I need to finish this book one day… I think this preview is still for free on Amazon.

Miami, Florida—1986

The morning’s air was hot and slimy-damp and thick. A hard, sticky wind blew in off the Atlantic. Down at the waterfront the warehouse was a scene of confusion, and that confusion was scattered and colored the scene in every direction.

Furious orange and red flames poured through exploding windows, mixing with thick and greasy, toxic smoke. Shards of glass flew in every direction at once, like a deadly web. The stench and plumes of thicker smoke engulfed some idling semi-trucks. Gasoline and diesel oil fires burned everywhere, commingled with random explosions from every corner. Helicopters filled the air, adding an intimidating noise to the chaos and a palpable thump felt in the chest, even from a sidewalk a half mile away.

From a safe distance, breathless reporters standing outside news vans screamed events as they unfolded and jammed microphones in the faces of bystanders and anyone who walked past them on the sidewalk, while camera crews filmed and recorded the cacophony.

The world watched on TV, transfixed.

If you took a step back from the chaos and carnage, it all looked almost staged.

On a corner, to the north side of the red brick building, stood an assembly of local cops, FBI, DEA and some federal agents in plainclothes. Out of a door, a flash of blue uniforms and a hurried band of handcuffed men ran out the door and into waiting vans. One of the men was the notorious New York mobster, Vinny Gentile.

It was always quite a spectacle when the US Government decided to seize the moral higher ground.

United States Federal Penitentiary Marion, Illinois—1996

The gray sky released a hundred-year flood that slammed into the ground with the ferocity of a machine gun. Big drops attacked the dirt in the yard, creating puddles everywhere, like tiny bombs dropped from the sky. The puddles converged to form small ponds as the yard faded from view.

Inside, behind a myriad of locked doors and electronic switches and alarms, the two-foot thick concrete walls are painted gray. The cement barrier is broken every twenty feet by a barred window that someone decided to cover in diamond shaped expanded metal grate. The bars and the grate are gray.

Wearing a gray jumpsuit, sits a gray-haired man in a gray folding chair. His hands cuffed to a gray metal table. A guard in a gray and black uniform cradles a rifle. A young federal agent wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a dark blue three-piece suit with a red tie sits across from the gray old man. Another man in a shiny maroon suit sits next to the handcuffed man. Apparently, an attorney.

The older man sits in silence, grinding his teeth, small beads of sweat appear on his forehead. The federal agent and the lawyer are talking in hushed tones, perhaps under the misconception the guard doesn’t hear and absorb every word. As they talk, they shove papers across the gray table at each other.

The fed finally stops pushing papers around and talking to the lawyer. He turns to the gray-haired man, Vinny.

The federal agent finally speaks, “Mr. Gentile, you have served ten years of a thirty-year sentence in a maximum-security facility. With a small amount of cooperation on your part, we can get this reduced to another year served in a minimum-security facility, back in New York State, for you. Closer to family and friends. Day passes, work release, family visits. A minimal amount of cooperation. No one will say you flipped or that you’re a turncoat. We want you to answer some questions honestly. Then you appear before a judge, show remorse for the crimes you’ve committed, and I’d say by spring 1998 you are a free man and back in New York City, still a young enough man to enjoy a good life. What do you think about that?”

Vinny speaks, actually grunts first. Looks around the room, looks hard at the guard, then the suit sitting next to him, then the federal agent.

“When I eat sausage, I never think about the dead pig.”

He half climbs out of his seat, still in handcuffs. “Fucking remorse? Fucking remorse, you realize that me and the people like me who were busted in that raid in Miami were all working for you fuckers. You know that you fucking know that!

“The reason I sit here alive today is I kept my word to my crew, my family, my troops. I never ratted, I ain’t about to rat. Fuck you!”

He sits back down, still in rage, not so much retreating as realizing handcuffed he has nowhere to go.

“Do either of you two assholes know why you never whistle in prison? They say it makes incarcerated men think of birds and flowers and life on the outside. You know what I miss, PUSSY! That’s all I fucking miss, pussy and a nice meal, my mom’s cooking, but she’s dead, so just pussy. I’m a lucky man. I had enough pussy in my thirty-five years on the outside, I got plenty of memories to keep me happy now. I fucking whistle whenever I want to. Fuck birds and fresh air.

