Alena and unflattering theories about environmentalists in general, when finally I heard the familiar slurp and roar of my car cutting through the mist ahead of me.
Rolfe was driving, his face impassive. I flung myself into the road like a tattered beggar, waving my arms over my head and giving vent to my joy, and he very nearly ran me down. Alena was out of the car before it stopped, wrapping me up in her arms, and then she was bundling me into the back seat with Alf and we were on our way back to the hideaway. “What happened?” she cried, as if she couldn’t have guessed. ‘‘Where were you? We waited as long as we could.”
I was feeling sulky, betrayed, feeling as if I were owed a whole lot more than a perfunctory hug and a string of insipid questions. Still, as I told my tale, I began to warm to it--they’d got away in the car with the heater going, and I’d stayed behind to fight the turkeys, the farmers and the elements, too, and if that weren’t heroic, I’d like to know what was. I looked into Alena’s admiring eyes and pictured Rolfe’s shack, a nip or two from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, maybe a peanut-butter-and-tofu sandwich and then the bed, with Alena in it. Rolfe said nothing.
Back at Rolfe’s, I took a shower and scrubbed the turkey droppings from my pores, then helped myself to the bourbon. It was ten in the morning and the house was dark--if the world had ever been without fog, there was no sign of it here. When Rolfe stepped out onto the porch to fetch an armload of firewood, I pulled Alena down into my lap. “Hey,” she murmured, “I thought you were an invalid.”
She was wearing a pair of too-tight jeans and an oversized sweater with nothing underneath it. I slipped my hand inside the sweater and found something to hold on to. “Invalid?” I said, nuzzling at her sleeve. “Hell, I’m a turkey liberator, an ecoguerrilla, a friend of the animals and the environment, too.”
She laughed, but she pushed herself up and crossed the room to stare out the occluded window. “Listen, Jim,” she said, “what we did last night was great, really great, but it’s just the beginning.” Alf looked up at her expectantly. I heard Rolfe fumbling around on the porch, the thump of wood on wood. She turned around to face me now. “What I mean is Rolfe wants me to go up to Wyoming for a little bit, just outside Yellowstone--”
Me? Rolfe wants me? There was no invitation in that, no plurality, no acknowledgment of all we’d meant to each other. “For what?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“There’s this grizzly--a pair of them, actually--and they’ve been raiding places outside the park. One of them made off with the mayor’s Doberman the other night and the people are up in arms. We--I mean, Rolfe and me and some other people from the old Bolt Weevils in Minnesota?--we’re going to go up there and make sure the Park Service--or the local yahoos--don’t eliminate them. The bears, I mean.”
My tone was corrosive. “You and Rolfe?”
“There’s nothing between us, if that’s what you’re thinking-- this has to do with animals, that’s all.”
“Like us?”
She shook her head slowly. “Not like us, no. We’re the plague on this planet, don’t you know that?”
Suddenly, I was angry. Seething. Here I’d crouched in the bushes all night covered in turkey crap, and now I was part of a plague. I was on my feet. “No, I don’t know that.”
She gave me a look that let me know it didn’t matter, that she was already gone, that her agenda, at least for the moment, didn’t include me and there was no use arguing about it. “Look,” she said, her voice dropping as Rolfe slammed back through the door with a load of wood, ‘‘I’ll see you in L.A. in a month or so, OK?” She gave me an apologetic smile. “Water the plants for me?”
AN HOUR LATER, I WAS ON THE ROAD AGAIN. I’d helped Rolfe stack the wood beside the fireplace, allowed Alena to brush my lips with a goodbye kiss, and then stood there on the porch while Rolfe locked up, lifted Alf into the bed of his pickup and rumbled down the rutted dirt road with Alena at his side. I watched till their brake lights dissolved in the drifting gray mist, then fired up my car and lurched down the road behind them. A month or so: I felt hollow inside. I pictured her with Rolfe, eating yogurt and wheat germ, stopping at motels, wrestling grizzlies and spiking trees. The hollowness opened up, cored me out till I felt as if I’d been plucked and gutted and served up on a platter myself.
I found my way back through Calpurnia Springs without incident--there were no roadblocks, no flashing lights and grim-looking troopers searching trunks and back seats for a tallish 30-year-old ecoterrorist with turkey tracks down his back--but after I turned onto the highway for Los Angeles, I had a shock. Ten miles up the road, my nightmare materialized out of the gloom: red lights everywhere, signal flares and police cars lined up on the shoulder. I was on the very edge of panicking, a beat away from cutting across the meridian and giving them a run for it, when I saw the truck jackknifed up ahead. I slowed to 40, 30, and then hit the brakes. In a moment, I was stalled in a lane of cars and there was something all over the road, ghostly and white in the fog. At first I thought it must have been flung from the truck, rolls of toilet paper or crates of soap powder ruptured on the pavement. It was neither. As I inched closer, the tires creeping now, the pulse of the lights in my face, I saw that the road was coated in feathers, turkey feathers. A storm of them. A blizzard. And more: There was flesh there, too, slick and greasy, a red pulp ground into the surface of the road, thrown up like slush from the tires of the car ahead of me, ground beneath the massive wheels of the truck. Turkeys. Turkeys everywhere.
The car crept forward. I flicked on the windshield wipers, hit the WASHER button, and for a moment, a scrim of diluted blood obscured the windows and the hollowness opened up inside me till I thought it would suck me inside out. Behind me, someone was leaning on his horn. A trooper loomed up out of the gloom, waving me on with the dead yellow eye of his flashlight. I thought of Alena and felt sick. All there was between us had come to this, expectations gone sour, a smear on the road. I wanted to get out and shoot myself, turn myself in, close my eyes and wake up in jail, in a hair shirt, in a strait jacket, anything. It went on. Time passed. Nothing moved. And then, miraculously, a vision began to emerge from behind the smeared glass and the gray belly of the fog, lights glowing golden in the waste. I saw the sign, GAS/FOOD/LODGING, and my hand was on the blinker.
It took me a moment, picturing the place, the generic tile, the false cheer of the lights, the odor of charred flesh hanging heavy on the air, Big Mac, three-piece dark meat, carne asada, cheeseburger. The engine coughed. The lights glowed. I didn’t think of Alena then, didn’t think of Rolfe or grizzlies or the doomed bleating flocks and herds or of the blind bunnies and cancerous mice--I thought only of the cavern opening inside and how to fill it. “Meat,” and I spoke the word aloud, talking to calm myself as if I’d awakened from a bad dream, “it’s only meat.”
"Cardinal Knowledge”
T. C. Boyle
I’D NEVER REALLY THOUGHT MUCH ABOUT MEAT. It was there in the supermarket in a plastic wrapper; it came between slices of bread with mayo and mustard and a dill pickle on the side; it sputtered and smoked on the grill till somebody flipped it over, and then it appeared on the plate, between the baked potato and the julienned carrots, neatly crosshatched and floating in a puddle of red juice. Beef, mutton, pork, venison, dripping burgers and greasy ribs, it was all the same to me—food, the body’s fuel, something to savor a moment on the tongue before the digestive system went to work on it. Which is not to say I was totally unconscious of the deeper implications: Every once in a while, I’d eat at home—a quartered chicken, a package of Shake ‘N Bake, Stove Top Stuffing and frozen peas, and as I hacked away at the stippled yellow skin and pink flesh of the sanitized bird, I’d wonder at the darkish bits of organ clinging to the ribs--what was that, liver? Kidney?--but in the end, it didn’t make me any less fond of Kentucky Fried or Chicken McNuggets. I’d seen those ads in the magazines, too, the ones that showed the veal calves penned up in their own waste, their limbs atrophied and their veins so pumped full of antibiotics they couldn’t control their bowels, but when I took a date to Anna Maria’s, I could never resist the veal scaloppine.
And then I met Alena Iorgensen.
It was a year ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving--I remember the date because it was my birthday, my 30th, and I’d called in sick and gone to the beach to warm my face, read a book and feel a little sorry for myself. The Santa Anas were blowing and it was clear all the way to Catalina, but there was an edge to the air, a scent of winter, and as far as I could see in either direction, I had the beach pretty much to myself. I found a sheltered spot in a tumble of boulders, spread a blanket and settled down to attack a pastrami on rye I’d brought along for nourishment. Then turned to my book--a comforttingly apocalyptic tract about the demise of the planet--and let the sun warm me as I read about the denuding of the rain forest, the poisoning of the atmosphere and the swift, silent eradication of species. Gulls coasted by overhead. I saw the distant glint of jetliners.
I must have dozed, my head thrown back, the book spread open in my lap, because the next thing I remember, a strange dog was hovering over me and the sun had dipped behind the rocks. The dog was big, wild-haired, with one staring blue eye, and it just looked at me, ears slightly cocked, as if it expected a Milk-Bone or something. I was startled--not that I don’t like dogs, but here was this woolly thing poking its snout in my face--and I guess I must have made some sort of defensive gesture, because the dog staggered back a step and froze. Even in the confusion of the moment, I could see that there was something wrong with this dog, an unsteadiness, a gimp, a wobble to its legs. I felt a mixture of pity and revulsion--it had been hit by a car, was that it?--when all at once, I became aware of a wetness on the breast of my windbreaker and an unmistakable odor rose to my nostrils: I’d been pissed on.
Pissed on. As I lay there unsuspecting, enjoying the sun, the beach, the solitude, this stupid beast had lifted its leg and used me as a pissoir--and now it was poised there on the edge of the blanket as if it expected a reward. A sudden rage seized me. I came up off the blanket with a curse, and it was only then that a dim apprehension seemed to seep into the dog’s other eye, the brown one, and it lurched back and fell on its face, just out of reach. And then it lurched and fell again, bobbing and weaving across the sand like a seal out of water. I was on my feet now, murderous, glad to see that the thing was hobbled--it would simplify my task of running it down and beating it to death.
“ALF!” A VOICE CALLED, and as the dog floundered in the sand, I turned and saw Alena Jorgensen poised on the boulder behind me. I don’t want to make too much of the moment, don’t want to mythologize it or clutter the scene with allusions to Aphrodite rising from the waves or accepting the golden apple from Paris, but she was a pretty impressive sight. Bare-legged, fluid, as tall and uncompromising as her Nordic ancestors and dressed in a Gore-Tex bikini and hooded sweat shirt unzipped to the waist, she blew me away. Piss-spattered and stupefied, I could only gape up at her.
“You bad boy,” she said, scolding, “you get out of there.” She glanced from the dog to me and back again. “Oh, you bad boy, what have you done?” she demanded, and I was ready to admit to anything, but it was the dog she was addressing, and it flopped over in the sand as if it had been shot. Alena skipped lightly down from the rock, and in the next moment, before I could protest, she was rubbing at the stain on my windbreaker with the wadded-up hem of her sweat shirt.
I tried to stop her—“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s nothing,” as if dogs routinely pissed on my wardrobe—but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“No,” she said, rubbing, her hair flying in my face, the naked skin of her thigh pressed unself-consciously to my own, “no, this is terrible, I’m so embarrassed. Alf, you bad boy. I’ll clean it for you, I will, it’s the least--oh, look at that, it’s stained right through to your T --shirt--”
I could smell her, the mousse she used in her hair, a lilac soap or perfume, the salt-sweet odor of her sweat—she’d been jogging, that was it. I murmured something about taking it to the cleaner’s myself.
She stopped rubbing and straightened up. She was my height, maybe even a fraction taller, and her eyes were slightly mismatched, like the dog’s: a deep earnest blue in the right iris, shading to sea-green and turquoise in the left. We were so close we might have been dancing. “Tell you what,” she said, and her face lit up with a smile. “Since you’re so nice about the whole thing, and most people wouldn’t be, even if they knew what poor Alf had been through, why don’t you let me wash it for you--and the T--shirt, too?”
I was a little disconcerted at this point--I was the one who’d been pissed on, after all--but my anger was gone. I felt weightless, adrift, like a piece of fluff floating on the breeze. “Listen,” I said, and for the moment, I couldn’t look her in the eye, “I don’t want to put you to any trouble. . . .”
‘‘I’m ten minutes up the beach, and I’ve got a washer and drier. Come on, it’s no trouble at all. Or do you have plans? I mean, I could just pay for the cleaner’s, if you want. ...”
I was between relationships--the person I’d been seeing off and on for the past year wouldn’t even return my calls--and my plans consisted of taking in a solitary late--afternoon movie as a birthday treat, then heading over to my mother’s for dinner and the cake with candles. My aunt Irene would be there, and so would my grandmother. They would exclaim over how big I was and how handsome, and then they would begin to contrast my present self with my previous, more diminutive incarnations and finally work themselves up to a spate of reminiscence that would continue unabated till my mother drove them home. And then, if I was lucky, I’d go out to a singles bar and make the acquaintance of a divorced computer programmer in her mid-30s with three kids and bad breath.
I shrugged. “Plans? No, not really. I mean, nothing in particular.”
ALENA WAS HOUSE-SITTING A ONE-ROOM BUNGALOW that rose stumplike from the sand, no more than 50 feet from the tide line. There were trees in the yard behind it and the place was sandwiched between glass fortresses with crenelated decks, whipping flags and great hulking concrete pylons. Sitting on the couch inside, you could feel the full reverberation of each wave hitting the shore, a slow, steady pulse that forever defined the place for me. Alena gave me a faded UC Davis sweat shirt that nearly fit, sprayed stain remover on my T--shirt and windbreaker and in a single fluid motion flipped down the lid of the washer and extracted two beers from the refrigerator beside it.
There was an awkward moment as she settled into the chair opposite me and we concentrated on our beers. I didn’t know what to say. I was disoriented, giddy, still struggling to grasp what had happened. Fifteen minutes earlier, I’d been dozing on the beach, alone on my birthday, feeling sorry for myself, and now I was ensconced in a cozy beach house, in the presence of Alena Jorgensen and her spill of naked leg, drinking a beer. “So what do you do?” she said, setting her beer down on the coffee table.
I was grateful for the question; too grateful, maybe. I described to her at length how dull my job was, nearly ten years with the same agency, writing ad copy, my brain gone numb with disuse. I was somewhere in the middle of a blow-by-blow account of our current campaign for a Ghanian vodka distilled from calabash husks when she said, “I know what you mean,” and told me she’d dropped out of veterinary school herself. “After I saw what they did to the animals. I mean, can you see neutering a dog just for our convenience, just because it’s easier for us if they don’t have a sex life?” Her voice grew hot. “It’s the same old story, species fascism at its worst.”
