the Bicycle Review

Guns on the Border and Elsewhere




Epilogue: Some stories are too dangerous to be told from one point of view. Our editor arrived in Arizona looking for some rest and relaxation, and instead came face to face with some twisted Cabal. This is a true story. True to the letter, as by the end of it, we can see the fear of guns start to make our author and editor shaky as hell. The names have been left out to protect the innocent.


Guns on the Border and Elsewhere, pt. 1

It was a dark and stormy night. Well…sort of. The clouds were gathering, anyhow. It had been raining in Oakland and San Francisco, off and on, for some time, and as I had no permanent place to stay, this was of some concern. There was a storm brewing, at any rate.

What? That is the first question. As far as “Who?” …we’ll get to that, too; though strangely, most of the principal players seem to be anonymous.

What was I doing in San Francisco? I was sleeping on a floor in a slum hotel near the tenderloin, with two other people, whose names are not getting handed out here. I was lucky to have that.

What was I doing in Oakland? I was selling tamales in bars, and getting drunk. Not a bad profession provided you worked at it. It is not for everyone, and I am certainly not recommending it to you. For one thing the pay is barely enough to keep you in food, shelter, clothing, etc. Then again, you can say that about most jobs these days.

The economy is not improving for the people at the bottom of the pyramid, and these people are reacting in a very constitutional manner…or so they think. We’ll get to that one, later.

I know, I know…but Salinger and Thompson are both gone, and now somebody has to do it…I digress. That’s just old school American journalism, which admits it has a point of view, as opposed to new school American journalism, which tries to pretend it doesn’t have one. “Point of View?” they’ll say, shocked…as if, as writers, they have never heard of such a thing. The bloggers are making their stand, but there’s too many of them, and most of them are idiots who don’t even know how to use a spell and grammar check even tho it’s right in front of there face. (sic)

***

I was walking out of the Liquor Store across from the Stork Club on Telegraph avenue, in Oakland. There were four men outside, of various racial backgrounds. Even these backgrounds will be kept protected, as they are not the real issue, here. Suffice it to say that these gentlemen were mentally ill.

Now, that’s a loaded label; ask a guy who’s had it pointed right at him for most of his life. That would be me. Except that most people refer to me as “crazy”, “idiot”, “alcoholic”, and so on. And so, on…I can be a little manic at times. Sometimes I do and say things which don’t seem to make any sense to other people. I do not have epilepsy, so

I am not an idiot. I do not hurt people unless they attack me first, so I am not crazy in any kind of sadistic way. Alcoholism is not a disease, it’s a self-control issue, and one I can handle better than a lot of others. I get a lot of my best ideas during what Fitzgerald called “the Long Dark Knight of the Soul”…err, night that is. Not all of the ideas I get are good, but unlike a lot of writers, I am handy with a pair of scissors. I’ll take the delete key, you can save your rejection letters. I’ve stopped reading them, simply because I’ve already read and considered the major themes of rejection letters, and it is always more personal than either of the authors would like to admit.

 When people do attack me, whether with weapons or words, I make every effort to restrain them before resorting to violence. Having said that, let’s whip out some old school negative capability here, and use it as it was intended.

I have a bike chain in my bag, and if you try to steal my money, I could pull it out. I am not going to hit you with it, hopefully. Of course, if you have a gun, it’s all yours. I’m not going to risk my life any more than is unavoidable. Besides, I carry this bike chain as a tool to stop people from stealing my bike. I have had several bicycles stolen, and I am too poor to afford stolen bicycles. If I am on my bicycle, the thieves can’t get me (the petty ones, anyhow) but your dad who drives drunk may end my life with his giant muscle car.

I know what some of you are going to say: “he’s paranoid”. You probably are in a line of work where you can live in a nice neighborhood. When you are in public, you walk from the door of your car to the door of a building. Who’s paranoid, here? You are willing to risk the life of the planet itself to protect your own paranoid ass. The shit you are belching into the sky is killing us all. It’s getting a little late not to believe in environmental catastrophe, here, and if you don’t believe me, go to Tokyo.

And don’t expect the boomers to do anything about it, either. They’re old, and they’re tired, and they already did their job, which was to make you. Still, it’s awfully nice of them to send all that money to Tokyo.

…And guess who has never pulled out his bike chain?

On the other hand, let’s say an unarmed man was raping an unarmed woman in a dark alley. His pants are down. He’s distracted, focused only on controlling her. What would you do? The cops are down at the Transit center giving tickets for panhandling.

The odds of this are pretty small, but I have seen it, and there was nothing I could do but call the police and let the woman continue to be raped.

I am not a Christian, and all I have to say about White Wizardry is that it has a bad rep in this country, and ought to be abolished; as an apologia, if nothing else. They are much better at it in England than here in America, and even the Queen has long ago ceded her political power, if not her influence. ..But enough has been said about her.

…Which brings up the obvious question: why are all these people attacking me?

Why do the Police stop me when I am walking down the street, or riding my bicycle, or simply sitting at a bus stop? Is it the color of my clothes? Is it my dark hair? My large, pointy ears? My olive complexion, perhaps? (last sic, here) Could it be my slightly Asiatic eyelids, which remind them so much of a picture they were shown?

..A picture of the Devil.

There are many different pictures of Devils in this world. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, or in Iran, he is white and American looking, and wears a suit or a US Army uniform.

 As we all know, hopefully, the Devil does not really exist. The Devil is a mythological figure created to serve a purpose, and to teach a lesson. And if he does exist, no one is going to beat him. He’s too clever. Just get out of his way. He was friends with God in the old days, which means he has been around longer than you. If you can catch him, you’ve got the wrong guy.

But let’s get to the part about guns…




  Guns on the Border and Elsewhere Pt. 2

…But first, let’s talk about Gangs. Don’t worry, there is a story here, and I will get to it in time. Since I have the space, I am taking the editorial license to explore the issues in depth.

Gangs are not cool. If I could just type that over and over I would. Maybe somebody who has a t-shirt company will use it.

Gangs are not cool, but they are tough, and there are a lot of them. If you want to survive as a young man in this country today, you have to be in one, on some level or another. It has always been this way, at home and abroad. It is nothing new.

A gang is defined by law, under statutes in several states, as two or more people dressed similarly. Either we need a better law, or no law at all. Is a football team a gang? Weeell…sometimes they act like it. I’ve been messed with by more jocks than I have gangsters.

To quote an anonymous source: “Real Gangsters Chill, cos real gangsters know.”

Maybe some of you think you know who said that, but it came from a back alley in Brooklyn, and it was written in the Deep South.

Some of the members of this extended family and I (who shall also remain anonymous) used to be in a band together; a band that changed its name every six months. This was in Seattle, and if you are familiar with the weather there, you get the picture. …Or maybe not. In short, we made politically provocative statements in bars, and no one who disagreed with us could mess with us; but a lot of people are stupid, and they still tried. Then other people disagreed with those people, and things would get tense.

Then, our leader used to say: “Fuck You! We’re not a band! We’re a fucking gang! We got twenty motherfuckers up here with heavy instruments! Now shut the fuck up and listen or get the fuck out of the house!” …Or something roughly equivalent to that. This may seem a little aggressive, but it actually did wonders to keep the peace. These people would all have been arguing anyway, and that’s fine. It’s always funny until someone gets hurt.

What about the Police? Are they a gang? No, not Sting.

There are certainly more than two of them. They are definitely dressed similarly. Many of them are fine people, but some of them are not. These individuals should be rooted out and expelled from Police work. But who is going to do that? The Police?

There are even bigger Gangs than the Police.

It seems we need a new definition for what a Gang is. It seems “Gang”, in fact, is a slang word, doublespeak, and of absolutely no use for those of us who would like to speak some version of English. It is a word that was created to hide something. It does not show you what something is, it conceals it.

Okay, so, what about a corporation? Let’s look at the syllables. Obviously, we are dealing with another funny word here. It has something to do with becoming a body. E Pluribus Unum, and all that sort of thing. Old Stuff: Roman Stuff, Spanish stuff, English stuff, Masonic stuff.

In other words: out of many, one.

They all seem to dress similarly, too; at least the oldest and most powerful ones…currently.

Is a Corporation a Gang? We can’t ask that question. Neither of the words means anything. What about Hollywood? What about etc?

The Law is useless. We will have to resort to the dictionary…


Guns on the Border and Elsewhere, Pt. 3

Kafka once said, famously, that the door to the law was controlled by a series of successively scarier guards. This was a parable. What he did not say was that if you talk to the guards, they might let you in. He didn’t add this, at least not explicitly, because he knew that you had to really understand the first part before you would be able to get the second part.

This was in Bohemia, circa WWI. He couldn’t have been more right…then. These days the door to the law is open, but there aren’t enough copies to go around.

The guards aren’t too scary these days. In fact, they’re kind of old and withered. Your dad’s drunk lawyer friend, for instance, is hogging all the law books because he’s too much of a schmuck to go out and buy his own. Or some weird old lady in a straw hat, that nobody tells to not bring her iced tea into the library…yes, about her.

She might look kind of funny, but she knows the law. And when you get to the third floor of the library to look up “Gangs” in the jolly old Oxford, she’s already got the book on the table. You don’t bother to ask her if you can look at it, because you’re in a library, and you know what the answer will be.

“Shh…”

…But that’s another story. Let’s get back to the Liquor store.

It had been a good night, so far as selling tamales goes. My Lady Friend and I, we thought we were due for a celebration. So she stayed at the bar, to sell some tamales, and I went to the Liquor Store to get us a more affordable flask of something than what was available at the bar.

I wasn’t going to go to just any Liquor Store, either. That’s not my style. Plus, the barkeep there has said I was being too aggressive, so I figured letting the Lady do the work was the smart move. He never said anything to her about it. Anyways, he was basically a good guy, who just wanted us to know who was in charge.

Besides which, I smoke. In the City of Oakland, as in so many other places, this is only permitted in certain spots. The best thing for a smoker to do is to be in motion.

I love smoking, but again, it is not something that I am endorsing. You won’t see me smiling on any cigarette ads any time soon. Artists have a long tradition of smoking; especially the ones with “mental problems”. The current psych lit says we should just buy their drugs instead. I’m going to stick with my smoking and drinking. It’s cheaper, and not as dangerous. Take the famous case of a certain David Foster Wallace, one of the most brilliant writers of our century, as well as the end of the last. He took his doctor’s advice. What his doctor didn’t know was that his brain was different than others. Not the doc’s fault, really. In the table of the sciences, Psychiatry is a very new science. As for Psychology, it is a metaphysical discipline. Physics and metaphysics must be kept separate, on paper anyhow, the better to be more clearly understood. Einstein understood this, so go argue with him. That’s what he wanted you to do, and Yahoo says a 12 year old is tackling it as we speak. Good luck, son.

DFW took his doctor’s advice. As it turned out, the drugs they were giving him started to destroy his brain. He had to get off them, or lose his mind. By this time he had become so dependent on them that he hung himself in his own house, where his wife found him one very sad day. RIP DFW.