Addressing the young, handsome federal agent, Vinny laughs. “You assholes think I’m afraid of retribution from my friends I do business with. Let me assure you, J. Edgar Hoover, I’ve never lost a minute of sleep worried about my guys and my connections from the old neighborhood. Nah, it’s you fucking feds I fear. You were probably in high school when I first went up. Mob, feds, FBI, CIA, Congressmen, state cops, judges, everyone, fucking everyone, was in on our game. There is more blood and dope and dirty money in and on the hands of your bosses than any of my crew ever dreamed of. Jesus, the dope, money and pussy. It was like paradise until some of you assholes got scared and blew everything the fuck up. You know the official story of the warehouse fire in Miami where I was taken into custody.”

Vinny stands again and points a finger as best he can, in the short cuffs. “YOU fuckers did that! No mob, no organized crime, no racketeers, you feds did that!”

“I’m not in prison here, locked up. I’m locked up to be safe from you assholes. That deal was cut,” and he looks down at his lawyer’s son, “by your fucking old man, when he still had a pair of balls, to keep me quiet and alive. Even in here, I expect a hit one day.

“The last time I saw any of my family I was sitting in my ma’s sister’s living room. My mom and dad was long since dead. Aunt June had these couches and chairs in that room all covered over with plastic. All the god-fucked ugly flower patterned furniture covered in clear, slippery plastic. You went in there on a hot day in the summer and your sweaty ass would slip right off. I remember being in that room, alone, knowing I was going and never coming back. I stared down at the carpeted floor, more god-fucked ugliness, and I noticed the tracks and dirt ground into her fancy rug. I thought of all of us, Ma, the old man before he bought it, my cousins. We could never sit in that fucking room; we was only allowed to pass through. I saw the damage the years had done in that ugly carpet, then I looked up and into a mirror and I saw the years in the creases of my face too. I was ground down and worn out from a young age.

“We all took the deal, all us boys, me, Eddie G, those of us that was in that warehouse that morning in ‘86, to keep you motherfuckers from our families. You cocksuckers are dirtier than any mob, and you fucking know it.

“We took the deal as it was offered. We took the heat so you feds could stay free and keep living your lives and driving your big cars and drinking the top shelf booze and fucking the top shelf whores, while we took the hit. We took it and you left our families alone. That was the deal. That was the only fucking deal.

“Now you want to break that deal, too.”

“But you know what? It’s fine. I’ve taken to reading and writing poetry. I’m studying ancient Chinese philosophy. This life leaves a lot to be desired, but I’m safe in here, for the time being, safe from you assholes. I’ve got a couple of friends who have all the information on this whole scam. Any moves against me or a few others in lockup and half the US government from the mid-1980s till now is front page news.

“So, please, go fuck yourselves.”

Then he looks to his left at his attorney. “What, did your old man retire? I can’t believe he had the fucking balls to set me up like this with his candy-ass son. You tell your old man to go fuck himself too.”

Vinny turns his gaze to the guard, who is fighting hard to hold in a grin. “What do you make as a prison guard in 1996, Officer Artie? What, twenty, twenty-five grand a year?”

Looking back at the fed he says, “What the fuck, you think this is some kind of bubble here in this room? You think Artie here is above a couple of hundred stuffed in his pocket to spill what was discussed here? Do you think I’m stupid? Do I look stupid? Yeah, I’ll be out in the spring of 1998 and dead on the street before summer. Me, Eddie G, a few others and some boxes of papers are all that hold this whole shit show in place. You should be showing some gratitude. Take us out of the equation and the whole carnival ride collapses.”

He stands, kicks his chair from under him. The seat flips over backward and slams into a wall.

“Artie, get me the fuck away from these pigs.”

Vinny Gentile never ratted, his legend in the mob and on the street secure for eternity. He was transferred in late 1996 to ADX Florence, in Colorado. The highest security prison in the United States federal prison system. In 2008 He was transferred to the step-down facility Florence-High. Vinny Gentile died in Florence-High in 2016. The official story was he died of a heart attack in the shower while masturbating. He never spoke to his lawyer or federal agents again.

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That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

I remember Rubin Solaro. He was the only guy who ever scared Hector Luis. Nothing scared Luis.

Rubin wanted to kick my ass, maybe, possibly kill me. Luis had a plan. He’d fought Rubin. Rubin hurt him badly. The plan was simple. Hector Luis would wrap my hand and put gloves on me and have me hit a tree for about half an hour a day. He said Rubin’s body was that hard, like hitting a tree. I would break my hand punching his gut. I had to get used to what it would feel like to hit him. We did this for a week.