Alf was lying at my feet, grunting softly and looking up mournfully out of his staring blue eye, as blameless a creature as ever lived. I made a small noise of agreement and then focused on Alf. “And your dog,” I said, “he’s arthritic? Or is it hip dysplasia or what?” I was pleased with myself for the question--aside from tapeworm, hip dysplasia was the only veterinary term I could dredge up from the memory bank, and I could see Alf s problems ran deeper than worms.
Alena looked angry suddenly. “Don’t I wish,” she said. She paused to draw a bitter breath. “There’s nothing wrong with Alf that wasn’t inflicted on him. They tortured him, maimed him, mutilated him.”
“Tortured him?” I echoed, feeling the indignation rise in me--this beautiful girl, this innocent beast. “Who?”
Alena leaned forward and there was real hate in her eyes. She mentioned a prominent shoe company--spat out the name, actually. It was an ordinary name, a familiar one, and it hung in the air between us, suddenly sinister. Alf had been a part of an experiment to market booties for dogs--suede, cordovan, patent leather, the works. The dogs were made to pace a treadmill in their booties to assess wear; Alf was part of the control group.
“Control group?” I could feel the hair rising on the back of my neck.
“They used eighty-grit sandpaper on the treads to accelerate the process.” Alena shot a glance out the window to where the surf pounded the shore; she bit her lip. “Alf was one of the dogs without booties.”
I was stunned. I wanted to get up and comfort her, but I might as well have been grafted to the chair. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “How could anybody--?”
“Believe it,” she said. She studied me for a moment, then crossed the room to dig through a cardboard box in the corner.
If I was moved by the emotion she’d called up, I was moved even more by the sight of her bending over the box in her Gore-Tex bikini; I clung to the edge of the chair as if it were a plunging roller coaster. A moment later, she dropped a dozen file folders in my lap. The uppermost bore the name of the shoe company, and it was crammed with news clippings, several pages of a diary relating to plant operations and workers’ shifts at the Grand Rapids facility and a floor plan of the laboratories. The folders beneath it were inscribed with the names of cosmetics firms, biomedical-research centers, furriers, tanners, meat packers. Alena perched on the edge of the coffee table and watched as I shuffled through them.
“You know the Draize Test?” I gave her a blank look.
“They inject chemicals into rabbits’ eyes to see how much it’ll take before they go blind. The rabbits are in cages, thousands of them, and they take a needle and jab it into their eyes and you know why, you know in the name of what great humanitarian cause this is going on, even as we speak?”
I didn’t know. The surf pounded at my feet. I glanced at Alf and then back into her angry eyes.
“Mascara, that’s what. Mascara. They torture countless thousands of rabbits so women can look like sluts.”
I thought the characterization a bit harsh, but when I studied her pale lashes and tight lipstickless mouth, I saw that she meant it. At any rate, the notion set her off, and she launched into a two-hour lecture, gesturing with her flawless hands, quoting figures, digging through her files for the odd photo of legless mice or morphine-addicted gerbils. She told me how she’d rescued Alf herself, raiding the laboratory with six other members of the Animal Liberation Front, the militant group in honor of which Alf had been named. At first, she’d been content to write letters and carry placards, but now, with the lives of so many animals at stake, she’d turned to more direct action: harassment, vandalism, sabotage. She described how she’d spiked trees with Earth-First!-ers in Oregon, cut miles of barbed-wire fence on cattle ranches in Nevada, destroyed records in biomedical-research labs up and down the coast and insinuated herself between the hunters and the bighorn sheep in the mountains of Arizona. I could only nod and exclaim, smile ruefully and whistle in a low “Holy cow!” sort of way. Finally, she paused to level her unsettling eyes on me. “You know what Isaac Bashevis Singer said?”
We were on our third beer. The sun was gone. I didn’t have a clue.
“Every day is Auschwitz for the animals.”
I looked down into the amber aperture of my beer bottle and nodded my head sadly. The drier had stopped an hour and a half ago. I wondered if she’d go out to dinner with me, and what she would eat if she did. “Uh, I was wondering,” I said, “if ... if you might want to go--out for something to eat--”
Alf chose that moment to heave himself up from the floor and urinate on the wall behind me. My dinner proposal hung in the balance as Alena shot up off the edge of the table to scold him and then gently usher him out the door. “Poor Alf,” she said sighing, turning back to me with a shrug. “But listen, I’m sorry if I talked your head off--I didn’t mean to, but it’s rare to find somebody on your own wave length.”
She smiled. On your own wave length: The words illuminated me, excited me, sent up a tremor I could feel all the way down in the deepest nodes of my reproductive tract. “So how about dinner?” I persisted. Restaurants were running through my head--would it have to be a veggie? Could there be a whiff of grilled flesh in the air? Curdled goat’s milk and tabouleh, tofu, lentil soup, sprouts: Every day is Auschwitz for the animals. “No place with meat, of course.”
She just looked at me.
“I mean, I don’t eat meat myself,” I lied, “or actually, not anymore”—since the pastrami sandwich, that is—“but I don’t really know anyplace that ...” I trailed off lamely.
“I’m a vegan,” she said.
After two hours of blind bunnies, butchered calves and mutilated pups, I couldn’t resist the joke. ‘‘I’m from Venus myself.”
She laughed, but I could see she didn’t find it all that funny.
Vegans didn’t eat meat or fish, she explained, or milk or cheese or eggs, and they didn’t wear wool or leather--or fur, of course.
“Of course,” I said. We were both standing there, hovering over the coffee table. I was beginning to feel a little foolish.
“Why don’t we just eat here,” she said.
THE DEEP THROB OF THE OCEAN SEEMED TO SETTLE IN MY BONES as we lay there in bed that night, Alena and I, and I learned all about the fluency of her limbs and the sweetness of her vegetable tongue Aif sprawled on the floor beneath us, wheezing and groaning in his sleep, and I blessed him for his incontinence and his doggy stupidity. Something was happening with each beat of the surf--and I was ready to go along with it. In the morning I called in sick again.
Alena was watching me from bed as I dialed the office and described how the flu had migrated from my head to my gut and beyond, and there was a look in her eye that told me I would spend the rest of the day right there beside her, peeling grapes and dropping them one by one between her parted and expectant lips. I was wrong. Half an hour later, after a breakfast of brewer’s yeast and what appeared to be some sort of bark marinated in yogurt, I found myself marching up and down the sidewalk in front of a fur emporium in Beverly Hills, waving a placard that read HOW DOES IT FEEL TO WEAR A CORPSE? in letters that dripped like blood.
It was a shock. I’d seen protest marches on TV, antiwar rallies and civil rights demonstrations and all that, but I’d never warmed my heels on the pavement or chanted slogans or felt the naked stick in my hand. There were maybe 40 of us in all, mostly women, and we waved our placards at passing cars and blocked traffic on the sidewalk. One woman had smeared her face and hands with cold cream steeped in Red #3, and Alena had found a ratty mink stole somewhere--the kind that features whole animals sewed together, snout to tail, their miniature limbs dangling--and she’d taken a can of crimson spray paint to their muzzles so that they looked freshly killed. She brandished this grisly banner on a stick high above her head, whooping like a savage and chanting, “Fur is death, fur is death,” over and over again till it became a mantra for the crowd. The day was unseasonably warm, the Jaguars glinted in the sun and the palms nodded in the breeze, and no one but for a single tight-lipped salesman glowering from behind the store’s immaculate windows paid the slightest bit of attention to us.
I marched out there on the sidewalk--feeling exposed and conspicuous but marching nonetheless--for Alena’s sake and for the sake of the foxes and the martens and all the rest, and for my own sake, too: With each step I took, I could feel my consciousness expanding like a balloon, the breath of saintliness seeping steadily into me. Up to this point, I’d worn suede and leather like anybody else--ankle boots and Air Jordans, a bombardier jacket I’d had since high school. If 1’d drawn the line with fur, it was only because I’d never had any use for it. If I’d lived in the Yukon--and sometimes, drowsing through a meeting at work, I found myself fantasizing about it--I would have worn fur, no compunction, no second thoughts.
But not anymore. Now I was a protester, a placard waver, now I was fighting for the right of every last weasel and lynx to grow old and die gracefully, now I was Alena Jorgensen’s lover and a force to be reckoned with. Of course, my feet hurt and I was running sweat and praying that no one from work would drive by and see me there on the sidewalk with my crazy cohorts and denunciatory sign.
We marched for hours, back and forth, till I thought we’d wear a groove in the pavement. We chanted and jeered and nobody so much as looked at us twice. We could have been Hare Krishnas, bums, anti-abortionists or lepers, what did it matter? To the rest of the world, to the uninitiated masses to whose sorry number I’d belonged just 24 hours earlier, we were invisible. I was hungry, tired, discouraged. Alena was ignoring me. Even the woman in redface was slowing down, her chant a hoarse whisper that was sucked up and obliterated in the roar of traffic. And then, as the afternoon faded toward rush hour, a wizened silvery old woman who might have been an aging star or a star’s mother or even the first dimly remembered wife of a studio exec got out of a long white car at the curb and strode fearlessly toward us. Despite the heat--it must have been 80 degrees at this point--she was wearing an ankle-length silver-fox coat, a bristling shouldery wafting mass of peltry that must have decimated every burrow on the tundra. It was the moment we’d been waiting for.
A cry went up, shrill and ululating, and we converged on the lone old woman like a Cheyenne war party scouring the plains. The man beside me went down on all fours and howled like a dog, Alena slashed the air with her limp mink and blood sang in my ears. “Murderer!” I screamed, getting into it. “Torturer! Nazi!” The strings in my neck were tight. I didn’t know what I was saying. The crowd gibbered. The placards danced. I was so close to the old woman I could smell her--her perfume, a whiff of moth balls from the coat--and it intoxicated me, maddened me, and I stepped in front of her and blocked her path with all the seething militant bulk of my 185 pounds of sinew and muscle.
I never saw the chauffeur. Alena told me afterward that he was a former kickboxing champion who’s been banned from the sport for excessive brutality. The first blow seemed to drop from above, a shell lobbed from deep within enemy territory; the others came at me like a windmill churning in a storm. Someone screamed. I remember focusing on the flawless rigid pleats of the chauffeur’s trousers, and things got a bit hazy.
I woke to the dull thump of the surf slamming at the shore and the touch of Alena’s lips on my own. I felt as if I’d been broken on the wheel, dismantled and put back together again. “Lie still,” she said, and her tongue moved across my swollen cheek. Stricken, I could only drag my head across the pillow and gaze into the depths of her parti-colored eyes. “Youu’ re one of us now,” she whispered.
Next morning, I didn’t even bother to call in sick.
BY THE END OF THE WEEK, I’d recovered enough to crave meat, for which I felt deeply ashamed, and to wear out a pair of vinyl huaraches on the picket line. Together, and with various coalitions of antivivisectionists, militant vegans and cat lovers, Alena and I tramped a hundred miles of sidewalk, spray-painted inflammatory slogans across the windows of supermarkets and burger stands, denounced tanners, furriers, poulterers and sausage makers and somehow found time to break up a cockfight in Pacoima. It was exhilarating, heady, dangerous. If I’d been disconnected in the past, I was plugged in now. I felt righteous--for the first time in my life, I had a cause--I had Alena, Alena above all. She fascinated me, fixated me, made me feel like a tomcat leaping in and out of second-story windows, oblivious to the free fall and the picket fence below. There was her beauty, of course, a triumph of evolution and the happy interchange of genes going all the way back to the cave men, but it was more than that--it was her commitment to animals, to the righting of wrongs, to morality that made her irresistible. Was it love? The term is something I’ve always had difficulty with, but I suppose it was. Sure it was. Love, pure and simple. I had it, it had me.
“You know what?” Alena said one night as she stood over the miniature stove, searing tofu in oil and garlic. We’d spent the afternoon demonstrating out in front of a tortilla factory that used rendered animal fat as a congealing agent, after which we’d been chased three blocks by an assistant manager at Von’s who objected to Alena’s spray-painting MEAT IS DEATH over the specials in the front window. I was giddy with the adolescent joy of it. I sank into the couch with a beer and watched Alf limp across the floor to fling himself down and lick at a suspicious spot on the floor. The surf boomed like thunder.
“What?” I said.
“Thanksgiving’s coming.”
I let it ride a moment, wondering if I should invite Alena to my mother’s for a big basted bird stuffed with canned oysters and buttered bread crumbs, and then realized it probably wouldn’t be such a great idea. I said nothing.
She glanced over her shoulder. “The animals don’t have a whole lot to be thankful for, that’s for sure. It’s just an excuse for the meat industry to butcher a couple million turkeys, is all it is.” She paused; hot safflower oil popped in the pan. “I think it’s time for a little road trip,” she said. “Can we take your car?”
“Sure, but where are we going?”
She gave me her Gioconda smile. “To liberate some turkeys.”
IN THE MORNING, I CALLED MY BOSS to tell him I had pancreatic cancer and wouldn’t be in for a while, then we threw some things into the car, helped Alf scrabble into the back seat and headed up Route Five for the San Joaquin Valley. We drove for three hours through a fog so dense the windows might as well have been packed with cotton. Alena was secretive, but I could see she was excited. I knew only that we were on our way to rendezvous with a certain “Rolfe,” a longtime friend of hers and a big name in the world of ecotage and animal rights, after which we would commit some desperate and illegal act for which the turkeys would be eternally grateful.
There was a truck stalled in front of the sign for our exit at Calpurnia Springs, and I had to brake hard and jerk the wheel around twice to keep the tires on the pavement. Alena came up out of her seat and Alf slammed into the armrest like a sack of meal, but we made it. A few minutes later, we were gliding through the ghostly vacancy of the town itself, lights drifting past in a nimbus of fog, glowing pink, yellow and white, and then there was only the blacktop road and the pale void that engulfed it. We’d gone ten miles or so when Alena instructed me to slow down and began to study the right-hand shoulder with a keen, unwavering eye.
The earth breathed in and out. I squinted hard into the soft drifting glow of the headlights. “There, there!” she cried and I swung the wheel to the right and suddenly we were lurching along a pitted dirt road that rose up from the blacktop like a goat path worn into the side of a mountain. Five minutes later, Alf sat up in the back seat and began to whine, and then a crude unpainted shack began to detach itself from the vagueness around us.