But before I start crying onto my keys (and I am already tearing up a bit)

…

I can’t afford these accredited drug dealers anyhow. I don’t have health insurance. And let me just say that what they did to DFW doesn’t exactly inspire me to take their advice.

Instead, I go to the Liquor store. I was turned on to this particular one by a dark skinned friend of mine, in whose tiny hotel room in Oakland me and my Lady Friend of 5 years, then, found shelter for a night.

We had met this man at another bar in Oakland. It is the best bar in Oakland, and I am going to tell you its name. It is called “Café Van Kleef.”

The man was more than a little drunk, and the staff was asking him to leave. He assumed it was because he was Black. Actually, it was because he was too drunk and being a little too forward with the ladies that night.

Negotiations ensued. The kind of nonsensical negotiations which occur between someone who is very drunk and someone who is paid to watch drunk people and make sure that they do not get out of line.

Finally, it turned out that all he wanted was a cigarette. He said if someone would just give him one, he would leave. He was asking for a token of good faith. Everyone there was at least a few shades lighter than him, and he wanted to be sure he wasn’t being singled out. I waited for all of the office people to do it. They all had cigarettes, and this was the smoking patio. They all had jobs in offices, or unemployment checks, or rich parents, girlfriends, boyfriends. They all had enough to at least buy their own drinks. I got mine for free, as the owner is an old friend. If he had been there, he would have given the man a cigarette.

As it seemed that no one with a house and a bank account was going to give this progressively more frustrated man a cigarette so he could feel like he was leaving with his dignity, the task fell into my hands. There was a crowd of people between him and me. They were all gawking at him. To them it was a free show, something to laugh about. I made my way through and gave him a cigarette, and then he left. That’s the short version, anyhow.

Later that week, we were walking down Franklin, looking for a place to lie down, and he was outside another bar where we sold tamales. He gave us a place to lie down. On the way we stopped at the liquor store. No sic for the caps on the proper nouns here, but let me assure you, I do make the decision myself. It’s a Trick I learned from a Man named Thomas Pynchon, and then remodeled for my own Use.

This is the best Liquor Store in Oakland. They are open late, carry a variety of merchandise, and undercut the competition by a noticeable mark down. It is called “Telegraph Market”.

Please don’t be afraid to go there because of what I am about to tell you. Just bring a friend or two.

…Back to the night of the unusually lucky Tamale sales. I walked out of the Telegraph Market. There were four men of various races. They were passing a jug and blunt. Two of them were old school pimps who had been pushed out of the game long ago by the new blood. One of them sold Gold Grills. The other guy was just hanging out, looking shady. No, they were not all Black.

Which brings us back to our Gang question: If you wanted to get around the law, ‘twould be easy. Just have everyone dress differently; even better, team up with someone whose skin is a different Color.

As I walked by, one of the old men said: “Here come a pimp.”

“Nope,” I replied.

“Aw come on man, don’t mess wit me. I knows a pimp when I see one.” (I am dictating this to myself by recall. Some of the words might be slightly different than those spoken, but intent has not been messed with. It didn’t occur to me to take notes.)

“Well,” I said. “Let’s just say that I have provided pimp-like services in the past. But being as I never asked for a cut, you can’t really call me a pimp. I never solicited, I only dealt with the aftermath.”

“Whatever man, look at your ass. You got the red tie, the black suit. Your hair all slicked back with pomade. I know you man, I know you.”

“Not really, you don’t. But I’ll take it as a compliment.”

“You a smart man. Of course you would. Of course you should. You smoke bud?”

Let me just state for the record that of course I refused. I would never engage in any illegal activity like that.

We hung out for awhile and discussed the economy. We all agreed that things were looking bleak. Whether it was Tamales, Gold Grills, or Pimping, things were just not what they used to be. Meanwhile, homeboy kept standing there, being way too quiet. Looking back, I can see he was not part of the “Gang”. At least not the one I was in that night.

This conversation could only go on so long. I had to get back to the bar where my Lady Friend had probably tapped all the potential Tamale consumers there were to be had. We had to get to another bar, and sell more Tamales. We had already sold many, but of course our goal was to sell them all, and it was still fairly early in the night.

The pimps weren’t having it. They were having too much fun talking to me, and they insisted we finish the blunt which I of course did not partake of.

“Fine,” I said. “But after that, I’ve really got to go. I’ve got a Lady and a Dog waiting on me.”

“Aw shit, you know you a pimp now.”

“Just call me the Tamale Pimp.”

Finally, we all went our separate ways. Shady began to follow me. Another man appeared across the street, riding a bicycle.

Oh shit, here comes the rub, now.

Shady asked me for change. Of course, for the record, I didn’t have any. Not for him anyhow, but I could see the play, and I didn’t like it. If only I had turned left on Grand Avenue, everything would have been fine, but I was a wee bit tipsy, and well, a little scared.

Instead of making the correct move, which was Left on Grand, I continued to walk down Telegraph, towards the Café Van Kleef. I knew if I could just get there I would be fine. I didn’t care about my Lady Friend and her Dog so much anymore. I knew my life was in danger.

The man on the bicycle cut over to my side at Grand. Check. Mate in four moves.

He pulls up next to me: “Got any change?”

“Nope.”

“You dressed kinda nice.”

“Oh well.”

I knew there was no point in walking faster. If only I had my Bicycle. But my Lady Friend had left the keys to the bike chain at another friend’s house, and the spares had fallen out of my pocket into the couch while I slept. Because of this, there was no way we could get back to our friend’s garage, and pick up our bicycles.

I began to turn at random. There was nobody out on Telegraph just then, and I needed a Gang. Left on Grand could have ended the whole thing. Instead I went right on 20th. The details aren’t that important, and my memory of the whole incident from here on is a little fuzzy.

Let’s just say I was robbed at gunpoint, right next door to the welfare office, which was closed.

One thing I do remember, and feel it is important to state, is that the man who robbed me thanked me for being such a nice guy.





Guns on the Border and Elsewhere, Pt. $

How I need that hardboiled egg. Well, it still isn’t done, and I just want to get this one on record, in case there’s a frame job going on here. Probably paranoid, but I have seen this kind of thing happen before to people who open their mouths, or type on their keyboards to an audience of any remarkable size. Just CYA, here. Those who are familiar with the Juvenile Justice System in California will get that one, easily.

I was on my way to work yesterday, on foot, having just exited the bus, which was 30 mins late. There was a little blonde girl there. She had on a pink helmet, and she had a Bike. She was alone. She asked me when the next *** was coming.

“I just got off it,” I told her. “It usually goes the way you’re going, but for some reason it takes a different route at rush hour. It circles the shopping center in the opposite direction. Where are you going?”

As soon as I said it, I knew I had said too much, but fuck it. I was going to tell her the truth. Men in large white trucks immediately began to slow down and stare at me. No joke.

What was I doing? I was smoking a cigarette and talking to a girl who must have been about 5 or 6.

Obviously, a child molester. Or so the men in the White trucks seemed to think.

They usually drive fast. Now they were driving very slow. On the other hand, this was an intersection, and there were a lot of White Trucks in this neighborhood.

“Fuck it, you stupid asshole,” I told myself. “Just help the fucking kid.”

She said she was going to a certain department store whose name shall be omitted, here.

“Well,” I said. “You just missed the bus. There’s not another one for an hour. I don’t have a car, so I can’t help you. If you want to trust me, I can walk you to my work, you can wait outside, and one of the Ladies there can give you a ride to where you’re going.”

“Where do you work?”

I pointed, over there. I also told her the name of the place, and what it was across the street from.

“But you know,” I said. “It’s your decision whether you want to trust me or not.”

Her eyes grew large and scared.

“There’s another one coming,” she said.

“Good decision,” I replied.


Guns on the Border and Elsewhere, Pt. %

…Most likely not a frame job. Thankfully, people are usually not so clever. I could tell you some stories, though.

People are also not as greedy and manipulative as they seem, and when they are, it’s usually not their fault. We are constantly bombarded with images of wealth and power, and so it is only natural that this is what the vast majority of us would seek.

Perhaps it is time for some image control; or at least something approaching better images.

I don’t carry the bike chain as a weapon, but, potentially, anything is.

Officially, 34 Americans are killed every day by Guns. This doesn’t include people killed by the police, the undocumented, or the well-disposed of. It’s just a number, a fact…hard to put a face on.

What has become a little more personal for me is that on 8 January of this year 2011 of the Christian era, 6 people were gunned down, and 13 injured. This happened right down the street from my current place of employment. I was robbed at gunpoint later that same night.

The man who robbed me was not mentally ill, he was just greedy. The man who opened fire on that crowd in Tucson was mentally ill, for lack of a better label. He was against greed. You might even say he had been enraged by it; provoked, even.

…But those who cannot control themselves in the face of such provocations, they need to be taken well in hand.

Neither of these men should have had guns. The second amendment was meant to be a check against the power of the federal government, not the citizens of the United States.

In the past, you see, the Gangs lived by a code. Some of them still do. They worked behind the scenes, and they kept what they did quietly to themselves. This is no longer the case. The glorification of mindless violence has changed all that.

Have we evolved into intelligent life only to reduce ourselves to mindless beasts because we cannot handle the responsibility of our existence?

Where are the men of Honor? Where are the men who think with their heads, not their dicks or their pituitary glands?

Many of them are in prison. Many of them are in mental hospitals. Many of them couldn’t take it anymore. They snapped. They made some kind of public outcry. They were carted away.

No one wants to see an honorable man. He is a threat to the very system which supports us all. People see images of violence every day and they have become somewhat immune to them. …Words, though…words stay in their heads. This is especially true when something is hard to understand; it’s part of puzzle solving, which has become an essential function of the human brain as it navigates the labyrinth of the human environment.

In the face of this, we learn to trick ourselves. We learn to reject anything which is too complicated, unless it is of direct benefit to our selves.

Violence is not a tool in my bag. Violence is the product of a disturbed, broken mind. It is both a sociological and a personal issue, and both society and the individual must be held responsible for it.

I do not use it because I have no use for it. I never carry more than $20 cash on me, and I don’t have any credit cards.

I am finished with selling Tamales in bars.

I have lost more through my own carelessness than through thievery, although many friends, enemies, and strangers have stolen from me in their hour of greed/need.

In other words, the bike chain is there to lock up my bike. When I don’t have my bike, I don’t have my bike chain. However, I have noticed that more and more people are twirling their bike chains around in public places. Nothing to cry foul about, but for Dog’s sake, be careful. Don’t make such a spectacle of yourselves. And above all, make sure the police don’t see you doing such things, because they will make a note of it. They are smarter than they like to come off.

When a tool has too many functions, where and how to use it can become a little tricky. This is what happened here in Tucson.

I knew I had to come here, though to be completely honest, I didn’t know why at first, or not in detail anyhow.

I knew I wanted to do a piece on Guns, Drugs, Gangs, and Artificial Selection, among other things.

As it turns out, I couldn’t have come to a better place.


Guns on the Border and Elsewhere, Pt.  ^


…But let’s get back to the rape scene, especially since such scenes seem to be so popular these days.