The night of what was to be the fight came. Rubin’s girlfriend was with me in my car. We were parked outside the bar smoking weed. He saw us, and approached. I rolled down the window and started to run my mouth. He connected with one shot to my temple. It knocked me clean across the front seats.

I woke up bloody. The girl was gone.

Luis was there. He said, “Lobb, you never told me you was with his girl?”

I said, “You think maybe that’s why he was pissed?”

His eyes were on fire, “You deserve to bleed behind that stupid shit.”

I didn’t know until months later Luis answered Rubin’s attack on me with a maple baseball bat.

That war was over, for now, but wars were never really over. We just went to corners and caves and licked our wounds and talked shit until we were ready to go again.

We thought we’d live forever, Luis and me. Luis didn’t. He’s been gone a long time. I still talk to him. I wish he’d lived to see the violence fade and just be a tired old man trying to piece together the memories to the scars.

One of the boys from back in the day said there is an honor in being an old man covered in scars. I’ve yet to understand the honor.

Tonight, I lean on the sink looking out my window, the sun is setting after a violent mid-summer storm. The temperature has dropped twenty-five degrees. The world is rich and green and alive and wet. The sharp last rays of this July day cut through the clouds and make the maples look to be blazing in gold. The hot air seems kinder. Me and Luis we never saw a sunset like that. Maybe it would have been different if we had.

Luis was the street poet and the scholar. He always knew how to keep the blood inside. Blood was our currency and language. He called me blood and I called him blood, when the mother and father and the churches and the grandmas and the cops had all abandoned us, to the street, all we had left was blood.

The night with Rubin in the bar parking lot, as he took care of me with gauze and tape and a kindness most people would never believe possible he looked at me and said, “You cut bad, man. We gots to keep that shit on the inside.” And we rubbed our bloody arms together.

I can still see that scar through the tattoo on my left arm.

Boys who played with sticks and knives. Blood brothers…

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t was in that sweet spot of summer, in the three hours after dinner when the sun is settling down for the night and its hot rays are longer and shining on me from the western horizon. The heat of the day has dropped off a good ten degrees. I was in my tool shed, my happy place, in the best moment of a summer’s day, in my favorite time of the year, when my phone made that text message noise.

Usually, at this time of day that sound means something from Mark or Bobby or Carlos or Chris, that will make me laugh or think or start a discussion that eventually makes me learn something. More of them than not is about a car, and old car, and that will make me wax nostalgic. Most times I enjoy these moments looking back, sometimes I find myself annoyed at how I tend to forget the bad of days past and only remember the sweet spots. The pieces we carry with us on this long march.

This text was different, somebody died. My first thought is the herd is thinning. Then I ponder the palpable energy that was the force of childhood is slowly dissipating back to the universe. Perhaps to be used again in another form.

Childhood was a collage of black and white and red, when a little blood was let. Angst and dreams and aspirations and baseball and the looming disappointment of adulthood. Friendships formed and fell, and battles waged and lost. Sometime between that time and this time, we scattered to the games we chose and lost ourselves.

I heard Archie died from a cousin of his I’d never met before. The cousin, at least a generation younger than me and Archie, said he’d been gone awhile, and I was left to paint my own conclusions and fill in my own blanks. That day was the saddest I’d been for a good long time.

Part of me always imagined Archie and me would find each other again and ride off into the sunset, still boys telling dirty jokes and laughing and running away from whatever needed running from.

I guess it wasn’t fair to expect that, or at all how it was meant to be. I saw the world through a pie-eyed white boy reality, while Archie’s reality had a darker and harder and sharper edge.

He wasn’t my first friend, but he was part of the core of boyhood. A time all too brief in its passing blur. He was a staple and essential element of my story.

With Archie I’d sit in the principal’s office, a united front while some man in a tie decided we were bad and what punishment fit our crime. It didn’t sit too well with either of us. Some man with no sense of humor could somehow claim dominion over us.

The day the cousin told me Archie had been gone a while, it felt like someone had taken a blade and cut out a big chunk of me. The reality of life as a young black man in an unforgiving, dirty city proved harder and uglier than the reality of life for a young white boy like me.

Then today, I read the text about a girl from long away and of that same place and time, who has just died. Just a nice and kind little girl who brought her lunch in a metal box with dolls painted on its sides and a matching thermos. And some days when we didn’t have any lunch, the girl would share hers with Archie and me. And when I heard she was dead, the same sadness I felt for Archie came back to haunt me once again.