Rolfe met us on the porch. He was tall and leathery, in his 50s, I guessed, with a shock of hair and rutted features that brought Samuel Beckett to mind. He was wearing gum boots and jeans and a faded lumberjack shirt that looked as if it had been washed a hundred times. Alf took a quick pee against the side of the house, then fumbled up the steps to roll over and fawn at Rolfe’s feet.
“Rolfe!” Alena called, and there was too much animation in her voice, too much familiarity, for my taste. She took the steps in a bound and threw herself into his arms. I watched them kiss, and it wasn’t a fatherly-daughterly sort of kiss, not at all. It was a kiss with some meaning behind it, and I didn’t like it. Rolfe, I thought: What kind of name is that?
Rolfe,” Alena gasped, still a little breathless from bouncing up the steps like a cheerleader. ‘‘I’d like you to meet Jim.”
This was my signal. I ascended the porch steps and held out my hand. Rolfe gave me a look out of the hooded depths of his eyes and then took my hand in a hard callused grip, the grip of the wood splitter, the fence mender, the liberator of hothouse turkeys and laboratory mice. “A pleasure,” he said, and his voice rasped like sandpaper.
There was a fire going inside, and Alena and I sat before it and warmed our hands while Alf whined and sniffed and Rolfe served Red Zinger tea in Japanese cups the size of thimbles. Alena hadn’t stopped chattering since we stepped through the door, and Rolfe came right back at her in his woodsy rasp, the two of them exchanging names and news and gossip as if they were talking in code. I studied the reproductions of teal and widgeon that hung from the peeling walls, noticed the case of Heinz vegetarian beans in the corner and the half gallon of Jack Daniel’s on the mantel. Finally, after the third cup of tea, Alena settled back in her chair--a huge old Salvation Army sort of thing with a soiled antimacassar--and said, “So what’s the plan?”
Rolfe gave me another look, a quick predatory darting of the eyes, as if he weren’t sure I could be trusted, and then turned back to Alena. “Hedda Gabler’s Range-Fed Turkey Ranch,” he said. “And no, I don’t find the name cute, not at all.” He looked at me now, a long steady assay. “They grind up the heads for cat food, and the neck, the organs and the rest, that they wrap up in paper and stuff back in the body cavity like it was a war atrocity or something. Whatever did a turkey go and do to us to deserve a fate like that?”
The question was rhetorical, even if it seemed to have been aimed at me, and I made no response other than to compose my face in a look that wedded grief, outrage and resolve. I was thinking of all the turkeys I’d sent to their doom, of the plucked wishbones, the pope’s noses and the crisp browned skin I used to relish as a kid. It brought a lump to my throat, and something more : I realized I was hungry.
“Ben Franklin wanted to make them a national symbol,” Alena chimed in, “did you know that? But the meat eaters won out.”
“Fifty thousand birds,” Rolfe said, glancing at Alena and bringing his incendiary gaze back to rest on me. “I have information they’re going to start slaughtering them tomorrow for the fresh-not-frozen market.”
“Yuppie poultry.” Alena’s voice was drenched in disgust.
For a moment, no one spoke. I became aware of the crackling of the fire. The fog pressed at the windows. It was getting dark.
“You can see the place from the highway,” Rolfe said finally, “but the only access is through Calpurnia Springs. It’s about twenty miles--twenty-two point three, to be exact.”
Alena’s eyes were bright. She was gazing at Rolfe as if he’d just dropped down from heaven. I felt something heave in my stomach.
“We strike tonight.”
ROLFE INSISTED THAT WE TAKE MY CAR--”Everybody around here knows my pickup, and I can’t take any chances on a little operation like this”--but we did mask the plates, front and back, with an inch-thick smear of mud. We blackened our faces like commandos and collected our tools from the shed out back--tin snips, crowbars and two five-gallon cans of gasoline. “Gasoline?” I said, trying the heft of the can.
Rolfe gave me a crazy look. “To create a diversion,” he said. Alf, for obvious reasons, stayed behind in the shack.
If the fog had been thick in daylight, it was impermeable now; the sky collapsed upon the earth. It took hold of the headlights and threw them back at me till my eyes began to water from the effort of keeping the car on the road. But for the ruts and bumps, we might have been floating in space. Alena sat up front between Rolfe and me, curiously silent. Rolfe didn’t have much to say, either, save for the occasional grunted command: “Hang a right here”; “Hard left”; “Easy, easy.” I thought about meat and jail and the heroic proportions to which I was about to swell in Alena’s eyes and what I intended to do to her when we finally got to bed. It was two A.M. by the dashboard clock.
“OK,” Rolfe said, and his voice came at me so suddenly it startled me, “pull over here--and kill the lights.”
We stepped out into the hush of night and eased the doors shut behind us. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could hear the not-so-distant hiss of traffic on the highway, and another sound, too, muffled and indistinct, the gentle, unconscious suspiration of thousands of my fellow creatures. And I could smell them, a seething rancid odor of feces and feathers and naked scaly feet; it crawled down my throat and burned my nostrils. “Whew,” I said in a whisper, “I can smell them.”
Rolfe and Alena were vague presences at my side. Rolfe flipped open the trunk and in the next moment, I felt the heft of a crowbar and a pair of tin snips in my hand. “Listen, you, Jim,” he whispered, taking me by the wrist in his iron grip and leading me half a dozen steps forward. “Feel this?”
I felt a grid of wire, which he promptly cut: snip, snip, snip. “This is their enclosure--they’re out there in the day, scratching around in the dirt. You get lost, you follow this wire. Now, you’re going to take a section out of this side, Alena’s got the west side and I’ve got the south. Once that’s done, I signal with the flashlight and we bust open the doors to the turkey houses--they’re these big low white buildings; you’ll see them when we get close--and flush the birds out. Don’t worry about me or Alena. Just worry about getting as many birds out as you can.”
I was worried. Worried about everything, from some half-crazed farmer with a shotgun or an AK-47, or whatever they carried these days, to losing Alena in the fog to the turkeys themselves--how big were they? Were they violent? They had claws and beaks, didn’t they? And how were they going to feel about me bursting into their bedroom in the middle of the night?
“And when the gas cans go up, you high-tail it back to the car, got it?”
I could hear the turkeys tossing in their sleep. A truck shifted gears out on the highway. “I think so,” I whispered.
“And one more thing--be sure to leave the keys in the ignition.”
This gave me a pause. “But--?”
“The getaway.” Alena was so close I could feel her breath on my ear. “I mean, we don’t want to be fumbling around for keys when all hell is breaking loose out there, do we?”
I eased open the door and reinserted the key in the ignition, even though the automatic buzzer warned me against it. “OK,” I murmured, but they were already gone, soaked up in the shadows and the mist. At this point, my heart was hammering so loudly I could barely hear the rustling of the turkeys. This is crazy, I told myself, it’s hurtful and wrong, not to mention illegal. Spray-painting slogans was one thing, but this was something else altogether. I thought of the turkey farmer asleep in his bed, an entrepreneur working to make America strong, a man with a wife and kids and a mortgage . . . but then I thought of all those innocent turkeys consigned to death, and finally I thought of Alena, long-legged and loving, and the way she came to me out of the darkness of the bathroom and the boom of the surf.
I took the tin snips to the wire.
I must have been at it half an hour, 45 minutes, gradually working my way toward the big white sheds that had begun to emerge from the gloom up ahead, when I saw Rolfe’s flashlight blinking off to the left. This was my signal to head to the nearest shed, snap off the padlock with my crowbar, fling open the doors and herd a bunch of cranky, suspicious gobblers out into the night. It was now or never, I looked twice around me and then broke for the nearest shed in an awkward crouching gait. The turkeys must have sensed that something was up--from behind the long white windowless wall there arose a watchful gabbling, a soughing of feathers that fanned up like a breeze in the treetops. Hold on, you toms and hens, I thought, freedom is at hand. A jerk of the wrist and the padlock fell to the ground. Blood pounding in my ears, I took hold of the door and jerked it open with a great dull booming reverberation--and suddenly, there they were, turkeys, thousands upon thousands of them, cloaked in white feathers under a string of dim yellow bulbs. The light glinted in their reptilian eyes. Somewhere a dog began to bark.
I steeled myself and sprang through the door with a shout, whirling the crowbar over my head. “All right!” I boomed, and the echo gave it back to me a hundred times over. “This is it! Turkeys, on your feet!” Nothing. No response. But for the whisper of rustling feathers and the alertly cocked heads, they might have been sculptures, throw pillows, they might as well have been dead and butchered and served up with yams and onions and all the trimmings. The barking of the dog went up a notch. I thought I heard voices.
The turkeys crouched on the concrete floor, wave upon wave of them, stupid and immovable; they perched in the rafters, on s eves and platforms, huddled in wooden stalls. Desperate, I rushed into the front rank of them, swinging my crowbar, stamping my feet and howling like the wishbone plucker I once was. That did it. There was a shriek from the nearest bird and the others took it up till an unholy racket filled the place, and now they were moving, tumbling down from their perches, flapping their wings in a storm of dried excrement and pecked-over grain, pouring across the concrete floor till it vanished beneath them. Encouraged, I screamed again—“Yeeeeeee-ha-ha-ha-ha!” and beat at the aluminum walls with the crowbar as the turkeys shot through the doorway into the night.
It was then that the black mouth of the doorway erupted with light and the ka-boom! of the gas cans sent a tremor through the earth. Run! a voice screamed in my head, and the adrenaline kicked in and all of a sudden, I was scrambling for the door in a hurricane of turkeys. They were everywhere, flapping their wings, gobbling and screeching, loosing their bowels in panic. Something hit the back of my legs and all at once I was down among them, on the floor, in the dirt and feathers and wet turkey shit. I was a roadbed, a turkey expressway. Their claws dug at my back, my shoulders, the crown of my head. Panicked now, choking on the feathers and dust and worse, I fought to my feet as the big screeching birds launched themselves around me and I staggered out into the barnyard. “There! Who’s that there?” a voice roared, and I was off and running.
What can I say? I vaulted turkeys, kicked them aside like so many footballs, slashed and tore at them as they sailed through the air. I ran till my lungs felt as if they were burning right through my chest, disoriented, bewildered, terrified of the shotgun blast I was sure would cut me down at any moment. Behind me the fire raged and lit the fog till it glowed blood--red and hellish. But where was the fence? And where the car?
I got control of my feet then and stood stock-still in a flurry of turkeys, squinting into a wall of fog. Was that it? Was that the car over there? At that moment, I heard an engine start up somewhere behind me--a familiar engine with a familiar coughing gurgle in the throat of the carburetor--and then the lights blinked on briefly 300 yards away. I heard the engine race and listened, helpless, as the car roared off in the opposite direction. I stood there a moment longer, forlorn and forsaken, and then I ran blindly off into the night, putting the fire, the shouts and the barking and the incessant mindless squawking of the turkeys as far behind me as I could.
WHEN DAWN FINALLY BROKE, it was only just perceptibly, so thick was the fog. I’d made my way to a blacktop road--which road and where it led I didn’t know--and sat crouched and shivering in a clump of weeds just off the shoulder. Alenda wouldn’t desert me, I was sure of that--she loved me, as I loved her; needed me, as I needed her--and I was sure she’d be cruising along the back roads looking for me. My pride was wounded, of course, and if I never laid eyes on Rolfe again I felt wouldn’t be missing much, but at least I hadn’t been drilled full of shot, savaged by farm dogs or pecked to death by irate turkeys. I was sore all over, my shin throbbed where I’d slammed into something substantial while vaulting through the night, there were feathers in my hair and my face and arms were a mosaic of cuts and scratches and long trailing fissures of dirt. I’d been sitting there for what seemed like hours, cursing Rolfe, developing suspicions about Alena and unflattering theories about environmentalists in general, when finally I heard the familiar slurp and roar of my car cutting through the mist ahead of me.
Rolfe was driving, his face impassive. I flung myself into the road like a tattered beggar, waving my arms over my head and giving vent to my joy, and he very nearly ran me down. Alena was out of the car before it stopped, wrapping me up in her arms, and then she was bundling me into the back seat with Alf and we were on our way back to the hideaway. “What happened?” she cried, as if she couldn’t have guessed. ‘‘Where were you? We waited as long as we could.”
I was feeling sulky, betrayed, feeling as if I were owed a whole lot more than a perfunctory hug and a string of insipid questions. Still, as I told my tale, I began to warm to it--they’d got away in the car with the heater going, and I’d stayed behind to fight the turkeys, the farmers and the elements, too, and if that weren’t heroic, I’d like to know what was. I looked into Alena’s admiring eyes and pictured Rolfe’s shack, a nip or two from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, maybe a peanut-butter-and-tofu sandwich and then the bed, with Alena in it. Rolfe said nothing.
Back at Rolfe’s, I took a shower and scrubbed the turkey droppings from my pores, then helped myself to the bourbon. It was ten in the morning and the house was dark--if the world had ever been without fog, there was no sign of it here. When Rolfe stepped out onto the porch to fetch an armload of firewood, I pulled Alena down into my lap. “Hey,” she murmured, “I thought you were an invalid.”
She was wearing a pair of too-tight jeans and an oversized sweater with nothing underneath it. I slipped my hand inside the sweater and found something to hold on to. “Invalid?” I said, nuzzling at her sleeve. “Hell, I’m a turkey liberator, an ecoguerrilla, a friend of the animals and the environment, too.”
She laughed, but she pushed herself up and crossed the room to stare out the occluded window. “Listen, Jim,” she said, “what we did last night was great, really great, but it’s just the beginning.” Alf looked up at her expectantly. I heard Rolfe fumbling around on the porch, the thump of wood on wood. She turned around to face me now. “What I mean is Rolfe wants me to go up to Wyoming for a little bit, just outside Yellowstone--”
Me? Rolfe wants me? There was no invitation in that, no plurality, no acknowledgment of all we’d meant to each other. “For what?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“There’s this grizzly--a pair of them, actually--and they’ve been raiding places outside the park. One of them made off with the mayor’s Doberman the other night and the people are up in arms. We--I mean, Rolfe and me and some other people from the old Bolt Weevils in Minnesota?--we’re going to go up there and make sure the Park Service--or the local yahoos--don’t eliminate them. The bears, I mean.”