I was walking around the Westlake District of Los Angeles, some time near midnite. This was in the late nineties.

I was looking for a certain crew of Salvadoran transsexuals who dabbled in drug dealing. I had been walking for some time.

That was when I heard the scream. Screams, more like.

There she was, chest down in an alley off of Alvarado blvd. There was one man behind her, and several more stood guard, waiting their turn. There were more than two of them, and they were all dressed similarly.

I was lucky to have caught only a glimpse of it. I was lucky they didn’t see me. If they had, I wouldn’t be here.

What was I going to do? I called the cops. The infamous Rampart Division, known for their double dealing ways. Maybe I should have asked them if they had any of what I was looking for, as it was a public secret that they were a link in the chain of supply.

Instead, I left.

In the papers the next morning, there was a story about a gun battle between the police and the members of a certain crew of Salvadoran bangers. Two cops were injured. One of the men was detained. The rest escaped. They scaled the fence at the back of the alley, and disappeared. By the time the Ghetto Bird got there, they were gone.

The man they caught covered the whole crew. He just pulled out an automatic weapon and pointed it at the cops. He didn’t fire it. He didn’t have to. He could have killed them all, or at least taken out a few of them. Under his cover, the other men fled. The barrio in that neighborhood is a series of apartment buildings, each of which have fifty or so units. Many of them are safe houses for this particular gang. A house to house search was impossible, and anyways, who were they looking for: a Salvadoran in a wife beater and Khakis? That’s half the hood. What are you going to do, arrest them all?

I didn’t keep following the story, but I can tell you what probably happened. The man was deported, after serving a short prison term here. He was charged with possession of the weapon, and whatever else he might have had on him. The Salvadoran embassy got involved. He gave the police some information.

Since he had not raped or murdered anyone, there was little anyone could do except put him away for a little while.

You could call him an accomplice, but he could deny that he knew what was going on. He could even say that he was against it, but couldn’t speak up in such a crowd. This could all be true, although it is safe to say there might be a reason to doubt it.


Guns on the Border and Elsewhere Pt. &

…You can’t beat a guy like that. When you send him to prison, he runs it. He has free reign to terrorize someone in prison: more than he does on the outs.

Still, the men at the top of such organizations, and their well paid lawyers, have known for a long time that Gun Control is the enemy. The terrorized public in California has demanded action. You won’t see anyone defending the right to own an AK in a place where they are used, regularly, to facilitate gang rape, witness intimidation and/or murder, random sprays of bullets that miss the target and end up taking out a 5 yr. old, and etc.

What they have figured out is that there are places like Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, where the local citizens will defend their rights to own such weapons.

In the wake of the Loughner incident, and Virginia Tech, and Columbine, that is starting to change.

Let me make my own position clear: I do not have a problem with a sober, reasonable individual owning a gun for hunting or home defense, as long as they keep it away from their kids. I choose not to own one myself, not because of my so-called mental illness, but because I just don’t see how it’s worth it. On the two occasions I have been robbed at gunpoint, I am pretty sure that if I had pulled out a gun, it would have ended badly. Being a hero is one thing. Being stupid and reckless is another.

I am not trying to take away anyone’s rights. I think that a dialogue is more helpful than a monologue.

On 28 March of this overwhelmingly violent year of “Christian” epoch, there was a press conference at the library in Downtown Tucson. I was one of the only reporters there. The crowd was small. It was a press conference, not a rally. If it had been a rally, there would probably have been angry rabble from both sides shouting their opinions in one another’s faces. Right, like America needs more of that sort of thing.

At the same time that the President has been sending more armed men into the Mediterranean, for better or worse, he has been calling for action on the gun issue at home. Surprisingly, according to a recent poll by  http://www.fixgunchecks.org  83% of Arizonans polled now favor background checks for all gun buyers. This includes 75% of gun owners polled. Surely, polls can be manipulated, but Arizonans are pretty open about their opinions as anyone who’s been here for even a day will attest to.

The first speaker, an elderly Woman, spoke softly and used a lot of facts. I didn’t catch her name, but it seemed like she was mostly there to facilitate anyhow. She was a reasonable speaker, but due to issues with the sound, I honestly couldn’t make out over half of what she was saying. My Dog people, this is important stuff here. Let’s speak up. Still, she was old, so we forgive her.

Then Tucson Ward 3 City council member, Karin Uhlich, came up and discussed the issues in the way most politicians always seem to. In steady measured tones which inspire few of the waking. Perhaps we should play her voice in our rooms when we are having trouble sleeping. It should do the trick. What she said on the issues was sound, and a lot of it was similar to some things I have said here, but to say the least, it was not exactly a stirring speech. Perhaps she is doing some good work behind the scenes. It certainly seems that way, but I will have to investigate more thoroughly. Which I will.

The next speaker was Doctor Peter Rhee, Chief of Trauma at University Medical Center. He too was staid, but more inspiring because of all of the things he has seen with his own eyes. He did not speak in gruff macho tone, but you could feel the sincerity.

He talked about watching victims of gun violence come into the Trauma ward, and what that can do to your view of the world, while noting that Gun Violence in Tucson is lower than most places in Arizona, and most cities in the U.S.

Rhee: “The Fix Gun Checks Act is a common sense step that will help save innocent lives…I believe that a background check system that is thorough, effective, and that applies to every gun buyer will help to keep the streets safer, and keep innocent people out of my operating room…as a doctor who was seen and treated many gunshot wounds, I think it is overdue.”

Well spoken, Doc.

Some awkward moments followed, as a Nurse named Nancy ___ (I couldn’t make out her last name due to someone talking right next to my ear) and shooting victim James Fuller, were both called to the podium. Neither of these individuals was able to make it. They were both still recuperating, in one way or the other, from the events of that Christ like 8 January of humility, love, and guns.

The most stirring speaker that day was a man named Randy Gardner, who could have lost his life that day, simply because he happened to be there on 8 January. I won’t start calling it “Christians who love guns day”, because there is such a thing as beating a dead horse, but let me explain what I mean.

Again, I am not a Christian. I was not raised as one, and there is no way anyone is ever going to convince me to become one. I have philosophical disagreements with Christ. Not many, but a few. I have even more philosophical disagreements with Paul. I find nearly every one of his epistles to be narrow minded and outdated, and, more importantly, in direction contradiction to what Jesus is supposed to have said.

This is my decision and I am not interested in pushing it on anyone else.

However, if you want to call yourself a Christian, here are a few sayings you might want to honor and obey:

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

“If someone should smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

“It will be harder for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, than for a Camel to enter the eye of a Needle.”

Gardner spoke passionately, in a loud, but not overbearing voice. In a bizarre twist of fate, he was also present at the infamous Kent State Massacre. (If you don't know, wikipedia it)

He began by thanking Doctor Rhee and all the nurses at UMC for their hard work on 8 Jan.

Randy Gardner didn’t die that day, but he was shot in the foot, which I imagine must have hurt like hell.

Gardner: “…It was a very nightmarish environment to be in. A lot of people were affected…So what’s the cost of doing nothing?”

Perhaps the most prescient thing he had to say, and, natch, I am biased, was about the mentally ill. According to Gardner, and I can attest to this, as it has happened to me personally, twice: get this, “the mentally ill are often the victims of gun violence.”

I couldn’t help it. I had to yell out: “Thank You!”

A woman next to me who had been trying to read my notes turned to me and said: “Somebody had to say it.”

 

Guns on the Border and Elsewhere, Pt. *

…Hmm, apparently the Guardians of the Law took the day off. I was able to copy 4 pages from Oxford. Here’s a sample.

GANG:

…I: Action or mode of going; way, passage….in plural: Steps, goings, journeyings…

II: The power of going, ability to walk about.

B: Manner of going, gait, or carriage.

As in: “Lucheri has don me scrud Meself, and bere my bodi prud in Gang.” (spellcheck has a problem with my English)

-cursor M, 1300, c.e.




GOTBAE (

Hmm... what's happening here? Did the mama's boys cut the mama's boys swords off? Too bad, because men are supposedly stronger than women.



Guns on the border and elsewhere Pt dieu

So, two men walk into a bar. They buy two drinks. The bartender is very nice to them. They just want two drinks because they are responsible citizens. One is called N, the other is J. They want to maybe shoot a game of pool. They don't care. there is not so much intention behind their actions. They are just having fun. Some dipshit keeps pestering them, telling them to buy more drinks. His face is too pale, even for a white man, which makes this author deduce that he was probably high.
The two men ignore him. As should you.
They talk about the weather and the government.
But this dipshit, he won't stop interrupting them. He even follows them into the bathroom, where he exposes himself as a homophobe even though they are just pissing in the establishment's urinal.



Guns on the Border and Elsewhere pt. ?

Alright, who are You? For a second there I thought I was paranoid, but now I'm beginning to see the light. I would just like to warn everyone that I have friends in high places. I don't like to bother them, or ask them for help, but I will if you continue to stalk me. All of you. It's hard to know what comes from where, but if someone doesn't play good cop, then everyone is going to be found guilty.

This is a public threat: If I die, you die.



Guns on the Border and Elsewhere: The End

V is for Victory. P is for Peace. Please don't kill me...

I don't deserve it. I'm just trying to tell the truth. Which, apparently, is a crime. Well guess what? There's a reason why the first article came before the second: The pen is mightier than the sword.

A certain person once told me that his opinion on Gun control was that people should be shot in the face. I told him nothing was off the record.



Postscript: This is not a political journal. We just don't want to see anything happen to our editor. Two men have been following him lately, and who knows how many more are behind them. What we do know is that too many people in this town have made suggestive, and rather aggressive comments to our ed. about city boys coming in and digging around for dirt. This is kind of childish. We are an underground media organization, and you really have nothing to fear from us. You have your right to your own opinion, as do we, and that is all it is: an opinion.

For those of you who agree with us that every effort should be made to keep guns out of the hands of the criminally insane, the least you can do is click on the link below and follow the easy instructions.

http://www.fixgunchecks.org


Copyright 2011 by J de Salvo

We Are Stars

Outside a Las Vegas hotel, The Crescent Moon, Chad Chaos considered unzipping himself to show his credentials when he heard the demand, “Credentials please.” The lips the words escaped from were colored by Chocoberry lip-gloss, applied thickly like melted chocolate, obliterating the line between refined and raunchy. The body under the mouth was mostly two large chest bulbs that built up her bust. Before Chad Chaos could present his credentials, his body guard handed over a glossed invitation, pulled from his rented dinner jacket to avoid appearing in another of his boss’s sexual harassment suits. The bouncing D-cup bouncer read the invite like it was her own mother’s obituary. “Welcome to the Adult Movie Awards, Mr. Chaos.”

Chad Chaos was up for Best Group Scene. His scene was art.  His movie was Out to Pasture: Oldies but Goodies. After a forty-seven minute scene, he went off like he was putting out a fire.