We’re old now and our best days are lost to the wind behind us, but part of me stayed in that school on the hill where we heard the President had been shot and we watched John Glenn go into space, and some days I wonder if I could go back to that place and time, and if it’s still there, would I find them again.

That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

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This man came back here, after a life spent in service to some boss’s dream; here to this swamp to sit and ponder and reconcile it all. It was a moment of self-awareness, but no catharsis. Simply a moment when he stopped working and counting the minutes till quitting time and listening to someone yell at him to move faster, to pull the lever harder and lift the bale higher. In the silence he listened to the haunting voices in his head that had been trying to talk to him since those early days when he left this place.

Sitting there on the damp muck and stones he touched on his personal nostalgia of this place. This place he’d run from for so many years, but the place that was always his home. The one place he needed to find again, his grounding place, the place he knew he’d return to, if for no other reason than to be buried here. Buried in a hole six feet deep up in Evergreen Cemetery, as good a place as any to be dead, he supposed. Buried by other working men, who’d later put away the shovels and park the backhoe and dust the cemetery dirt from the muddy jeans and shoes and go home.

His life, now gone was an abstract that terrified him and confused him. He was far better as a visitor to someone else’s life than to be any integral part of his own. A lone observer, never an active participant.

He left this place a young man to find his job and his place and a big hard dick for the work. This man who finds himself back here now bears no resemblance to that boy at all. Just a broke down defeated man empty as a barren field, sad and tired and fearful he’s spent his life’s energy chasing a rabbit that was never meant to be caught.

He fully understood and accepted the toxicity of nostalgia, but he found himself allowing his thoughts to wallow in it for a moment all the same.

The man by the log closed his eyes and deeply inhaled his smoke as it burned down to the butt and thought about that sound a family makes sitting down to a table and eating. Forks and plates clanking and laughter and arguments and his old man cussing out his own boss and calling out for more beans or potatoes. He missed his home. He realized everyone he recalls with a smile is now dead and how much he missed in his time away. He should walk himself up to the burial ground and see if he can hear those sounds of home from there. He and his sister laughing as their Ma yelled it was time to eat or his father tired and cursing at the end of another working day.

The work that consumed his father and drove him and defined him, he realizes now has robbed him too and left him broken like a trampled twig.

His father, always a good soldier, always working for another man’s dream, another man’s riches. He sees now he followed in his father’s footsteps.

What a crummy deal it was to have sold the hours of his life for dollars and dimes. What a crummy deal to realize he let the work define him. He was always a carpenter or a truck driver or a farmer or a mechanic. He worked with a fire in his gut to be whatever it was that these jobs demanded he be. But when he was no longer any of these things that defined him, he was an empty vacuous shell. Kind of all hollowed out like a like log that had been burned and gutted from the inside.

Thinking back to those noisy dinner times he realizes now that somewhere between his leaving the house of his father and now, he’d completely lost all that he once was.

Crushing the smoldering butt in the damp sand he stands and walks up the hill to the burial ground to once again find those he missed. Maybe somewhere in those old mossy and lichen ruined stones he could find a hint of those who knew him and what he once was and he could for a moment lose this man he’d become.

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I like to sit out on these late summer nights, when the moon is just up and the sun ain’t quite done setting and relive the day, when it’s a day like today has been, a good and fine day.

I wallow in the new night’s song of tree frogs and katydid’s and crickets, soaking in every disjointed sound, knowing full well it’s the last third of August now, and far too soon the world will grow cold and silent again and days like today will have to be forsaken for another long winter.

I took my old ‘51 Ford on a sixty-mile trip today through some of the prettiest roads I’ve ever known, each one now lost in deep summer green weeds and trees and wildflowers, across some creeks and streams, down past Schunnemunk and StormKing mountains. Down on the hilly old southern Orange County roads. I always loved those mountain names. Schunnemunk is Leni Lenape for “Excellent Fireplace” and StormKing just sounds like a badass name for a mountain.

I get a real sense, a spooky Deja-vu feel when I take these rides. This car, my 1951 Ford Custom convertible, I know is my dad’s car, but the paper records from more than a half century ago proving or disproving that fact are long lost to moldy dust.

I go for these rides by myself, but never alone; down through some of the roads my father haunted as a boy.