My tone was corrosive. “You and Rolfe?”
“There’s nothing between us, if that’s what you’re thinking-- this has to do with animals, that’s all.”
“Like us?”
She shook her head slowly. “Not like us, no. We’re the plague on this planet, don’t you know that?”
Suddenly, I was angry. Seething. Here I’d crouched in the bushes all night covered in turkey crap, and now I was part of a plague. I was on my feet. “No, I don’t know that.”
She gave me a look that let me know it didn’t matter, that she was already gone, that her agenda, at least for the moment, didn’t include me and there was no use arguing about it. “Look,” she said, her voice dropping as Rolfe slammed back through the door with a load of wood, ‘‘I’ll see you in L.A. in a month or so, OK?” She gave me an apologetic smile. “Water the plants for me?”
AN HOUR LATER, I WAS ON THE ROAD AGAIN. I’d helped Rolfe stack the wood beside the fireplace, allowed Alena to brush my lips with a goodbye kiss, and then stood there on the porch while Rolfe locked up, lifted Alf into the bed of his pickup and rumbled down the rutted dirt road with Alena at his side. I watched till their brake lights dissolved in the drifting gray mist, then fired up my car and lurched down the road behind them. A month or so: I felt hollow inside. I pictured her with Rolfe, eating yogurt and wheat germ, stopping at motels, wrestling grizzlies and spiking trees. The hollowness opened up, cored me out till I felt as if I’d been plucked and gutted and served up on a platter myself.
I found my way back through Calpurnia Springs without incident--there were no roadblocks, no flashing lights and grim-looking troopers searching trunks and back seats for a tallish 30-year-old ecoterrorist with turkey tracks down his back--but after I turned onto the highway for Los Angeles, I had a shock. Ten miles up the road, my nightmare materialized out of the gloom: red lights everywhere, signal flares and police cars lined up on the shoulder. I was on the very edge of panicking, a beat away from cutting across the meridian and giving them a run for it, when I saw the truck jackknifed up ahead. I slowed to 40, 30, and then hit the brakes. In a moment, I was stalled in a lane of cars and there was something all over the road, ghostly and white in the fog. At first I thought it must have been flung from the truck, rolls of toilet paper or crates of soap powder ruptured on the pavement. It was neither. As I inched closer, the tires creeping now, the pulse of the lights in my face, I saw that the road was coated in feathers, turkey feathers. A storm of them. A blizzard. And more: There was flesh there, too, slick and greasy, a red pulp ground into the surface of the road, thrown up like slush from the tires of the car ahead of me, ground beneath the massive wheels of the truck. Turkeys. Turkeys everywhere.
The car crept forward. I flicked on the windshield wipers, hit the WASHER button, and for a moment, a scrim of diluted blood obscured the windows and the hollowness opened up inside me till I thought it would suck me inside out. Behind me, someone was leaning on his horn. A trooper loomed up out of the gloom, waving me on with the dead yellow eye of his flashlight. I thought of Alena and felt sick. All there was between us had come to this, expectations gone sour, a smear on the road. I wanted to get out and shoot myself, turn myself in, close my eyes and wake up in jail, in a hair shirt, in a strait jacket, anything. It went on. Time passed. Nothing moved. And then, miraculously, a vision began to emerge from behind the smeared glass and the gray belly of the fog, lights glowing golden in the waste. I saw the sign, GAS/FOOD/LODGING, and my hand was on the blinker.
It took me a moment, picturing the place, the generic tile, the false cheer of the lights, the odor of charred flesh hanging heavy on the air, Big Mac, three-piece dark meat, carne asada, cheeseburger. The engine coughed. The lights glowed. I didn’t think of Alena then, didn’t think of Rolfe or grizzlies or the doomed bleating flocks and herds or of the blind bunnies and cancerous mice--I thought only of the cavern opening inside and how to fill it. “Meat,” and I spoke the word aloud, talking to calm myself as if I’d awakened from a bad dream, “it’s only meat.”
A failure to communicate
I'll take this down, but its something that I noticed that was intriguing yesterday...
http://americannews.com/youll-never-believe-why-this-woman-was-sentenced-to-25-years-for-murdering-her-rapist/
That there is a link! There is one inaccuracy, only shown in the photo. The text is accurate. Relatively so. Maybe not.
Before I get to that, here is the actual case. I don't want my blog turned into a crime drama. Fuck that. I just told someone my dream last night. I'm skating on thin ice.
(And I just finished the last bit of caffeine in the house. Save me Jesus.)
The actual story as shown through the entertainment lenses in black and white morality is a formula for almost all of these stories. Its a one trick pony. How dare these killers think we are that stupid to believe them? They are betting their freedom on the collected stupidity of a typical jury pool.
All of them can fit into that morality. Which is just as good because it's confusing to question it deeper in a 45 minute time slot. Murder will always be illegal.
The red flag in the real story is that, like me, this girl was addicted to benzos.
The amount of a certain type of benzo that I had to take every 12 hours to prevent a seizure for, I don't know, 17 years, is enough with one dose to kill most people. Luckily, I don't have a murder under my belt, otherwise I'd have to rely on the collected stupidity of law abiding citizens for my freedom.
This is the problem with that link....
He's not black. Nope. The real man she killed is the white guy in the above photo. So knowing that one image is wrong, these are the comments on the story when he is switched with that black fellow....
One might say that what I am selling is black and white too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW55IlpNgRA
*Just ignore everything but the comments. Then if you are bored like me, you can watch this youtube and be indignant that she thinks you believe her.
He should still be alive, but aside from that, the prison systems just throw people away. They need to be like schools that you graduate from with some type of sociological competence. Something. Anything then what they are now. It's an entire culture of poverty stricken people who often don't know better. I'm waiting for Trump to talk about the corrective system. I did not vote for him, but felons can't vote. I'd rather be given the option to drink poison then to vote for either of the candidates up for sale.
Yesterday I hired a lawyer to appeal my conviction. It's a long shot, but I have such hope.
One end Side Note is that I only watched this one specific 48 hours because some asshole commented that it's hilarious after smoking a joint. That's not very nice.
http://americannews.com/youll-never-believe-why-this-woman-was-sentenced-to-25-years-for-murdering-her-rapist/
That there is a link! There is one inaccuracy, only shown in the photo. The text is accurate. Relatively so. Maybe not.
Before I get to that, here is the actual case. I don't want my blog turned into a crime drama. Fuck that. I just told someone my dream last night. I'm skating on thin ice.
(And I just finished the last bit of caffeine in the house. Save me Jesus.)
The actual story as shown through the entertainment lenses in black and white morality is a formula for almost all of these stories. Its a one trick pony. How dare these killers think we are that stupid to believe them? They are betting their freedom on the collected stupidity of a typical jury pool.
All of them can fit into that morality. Which is just as good because it's confusing to question it deeper in a 45 minute time slot. Murder will always be illegal.
The red flag in the real story is that, like me, this girl was addicted to benzos.
The amount of a certain type of benzo that I had to take every 12 hours to prevent a seizure for, I don't know, 17 years, is enough with one dose to kill most people. Luckily, I don't have a murder under my belt, otherwise I'd have to rely on the collected stupidity of law abiding citizens for my freedom.
This is the problem with that link....
One might say that what I am selling is black and white too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW55IlpNgRA
*Just ignore everything but the comments. Then if you are bored like me, you can watch this youtube and be indignant that she thinks you believe her.
He should still be alive, but aside from that, the prison systems just throw people away. They need to be like schools that you graduate from with some type of sociological competence. Something. Anything then what they are now. It's an entire culture of poverty stricken people who often don't know better. I'm waiting for Trump to talk about the corrective system. I did not vote for him, but felons can't vote. I'd rather be given the option to drink poison then to vote for either of the candidates up for sale.
Yesterday I hired a lawyer to appeal my conviction. It's a long shot, but I have such hope.
One end Side Note is that I only watched this one specific 48 hours because some asshole commented that it's hilarious after smoking a joint. That's not very nice.
Monday, February 27, 2017
West Texas Hipsters- If They Exist.
I didn't pay attention to my boyfriend, before he became that to me, until he told me that he lived in Florida. He's eaten alligator tails before; very exotic.
And because Texas is an ass-kicking state, here is the rest of this story:
http://gawker.com/man-named-bear-kills-gator-that-ate-his-dumb-friend-h-1716237190
&
http://www.barstoolsports.com/barstoolu/in-the-best-follow-up-ever-man-named-bear-shoots-and-kills-the-alligator-who-ate-his-friend-over-the-weekend-he-had-to-go/
I love my human race. Bless those gators.
Friday, September 30, 2016
Spreadable Toes
Notice that when I get bored or annoyed with writing something specific out, I'll just start another blog.
This has nothing to do with anything in this blog. My tuxedo cat (he works the night shift) can spread his toes out to bite out any straw or dirt in them. It reminds me of the stupidest idea from my brain in a long time. I've got toe envy. I can't spread them out that far. So, because I'm my toughest critic, I thought (as a college student...that's where Uncle Sam's $$$ went); well I thought that only highly advanced people could spread their feet apart. So one day I met Mike. Don't know his last name. Don't care.
He was an only child from Fredericksburg, Maryland. My own family took the 3 hour, one way, ride so my mother could see her children slip and slide down a rock waterfall like lima beans.
He was confused. Mike was the man responsible for the quote, "You like to swim in the deep end. I love the baby pool." How poetic. Mike towered over me, and I'm not short. He drove a Lexus, which was his identity, or he seemed to feel that way in a good light. One day when we were having sex, I turned around to see him flexing his biceps in the closet mirror window. I dumped him like heavy chair being carried up a flight of stair with no thank you attacked. That's how I spent half of my yesterday anyway.
But his toes! It was not his car that got me. Or that he lived in a safe heaven that my family loved to visit. Those were the happiest times of our lives. But Mike had no place in that life other then be the guy who could....throw tennis balls with his toes! I kid you not. The man is a circus freak show.
So my one week fling with this Mike from Maryland character ended quickly, but he had one funny story that was worth writing down. He was the joke of a funny story that is also worth writing down.
Order of Operations:
The second story hurts me too, so I'll save it for now. The first story is of Mike's first acid trip. I may have peed myself when he told me this story because he never once told it with a laugh. See, I don't care. I'll run behind a tree and laugh until I can compose myself, which takes a while.
So Mike and two of his friends drop acid for the first time...in Mike's parents house. They ate a plate of spaghetti before the acid kicked in. Spaghetti with meatballs. They must have been famished or nervous because the meatballs went down too quickly.
Mike went to the bathroom to wash his hands, and as he was leaving, one of his two friends spewed meatballs everywhere. Mike yelled, "Help us. He's coughing up his stomach!" The three men ran in three different directions leaving Mike's parents at home to wonder about their cooking skills. And damn if Mike could do that story more justice.
Why does this 6 day affair get a blog? Well, Mike came over one day with a flower in a flower pot- a black plastic flower pot- that definitely was found doing a plastic tumble roll in Arcata. Its the thought that counted, so I was very happy (didn't we break up the following day though???) He had a somewhat scripted ramble that accompanied his makeshift flower pot. He said, "Since your name is Rose [the flower was a purple larkspur], I saw the most beautiful flower on the side of the road and said, "Gotta get my girl that." (Again, it did not last a week.)
So the story that makes us both look funny came from my vicious Boston transplant neighbors. I consider one (out of the three) still one solid dear friend, even though he is punching his was through Massachusetts as I write. The other two were knee deep in imaginary pussy. I hung out with them often (which makes me an authority fearing weed-loving Boston natives.....no it doesn't.) The day before Mike brought that long, purple, highway flower over, these Boston neighbors were watching him through their window. In Humboldt it gets boring because you literally watch plants grow. These boys hated my blonde Fresno, Californian roommate, and probably still hate me for picking her over the Japanese violinist.
Side Note: My favorite therapist told me that as long as I don't visit, nor settle in Fresno, I did well by her.
"You're roommate has a steady stream of men. And they all look them same; like a bunch of fuckin monkeys. This one came by in a Lexus yesterday with a dead plant.....He kept banging and waiting. I almost felt bad for him. What was he afraid of? She was back in her bedroom replacing him? Fucking monkeys."
I never spoke up because-wowch!- I did not know that he was that frantic to get me that flower. It did die a few days later. curses to those black plastic pots. This is the blog that does not fit. If I were to snap a photo of someone like this (Meatball Mike) in more blogs, no to even comprehend!!!No sir.
Climb those Appalachian mountains until you touch the sky. And of course, keep that Wade the Duck life persevere on at all times. I'm not alone in the world.
This has nothing to do with anything in this blog. My tuxedo cat (he works the night shift) can spread his toes out to bite out any straw or dirt in them. It reminds me of the stupidest idea from my brain in a long time. I've got toe envy. I can't spread them out that far. So, because I'm my toughest critic, I thought (as a college student...that's where Uncle Sam's $$$ went); well I thought that only highly advanced people could spread their feet apart. So one day I met Mike. Don't know his last name. Don't care.
He was an only child from Fredericksburg, Maryland. My own family took the 3 hour, one way, ride so my mother could see her children slip and slide down a rock waterfall like lima beans.
He was confused. Mike was the man responsible for the quote, "You like to swim in the deep end. I love the baby pool." How poetic. Mike towered over me, and I'm not short. He drove a Lexus, which was his identity, or he seemed to feel that way in a good light. One day when we were having sex, I turned around to see him flexing his biceps in the closet mirror window. I dumped him like heavy chair being carried up a flight of stair with no thank you attacked. That's how I spent half of my yesterday anyway.
But his toes! It was not his car that got me. Or that he lived in a safe heaven that my family loved to visit. Those were the happiest times of our lives. But Mike had no place in that life other then be the guy who could....throw tennis balls with his toes! I kid you not. The man is a circus freak show.
So my one week fling with this Mike from Maryland character ended quickly, but he had one funny story that was worth writing down. He was the joke of a funny story that is also worth writing down.
Order of Operations:
The second story hurts me too, so I'll save it for now. The first story is of Mike's first acid trip. I may have peed myself when he told me this story because he never once told it with a laugh. See, I don't care. I'll run behind a tree and laugh until I can compose myself, which takes a while.
So Mike and two of his friends drop acid for the first time...in Mike's parents house. They ate a plate of spaghetti before the acid kicked in. Spaghetti with meatballs. They must have been famished or nervous because the meatballs went down too quickly.