Two women opened the doors. They each had a high school diploma and a monthly birth control birth subscription. Chad Chaos ignored one of them offering her ass to his palm. No underwear. An event photographer saw the scene and begged to capture the moment, “Mr. Chaos, of you want to, spank her, please.” Chad Chaos saw the porno paparazzi and their demanding faces of fanatical fandom begging to see him punish the girl, Ally Eighteen, a newbie in the industry. She was used to basements and hand cameras, not annual contracts, and not this attention. She pulled a tiny nipple from out of her dress and directed it to Chad. Those holding cameras begged and pleaded, but Chad Chaos disappeared from their lenses through the open doors.  

….

Recorded orchestral music lifelessly replayed to begin the award show. The sounds introduced a face perfectly fitted for a TV box. Although most everyone in the United States knew his face, the night’s host introduced himself and welcomed the crowd. He appeared on news networks with options about topic forced his way. That evening, he was too happy to share the room with so much sex. That evening, he was the host.

“Outside are celebrities, or those who people call real celebrities. They’re lined up. They’re almost in the street. They’re pushing against the closed doors like parents wanting a the newest hard to get toy for Christmas. Slobbering chumps. I think it’s obvious you people are the real celebrities. They want you, all of you in this room. You give what people want. You are the lights, sights and sounds of Las Vegas, but in people’s homes. Ladies, they enjoy your bodies like buffets; guys, you are the tall and erect hotels they vacation in. You give what people what they hope to see at the movies. And what the award-winning stars give in the back of cabs.”

Lounging in praise, the attendants laughed and mocked the recent cocaine powder powered scandal of a Hollywood super-starlet. As the mirth rose, from the stage, the host saw the hotel doors open as late-comers ushered in. The back rows were illuminated. With the open doors saw tits too big to be gifts from god—the Lord was not that generous with girth and firmness. He saw cell-phone photo ops conducted in once private darkness.

“This occupation is the only economy that isn’t struggling. That’s because TV and movies are too tame, and you ladies and gentlemen, love your work. Your love is work.”

As his opening monologue scrolled on the teleprompter, the host wore the mangy mask of the crude comedian as he moved on to make jokes about semen being the juice of the porn biz; how it was the cheapest fuel on the planet, but as he spoke, he watched only dresses sparking like rain drops in mud.

When the opening monologue came to an end, the host put his hands in his pockets, microphone too, and let out a yawn. And lazily drew the microphone back to his face. “But now, after being here for awhile, I’m bored with all this. All of it. All of you. Everyone and everything in this room bores me. This carnal carnival of sensuality and sex toy reps only makes me sleepy.” The host let out another yawn and stretched his arms, pulling his shoulders back; his microphone caught the sound of a pop. “This isn’t sexy,” he said pointing to a table of women who each spent an hour on nose powdering alone. “All of you screw for the camera—only one person screwed the camera. Her performances of Cleopatra, Ayn Rand, Calamity Jane, Sappho, and Pocahontas each exceeded everything history books and Hollywood tried to create. ”

Electric anticipation, everyone felt it. Something big was coming their way.

“Only one person has loved this work for a lifetime. Ladies may I introduce to your labias and gentlemen may I introduce to your junk, the jazz of jizz, the mother of the mother lode, my co-host this evening, Gemstone Jeanie!”

The nearly clothed but still fully triple X-rated crowd panted, puffed and ejaculated cheers and acclamations in convulsions as if the Lincoln Memorial stood from its stone chair and recited the alphabet backwards. Still gasping, they clapped as Gemstone Jeanie lit up under the stage lights. Gemstone was the archetype that every piece of ass in the industry was weighed against. She was the basketball star whose shadow cast over every season’s megastars. No one wanted someone better than Gemstone, but no one could be better than Gemstone. Gemstone cut everyone into ribbons film. She made the darlings of desire feel like deleted scenes on an editing floor.

Standing at the podium, her prom queen hair fit as naturally as a wet mutt mounting an aged but still paid to be maintained show pooch. Her eye lashes, thin with a hint of reddishness, curled from her face like they tried to scratch wounds into her forehead. She smiled as little as she could because smiling is when the wrinkles show. No one knew how little she wanted to be standing there. Favors were called in for the feat. She was begged and worshipped to for her presence. At that moment, she wanted to be at home, in bed early. Probably asleep with her hand intertwined with her husband with their wedding bands scraping metal.

But an award was coming her way soon.

“I would—” The crowd continued raving, cutting her sentence short. Gemstone didn’t allow the wrinkles of affection or annoyance show. “I would like to thank something very special to me; something very special to us all. On behalf of everyone in this room, I would like to thank my tits!” The breasts she shared with the room were caught in a library’s worth of photos and hundreds of days worth of film. After retirement, this was as graphic as Gemstone’s pornography got. After calling chicanery quits, Gemstone found a Methodist man who did not know her body was a traveling circus. He wasn’t present to see his wife on display, the host noticed.

“I want to thank all our tits,” Gemstone said as she pointed her geriatric but gigantic, scientifically sustained chest at the crowd. To the left and to the right. Gemstone wasn’t unhappy to bare her breasts, doing so meant she had to talk less. The host thought no one should be elated to see an old lady’s chest, but he had no idea that Gemstone had taken the innocence of every man in the room. In late night lust, they found Gemstone Jeanie. Some ladies stood up from their seats, offering themselves but exposing themselves to Gemstone’s golden dress.

“Silicone and whiskey are the keys, ladies,” she said as she tucked her well-worn breasts back into like they were the pocket lining of blue jeans. “Nothing preserves like those two.”

“Instead of laughing, can all of you respond like that for the rest of the evening,” the host said nervously, feeling like he was back in youthful days, when he was a comedian opening for third-rate, or at best, B-list acts in dive bars that paid in canned beers, zip-lock bags of Swisher Sweets, and the occasional waitress.

“All that pink color, it is like heaven, isn’t it,” Gemstone said to her co-host. “This is the heaven I’ve hoped for. I’m in heaven among pink stars in the sky. And like my co-host said earlier, you are stars. Outside, those divas and prima donnas with their resumes and acting classes mean nothing to our art. We are what people watch in the dark. We are the sex gods, and when you’ve fucked this much, there’s no needed for any other heaven.”

Being called co-host was not something the host enjoyed hearing. He chewed his cheek and thought little be believed in Gemstone’s tone, but each member of the audience was devoted to the Gemstone’s lip service in honor of them. Off script, Gemstone continued praising pornography as the host watched the teleprompter’s text skip past a monologue he spent hours writing.

In the tone of a referee breaking up a boxing match, the host set the award show back on course. “Now some recognition for the films this year that caused divorces, rawness, kept the lube industry alive, and stained so many sheets.”

…

An hour into the show and already awards for Best Sound Track, Best Gagged Girl, Best Once-Illegal Sex Act, Shortest Gay Scene, and Most Outrageous Film, which went to Doughnut Glory Holes, where at each instance of a male character’s climax, the film would cut to footage of Bavarian cream would erupting from a pastry.

The host, momentarily free of Gemstone Jeanie, walked out to his cued stereo music alongside adult star Alvin Aventinus. The host had no clue his fellow presenter was eccentric to the point of no humor. The host knew that Alvin was the queen of queer porn and that he had the word TENDER tattooed down his penis. “I thought some put Taco Bell hot cause packets under the hotel’s toilet seats. I felt bad that a prank would be pulled on such a night. But then I realized that Minerva Everglade, winner of best anal, used the restroom before me,” Alvin said as he snickered through his nose, into the microphone, unprepared for what he said because he was not present at any rehearsal.

“This next award,” said the host, “is as valuable as Larry Flynt’s golden wheel chair--

“Or his erection,” Alvin injected.

A few laughs answered back as the crowd filed back into to their seats. Most were sweaty from drinking and an active evening—doing what the cameras told them to do was exhausting. But no matter how dainty the dress or how well-fitting the tuxedo, the actors sold their bodies during the numerous intermissions.

“This next award is for a life time of not faking it,” said the host.

“She perfected industry into art,” Alvin said, finally following the teleprompter.

“From scenes on her knees to backseats, she has been an inspiration. She has chewed up and spit out--

“Or sometimes swallowed—” Alvin said as he strayed from the prompter.

The host shoved Alvin to the side. “Actors and actresses for more than two decades.”

“So this year’s Life Time Achievement Award can go to no one else but--

“Gemstone Jeanie!” Alvin screamed into the microphone. His voice along with the speakers cracked.

          Gemstone was prepared not to smile. The spotlight hit her table. She hugged her manager, a kindly Jew from Mt. Carmel country; a man who thanked God for the sex industry. He built a community center from the money that Gemstone Jeanie’s body produced.

          As she rounded the circular tables, decorated with flowers pulled from the soil and condemned to glass vases curved seductively like a woman’s silhouette, the crowd stood to clap once again. All Gemstone Jeanie looked at was the screen behind the presenters. Four-digit numerals of year her first movie was released faded into, and then dissolved from the screen. The film was a parody of Amish life, Shameful Shamus.Her first scene was in the back of a black horse and buggy in Lancaster County. One take was all they got. In an Amish community the music of public sex does not go unnoticed, nor do cameras and booms. They were caught a tobacco field and the whole crew was hunted with men with beard, bibles, and bats. Hand carved, of course.

          As Gemstone walked closer the stage and her prestigious award, the montage became a blur of positions and perversions. Group jobs in the snow to solo acts under the sun on beaches. The metamorphosis of hair styles and body hair. A clip flashed of the exposé she cooked up to nab crooked public figures, Jerks and Jerk-Offs. A room of actresses and hidden cameras would descend on a ensnared preacher, senator, or university dean. It wasn’t’ the power of sex as much as the persistency of sexual appeal. Some called it rape; some called it porn with a conscience.

Gemstone saw her own body on film, flipped horizontal, hung vertical. She had never seen this much of herself. She had too many awards from doing too many movies, but anytime she would be nominated and a clip was played, she would look down and count the bubbles in her drink. Decades, Presidential administrations, wars and recessions went by clip by clip. Her career was compressed into a series of sequential close-ups and half second fetishes.

          As she lifted her high heel to steady herself on the first step as the last clip played from her last movie. Gemstone Shines On. It was filmed on her wedding night. When she was younger she would enjoy real intimacy with the windows wide open. The curtains would be pulled as far to the side as they could. Doors would be unlocked. She said she didn’t need heaven earlier that evening, but her marriage was her real afterlife. On the night she wanted affection and confidence more than anything hotel workers planted cameras in the room and sold the footage.

          On the presentation screen, her true love was in grainy black and white. Gemstone heard chuckles at the standard missionary position. She remembered being in love on that hotel bed. The host stood aside after Gemstone shrugged off a hug from Alvin Aventinus.

          She stood in front of a room of sex icons—who and what people wanted to look like when their own clothes were taken off. With all the sex, she wasn’t pleased. The crowd stopped clapping and one by one, slouched in stages until they were all seated. Gemstone tapped her wedding ring on the podium. Her curls hung from her head and were pushed away like a swing with her heavy breathing. She leaned over to the microphone, seeing the seconds ticking down for her acceptance speech, and said, “Jerks and jerk-offs.” She left the stage, stabbing her heels into the each step. Her award, a glass shard reading Lifetime Achievement, was left on the podium.