We talk, my dad and me when I drive that old 8BA flathead on days like this when it couldn’t be humming or purring any better. It’s running like that because I know how to fix things I’ve no business knowing or any way of knowing how to fix, it just seems to happen. Sometimes I’ll be leaning over the fender messing with the carburetor or the distributor and I’ll get hit with a very real, somewhat chilling sense and I can see five- or six-year-old me, sitting in that same fender well, probably fucking with something I was told not to touch.

It was an odd but not at all disconcerting feeling the first time I sat behind the big steering wheel of this car now, or again, so many decades after the last time and knew I’d been here before. Not in a similar car: this car. An inexplicable and completely non-scientific totally irrational knowing, that is stronger and more defining and reassuring than any paper record could verify; if they in fact still did exist in some far off and forgotten file cabinet up in Albany.

These spooky moments have happened more times than I can count in the past two years, since me and that old Ford again found each other.

I drive on through Washingtonville and past the house where my dad’s family lived, with his father and mother and brothers and sisters. My uncle Rick’s cinder block garage still stands next to a modern house. Their family home, parts of it dated back to the late 1700s, bulldozed down in the late 1980s. We drive down the road a bit and on through Craigville, which isn’t much more than an intersection in these old winding two lane roads. Past my great-grandma’s house. Then we drive on to the cemetery where he’s been buried so many decades I’ve sometimes lost count. Many of my family are buried here too dating back into the Eighteenth Century. There’s a place there for me too. It’s odd, I suppose that I’ve known since I was a young boy where my final rest would be. I never thought about it much, but it’s oddly comforting to know one day I’ll return to the same good Orange County dirt like my ancestors.

The ride changes there, I feel like his spirit leaves me and the old Ford and walks back to his grave. I sit there for a moment with the engine idling, but not too long, those damn flatheads tend to overheat when they’re not moving. I notice this summer’s days are waning as I suppose are my own.

The ride home is solitary but not sad. I know he’ll show up again on some random Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever day in the summertime and tell me to put the top down and screw all that working, there always will be time to find for work. Suddenly out of nowhere something will say, “let’s go for a ride down around home again..”

Who am I to argue?

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That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

Because I’m a known marketing genius I chose—years ago—to pick the two worst possible days of the week to post for reader engagement!

As always, thank you for sticking with me!

Please look for us on the new day and times!

Bill

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A summer evening, one of those hot and sticky August nights that really was still pretty much mid-summer, but by this time of the season people are getting tired of being sweaty and start rushing to the arrival of the fall time. I sat with Harry on folding lawn chairs out back of his house by the swamp. All my life I’ve known him, all my life he’s been a bit of an enigma to me.

I sat for a good long time and stared at his hands while he talked about the old days and the old times. Only when he reached for the beer can sweating on a well-worn nearby table, the maple wood veneer peeling away, did they move from his lap. Those hands betrayed a calm I knew to be an illusion and a lie. These were not the hands of a peaceful man, these hands had landed more than a few well-placed punches, these hands have held a knife and a pistol as well as big long pipe wrenches and hammers. He told me one time, before this time now—when he’s an old and tired man, “A man needs to do what needs to be done. That’s it. Just do what needs to be done. Don’t question, don’t look back. Ain’t nothing or noble in this enterprise, it’s just doing what needs doing and keeping your mouth shut when it’s all done.”

I suppose I took that as some kind of advice from him and made it my credo. As if the need or the demands of the situation in the moment justified whatever work or violence was required to rectify the situation.

He talked a lot about girls and old cars. Each stage of his life seemed to be framed by a particular girl and a certain car. He said all the girls were special and perfect and pretty, but only for a time, never for a lifetime, never to settle with for very long. Just for a time.

They were factory girls and girls who worked in bars. Girls who could break a sweat and guzzle a shot and a beer and take a swing at you as well as any man ever could. He mentioned the colors of their summer dresses and blouses in a way to imply the colors were forever bound to the particular girl and her memory, as if the color of those dresses and the slivers of his recollections had become a part of their souls, then frozen in time, forever from now on inseparable. These weren’t just words that Harry spoke drinking beers now on a hot August night on a folding lawn chair, they were spoken photographs shared with me. Each retelling of his tales made the photos just a bit richer and deeper.

The cars seem to have souls too, and stories that were sacred and only retold to a select few. Big block Chevy’s and small block Fords and big Mopar Hemis. Each car and its details was delivered to me, much like the girls and the color of their summer dresses as something sacred and ancient to never be seen again.