Mike went to the bathroom to wash his hands, and as he was leaving, one of his two friends spewed meatballs everywhere. Mike yelled, "Help us. He's coughing up his stomach!" The three men ran in three different directions leaving Mike's parents at home to wonder about their cooking skills. And damn if Mike could do that story more justice.
Why does this 6 day affair get a blog? Well, Mike came over one day with a flower in a flower pot- a black plastic flower pot- that definitely was found doing a plastic tumble roll in Arcata. Its the thought that counted, so I was very happy (didn't we break up the following day though???) He had a somewhat scripted ramble that accompanied his makeshift flower pot. He said, "Since your name is Rose [the flower was a purple larkspur], I saw the most beautiful flower on the side of the road and said, "Gotta get my girl that." (Again, it did not last a week.)
So the story that makes us both look funny came from my vicious Boston transplant neighbors. I consider one (out of the three) still one solid dear friend, even though he is punching his was through Massachusetts as I write. The other two were knee deep in imaginary pussy. I hung out with them often (which makes me an authority fearing weed-loving Boston natives.....no it doesn't.) The day before Mike brought that long, purple, highway flower over, these Boston neighbors were watching him through their window. In Humboldt it gets boring because you literally watch plants grow. These boys hated my blonde Fresno, Californian roommate, and probably still hate me for picking her over the Japanese violinist.
Side Note: My favorite therapist told me that as long as I don't visit, nor settle in Fresno, I did well by her.
So my neighbors, The Massholes, were joking about Mike banging on the kitchen window, the front door, then coming down to honk his horn, then back up again. One of them even demonstrated his defeated posture when he realized he was not getting on the opposite side of that front door.
"You're roommate has a steady stream of men. And they all look them same; like a bunch of fuckin monkeys. This one came by in a Lexus yesterday with a dead plant.....He kept banging and waiting. I almost felt bad for him. What was he afraid of? She was back in her bedroom replacing him? Fucking monkeys."
I never spoke up because-wowch!- I did not know that he was that frantic to get me that flower. It did die a few days later. curses to those black plastic pots. This is the blog that does not fit. If I were to snap a photo of someone like this (Meatball Mike) in more blogs, no to even comprehend!!!No sir.
Climb those Appalachian mountains until you touch the sky. And of course, keep that Wade the Duck life persevere on at all times. I'm not alone in the world.
Friday, August 12, 2016
Who Invented The Back-Scratcher?
The Back-Scratcher is not a household name enough to pass my spell check. I did not realize I owned one until yesterday, when I realized I was walking around with Ambien in my bedside tin. That is how it works. I don't remember how I came to own a back-scratcher, but here...backscratcher...I'll start the trend of making it a compound word. Someone probably hates me enough to have replaced the fruitcake for a Christmas gift. Or realized that I was a fruitcake and needed a backscratcher to complete the set. What else would be fitting for that Dollarstore (compound word, I summit) shopping cart? Wall-Dry (its generic for Benadryl.)
Side Note: I know someone who checked into rehab for that particular addiction. I laughed until I was buying my Wall-Dry in bulk at the Dollarstore.
I'll cut to the chase. I was up with God knows how much Ambien in my system last night, stuck on a 20/20 called 'Rehab Mogul'. My goodness. My will to wrap that around my head was very weak because that is the world I live in. That easily Youtubed episode (Rehab Mogul),
Which I had to laugh had the most watched hits on it after I did the research that this meth-addled felon rehab Mogul (he likes the term enough to make t-shirts with the name, which is just as scary as the fast sales of these t-shirts, probably by the addict residents.)
Where was I? This guy is being sued by a man named Cliff Brodsky, who had the most hits on his 20/20 uploaded episode that he put on-line. I got a laugh that the guy who was a forerunner in suing him for the most money led the initial campaign against him publicly.
I know he is suing him but I did not read his reasoning behind his lawsuit. One thing I can assume...it was not for his long hind legs (also the name of a good band.) But this bad guy that this episode is about deserves to be taken down (and replaced with the same personality.)
The Lex Luthor of this episode has a name: Chris Bathum. He owns 70% of a popular rehab chain in Southern California (I wonder how many Benadryl addicts are there.) This guy is a villain. A meth-addled womanizer who targeted the most beautiful vulnerable women trying to get out of the drug world in one piece. He molested beautiful women, putting meth in orifices that are unorthodox for getting high. He sucks. But..
I'll be the villain by stringing in my lawsuit for getting knocked onto the Mopac (Austin's popular highway) by a woman who refused to apologize to me. There is a connection to my lawsuit for the license plate tattooed on my thigh with these rehab-molestation lawsuits. These women are rightfully suing this drug rehab owning drug addict. They are, and I hope they bleed this leach dry. But women who have high cheekbones ten years after they claim that the drugs left them with nothing but a overpass for their rooftops, believe me, these women know all the rules people break to exploit them. Its a sad fact that apparently does not apply to me. Somewhere in my three day Ambien binge I tried to get a job by applying at the local 7-11 (never turned in that application but I'm surprised I used a pen to fill it out!) and also an escort service. Yes, in a semi-conscious state I applied for a job as an escort via phone. I vaguely remember doing that. I am not quite sure what a real escort does, but I am good company while watching a movie in public view. Anyway, the guy on the phone of the escort service I called seemed like a pimp. He probably was a pimp. When I added a decade to what he thought I said my age was, his interest dropped as he saw my confidence rise. So the stories that I know of escorts (involve crime shows like, "The Craigslist Killer") will never be fleshed out. Damn. My high school reunion is next year too.
My lawyer was awesome for my lawsuit. He loved my father, who did most of the talking. When my father listed a string of reasons why this woman (an Asian driver...like my stepmother) should pay me lots of money, I would only inject, "Its not that bad now." The lawyer's answer was always, "No! You are hurt. Remember you are hurt. Say that you are hurt. She did permanent damage..."
Well the same with these beautiful women. When you have a decade under your belt of hard drug addiction, you have been through every sick exploitative manipulative man, and you have the power to beat most of them. This is not their first rodeo. But after telling their stories, which I am certain are true, they add, "I still have nightmares that I hear his voice..." Okay, okay. That's implied.
And this guy is so smug and arrogant that he really believes his intelligence will be enough to outwit all of these women and their lawyers. He is going down swinging, but he is definitely going down. Oh, and my point! I do have a point. He's a felon, like me. To me in my rookie first year as a felon, there are two types of felons. So far. Kind of.
1.) The kind that are working at 7-11. Or have an application filled out in their bedrooms while they tell their hairdresser, manicurist, inept Sephora make-over artists that they are indignant for being labeled as such. And...
2.) The one's that adjust and make something of themselves. They make backscratchers and drug rehabilitation facilities. They are kind of like pimps. I'd like to think that the creator of the Backscratcher has thumbed his (or her) nose at the system and is, at this very moment, wearing a lime green leisure suit and five pound gold chain necklaces.
I fit into the first of course. Chris Bathum fits into the second. I think his felony came from pretending to sell expensive exercise gear on Ebay. He is a pimp selling a clarity he seeks as well, but in the thighs of six foot blondes. He would have been better off inventing the backscratcher.
Side Note: I know someone who checked into rehab for that particular addiction. I laughed until I was buying my Wall-Dry in bulk at the Dollarstore.
I'll cut to the chase. I was up with God knows how much Ambien in my system last night, stuck on a 20/20 called 'Rehab Mogul'. My goodness. My will to wrap that around my head was very weak because that is the world I live in. That easily Youtubed episode (Rehab Mogul),
Which I had to laugh had the most watched hits on it after I did the research that this meth-addled felon rehab Mogul (he likes the term enough to make t-shirts with the name, which is just as scary as the fast sales of these t-shirts, probably by the addict residents.)
Where was I? This guy is being sued by a man named Cliff Brodsky, who had the most hits on his 20/20 uploaded episode that he put on-line. I got a laugh that the guy who was a forerunner in suing him for the most money led the initial campaign against him publicly.
I know he is suing him but I did not read his reasoning behind his lawsuit. One thing I can assume...it was not for his long hind legs (also the name of a good band.) But this bad guy that this episode is about deserves to be taken down (and replaced with the same personality.)
The Lex Luthor of this episode has a name: Chris Bathum. He owns 70% of a popular rehab chain in Southern California (I wonder how many Benadryl addicts are there.) This guy is a villain. A meth-addled womanizer who targeted the most beautiful vulnerable women trying to get out of the drug world in one piece. He molested beautiful women, putting meth in orifices that are unorthodox for getting high. He sucks. But..
I'll be the villain by stringing in my lawsuit for getting knocked onto the Mopac (Austin's popular highway) by a woman who refused to apologize to me. There is a connection to my lawsuit for the license plate tattooed on my thigh with these rehab-molestation lawsuits. These women are rightfully suing this drug rehab owning drug addict. They are, and I hope they bleed this leach dry. But women who have high cheekbones ten years after they claim that the drugs left them with nothing but a overpass for their rooftops, believe me, these women know all the rules people break to exploit them. Its a sad fact that apparently does not apply to me. Somewhere in my three day Ambien binge I tried to get a job by applying at the local 7-11 (never turned in that application but I'm surprised I used a pen to fill it out!) and also an escort service. Yes, in a semi-conscious state I applied for a job as an escort via phone. I vaguely remember doing that. I am not quite sure what a real escort does, but I am good company while watching a movie in public view. Anyway, the guy on the phone of the escort service I called seemed like a pimp. He probably was a pimp. When I added a decade to what he thought I said my age was, his interest dropped as he saw my confidence rise. So the stories that I know of escorts (involve crime shows like, "The Craigslist Killer") will never be fleshed out. Damn. My high school reunion is next year too.
My lawyer was awesome for my lawsuit. He loved my father, who did most of the talking. When my father listed a string of reasons why this woman (an Asian driver...like my stepmother) should pay me lots of money, I would only inject, "Its not that bad now." The lawyer's answer was always, "No! You are hurt. Remember you are hurt. Say that you are hurt. She did permanent damage..."
Well the same with these beautiful women. When you have a decade under your belt of hard drug addiction, you have been through every sick exploitative manipulative man, and you have the power to beat most of them. This is not their first rodeo. But after telling their stories, which I am certain are true, they add, "I still have nightmares that I hear his voice..." Okay, okay. That's implied.
And this guy is so smug and arrogant that he really believes his intelligence will be enough to outwit all of these women and their lawyers. He is going down swinging, but he is definitely going down. Oh, and my point! I do have a point. He's a felon, like me. To me in my rookie first year as a felon, there are two types of felons. So far. Kind of.
1.) The kind that are working at 7-11. Or have an application filled out in their bedrooms while they tell their hairdresser, manicurist, inept Sephora make-over artists that they are indignant for being labeled as such. And...
2.) The one's that adjust and make something of themselves. They make backscratchers and drug rehabilitation facilities. They are kind of like pimps. I'd like to think that the creator of the Backscratcher has thumbed his (or her) nose at the system and is, at this very moment, wearing a lime green leisure suit and five pound gold chain necklaces.
I fit into the first of course. Chris Bathum fits into the second. I think his felony came from pretending to sell expensive exercise gear on Ebay. He is a pimp selling a clarity he seeks as well, but in the thighs of six foot blondes. He would have been better off inventing the backscratcher.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Mongoloid w/ Bruce Conner.
Even though he is dead, a friend of mine swears if you say the name, "Bruce Conner" you'll get a free Master's Degree. My friend is alive and well, if that statement is ambiguous.
Friday, August 5, 2016
Fluffy and the Bearded Lady
Originally, Ned Flanders freak out was meant for this blog, but I suppose the emotions had to fester before they were spelled out. Fester like the massive owie that the bearded woman's cat bite did to my arm. Now no one likes the word puss, but if you delete the last 's' in that word, it means: cat. My next door neighbor's cat, Fluffy, left a welt of dead white blood cells inside my forearm. Fluffy has unchecked aggression. Fluffy is a gorgeous Persian cat who masquerades as an adoring love bug, but at night he stalks my overweight...He stalks him:
Lucian can not handle himself in a cat fight. Fluffy has cornered my cat twice now, bit the hell out of me when I try to stand between them, and a few days ago that bite led me to get emergency care. I'm a cat fanatic and I had no idea that any cat could fight like that.
I'd describe Fluffy as having the soul of a condemned death row inmate who tortured and killed for kicks, got sloppy and was caught, convicted, and was condemned to the electric chair. But before his execution, he vowed to come back through reincarnation as the most inconspicuous life form possible and continue to wreak havoc on the world.
Fluffy would have a decorated biker's jean jacket on with a cigarette dangling from his lips if he were human. Fluffy can fight like Muhammad Ali. At 37, I've never seen such a bass-ass in fur form.
So this condemned inmate came back with a guardian of course that was also inconspicuous. That would be my mildly mentally handicapped neighbor. I knew it; I knew that no one could be THAT sweet. I reach my threshold for kindness after a certain amount of time with an ear to ear smile. I have to retriet from public and regroup. I knew she would be that way too because she is human.
Yes, I have yet another neighbor that I'm at odds with again. This time this was not my fault.
I am about 115 pounds of bouncing anger in the form of both dance moves and a game of charades when I am really revved up, and wanting to explain myself to the closest poor soul walking my way.
Side Note: That song, "Blinded by the Light" I thought the lyrics were, "Wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night." It makes no sense, but no one knew the lyrics when that song popped up while we were at a poker table. The winning hand did not chime in.
This morning it was a maintenance man that innocently crossed my path. He was trapped in his golf cart and I was blinded by the light of anger. 115 pounds of awkward tits and a nasally east coast voice. That Seinfeld episode where George Costanza looks like an angry gorilla when people observed him without hearing him because of a wall of glass? That's me. Except a woman with hair and knobby knees and elbows.
Side Note: My previous neighbor began too early in the morning with a rant of his own; gliding, yelling, dancing- and he was not asking me anything. He was just blowing off steam. He was like Tom Cruise's Oscar Nominated (did he win?) role of Jerry McGuire, angrily dancing his way into a solid gold performance. I never told anyone, but as that neighbor, Jason was his name, was moving about and dancing his anger out and yelling- especially since it was a rant and he was not allowing me to talk- I distinctly remember thinking, "I am in love! This is my soul mate. I found my other half. My heart is floating up to heaven..." Then he ended his rant with, "Today your cat is dead! I'm calling animal control today. Your cat will be dead." And those comments snapped me back into reality and my heart dropped back into my chest, but sunk even lower.