          Gemstone parted a sea of waitresses dressed as French maids. No one could pretend not to notice her leaving. Everyone in the room was flabbergasted by her real emotion. Gemstone Jeanie’s passion kept the recorded music from playing. The Teleprompters were devoid of any text. As she reached the doors, the host took to his microphone; well-rehearsed, he shuffled along to the next category. “Since Watergate, the term deepthroat as been too political. But these next ladies take it back, and take it all down.”

Copyright 2011 by Tyler Malone

Accident

            When her life unexpectedly ended, I was in the same automobile, which allowed me to see the face of death.  The raindrops, those unwitting witnesses of our fight … the car skidded … I was unable to regain control.  A memory: the telegraph pole stuck by the edge of the road, silently and inexorably headed our way, in such a manner that it was senseless to resist.  When I came to, she was still with me.  But it was only a first impression.  In reality, she was no more.  Her head, painted over with blood, rested on my hurting, bruised shoulder constrained by the indifferent embrace of a safety belt.  A safety belt she had so carelessly neglected while improvising our last scene.

          The officials arrived: the police, the ambulance, the firemen.  I felt powerless to get out of the car, even to turn my head to the right, in the direction where she had been only such a short time ago, from where only a minute earlier had emanated a passionate flow of verbal hostility.  Had been, still somehow close, despite all the vulgarities that had plagued our life.  It was impossible to believe that the verdict was irreversible. 

          Naturally the fate would have it that I got away with only a small collection of bruises and scratches: a short list of questions, a short entombment of several extremities in their respective casts, a short series of chats with a psychiatrist.  But my decision was already made.  All that was happening was perceived from an emotional distance, like a provincial railway station the train passes at a barely lowered speed. 

          Everyone’s life has those places.  One of my places is a hillside plaza – a wonderful location for nocturnal observations, meditations on unfulfilled destiny – with every light taking on a special meaning, be it a pedestrian’s cigarette or an automobile’s eye.  I thought it was high enough.  Once I told her that if I ever chose to take that step, I would select this place, this method.  She replied that it was not reliable enough.  We were interrupted.  I never found out how seriously she had taken my words.  At the time, I may have not meant them completely seriously.

          But the thought itself was not new or unexpected, I had cherished it in my imagination like a stuffed toy I could bury my nose in when no other choice was left.  I knew that our existence together was doomed.  I couldn't keep her.  I had no emotional energy left to keep anyone or anything.  Even so, there remained occasional moments of harmony, when hope swelled inside my lungs and I felt there was still a reason to keep trying. 

          The banality of our story has not ceased to fascinate me even now: her meeting a semi-comical individual referred to with a smile, their conversations at work.  But an accidental revelation soon opened my eyes to the fact that the era of conversations had mutated into something different, which I could not, or did not want to, guess in time.  Me, I still believed in our magical forever, in our fairy tale for two; I was still convinced that it was impossible, unthinkable to imagine someone else as a replacement.  And she, she acted as usual, in no hurry to share the new information.  Perhaps some remnants of a feeling for me still wiggled in her heart, perhaps they lay dormant there in their shadow state.  Her silence, her cool ability to act as if nothing was happening, are still lodged in my heart like sharp claws of pain. 

          This was a fairly unpleasant period, marked by her hesitant oscillations between me and my newly found rival.  To a natural question why I did not cancel, why I continued paying for the subscription, I can give a terrifyingly simple answer: because of those isolated days, hours, minutes when it seemed that time could be turned around by sewing the future together from the patches of the past.  Even armed with my latter day tolerance, I would not describe her attitude in those days as sensitive.  This was to be expected.  For the sake of objectivity I must mention: by then I too had shown her a variety of faces other than my best. 

          This is how it went on, until an accident in the rain terminated this much overextended play.  Without a doubt or a chance of compromise, everything was over.  And I realized with full clarity that I would prefer to give her away to any rival, any monster on Earth or elsewhere, if I could know, could be sure that she is alive, that she exists.  I don't think I was quite myself those days.  Only the decision I had made gave my life any meaning.  What was I waiting for?  Perhaps I thought that once I had made up my mind, I would not change it.  Thus the particular day did not matter. 

            Even in that state I was unable to suppress my annoying, pointless feeling of responsibility: I sorted out my affairs, gave a notice at work.  I took all possible measures to ensure that my disappearance was a minimal burden for those around.  Does it mean I’m a good person, or does it mean I’m well-trained? 

          Then one night it became clear that further waiting was unnecessary.  My thoughts turned backwards and, having leaped over a significant portion of reality, landed in that strange world where we were still together, where she was, where one day she would no longer be, but I did not know it yet.  On my way to my destination I was aware of the special significance of these minutes.  My eyes carefully reviewed the setting, in some cases correcting the pre-existing information in my memory – a memory that was to stay powered on for only a while longer.  In one place I even took a roundabout route to give myself the pleasure of a last glimpse at an elegant old church lost amidst boring new buildings, an orphan dear to me.   The silence, the darkness of the spellbound universe were harmonious with the vacuum inside me, with my utter indifference towards what was going to happen.  Yet it occurred to me that the true goal of my deviation was to assign the whole endeavor an esthetic finality, a sense of perfection.  But who else, except for me, was going to appreciate this one-actor show, in which the audience had not yet had the chance to enter the theater?

          Later, standing on the banister between the plaza and the area designated for free flying, I saw that the height was definitely adequate.  But I no longer had a chance to convince her of that, even with my own example.  It was hard to believe that the myriad details the world presented to me in their nighttime finality would instantly fade into nothingness.  Suddenly I lost my balance.  For a few seconds I was twitching and swaying on that banister, right on the edge between existence and an accidental death.  Or, to be more precise, between an accidental death and a premeditated one.  Maybe I should have taken advantage of destiny’s unexpected offer?  But I didn't have time to weigh all the pros and cons of this option: primitive instincts took over, returning me into the state of balance (after what had felt like a million seconds of panic).  Unexpectedly, the need to pursue the intended course of action seemed questionable.  An indescribable lightness, almost happiness, overtook me.  Instantly it appeared laughingly illogical that for her betrayal I was planning to give up my own participation in the show.  Everything was still ongoing.  New actors were bound to enter the stage.  Events could unravel in a completely new, unforeseen direction.  I felt joyful realizing that in the end, she was unable to ruin me. 

          After that, everything was fine.  I won’t lie: momentary fits of nostalgic depression still visited me.  It seemed that a harmony once possessed was never to be recaptured.  But a minor application of will power was enough to clean up my soul.  Naturally, a replacement was found – a woman who made it all peaceful and lighthearted, without blood-thirsty fights and without lies – until I became aware of the fact that this very calm was the danger, that I was growing discontent with the newfound silence.  A previously undiagnosed addiction to our exhausting quarrels, grand reconciliations, those large and small tempests, was twisting and turning my mind.  This revelation surprised me at first, but then it seemed logical, like underwater reefs exposed by the tide, previously hidden in the subconscious.  The hopelessness grew.  All possible antidotes had already been tried, and none of them had worked. 

          Last night, as I was positioned inside my apartment witnessing a series of events unfolding on the TV screen, I realized: what was started must be brought to completion, even if with a great deal of delay.  All the dirt that had accumulated in my soul blew away, replaced by peace and certainty, a certainty that this time I would not change my mind. 

          One might consider this a good place to end this story, handing it over to the reader to complete.  But let’s not be too hasty.  Truth is, in describing almost a year in my life I did not dare to tell the truth. 

            It was I who killed her. 

            We were speeding down that dark, rain-soaked road, telling each other things one should never say, never have to hear.  The weather inside us was just like outside: cloudy, humid, humiliating – especially compared to all of our crystal clear, sunny moments, all of them by now a matter of the past.  When the car skidded, I thought: is there really a point in continuing this game if it is clear with an almost mathematical certainty that I cannot keep her, that in her vacillation between me and not me she is going to end up in a solely predictable place which is not me?  Naturally, I could have controlled the car, or at least tried to.  Instead I hit gas, jammed the pedal into the floor, hearing and feeling with my entire body the sound of the obediently energized motor.  I looked at her.  She knew – of course she knew.  She understood: what used to be her future had just shrunk into a tiny lump, a barely visible marble.  This is when she smiled.   I didn't have time to wonder why.  Right at that second the exclamation point of the telegraph pole in question, frozen in silent expectancy by the edge of the road, interrupted my sentence.  I made a slight steering motion, sending us towards our fate.  I thought this second, the last one for both of us, was going to bring everything back, create a singular entity out of the two of us, an entity that would last forever!  But stupid, unnecessary, second-rate details always hinder the most important intentions.  I was wearing a seatbelt, while she was not. 

          Her last smile haunted me for days.  I kept trying to understand what it had meant.  Maybe she was happy with this ending?  I’m certain that the situation was painful to her too.  At times her pain seemed to be even stronger than mine.  She was unable to help herself.  Humans never are.  Maybe this smile was a last blessing she chose to give me? 

            No, it did not work, we were unable to merge into a singular entity.  I had miscalculated.  I wanted both of us to go away together, but I came unprepared.  Doesn't this mean it’s time for me to follow? 

          After the accident, I found myself looking – in the streets, on public transportation, everywhere – looking for her, as if she might appear from around a street corner or raise her head from a library desk, or perhaps – who knows – even knock on my door.  What would I tell her?  Would I apologize?  It’s hard to say.  One thing is clear: I could not imagine a sacrifice too great for even a slimmest chance of this mystical meeting. 

          Now everything is said.  No secrets left.  I don't know who would make a good candidate to judge me.  My imaginary reader?  Those who knew me?  A stranger who does not have a clue about any of this?  I don't really care: let anyone judge me if they wish. 

            Better yet: I will judge myself.  I will interrupt this overextended mistake.  I will pay her back.  Pay someone back – whoever made it so that in our last second together, in an accelerating car, I ended up wearing a seatbelt – while her carelessly packaged, infinitely breakable body surrendered so willingly, so completely.


Copyright 2011 by A. Molotkov

 

 

 

The Head Table

 

 

 

Looking back, the thing that can be said most justly of Cal, Tom, and Sheila is that they aspired to sit at a head table – the kind of head table that presides over banquets, luncheons, and prayer breakfasts, where ideally they could be raised above their peers on a dais, perhaps even backed up by a few flags. That Cal, Tom, and Sheila are still in LA, growing more than a bit long in the tooth, is one of the things that amuses me about this story. They're all a little like the reclusive old rich lady, sitting behind drawn shades in a run-down house, living in a long-gone world.

If you had checked an atlas or travel book late in the last century, you would have read something like this: "Many people think of Los Angeles as the entertainment capital of the world, but the city is a regional banking and financial center." What you would have read then is no longer true. The days of LA as a banking center are as gone as the days of punch-card programming and green-line printouts.