*Big Bend National Park. At Jo Mama's RV Park. I bet a day at a real trailer park would be fun. I bet there are many bearded ladies. The right talent scout could make money raiding a big trailer park. The one closest to a home of mine had the best liquor store. Not that I would know (Who me? couldn't be! No possibility.)
I told the maintenance man about my blossoming feud with my next door neighbor. Her cat, Fluffy that Badass, bit me so hard that I had to go to the emergency care section of the doctor's office. It cost a down payment of $50, and they gave me one shot. They wanted to give me the dreaded rabies shots
Side Note: I've had them once before, but for one probably fatal (if not immediately caught) case of anaphylactic shock. I had no choice about having those needles put into my stomach. That is one hell of a way to die. You die from suffocation, but the pain of severe inching and panic make lucid thoughts nearly impossible. Then I'd have the stigma of a peanut as the murderer weapon on my death certificate.
I kept texting my neighbor, begging her to tell me if Fluffy had his rabies shots yet. Her responses were things like, "He likes to jump on the table!" If you think I'm being mean about my neighbor, wait until I explain my issues with her. Also, she has three rather successful grown children and a nicer apartment then my own. Plus a surplus of government money. She is no drooling victim when she talks (because the beard catches any wayward saliva.) I have not explained why I was angry with her yet.
The doctor wanted me to call animal control because it was the second bite from Fluffy, and the doctor assured me that he would not be harmed. I refused. The doctor told me that in four days (that is today) if the welt does not go down, I have to pay for the rabies needles. Plus in all seriousness, it was a huge welt that really did hurt. I could not sleep after the second night because the bump swelled so much. I also could not initially afford the antibiotic, so the bruise could, in theory, get a lot worse. The antibiotic prescribed is called Amox-Clav 875-125, and at my corporate pharmacy, twenty capsules of these little healers in pill form are slightly over seventy dollars.
That second night, I texted my next door neighbor of a few months about the bite being serious enough to need antibiotics. I asked her if she would pay for them. This was a very reasonable request because the bite was not my fault in any light. No response. She usually did respond by text, even very late at night. I then got nervous thinking she could make my life hell, so I followed the initial text up with, "Just forget about it. I am your friend and I am on your side." Then I sent her two more texts, telling her that I was sorry for asking for any money for the antibiotics. If I had provoked her cat, I would never ask for money. Or if her cat were trapped, scared, was being picked up, or groped, I never would have asked for the required antibiotics. But her cat followed mine, cornered him, and I never touched her not-so-innocent Fluffy to expect the flying squirrel blitz attack to my right arm. That came out of no where. She's responsible for what her cat does when the act is aggressive and unprovoked.
The following day, the maintenance man who I just went ape shit to about the situation (this morning) showed up at her door as I was simultaneously walking into my adjacent door. This was a few days ago. I said to him, "Check out this cat bite." It was gross. There was, um, dead white blood cells in one of the two fang marks. Five minutes later, there was a knock on my door. My neighbor (usually abnormally kind hearted and friendly to creep-type levels) said, "Let me see your arm!" I gave her that arm. She starts pulling my arm with phoniness to her inspection like a rotating sausage on a stick, all while coyly mumbling, "Where is it?" It was in the center of my forearm and very obvious. She said, "Stay away from my cat. You obviously swell easily. Never touch my cat again." Then she went inside and a text popped up from her saying, "You are after my money. I don't have any." So this was the fifth or sixth time I apologized to her and said it was fine. But she would not stop texting. Finally, I went aggro-Ned Flanders and said, "Enough! Stop texting me!"
The next morning I had 5 texts from her. Each one was crazier then the next. So that sucked. I said, "I apologized for asking for money. I'm keeping my cat inside. Stop writing me." "You stop writing me." So that is our stale mate for now. I hope it remains a stale mate until I am called to leave this apartment.
That's it about this subject? Did I rant out? That's a first. My rant has never had an end before.
And it won't because I have something to add. Today I checked my account balance. I have $19 in my account. I walked in the merciless Austin summer sun to the closest mini-mart with my brain calming down after my skinny girl dance of anger about paying for my neighbor's cat bite. That was a much needed release. Then I got to the little corner store, pulled out my tall sugar free Redbull and real Mango sorbet (Mangoes are good!), wished them a good afternoon, and my visual mind thought back to my red Visa Card on top of the covers of my bed. Its my higher power's way of saying, "Take a second lap to calm yourself down." It worked.
As far as the "Calm Down Diddly" blog, let me leave nothing to the imagination. My host in L.A., who is my brother's brother-in-law, first walked me in my guest room to talk about our mutual issues with not abiding by the law and having a wicked attraction to alcohol. But after my father came in to say, "We are good in here" (leave us alone); they both went back to get more blankets or something. The host came back, morphed into Pepe Le Pew-
Side Note: Dave Chappelle was right in calling Pepe Le Pew a rapist.
-And he jumped on top of me as I was laying down. He was drooling on my face and asking me to kiss him. That's not cool. My father saved the day but was none the wiser, and I whispered to my dad as our non-consensual host left, "Please don't leave me. I'm scared of that guy." My dad put zero thought into it, and we went to sleep.
The next morning I told my older brother that I was scared of him. The brother that supports me financially. I said, "That guy attacked me last night." The word, "Attack" was a bit dramatic. But when I'm laying down and this guy- with my family in the house- is asking me from above, "Kiss me." Multiple times...I'm not tough. I was scared.
I am very good at being mellow in situations like that.
The issue with me is that, first, my older brother was furious that I was saying these things about our host. In no way did he stay close to me like I begged him to do. Second, when my older brother finally heard from others [his sister] that he would and could do something like that when he was drinking, my oldest brother told me that I should be ashamed of myself for not understanding that he is an alcoholic like me.
That was the straw the broke my back. If he did not understand sexual assault, fine. But don't blame me for missing compassion when I was the one the was jumped on. I was angry enough to take it out on myself, because that is what I do when I am angry: I hurt myself.
Hurting one self is a common problem that many people act upon. Especially people with a suicide (or two) in one's immediate family. After all, you are 50% more likely to follow your parent's example. If your father ran away from responsibility, you are 50% more prone to that exact same behavior. Divorce, suicides, all make the parent's children have a coin toss's luck or ill fate in their future. Of course this was told to me by Professor Michael Zimmerman at San Francisco State. He teaches James Joyce mostly. But I believe him. I also believe that intelligence can alter that 50% chance with better positive odds.
I was furious that not only did the subject become one that I was told to, "Drop," but my own brother scolled me after initially admitting that he did not believe me. Then he had the nerve to yell as a passenger in a packed car about my "drug use" (insomnia medication) being an issue that is, "Literally killing him";
How about how I feel? How do I feel to be too weak to defend myself and blamed and sentenced like the gypsy from The Hunchback of Notre Dame? No, it is not normal to jump on people just because you are, "A Friend of Bill's." No, I am not going to say its my fault this happened. I'm sick of it. For my own older brother to have hate in his voice about my accusation, then the hate morphs into some abstract but negative emotion when he asked me where my sympathy is for this poor soul? I think my sympathy is placed where ever that man's apology to me is laying around.
Finally, I am in serious financial trouble. I am thoroughly fucked about money and medication. I can not afford my medication. I can not afford food. I can't keep this up. I wrote a small (two person) list of people who had the ability to help me financially. People who were capable of contributing to just one nice outfit that I can wear while I apply for a job. That was my simple request; to have one power outfit that makes me look employable when I make my, "Are you hiring?" rounds. The first was my brother. The one who said, "Where is your compassion....?" So that did not surprise me terribly when he said, "NO." The second was my Uncle's partner, off and on, for over a decade. Our conversation via phone was less then two minutes. I told her my medication is just too expensive and I needed help.I pointed out that I had not asked for money (except what was in my grand mother's Will) in years. Her reply when my uncle asked what I wanted was, "She spent her money on drug therapy..." The words 'drug' and 'therapy' never came up in this one minute forty six second conversation. I clocked it and retaliated in the only way I know how: In a letter via a social media site. I've lashed out in Yelp reviews. I've demanded humane treatment via Facebook. So I politely apologized for calling and tried to smash my phone like a little kid. I internalize my anger.
I had a friend who told me, "I [as in 'she'] would commit suicide to prove her point." I can understand that. I get so frustrated that there are people rooting for me to lose. In that same vein of logic: I was watching a Youtube on the Ghostbuster women talking about how their co-star, Chris Hemsworth was, "Annoyingly Perfect." I got a kick out of them saying that they were rooting for him to be an asshole, or not such a creative threat, because he is so sweet, beautiful and talented. He's also married to a gorgeous Spanish (I think?) Goddess that is 40 years old (and is annoyingly gorgeous herself) and the couple have three children. Well, I have a few more years to be okay in a crowd. Thank you Spirit in the Sky!
I do the exact same thing too with talented people. I have seen perfect-looking people who I scan repeatedly in search of a visible defect before I can confidently approach them. I once knew a tall, shapely, gorgeous young woman who was so perfect, even a full year later I was looking for non-existent flaws. Yes, I'm human.
Jared Leto's beat down in Flight Club was understood without any more then the line, "I wanted to destroy something beautiful." I doubt post theater conversations included,"What the hell was that about?" Maybe a ''Grass is always greener"envy. Maybe a lawn growing with a deep green jealousy. A lawn filled with super-nutrients and plush vigorous grass adjacent to my brittle sun stained yard. Just like I've thought every blonde woman (including my slender and sweet mother) gained the upper hand because they are exotic, ironically so, to my dark features.
Side Note: Pepe Le Pew's sister (my sister-in-law) is a natural beauty that happens to be blonde. When she met me at the airport and I said that I was thirsty, she did not need to stand in line to ask an employee at the airport Starbucks if she could have a cup of ice water. They oblige her request with a smile. She handed the cup of water to me and I said out-loud: Oh to be blonde. What else do you secretly get without lines or payment?" Her response, "Well, I asked them to get that cup of water ready for me while I was waiting. They told me they would. It took long enough." Oh. I thought it was a secret wink to Nordic features. Glad I asked!
Having the genetically gifted as friends is a major benefit. I'd like to build an army of super Uber friends that make my days like dreams.
Side Note: I've been saying this for seventeen years. Everyone has a flaw, or a vulnerability when caught on a subject that (can be used against them) can make them more endearing actually. Marilyn Monroe may have been beautiful, but that soft voice and inviting smile in "Some Like It Hot" (even though she was pregnant, if I read that correctly) make her accessible. Flawless beauty without accessibility can be a problem.
Whatever one's personal definition of beauty is, most beautiful people can generate envy that can in turn change their personality to suit their counterparts. Envy in large numbers can insidiously push kind people to apologize. Too many apologizes will erode the soul's natural grace. I like Peter Bogdanovich's term, "Unicorns" for rare beauty.
Side Note: That's about the only thing I like about Peter Bogdanovich. His taste in Dorothy Stratten was obvious good taste. I did read (and actually own) a copy of, "The Killing of a Unicorn." I love the metaphor of a unicorn and its rare, unrepeatable beauty. But in that book its amazing how Mr. Bogdanovich does not comprehend that some of the things he openly hopes Paul Snider's private detective saw the two doing are things that probably added to why Dorothy Stratten was murdered before she was old enough to legally drink alcohol.
Yes, good people are very often mistreated. Or forced to alter their beauty to adapt to their environment. I've shaken off my shy nature in the twenty plus years since my high school graduation, but I'm pleased to know the shyness was a chameleon trait of necessity in an outer city high school, but the kindness came from my mother's blessed genes. This subject stays dormant in me always, but at night and especially with the pain of insomnia, these thoughts surface in waves. Humanity can be ugly to good people because of how they look; they adjust to avoid what seem to be countless apologies in different forms. I suppose parents are suppose to teach their children to apologize to no one if they are living their dreams out. Not all of us have parents that teach. Some just supply the genes and pop in to do damage now and then because they are bitter about their lack of parenting. This cycle can stop with anyone at any time.
Side Note: My father is obsessed with a painting by Goya called,"Saturn Devouring His Son." I'm not the 'Thought Police' so he can like what he wants, but being absent was not my father's biggest (fatal) flaw. He is excellent at using words to bring people down. Specifically his own children. My oldest brother...only wears green. I'll leave it at that. I am a felon and have had multiple failed engagements. My 1% brother (I joke, because he lives in San Diego) has two Master's Degrees from Cornell University. He married the most beautiful woman that Redding, California was graced with having as a mismatched resident. Next is my brother Ambrose. The brightest light burns twice as bright but half as long. We lost Ambrose at the age of 24. Death tends to freeze those who passed that gate in purity and a often artificial holiness. He had the most potential, but he was beat down the most. Far more then any one of us.The memories of these events that were unfair to him are too many to single out. He was tossed from home to home by my father. I was an unfit and selfish guardian. Ambrose never received the constant love of a mother because my mother passed away herself when he was only seven years old. A good memory of Ambrose is that he had these wild blondish red curls. My mother smoothed down and massaged those curls as a meditative act for her; as he laid half asleep on her belly when she was pregnant with her final child; my sister. I'd describe my sister as a Perfect 10 in body, mind and spirit. She's a survivor and a nurturer.
Ambrose had a very sophisticated sense of humor, and humor was the most important quality in his everyday life. He was a beautiful man. He had better lips then me, and big brown soft eyes. I once asked some random jerk who knew both of us what he expected would happen to Amby when he became an adult. His answer was, "I don't know? Supernova."
One of Amby's talents was his excellent eye for gems: for people and clothes, and in his version of art. His creativity was best put to use in finding exciting things to do with little money. Even if he had to be the one to take the hit; he would do what he could to make sure that other people were having fun. When my former roommate married him at my gentle urging (ironically) to help her pay for the bills she was rapidly generating with her famous quote,"Put it on my tab," it was my brother who made sure she received half of his military money for her travels, even though she left me with a ton of bills.
Side Note: Bills that I pay off every month, and will be paying off every month, for the rest of my days! Their marriage was a sham for military money, and Ambrose, being compassionate and caring, dived the bonus money in half. He also got into severe trouble when the sham was discovered. My roommate left my apartment as I was busy working back east for extra rent (at $850/month in San Francisco); to travel by jumping freight trains. He only once gave me $50 at her request (yep) for me to buy groceries. Even though it generated arguments with my brother and me over the money I was left to pay, I understood his heart. He gave her half of his bonus money for marriage, yet my own sister is legitimately married to a military man and she does not see shit of their 'bonus marriage money'. What did his extra money go to on her travels? To a fortune teller, alcohol, heroin at one point, and Heaven Only Knows what else because I never mended my relationship with that person, even though I forgave her immediately. I'm compassionate too. I cared for her safety. I started to flesh out this topic and my Internet froze. I'll take the hint that I should move on with this blog and with my life.
Amby liked to drink hot sake in a sauna. He owned the best velvet comforters to combat the insomnia both of us had/have. With a murder, you have one person to blame. With a suicide, I read that the average suicide causes an extreme impact of guilt and blame in at least 16 people. I feel as if he was murdered before he took his life, because his life was full of abuse, misunderstanding and injustice. Whether those things made him fight back with compassion or he was forged with a heart of gold, I only know the finished product. I am here instead of him, so when people root for me to fail, I have learned to fight back with everything I have. What more do they want to happen to me? After a while, wishing my failure seems sadistic, especially given the loss of my mother and brother before I turned 30. I collect friends and extend the term family to many of these friends and lovers. I want a wealth of people in my life because my life began with grief and loss.
Last Side Note: A drawback to losing two immediate family members way too early is that I don't hold my friends to a high standard of conduct. I'm learning, especially now that I started off fresh in Austin. Man, let me just say, Stay the hell out of Redding, California! Their brochure for that town was probably shot by Annie Leibovitz and assembled by a bevy of motivational voices that convince smart men that water can become wine. I'd like the same ensemble to create a brochure on a notorious jail like, "The Tombs" in New York. People would line up to commit crimes.
It's hard for me to articulate how my brother's unique humor presented itself (that sounds like I'm talking about Shingles!) Here is one quick joke. I was in Nebraska watching my 24 year old cat (maybe younger because she died at 24) and I was complaining on the phone to Ambrose about my new live-in fiance. He said to me, "Rose, I'm going to send you a video. Watch the entire thing, okay? Its about five minutes. Just watch it."
Yes, my name is in his name.
It was an R. Kelly song called, "Real Talk" and right at the point where he is singing his opera that,"Bitch I wish you wouuuld burn my Mother Fucking clothes...with your trifling ass...Milton!" Ambrose called back laughing so hard it became contagious. He said, "You don't want to sound like the woman on the other end of that phone."
I remember his frustration that his humor was misunderstood. Even in creating a simple joke at work; telling his peers at the restaurant he worked at that he finally bought a nice sofa. He was saying to co-workers that his new sofa would be delivered to his apartment that day. When some of them asked what it looked like, he laughed and said, "Maybe we can test drive it out together." They branded him as, "Gay." Or as, "Insincere." I remember him telling me that he could not even make a careless joke without mean comments about his sexuality. He was vulnerable because he was in San Diego alone. He was disliked by some because he had a certain outgoing social persona at parties, but in reality he was a quiet man who wanted to be loved. He was a genuine man.This is him in Annapolis.
I have a video in my apartment that was made into a DVD with Ambrose on it that has some hilarious antics. I have only seen it once, within a week of the news of his passing, and I have not had the courage to watch it again. But there is one part of that DVD that I'd like to upload. It should go between these two
lines
one
day, when I heal more and gather the courage to praise the time we spent together. Okay, I'll give the gist of part of an antic on this DVD now. Amby is at Bethel Church in Redding, California interviewing...I kid you not...a 'Former Satan Worshiper." I guess the Dark Lord gets capitalized too. This guy is cloaked from head to toe in black, including his eyes which are dilated because he is freaking high on some extremely funny stimulate. Funny? Well, it made him tell my brother, on tape, that he knows that Jesus is real because he [The Ex-Satan Guy] can... control the minds of squirrels. Yes, I seriously think it would go viral because it nearly made me pee my pants. The stoned-outa-his-freakin-holly-rollin-mind guy explains: "See that tree over there? [He points to a patch of grass with no trees anywhere in site.] Well, I can tell that squirrel over there [no squirrel in site], to, well, brother, pick up that acorn over there. Now go climb that tree. Climb on the left branch, throw the acorn to the right not the left. Praise Jesus."
I really need to upload that lightening rod of The Word of God. I'd become a Christian if I could control squirrels too. I'd have an army of squirrels to carry out...Okay, no sense in imagining where that would lead.
Unfortunately Amby laughed his way out of Bethel Church, which is the only way to leave if you have a brain.
About an hour after I got that phone call that he was gone- which I can only guess because I had no concept of time-I almost laughed. Some weird noise came out of me and I said to myself out loud, 'I did not know that I would die today.' Nothing was ever the same without him. You can see my personality change in this blog after I lost him. My very last blog with him in calling distance was called, "Joy to The World Baby" and the subject was a 'Best of Craigslist." The change is very obvious. Even our family reunion was strange without him. I kept a locket on me through the entire reunion of Amby as part of the necklace and my D on the other end.
*Look at Ambrose's eyes and face, then look at mine. We had the same voice. He was sick growing up and after he left us, I got those lethal allergies. The killer peanut being one. Corn being a lesser bother. Most hard liquor is distilled with corn. I quit drinking almost two years ago, except maybe a half dozen drunk occasions.
I drank on the last plane, after a transfer, on my way from San Diego, then a transfer in Arizona, finally ending in a connecting flight back to Austin. I got stuck by the window seat (usually a plus) with a well liquored salesman who could not stop talking to me. At first I played the exhausted card. Then I tried to make small talk. But when the drink tray went by, I snapped and said, "Here is a $20 bill. Give me two white wines, then keep the change." I was cornered! I had to drink my way out.
Finally, today marks my first full year as a felon. Here is the one year photograph before I was fingerprinted and sincerely apologized to the substitute judge (which my lawyer capitalized on; the judge that was sick that day was, from what he said, the most feared judge in all of Texas.) I apologized for my embarrassing behavior. I told the judge that this felony destroyed the value of my Bachelor's degree though, so we are even. I gave my speech shaking honestly, and was thanked by the judge. I got to turn myself in, just like the Dave Chappelle skit where the white man is damned to prison to,"convert to Islam" and the black man sings, "The 5th!" and turns himself in when he deems it convenient. It was convenient for me to go in the first day of October.
I'd describe Fluffy as having the soul of a condemned death row inmate who tortured and killed for kicks, got sloppy and was caught, convicted, and was condemned to the electric chair. But before his execution, he vowed to come back through reincarnation as the most inconspicuous life form possible and continue to wreak havoc on the world.
Fluffy would have a decorated biker's jean jacket on with a cigarette dangling from his lips if he were human. Fluffy can fight like Muhammad Ali. At 37, I've never seen such a bass-ass in fur form.
So this condemned inmate came back with a guardian of course that was also inconspicuous. That would be my mildly mentally handicapped neighbor. I knew it; I knew that no one could be THAT sweet. I reach my threshold for kindness after a certain amount of time with an ear to ear smile. I have to retriet from public and regroup. I knew she would be that way too because she is human.
Yes, I have yet another neighbor that I'm at odds with again. This time this was not my fault.
I am about 115 pounds of bouncing anger in the form of both dance moves and a game of charades when I am really revved up, and wanting to explain myself to the closest poor soul walking my way.
Side Note: That song, "Blinded by the Light" I thought the lyrics were, "Wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night." It makes no sense, but no one knew the lyrics when that song popped up while we were at a poker table. The winning hand did not chime in.
This morning it was a maintenance man that innocently crossed my path. He was trapped in his golf cart and I was blinded by the light of anger. 115 pounds of awkward tits and a nasally east coast voice. That Seinfeld episode where George Costanza looks like an angry gorilla when people observed him without hearing him because of a wall of glass? That's me. Except a woman with hair and knobby knees and elbows.
Side Note: My previous neighbor began too early in the morning with a rant of his own; gliding, yelling, dancing- and he was not asking me anything. He was just blowing off steam. He was like Tom Cruise's Oscar Nominated (did he win?) role of Jerry McGuire, angrily dancing his way into a solid gold performance. I never told anyone, but as that neighbor, Jason was his name, was moving about and dancing his anger out and yelling- especially since it was a rant and he was not allowing me to talk- I distinctly remember thinking, "I am in love! This is my soul mate. I found my other half. My heart is floating up to heaven..." Then he ended his rant with, "Today your cat is dead! I'm calling animal control today. Your cat will be dead." And those comments snapped me back into reality and my heart dropped back into my chest, but sunk even lower.
*Big Bend National Park. At Jo Mama's RV Park. I bet a day at a real trailer park would be fun. I bet there are many bearded ladies. The right talent scout could make money raiding a big trailer park. The one closest to a home of mine had the best liquor store. Not that I would know (Who me? couldn't be! No possibility.)
I told the maintenance man about my blossoming feud with my next door neighbor. Her cat, Fluffy that Badass, bit me so hard that I had to go to the emergency care section of the doctor's office. It cost a down payment of $50, and they gave me one shot. They wanted to give me the dreaded rabies shots
Side Note: I've had them once before, but for one probably fatal (if not immediately caught) case of anaphylactic shock. I had no choice about having those needles put into my stomach. That is one hell of a way to die. You die from suffocation, but the pain of severe inching and panic make lucid thoughts nearly impossible. Then I'd have the stigma of a peanut as the murderer weapon on my death certificate.
I kept texting my neighbor, begging her to tell me if Fluffy had his rabies shots yet. Her responses were things like, "He likes to jump on the table!" If you think I'm being mean about my neighbor, wait until I explain my issues with her. Also, she has three rather successful grown children and a nicer apartment then my own. Plus a surplus of government money. She is no drooling victim when she talks (because the beard catches any wayward saliva.) I have not explained why I was angry with her yet.
The doctor wanted me to call animal control because it was the second bite from Fluffy, and the doctor assured me that he would not be harmed. I refused. The doctor told me that in four days (that is today) if the welt does not go down, I have to pay for the rabies needles. Plus in all seriousness, it was a huge welt that really did hurt. I could not sleep after the second night because the bump swelled so much. I also could not initially afford the antibiotic, so the bruise could, in theory, get a lot worse. The antibiotic prescribed is called Amox-Clav 875-125, and at my corporate pharmacy, twenty capsules of these little healers in pill form are slightly over seventy dollars.
That second night, I texted my next door neighbor of a few months about the bite being serious enough to need antibiotics. I asked her if she would pay for them. This was a very reasonable request because the bite was not my fault in any light. No response. She usually did respond by text, even very late at night. I then got nervous thinking she could make my life hell, so I followed the initial text up with, "Just forget about it. I am your friend and I am on your side." Then I sent her two more texts, telling her that I was sorry for asking for any money for the antibiotics. If I had provoked her cat, I would never ask for money. Or if her cat were trapped, scared, was being picked up, or groped, I never would have asked for the required antibiotics. But her cat followed mine, cornered him, and I never touched her not-so-innocent Fluffy to expect the flying squirrel blitz attack to my right arm. That came out of no where. She's responsible for what her cat does when the act is aggressive and unprovoked.
The following day, the maintenance man who I just went ape shit to about the situation (this morning) showed up at her door as I was simultaneously walking into my adjacent door. This was a few days ago. I said to him, "Check out this cat bite." It was gross. There was, um, dead white blood cells in one of the two fang marks. Five minutes later, there was a knock on my door. My neighbor (usually abnormally kind hearted and friendly to creep-type levels) said, "Let me see your arm!" I gave her that arm. She starts pulling my arm with phoniness to her inspection like a rotating sausage on a stick, all while coyly mumbling, "Where is it?" It was in the center of my forearm and very obvious. She said, "Stay away from my cat. You obviously swell easily. Never touch my cat again." Then she went inside and a text popped up from her saying, "You are after my money. I don't have any." So this was the fifth or sixth time I apologized to her and said it was fine. But she would not stop texting. Finally, I went aggro-Ned Flanders and said, "Enough! Stop texting me!"
The next morning I had 5 texts from her. Each one was crazier then the next. So that sucked. I said, "I apologized for asking for money. I'm keeping my cat inside. Stop writing me." "You stop writing me." So that is our stale mate for now. I hope it remains a stale mate until I am called to leave this apartment.
That's it about this subject? Did I rant out? That's a first. My rant has never had an end before.
And it won't because I have something to add. Today I checked my account balance. I have $19 in my account. I walked in the merciless Austin summer sun to the closest mini-mart with my brain calming down after my skinny girl dance of anger about paying for my neighbor's cat bite. That was a much needed release. Then I got to the little corner store, pulled out my tall sugar free Redbull and real Mango sorbet (Mangoes are good!), wished them a good afternoon, and my visual mind thought back to my red Visa Card on top of the covers of my bed. Its my higher power's way of saying, "Take a second lap to calm yourself down." It worked.
As far as the "Calm Down Diddly" blog, let me leave nothing to the imagination. My host in L.A., who is my brother's brother-in-law, first walked me in my guest room to talk about our mutual issues with not abiding by the law and having a wicked attraction to alcohol. But after my father came in to say, "We are good in here" (leave us alone); they both went back to get more blankets or something. The host came back, morphed into Pepe Le Pew-
Side Note: Dave Chappelle was right in calling Pepe Le Pew a rapist.
-And he jumped on top of me as I was laying down. He was drooling on my face and asking me to kiss him. That's not cool. My father saved the day but was none the wiser, and I whispered to my dad as our non-consensual host left, "Please don't leave me. I'm scared of that guy." My dad put zero thought into it, and we went to sleep.
The next morning I told my older brother that I was scared of him. The brother that supports me financially. I said, "That guy attacked me last night." The word, "Attack" was a bit dramatic. But when I'm laying down and this guy- with my family in the house- is asking me from above, "Kiss me." Multiple times...I'm not tough. I was scared.
I am very good at being mellow in situations like that.
The issue with me is that, first, my older brother was furious that I was saying these things about our host. In no way did he stay close to me like I begged him to do. Second, when my older brother finally heard from others [his sister] that he would and could do something like that when he was drinking, my oldest brother told me that I should be ashamed of myself for not understanding that he is an alcoholic like me.