This is one reason I chuckle when I think about Cal, Tom, and Sheila -- especially Tom and Sheila. Tom worked at the time for America First Bank’s holding company, while Sheila worked for WampusBank, names that have disappeared as permanently as Packard or Nash. Their headquarters buildings still stand downtown, but the corporate logos have long since been painted out, and instead of floor after floor full of cubicles populated with diligent junior bankers performing menial tasks, the buildings have become server farms. They are so close to the main Los Angeles telephone switching nexus that rates for connecting web servers to the national network are the cheapest available.

So even the buildings where Cal, Tom, and Sheila presided over the first meetings of what would become NACSA are inhabited mainly by ghosts. Between the savings and loan debacle and banking deregulation, the big LA banks are history, their data centers lying empty or razed to make way for condos.

NACSA stood for the National Association of Computer Security Administrators. As banks and other businesses trusted more and more of their operations to computers, it didn’t escape notice that the computers provided new ways to steal, and leaving theft aside, even ordinary errors could become massively expensive. Thus a new occupational skill was born, and inspiration struck Cal, Tom, and Sheila: a new skill inevitably meant a new set of adventitious structures: a professional association, with meetings, banquets, luncheons, and prayer breakfasts, at which head tables would be an essential feature. Beyond that, their imaginations soared: there’d be the need for incorporation, bylaws, codes of ethics, conferences, certifications, even a Hall of Fame, into which, in due course, Cal, Tom, and Sheila would be inducted. They started their luncheon meetings in a room off the cafeteria at America First Bank's headquarters building.

Soon enough, somebody in the executive suite at Sasquatch Federal, the bank where Jeff Siddon was working, heard about the America First Bank luncheon meetings. The word went down to Lorne T. Ballardash, Sasquatch Federal’s CIO, that something needed to be done about computer security. And America First was running with the ball. Why wasn't someone from Sasquatch going to those lunches? Ballardash, I'm sure, looked around for someone with time on his hands whom he wouldn't miss if the guy took an extra-long lunch, and his gaze settled on Evan Frimble, Jeff’s boss. Evan called Jeff in, told him about the lunches, and said they’d both go.

"This could turn out well for you," Evan said. "If you get involved in setting this thing up, you'll get to be well-known in the business. That could be very good for your career." Jeff did have a small question in the back of his mind when Evan said this -- why was it Jeff that this was going to work out well for? Didn't Evan expect to be involved?

Once during this period, Jeff had a blind date. Naturally, at an early stage, they got into what each of them did for a living. She, as I recall, did some sort of government grant type work. Jeff told her he was doing computer security for a bank. They'd gotten along all right until he said that. All of a sudden, she stood up. "Why, that's just like trying to prevent shoplifting," she said. Her face was turning red. She was getting very upset. "You're just like some kind of store detective, trying to prevent shoplifting!" Jeff hemmed and hawed and tried to talk about keeping people from getting into the payroll file and e-mailing copies all over the company, but she wouldn't hear of it.

"Companies spend all this money trying to prevent shoplifting! They probably spend more money on preventing shoplifting than whatever little bit people take out the door! Companies should just treat shoplifting as a cost of doing business! They shouldn't be trying to stop it!" She was so mad she was spitting little drops while she spoke. In fact, she seemed to be talking to someone other than Jeff, someone who'd apparently been sitting at that cocktail table with them all the time, and Jeff never knew it. And that third person must have had some connection with certain baggage over shoplifting.

"Computer security! I think that's awful! You and your greedy corporate bosses don't trust anyone! It's as bad as trying to catch someone at shoplifting!" Jeff tried to blurt out something about preventing expensive mistakes, but she was already stamping out of the cocktail lounge in a rage. Sometimes blind dates go like that. Cal, Tom, and Sheila were past the blind date stage. Evan wasn't; maybe that's why he seemed to hesitate over getting involved in NACSA.

Cal, Tom, and Sheila were people utterly without talent or skills of any sort, save for self-promotion. If pressed, they could turn on a sort of reluctant, threadbare charm, though it was nothing that would gain them favor with any normal person. Cal Dripwater, in fact, was a dour, bad-tempered fellow who gave the impression that life had let him down in some important way. He'd retired from the Navy well short of flag rank, but even in his office at the aerospace company where he worked, he had what government types call an "I love me wall" full of all the framed commendations he'd gotten in the Navy mostly for doing nothing, and photos of himself shaking hands with some grim Admiral or smiling Senator as they handed him each award. From whatever history I could piece together from that record, it didn't seem like he'd ever spent much time on shipboard. Tom and Sheila were younger, sneakier versions of Cal, with all the thwarted ambition but without the Navy-officer polish. I'll get to them later.

As instructed by his bosses, Jeff diligently attended the monthly luncheon meetings at America First Bank. At that stage, they were in the final stages of whipping their Code of Ethics into shape and casting about for things that, for a computer security administrator, might be unethical. The Code's centerpiece, the big thing everyone promised not to do, was this: they would never, ever turn over the membership roster of the group to a headhunter. And in the most recent meeting of the group, it had been proclaimed by the worthies at the head table that, to be eligible to continue attending the meetings, everyone had to sign the Code.

Jeff signed it, of course. If a headhunter ever stopped him on the street and asked him for a copy of the membership roster, he'd apologize and say it would be unethical for him to do such a thing. But Jeff had actually begun to do more with the group than just attend meetings. This was because of Roy Kendall. Jeff couldn't bear to see Roy doing all the grunt work by himself.

In fact, Roy and Jeff were the odd ones out in that group. Roy had been a sheriff's deputy, and before that he'd been an MP in the Army. At some point the county decided it needed a computer security administrator, and somehow Roy got the slot. He transferred over to the county computer center from the sheriff's office. But then, using his law enforcement experience, he got himself a private investigator's license, and this entitled him to carry a concealed weapon. Which he carried.

Roy, you might guess, was pretty tightly wound. Several years later, he was fired from a job when, out of the blue, he took a dislike to one of the vice presidents where he was working and simply went to the building access system and, on his own initiative, canceled the guy's key-card. The guy couldn't come in the door the next day. Naturally, someone had to follow up and figure out why this had happened, and Roy was the culprit. I knew Roy pretty well by then. He'd gotten tired of that job, and he figured he'd twist the tail of the guy he hated most in getting himself out of it. He usually left his jobs under bizarre circumstances like that.

For a while, Roy and Jeff were always applying for the same jobs. Jeff could tell that, because a lot of the time, he'd go in for an interview, and the hiring manager would have talked to Roy just before he talked to Jeff. He'd still be shaking his head. "You won't believe who was just in here," the hiring manager would say. "This guy has a private investigator's license. Our security guys check briefcases when people come into the data center. He had a .38 revolver in his. He showed the security guys the permit, and he showed them it wasn't loaded. He had the cartridges in a separate box. The guys downstairs had to make him check it and pick it up when he left."

So the manager would shudder, and he'd want Jeff to reassure him that he wasn't like Roy, that he didn't carry a concealed .38, that he wasn't that tightly wound -- it made him look awfully good in comparison. Jeff got a job once exactly that way; the guy offered it to him simply out of relief that he wasn't Roy. So, all things considered, Jeff owed Roy a lot.

Roy, on the other hand, despite his very rough edges, had volunteered to be program chair, the one who made sure there were speakers for the next six months of meetings. None of the head table types was interested in doing that kind of thing. That, after all, was work. Let simpletons and weirdos like Roy take care of that.

It was a certain, largely unconscious, sense of common cause with Roy that led Jeff to start volunteering to do some of the work involved in the monthly lunch meetings. Not long after Roy became program chair, Jeff started mailing out the announcements for each meeting, which began to grow into a small newsletter. To do the announcements, he had to talk to Roy on the phone between meetings, since Roy was the one who knew what the program would be, and they got to know each other better.

Roy hated the people who sat at the head table. His disdain for them, which he began to express to Jeff almost as soon as they started working together, was clear and complete. On the other hand, his inner sense of what was important told him that the meetings were worthwhile, so he put a lot of productive effort into the programs. He somehow separated his feelings about Cal, Sheila, and Tom from the reasons why he volunteered his time to the fledgling organization.

The mere fact that Roy and Jeff did the work that allowed the lunch meetings to continue and begin to prosper didn't entitle them to seats at the head table at the meetings themselves. They continued to sit out among the ordinary folks. The only acknowledgement during the meetings that they even existed came when Sheila, who usually chaired the meetings, would ask Roy at the end of each meeting what the program would be for next time. That was it. The head-table people were big-picture types. Worker bees weren't in their view finders.

Neither Cal, Tom, nor Sheila had any background in computers. Instead, they sat in the meetings mostly complaining that computer security people didn't have much prestige, something we've already seen, and the only way they could think to get a good computer security program going would be to get more prestige, and the way they saw it, that meant they should become vice presidents and have half a dozen people to order around -- none of whom, of course, did anything remotely worthwhile. They'd just be easy fodder for the next ten-percent layoff.

Not that they didn't understand, at least at some level, the need for a supporting cast to enable their starring roles. Tom Van Ness, in fact, began to look at the work Jeff and Roy were doing, and the wheels began to turn. Maybe he could get something more out of them than he was already getting: so far, after all, little more was happening than that Cal, Tom, and Sheila got to sit at a head table once a month, which was good for the ego, but it didn't buy any groceries.

Tom Van Ness was the computer security guy for America First Bank's holding company. The holding company was actually just a very small corporation that didn't do much more than own the paper for the actual banks that America First controlled. It didn't even have its own IS department. As a result, Tom had few, if any, actual duties. His job was nothing more than to collect a fair-sized paycheck for occupying a box on an org chart at the holding company.

Without making too big a deal of it -- Sheila and Cal might have thought he was fraternizing a little too much with the rank and file, after all -- Tom began to chat with Roy and Jeff before the formal meetings got started. He realized soon enough (the vibes couldn't have been much clearer) that Roy didn't want anything to do with him. And anyhow, an unpredictable type like Roy who carried a concealed .38 wasn't likely to help a guy like Tom climb higher on the corporate ladder. On the other hand, Tom began to see that Jeff was working in exactly the areas that he knew nothing about, which is to say, how you actually did computer security.

This wasn't to say that America First didn't have a bunch of people who worked in computer security. Not only that, but any of them made a good bit more than Jeff made at Sasquatch. They had a vice president and a couple of assistant vice presidents, all working diligently on computer security. Except that none of them knew anything about how to set up procedures, or what could go wrong in the middle of the night and how to fix it. America First hadn't gotten very far with computer security, in fact. Tom got the idea that Jeff should work for America First's bank, doing data security, among the half dozen people who were already there. Jeff would know how things were done; they wouldn't, but that would all work itself out. He'd be able to show them how it should be done. Right.

And as much as Tom could be sincere, I think he was sincere in trying to talk Jeff into this. He began to mention it before the monthly lunch meetings, and he began to call him up about it in between. It's true that America First was a bigger bank, it paid better, and Jeff might have a better chance of a career path there. Tom knew the people at Sasquatch well enough to recognize -- as Jeff already did -- that he'd never advance there. They'd just let him go on being the worker who knew how to clean the emulsion buildup off the mixing paddles in the blending tub, while the guys in the Friday night poker game would get the promotions. Lorne Ballardash, Sasquatch's CIO, after all, had spent a dozen years at America First, and people still knew him there.