That was the straw the broke my back. If he did not understand sexual assault, fine. But don't blame me for missing compassion when I was the one the was jumped on. I was angry enough to take it out on myself, because that is what I do when I am angry: I hurt myself.
Hurting one self is a common problem that many people act upon. Especially people with a suicide (or two) in one's immediate family. After all, you are 50% more likely to follow your parent's example. If your father ran away from responsibility, you are 50% more prone to that exact same behavior. Divorce, suicides, all make the parent's children have a coin toss's luck or ill fate in their future. Of course this was told to me by Professor Michael Zimmerman at San Francisco State. He teaches James Joyce mostly. But I believe him. I also believe that intelligence can alter that 50% chance with better positive odds.
I was furious that not only did the subject become one that I was told to, "Drop," but my own brother scolled me after initially admitting that he did not believe me. Then he had the nerve to yell as a passenger in a packed car about my "drug use" (insomnia medication) being an issue that is, "Literally killing him";
Finally, I am in serious financial trouble. I am thoroughly fucked about money and medication. I can not afford my medication. I can not afford food. I can't keep this up. I wrote a small (two person) list of people who had the ability to help me financially. People who were capable of contributing to just one nice outfit that I can wear while I apply for a job. That was my simple request; to have one power outfit that makes me look employable when I make my, "Are you hiring?" rounds. The first was my brother. The one who said, "Where is your compassion....?" So that did not surprise me terribly when he said, "NO." The second was my Uncle's partner, off and on, for over a decade. Our conversation via phone was less then two minutes. I told her my medication is just too expensive and I needed help.I pointed out that I had not asked for money (except what was in my grand mother's Will) in years. Her reply when my uncle asked what I wanted was, "She spent her money on drug therapy..." The words 'drug' and 'therapy' never came up in this one minute forty six second conversation. I clocked it and retaliated in the only way I know how: In a letter via a social media site. I've lashed out in Yelp reviews. I've demanded humane treatment via Facebook. So I politely apologized for calling and tried to smash my phone like a little kid. I internalize my anger.
I had a friend who told me, "I [as in 'she'] would commit suicide to prove her point." I can understand that. I get so frustrated that there are people rooting for me to lose. In that same vein of logic: I was watching a Youtube on the Ghostbuster women talking about how their co-star, Chris Hemsworth was, "Annoyingly Perfect." I got a kick out of them saying that they were rooting for him to be an asshole, or not such a creative threat, because he is so sweet, beautiful and talented. He's also married to a gorgeous Spanish (I think?) Goddess that is 40 years old (and is annoyingly gorgeous herself) and the couple have three children. Well, I have a few more years to be okay in a crowd. Thank you Spirit in the Sky!
I do the exact same thing too with talented people. I have seen perfect-looking people who I scan repeatedly in search of a visible defect before I can confidently approach them. I once knew a tall, shapely, gorgeous young woman who was so perfect, even a full year later I was looking for non-existent flaws. Yes, I'm human.
Jared Leto's beat down in Flight Club was understood without any more then the line, "I wanted to destroy something beautiful." I doubt post theater conversations included,"What the hell was that about?" Maybe a ''Grass is always greener"envy. Maybe a lawn growing with a deep green jealousy. A lawn filled with super-nutrients and plush vigorous grass adjacent to my brittle sun stained yard. Just like I've thought every blonde woman (including my slender and sweet mother) gained the upper hand because they are exotic, ironically so, to my dark features.
Side Note: Pepe Le Pew's sister (my sister-in-law) is a natural beauty that happens to be blonde. When she met me at the airport and I said that I was thirsty, she did not need to stand in line to ask an employee at the airport Starbucks if she could have a cup of ice water. They oblige her request with a smile. She handed the cup of water to me and I said out-loud: Oh to be blonde. What else do you secretly get without lines or payment?" Her response, "Well, I asked them to get that cup of water ready for me while I was waiting. They told me they would. It took long enough." Oh. I thought it was a secret wink to Nordic features. Glad I asked!
Having the genetically gifted as friends is a major benefit. I'd like to build an army of super Uber friends that make my days like dreams.
Side Note: I've been saying this for seventeen years. Everyone has a flaw, or a vulnerability when caught on a subject that (can be used against them) can make them more endearing actually. Marilyn Monroe may have been beautiful, but that soft voice and inviting smile in "Some Like It Hot" (even though she was pregnant, if I read that correctly) make her accessible. Flawless beauty without accessibility can be a problem.
Whatever one's personal definition of beauty is, most beautiful people can generate envy that can in turn change their personality to suit their counterparts. Envy in large numbers can insidiously push kind people to apologize. Too many apologizes will erode the soul's natural grace. I like Peter Bogdanovich's term, "Unicorns" for rare beauty.
Side Note: That's about the only thing I like about Peter Bogdanovich. His taste in Dorothy Stratten was obvious good taste. I did read (and actually own) a copy of, "The Killing of a Unicorn." I love the metaphor of a unicorn and its rare, unrepeatable beauty. But in that book its amazing how Mr. Bogdanovich does not comprehend that some of the things he openly hopes Paul Snider's private detective saw the two doing are things that probably added to why Dorothy Stratten was murdered before she was old enough to legally drink alcohol.
Yes, good people are very often mistreated. Or forced to alter their beauty to adapt to their environment. I've shaken off my shy nature in the twenty plus years since my high school graduation, but I'm pleased to know the shyness was a chameleon trait of necessity in an outer city high school, but the kindness came from my mother's blessed genes. This subject stays dormant in me always, but at night and especially with the pain of insomnia, these thoughts surface in waves. Humanity can be ugly to good people because of how they look; they adjust to avoid what seem to be countless apologies in different forms. I suppose parents are suppose to teach their children to apologize to no one if they are living their dreams out. Not all of us have parents that teach. Some just supply the genes and pop in to do damage now and then because they are bitter about their lack of parenting. This cycle can stop with anyone at any time.
Side Note: My father is obsessed with a painting by Goya called,"Saturn Devouring His Son." I'm not the 'Thought Police' so he can like what he wants, but being absent was not my father's biggest (fatal) flaw. He is excellent at using words to bring people down. Specifically his own children. My oldest brother...only wears green. I'll leave it at that. I am a felon and have had multiple failed engagements. My 1% brother (I joke, because he lives in San Diego) has two Master's Degrees from Cornell University. He married the most beautiful woman that Redding, California was graced with having as a mismatched resident. Next is my brother Ambrose. The brightest light burns twice as bright but half as long. We lost Ambrose at the age of 24. Death tends to freeze those who passed that gate in purity and a often artificial holiness. He had the most potential, but he was beat down the most. Far more then any one of us.The memories of these events that were unfair to him are too many to single out. He was tossed from home to home by my father. I was an unfit and selfish guardian. Ambrose never received the constant love of a mother because my mother passed away herself when he was only seven years old. A good memory of Ambrose is that he had these wild blondish red curls. My mother smoothed down and massaged those curls as a meditative act for her; as he laid half asleep on her belly when she was pregnant with her final child; my sister. I'd describe my sister as a Perfect 10 in body, mind and spirit. She's a survivor and a nurturer.
Ambrose had a very sophisticated sense of humor, and humor was the most important quality in his everyday life. He was a beautiful man. He had better lips then me, and big brown soft eyes. I once asked some random jerk who knew both of us what he expected would happen to Amby when he became an adult. His answer was, "I don't know? Supernova."
One of Amby's talents was his excellent eye for gems: for people and clothes, and in his version of art. His creativity was best put to use in finding exciting things to do with little money. Even if he had to be the one to take the hit; he would do what he could to make sure that other people were having fun. When my former roommate married him at my gentle urging (ironically) to help her pay for the bills she was rapidly generating with her famous quote,"Put it on my tab," it was my brother who made sure she received half of his military money for her travels, even though she left me with a ton of bills.
Side Note: Bills that I pay off every month, and will be paying off every month, for the rest of my days! Their marriage was a sham for military money, and Ambrose, being compassionate and caring, dived the bonus money in half. He also got into severe trouble when the sham was discovered. My roommate left my apartment as I was busy working back east for extra rent (at $850/month in San Francisco); to travel by jumping freight trains. He only once gave me $50 at her request (yep) for me to buy groceries. Even though it generated arguments with my brother and me over the money I was left to pay, I understood his heart. He gave her half of his bonus money for marriage, yet my own sister is legitimately married to a military man and she does not see shit of their 'bonus marriage money'. What did his extra money go to on her travels? To a fortune teller, alcohol, heroin at one point, and Heaven Only Knows what else because I never mended my relationship with that person, even though I forgave her immediately. I'm compassionate too. I cared for her safety. I started to flesh out this topic and my Internet froze. I'll take the hint that I should move on with this blog and with my life.
Amby liked to drink hot sake in a sauna. He owned the best velvet comforters to combat the insomnia both of us had/have. With a murder, you have one person to blame. With a suicide, I read that the average suicide causes an extreme impact of guilt and blame in at least 16 people. I feel as if he was murdered before he took his life, because his life was full of abuse, misunderstanding and injustice. Whether those things made him fight back with compassion or he was forged with a heart of gold, I only know the finished product. I am here instead of him, so when people root for me to fail, I have learned to fight back with everything I have. What more do they want to happen to me? After a while, wishing my failure seems sadistic, especially given the loss of my mother and brother before I turned 30. I collect friends and extend the term family to many of these friends and lovers. I want a wealth of people in my life because my life began with grief and loss.
Last Side Note: A drawback to losing two immediate family members way too early is that I don't hold my friends to a high standard of conduct. I'm learning, especially now that I started off fresh in Austin. Man, let me just say, Stay the hell out of Redding, California! Their brochure for that town was probably shot by Annie Leibovitz and assembled by a bevy of motivational voices that convince smart men that water can become wine. I'd like the same ensemble to create a brochure on a notorious jail like, "The Tombs" in New York. People would line up to commit crimes.
It's hard for me to articulate how my brother's unique humor presented itself (that sounds like I'm talking about Shingles!) Here is one quick joke. I was in Nebraska watching my 24 year old cat (maybe younger because she died at 24) and I was complaining on the phone to Ambrose about my new live-in fiance. He said to me, "Rose, I'm going to send you a video. Watch the entire thing, okay? Its about five minutes. Just watch it."
Yes, my name is in his name.
It was an R. Kelly song called, "Real Talk" and right at the point where he is singing his opera that,"Bitch I wish you wouuuld burn my Mother Fucking clothes...with your trifling ass...Milton!" Ambrose called back laughing so hard it became contagious. He said, "You don't want to sound like the woman on the other end of that phone."
I remember his frustration that his humor was misunderstood. Even in creating a simple joke at work; telling his peers at the restaurant he worked at that he finally bought a nice sofa. He was saying to co-workers that his new sofa would be delivered to his apartment that day. When some of them asked what it looked like, he laughed and said, "Maybe we can test drive it out together." They branded him as, "Gay." Or as, "Insincere." I remember him telling me that he could not even make a careless joke without mean comments about his sexuality. He was vulnerable because he was in San Diego alone. He was disliked by some because he had a certain outgoing social persona at parties, but in reality he was a quiet man who wanted to be loved. He was a genuine man.This is him in Annapolis.
I have a video in my apartment that was made into a DVD with Ambrose on it that has some hilarious antics. I have only seen it once, within a week of the news of his passing, and I have not had the courage to watch it again. But there is one part of that DVD that I'd like to upload. It should go between these two
lines
one
day, when I heal more and gather the courage to praise the time we spent together. Okay, I'll give the gist of part of an antic on this DVD now. Amby is at Bethel Church in Redding, California interviewing...I kid you not...a 'Former Satan Worshiper." I guess the Dark Lord gets capitalized too. This guy is cloaked from head to toe in black, including his eyes which are dilated because he is freaking high on some extremely funny stimulate. Funny? Well, it made him tell my brother, on tape, that he knows that Jesus is real because he [The Ex-Satan Guy] can... control the minds of squirrels. Yes, I seriously think it would go viral because it nearly made me pee my pants. The stoned-outa-his-freakin-holly-rollin-mind guy explains: "See that tree over there? [He points to a patch of grass with no trees anywhere in site.] Well, I can tell that squirrel over there [no squirrel in site], to, well, brother, pick up that acorn over there. Now go climb that tree. Climb on the left branch, throw the acorn to the right not the left. Praise Jesus."
I really need to upload that lightening rod of The Word of God. I'd become a Christian if I could control squirrels too. I'd have an army of squirrels to carry out...Okay, no sense in imagining where that would lead.
Unfortunately Amby laughed his way out of Bethel Church, which is the only way to leave if you have a brain.
About an hour after I got that phone call that he was gone- which I can only guess because I had no concept of time-I almost laughed. Some weird noise came out of me and I said to myself out loud, 'I did not know that I would die today.' Nothing was ever the same without him. You can see my personality change in this blog after I lost him. My very last blog with him in calling distance was called, "Joy to The World Baby" and the subject was a 'Best of Craigslist." The change is very obvious. Even our family reunion was strange without him. I kept a locket on me through the entire reunion of Amby as part of the necklace and my D on the other end.
*Look at Ambrose's eyes and face, then look at mine. We had the same voice. He was sick growing up and after he left us, I got those lethal allergies. The killer peanut being one. Corn being a lesser bother. Most hard liquor is distilled with corn. I quit drinking almost two years ago, except maybe a half dozen drunk occasions.
I drank on the last plane, after a transfer, on my way from San Diego, then a transfer in Arizona, finally ending in a connecting flight back to Austin. I got stuck by the window seat (usually a plus) with a well liquored salesman who could not stop talking to me. At first I played the exhausted card. Then I tried to make small talk. But when the drink tray went by, I snapped and said, "Here is a $20 bill. Give me two white wines, then keep the change." I was cornered! I had to drink my way out.
Finally, today marks my first full year as a felon. Here is the one year photograph before I was fingerprinted and sincerely apologized to the substitute judge (which my lawyer capitalized on; the judge that was sick that day was, from what he said, the most feared judge in all of Texas.) I apologized for my embarrassing behavior. I told the judge that this felony destroyed the value of my Bachelor's degree though, so we are even. I gave my speech shaking honestly, and was thanked by the judge. I got to turn myself in, just like the Dave Chappelle skit where the white man is damned to prison to,"convert to Islam" and the black man sings, "The 5th!" and turns himself in when he deems it convenient. It was convenient for me to go in the first day of October.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