I think Tom thought that if Jeff went over to America First, he'd work hard, make a lot of changes, everyone would think the changes were just great, and Tom could take the credit. I think that was Tom's little fantasy. He'd put Jeff in there, the seed would germinate and take root, a year or two later everything would be lookin' good, and Tom would step up and tell the big boys at the top that it had all been his doing. This was how Tom and the others saw life from the head table.

So that year, Jeff was one of the people invited to Tom's Super Bowl party, and so he got to meet his controlling wife, Nell, and his three hyperactive kids, out at their brand new faux Victorian tract house with a three-car garage in Lemon City. He drank warm Bud Lights until they ran out, which didn't take long. All that was left in the cooler after that was Diet 7-Up. He ate tasteless, overboiled hot dogs, soggy potato chips, and bland, gooey chili that was mostly just catsup, with the other B-list invitees the Van Nesses had over to watch the game that year.

There were a few low-level people from America First, along with some moms and dads from the Cub Scouts and the soccer league. Nobody else was there from NACSA. As hard as Jeff tried, he couldn't dream up an excuse that would get him out of there before the game ended. Tom was thinking, I guess, that Jeff was an OK guy, and he might even be able to help him look good at America First, but he was still nowhere near good enough for the NACSA head table. Even so, they could be friends. In any case, his plan was under way.

Tom's plan was what you might expect of someone with no subtlety and little sense. He simply began calling up Phil Brottles, the vice president who was in charge of computer security at America First's California bank. "You ought to talk to Jeff Siddon about that position that's opening up," he kept saying. "He's the guy who knows how it's done. You need to hear what he's put in place at Sasquatch."

I have a deep-seated feeling that Phil did not appreciate these calls. Phil was a vice president. Tom wasn't. I think Tom's business card said "Computer Security Manager", or something like that, but Tom had nobody to report to him, and considering the whole holding company was maybe 50 people, Phil didn't take him seriously. And I would guess that Phil especially resented the implication, however slight, that because Tom worked for the holding company, he could tell Phil what to do. So I would guess that Tom's calls to Phil went, more often than not, unanswered.

Meanwhile, Tom kept calling Jeff. "I just put in a call to Phil Brottles," he'd say. "Phil's a busy guy. I've been telling him he's got to talk to you about the new position." Then he'd add something more to try to get Jeff excited about the deal. "You know, Phil used to be the CIO for America First's California subsidiary," he said one day.

"I don't understand," Jeff said to him. "Why would someone who used to be CIO be working on computer security?"

"Oh," said Tom. "What I hear is that he had to go through the mandatory alcohol rehab program. The spin-dry, they call it."

"But if it all came out OK, why was he demoted?"

"It didn't all come out OK," said Tom. "He had to go through the program again."

"Usually you don't get that option," Jeff said.

"But he was the CIO," Tom reminded him. He tried to re-focus the discussion. "I know he's going to want to talk to you about the opening when his time frees up. That's really the place where you belong."

Well, that tells you something about computer security. That's where they put CIOs who don't work out. But at the back of his mind, Jeff could see that it wasn't good for Tom to be pestering a guy like Brottles that way, even if he wasn't CIO any more. Looking back, I’d say Jeff simply should have told Tom in no uncertain terms to stop the process, he wasn't interested. But I'm not sure if even that would have worked. Tom had gotten it into his head that his career depended on getting Phil Brottles to hire Jeff, and in light of what eventually happened, maybe it did. Tom was just plain stupid, of course, which was what had earned him his place at the NACSA head table. The only one who wasn't stupid there was Sheila Lamprey, but we'll get to that in due time.

After several weeks of trying, Tom got Jeff an interview with the computer security people at America First. I'm sure they finally relented and said they'd talk to Jeff just to stop the calls. The person he got in to see was Janet Barnwell, one of the assistant vice presidents who worked for Phil Brottles. The interview was unofficial; he didn't fill out an application.

Janet Barnwell was a babe. Beyond that, she wore a men's oxford shirt, so that her boobs pressed against it as if trying to get out. Jeff chatted with her and answered her questions, but he was mostly just dazzled by what he was seeing. And that was of no consequence, because the interview was only a perfunctory courtesy she was granting to Tom. It lasted about ten minutes, and the whole time, her gaze was listless, her questions routine. It was the kind of interview where you know beyond a doubt that they already have someone else in mind.

So Jeff called Tom and told him this when he got back to the office. He still wasn't inclined (as I've said he should have been) to tell him to forget the whole thing. I suppose Jeff had some vague notion that it couldn't hurt to go on with the attempt. So after Jeff talked to Tom, Tom called Janet and got her impression. Tom reported that Janet was mostly concerned that Jeff didn't seem like the kind of guy who spent much time at the gym. Tom was all worked up about this.

"Why is she worried about that?" he asked. "This is a back office job. You don't need to be a pretty face."

"Maybe you need to be a pretty face to be around Janet," Jeff said. Tom muttered something. He was going to keep working on things.

So a couple of weeks after Jeff’s interview with Janet Barnwell, Tom called him again. He'd finally gotten him in to see Phil Brottles. "It doesn't matter what Janet thinks," he told Jeff. "If Phil likes you, you're in. He used to be CIO." This was the continuing fantasy of the guy who sat at the head table. It goes without saying that Phil agreed to talk to Jeff for the same reason Janet did, to get rid of Tom's pestering.

If Phil was once a CIO, he no longer looked it. His hair was thinning and combed straight back from above a puffy face, enough to remind someone of Joseph McCarthy late in life, after the booze and hard knocks had finished their work. He wore scuffed brown brogans and an old blue suit a size too big for him. He still had a corner office, but that looked a little too big for him, too.

Jeff handed him a copy of his resume. Brottles skimmed over it, then lifted the first page and glanced at the second. All pro forma. "Have you thought about working for one of the big consulting firms?" he asked "They have people who do your kind of work." It was as nice a way as he could figure of telling Jeff he wasn't interested.

"Yes, I have," Jeff answered

"Good," he said. They didn't say much more. Jeff was in and out of there in a very short time. He called Tom again and told him how it had gone. It couldn't have gone much worse, of course, and that was what he said. Tom didn't say much. He just said he'd get back. He still had hope.

When Tom got back to Jeff over the Phil Brottles interview, the news was definitely not good. He'd been going through the interviews at America First mostly because he thought the worst that could happen -- and that was the case he was planning for -- was that they wouldn't hire him. That wasn't how things worked out.

Tom sounded shocked when he told Jeff about it. Phil, it turned out, had apparently felt he was still in the CIO club, and as soon as Jeff left his office, he'd called up Lorne Ballardash, the CIO Jeff worked for at Sasquatch, to tell him Jeff was applying for a job at America First. Actually, this wasn't exactly true; he hadn't filled out an application, hadn't gone through human resources, and the interviews he'd had with Janet Barnwell and Phil Brottles were strictly informal, set up at Tom Van Ness's instigation. And of course, neither Janet nor Phil had the slightest intention of hiring him.

That probably wasn't enough to suit Brottles's purpose. I suspect he was hoping the information would be of enough value to Lorne Ballardash that Lorne would feel he owed him something. It wasn't, as far as Lorne was concerned; it was enough to make him angry, but not enough to put him in Brottles's debt. That wasn't good news for Brottles, because I think he had visions of Lorne taking him on at Sasquatch the way he'd done with other alcoholic cronies from America First.

But even if he didn't achieve his primary purpose, Brottles's fallback was to treat the call as a kind of reference check. Bankers can be very chummy about this kind of thing. They'll call each other up and gossip about each other's subordinates at the drop of a hat. That's what happened here. Lorne bent Brottles's ear about how they just didn't consider him promotable, and no doubt much more.

The result, I would guess, was satisfactory to both parties, though not as much as it could have been for Brottles: while he didn't get anywhere with the possibility that Lorne would take him on at Sasquatch, he did get an ironclad excuse for not hiring Jeff at America First that he could give Tom Van Ness and anyone else who might ask him about it. Tom would stop pestering him for sure now. At the same time, Lorne warded off the possibility that America First would hire away the one guy he had who knew how to do computer security.

It was different, though, for Brottles. Tom called Jeff up again a week or two later, and he said Brottles was finally out. Evidently his latest trip through the spin-dry hadn't taken.

Then it must have been two or three months afterward that Jeff got a form letter in the mail from America First's human resources department. "Dear Applicant," it said. "We've matched your qualifications against all our available openings. We're sorry to say that blah blah blah." He was puzzled. He'd never filled out an application there, and he'd certainly never sent just a random resume wondering if they had any odd thing that might suit him. How did America First get the idea he wanted a job there, to the point where they sent him a Dear Applicant letter, when there was no reason for their human resources department to know who he was?

His interview with Brottles had completely slipped his mind by then, and it took a while for him to realize what had happened. Brottles had taken the resume he'd given him in the interview and sent it down to human resources himself. That meant he could feel less dishonest about telling Lorne Ballardash Jeff was applying for a job at America First.

But even when it was plain to Tom that America First wasn't going to hire Jeff, he still wasn't done with him. He had another bright idea, or I should say, Tom, Sheila, and Cal all had another bright idea. Not only had they been getting everyone who came to the monthly lunch meetings to sign a Code of Ethics, they'd been collecting dues. There were actually very few expenses, mostly just postage for mailing out the monthly meeting notices to the people who didn't get them via e-mail. But they got the regulars to pay $60 a year for the privilege of attending those lunchtime meetings in America First's cafeteria.

With the minimal expenses and a steady income, that meant NACSA's bank balance was growing. In fact, it was growing to the point that someone was sooner or later going to be tempted to do something with it, almost certainly something stupid, illegal, or both. Roy Kendall was the one who began to point that out. Why, he wanted to know, was the group charging $60 a year for membership when its expenses didn't remotely justify that kind of money? Sheila likely knew exactly what the money was going to be used for, but she wasn't ready to give her plan away just yet. And since Roy was starting to ask those questions from the floor in the monthly meetings, the head table people decided maybe they needed to do something about the problem.

So to forestall criticism, Tom, Sheila, and Cal decided they'd use the money to throw a party. A big party; they had a few thousand bucks to spend. The meeting that May, they decided, wouldn't be a lunch meeting on a Wednesday; it would be a dinner on a Friday night, paid for by the dues the members had been contributing. There would be a program, with a featured speaker. There would be silver, good china, white linen tablecloths. There would, of course, be a head table. All this would require work, but they had Roy and Jeff to do that.

And somehow, Tom still had plans for Jeff. He hadn't been able to get him a job at America First, but he wasn't done with trying to make over his life into something more like what he thought it should be. Jeff had turned up at his Super Bowl party without a date. Never mind that even if he'd known someone he could have taken to the party, knowing what he knew by then, he wouldn't have brought her. But when Tom wasn't looking at life from a head table, he was viewing it from the living room picture window of his big, new tract house out in Lemon City. What he saw when he looked at Jeff was a reclamation project. He was a mess, to be sure, but he had promise. For that matter, he could see not one, but several places where he might be able to set Jeff’s life in better order. And this time, he was going to get him laid.

When I speak of Tom, Sheila, and Cal sitting at the head table, I don't mean to imply they were the only ones there. At normal head tables, there's room for at least half a dozen, and NACSA's head table was no exception. Tom, Sheila, and Cal were the inner circle, but others sat there. I would call them associate members, not-quite made men or women, so to speak. Their leadership skills and their qualifications in the computer security field were, if such a thing was even possible, lower than those of the inner group. As a result, they tended to last at head table seats for some period of months, but eventually they drifted away, while Tom, Sheila, and Cal stayed where they were.

One of the associate head-table members during this period was Marybeth Stamper. Marybeth had some connection to Cal Dripwater, who was the apparent sponsor of her associate membership, though since Marybeth and Cal were such dreary, grim-faced, and utterly conventional people, their connection could only have been a respectable one. Tom, who'd been casting about for some potential way to get Jeff laid, settled soon enough on Marybeth. Nor can I exclude the contribution of Tom's wife, Nell, in his reflections on this matter. In Tom's, and no doubt his wife's, opinions, the appropriate blind date, hookup honey, or potential life partner for a hopeless mess like Jeff must also be a hopeless mess.

Nobody, of course, knows what was in Marybeth Stamper's heart. She may actually have been a very sweet person once you got to know her. And we've already heard Janet Barnwell's observation that Jeff didn't appear to spend a lot of time in the gym. Marybeth was, as these things go, a size or two bigger than what might be implied in saying that someone didn't spend a lot of time in the gym. On top of that, her clothes were all too small, so that seams were always on the verge of pulling apart, and buttons were holding on for dear life. Her bangs were often plastered to her forehead with sweat. Never mind that during this period Jeff had an account at Brooks Brothers, and at least his suits fit. Tom decided Marybeth and he were perfect for each other. Why not? If anything, Jeff was in worse shape, because he got along with guys like Roy Kendall, and at least Marybeth sat at the head table.

So, just as he had when he was trying to get him a job at America First, Tom kept calling him up between the monthly NACSA lunch meetings. "You and Marybeth are both going to be at the dinner in May, right?" he'd ask Jeff. "Don't you think that would be a perfect time to go out on a date? You could go someplace for drinks after the meeting." By this time, Jeff knew Tom's methods well enough to understand that he was making similar calls to Marybeth. He was in full Cupid mode. Jeff could tell, because at the monthly NACSA lunch meetings, every time Marybeth saw him, she tightened up and looked away in disgust.

Jeff and Roy Kendall, meanwhile, worked on the May dinner meeting. Roy lined up a speaker, and Jeff found a hotel and looked at the menu. But Tom was still pursuing his agenda to bring Jeff and Marybeth Stamper together, or get them hooked up, or whatever it was he had in mind. At Tom's instigation, Roy set Marybeth up to give a presentation at one of the regular lunch meetings before the May dinner, apparently to showcase her talents in computer security so Jeff would think well of her.

She talked about her job and her department at Consolidated Thermonuclear, the defense contractor where she worked. It was plain before she'd gone on very long that she didn't have much knowledge of computers, still less computer security. This was the kind of thing Roy hated to hear. If there was a reason he despised the people at the head table more than for their lack of leadership ability, it was their lack of technical knowledge.

"I hope you don't mind my asking this," said Roy during the questions after Marybeth's presentation, "but why are you in this group? It doesn't sound like your job really has much to do with computer security." That was Roy, of course.

"My job is much more important than computer security," Marybeth answered. "Much more important. We are the Security Coordination Department. We put together all the information from all the other security departments and pass it on to the government and our board of directors so they will understand our whole environment is secure." The other people at the head table started nodding their heads enthusiastically. Of course this was true. If someone at the head table said something, it most certainly was true. And the rest of the room was starting to become uncomfortable. They were pretty sure the people at the head table knew what they were doing, but you could never be completely sure of such things, and they didn't like the challenge to their thought processes so soon after lunch.

"But you don't seem to have anything directly to do with computer security," Roy repeated. "From all you've said, you don't seem to know much about it."

"We're Security Coordination," Marybeth said once more. "It's much more comprehensive than computer security." Cal, Sheila, and Tom started nodding their heads even more emphatically than they had before. And Tom decided it was time to wrap the meeting up. The people at the head table would do anything they could to get rid of Roy, except he was the only person willing to do the work of program chair. And of course, there was the .38 in his briefcase.

When the night of the May dinner meeting finally came around, Tom had the seating all worked out. Jeff got to sit at the head table, for the first and only time he was with NACSA. That was because the head table was especially big -- it looked like the hotel had run two of their regular long tables together end to end, so there were about a dozen seats there, for the speaker, his wife, and various other people. Roy didn't get to sit at the head table, even though he'd done as much work as Jeff had. But they had Jeff sitting between Marybeth Stamper and Tom's wife, Nell.

The placement was so that Nell could watch Jeff and make sure he didn't escape. Tom still had the idea that Jeff was going to go out for drinks with Marybeth after the dinner. But it was all in vain. Marybeth didn't want to go out for drinks. Actually, if she'd wanted to go, Jeff would have taken her.

Exactly why she didn't explain all this to Tom or Nell in the first place, I don't know. Maybe she did, and they didn't listen. But what Jeff got to hear over dinner -- garden salad with croutons and choice of dressing, sliced roast beef or baked cod filet, peas and carrots, rice pilaf, roll and butter, custard cup for dessert, coffee, I think something like $29.95 per person, including tax and tip -- was that she had an Intended. In the UK. In fact, she'd quit her job, and was in the process of packing to leave for the UK to join her Intended.

This was a very long story, and she told it to Jeff earnestly, though with a definite hint of snobbery. Her Intended was in the UK. Whatever Jeff was, he was not in the UK. He was in Los Angeles. She made that very clear. I don't know what the point of that was, since she was from LA just like everyone else -- no doubt she was already practicing a plummy accent, but wasn't ready to spring it on them just yet. Jeff was all for the guy in the UK, of course, and happy he didn't have anything else to explain to Tom or Nell when he and Marybeth didn't leave together. I'm not sure, actually, why she felt she had to give such an elaborate excuse. Jeff hadn't actually ever asked her out, after all.

She was wearing a pleated gray skirt with a plaid vest that evening, and they fit for once, probably new and purchased for her trip to join her Intended. And for all I know, everything she said was true, though Jeff was always a little puzzled that for all the talk of an Intended, she wore no engagement ring. Still, he never saw her at another NACSA meeting. So that was the end of Marybeth Stamper, and that was as close as Jeff ever got to getting laid at NACSA.

That notwithstanding, the dinner was held to be a great success. The only other area where it fell short was in not spending down as much as it should have of the group’s swollen bank balance. This, though, was something Sheila Lamprey had likely anticipated. There was enough money – or perhaps, with a few additional months of membership payments, there would be – for NACSA to hire an attorney and incorporate. This had been Sheila’s dream all along. To sit at a head table with no solid organization beneath it was, in her view, to sit in a house built upon sand.

"Hi, Jeff, it's Sheila Lamprey!!" she said on the phone one day, as if she were being introduced as a television quiz show host. She was full of little projects she wanted to assign to him. She wanted a brochure made up for NACSA, and that would be only preliminary to a web page.

"Hi, Sheila," he replied, trying to take some middle course between seeming not to care and the puppylike enthusiasm she apparently expected.

There was a muffled, "I'm running late," delivered with her hand over the receiver, apparently speaking to some subordinate back at WampusBank, where she worked. "I'm running late," she repeated. Then, "No, I'm running late," louder but still muffled with the hand over the receiver. Exactly what the other person in the office was trying to do to delay her, Jeff could never quite figure out. She was always, it seemed, running late. The bosses at WampusBank loved it. It meant she was very important.

That out of the way, she came back on the line to thrash over some inconsequential details of the brochure. How big were the photos of herself, Tom, and Cal going to be? Would the paper be pearl colored, or light buff? By the way, how was Roy making out with future speakers? Jeff had the impression she wasn't able to extract information from Roy as easily as she could get it from him. Roy, I have a feeling, would have heard the bit about running late and told her to call him back when she had the time. Jeff was starting to miss working with Tom, and he never thought he'd miss working with him.

He was doing this because his employer had told him to go to the lunch meetings, and beyond that, his boss had told him to get involved. Like Roy, he also saw some inherent worth in a professional group. And with Sheila working on incorporation, he thought some further good might come from that. After all, with bylaws, there would have to be elections of officers to specific jobs, and they could do away with the unelected drones that now occupied the head table. So he continued to make the best of things and put up with Sheila’s phone calls.

Meanwhile, Tom had had some bad news. America First Bank was cutting back. Someone had looked at the org chart at the holding company, and they'd found Tom doing computer security, except that the holding company didn't have its own computers, and Tom was in charge of exactly nothing. Jeff had known this for a couple of years, but it took that long for someone at America First to figure it out. In any case, Tom had his job cut. Since he was at the holding company, he got a sweet severance package, plus a phony office address and phone number to make it look like he still worked there. You'd think this would give Tom a lot of time to work on the NACSA incorporation, but he was looking for a new job, and Sheila wanted the project under her thumb anyhow.

The attorney they hired to work on the incorporation was a friend of Sheila’s, which after all seemed logical. She no doubt was pestering him with phone calls the same way she did with Jeff. When she brought it up at one of the lunch meetings, everyone thought it was fine. They trusted the people at the head table, and in any case, since NACSA was up to then an unincorporated association, there were no rules. The rules would only come when the articles of incorporation were finalized.

So it was no surprise when Sheila announced at a lunch meeting that the legal work was finished; the articles of incorporation and the bylaws were ready for approval.

“So will there be elections for officers?” Roy asked.
                   “Well, no,” said Sheila. “The officers who will start the organization are part of the bylaws. When you vote to approve the bylaws, you also approve the first set of officers.”

Roy and Jeff in particular took a more careful look at the package of papers in front of them. It was true. In fact, Cal, Tom, and Sheila were written into the bylaws, not just as the first set of officers, but in effect as Head Table For Life. That was what you got when the attorney who drew the whole thing up was one of Sheila’s cronies. Roy was mad. He started to sputter about possible conflict of interest.

“We need a sergeant at arms,” was Sheila’s response. “It seems to me that Roy is out of order.” Nobody was likely to remove Roy from the meeting, considering the .38 in his briefcase, but Roy got the message. He got up and left on his own. Jeff thought the matter over and left as well. He wished the head table luck in finding anyone else to do the work.

Tom got a new job in short order, working at Deloitte. After all, he was Executive Vice President of NACSA, newly incorporated, and likely to be a big rainmaker. The others did equally well. They were good at interviewing, and the hiring bosses could look at them and see reflections of themselves.  In fact, not long ago, all three were inducted as the first members of the group’s Hall Of Fame. Roy and Jeff eventually left the field.

 

 

Copyright 2010 by John Bruce