All of those young girls and the cars of the time are gone now, even though some of the girls who have grown old may still be alive, and the cars, what’s left of them rotting in some junk pile somewhere, both a reverent memory.

He said he did a lot of work as a young man in the rail yards and always referred to himself as a railroad man, even long years after he’d stopped working, and decades after his last day on the trains. Railroad men were hard men, at least to me in his telling and it seemed to me the steel rails and the diesel and the dirt and grime and the noise of that life, like the loud clank as two cars became coupled together—and one day almost took his arm off—was forever part of him. Harry was a man who feared many things. Perhaps his biggest fear was the echo that haunted him of all the lives he led before arriving at this place and time. The emptiness of it all. Harry wore his fear for the world to see.

“Sometimes with the girls I used to like to pay for it…” he blurted seemingly out of nowhere. “It just seems easier and more efficient to me. Everyone knows what was expected and what to expect. Then when you’re done you can get back to drinking and making more money so you could pay for it next time you needed it.”

He’d look past me occasionally when he talked and said it was always about the work, whatever the work happened to be. The good and hard and honest day’s work or the dark and hidden and silent crimes he committed, it all blended into who he was, and it was always about work, that like the girls and the cars defined his times.

“I suppose it would have been nice, for a time or two to feel that stuff all them songs was about. Falling in and out of love and all that. I just never saw the point or necessity of it.”

Harry said he preferred to call himself a railroad man because it seemed to paint an image of an honest and hard working guy, but many to most of the times the ride and rush was higher and more fun when he was not such an honest man. Stealing someone else’s shit and selling stuff that wasn’t supposed to be sold was always much more exciting and satisfying than a cold beer at the end of a hard day on the trains.

Breaking open another Genesee Cream Aleand taking a long drag he said, “I suppose I just got tired of looking over my shoulder all the time and trying to remember who I was to any five different people who thought they knew me. I got so tired of trying to recollect my stories to everyone; each a lie to cover another lie, that was covering up yet another lie, I just stopped one day and decided I’d just be a railroad man. A lawyer once told me the best I could ever escape this life of mine with was plausible deniability, and I liked the sound of that. I liked them fancy words and it’s really all I ever could have wanted or expected.”

“I suppose on this spot in my life about all I’m going to come to realize is we’re almost out of beer and for all the effort and anxiety and anger and pain and simple bad things I’ve done, I ain’t sittin’ at the tail end of this life a whole lot changed from who I was when I walked into this life.

“I got to tell you it, boy it gets pretty lonely out here, what with it all laid open and bare, to hear those haunted echos of who I was and what I’d done and what I’d become and knowing full well there weren’t a good goddamn thing to do to change it. To be forgotten was always what I really wanted. To be forgotten and left alone. Now, sittin’ here tonight I realize you’re my only friend, and you only know what I’ve decided to tell you… and to the world I’ve managed to do exactly that, and I suppose over all that’s a good thing.

Tonight, for perhaps the first time, I understand Harry

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I remember most how she’d lick the spoon after she stirred my coffee, then put it back in the cup, and oddly smile. The effervescent joy she’d find in the strangest of things, an egg or a cup of sugar to sweeten her bitter fruits, dandelion greens and cranberries. Her gifts from God, I took for granted and saw as not very important at all…

She had an old photo on her writing table of a monument in Sea Bright, New Jersey. The statue was dedicated to all the brave mariners who were lost to the sea, and she told me that’s what happened to her daddy, and the little seaside park was for him and other lost and shipwrecked sailors.

I knew she was lying; I knew that, but maybe it wasn’t so much a lie as it was just a way of her owning the sadness her daddy gave her. I heard he was a mean and abusive drunk, and he didn’t die at sea, but he was beaten to death, out back of a bar, not a mile from her home. And he was such a mean and abusive drunk that the county sheriff called it an accident. The one who delivered the beating was his son and her brother.

World War One darkened her horizon, the inconceivable madness of a world at war, but it was still someone else’s war, a far-off war, in a foreign land she’d only seen in fancy postcards. News in 1916 was largely word of mouth and newspapers; radios the toys of wealthy.

She drove a farm truck and worked the fields and orchards around the home where she was born and would eventually die. A 1916 Ford truck; it was a point of pride to her that such a fine and new piece of equipment would be entrusted to a girl. She could work the Model-T pedal shifters as well as any man, better than most. But to the men she knew, girls were more suited to washing the farm hand’s clothes and making babies and supper and fucking in dark places. The fucking never spoken of once it stopped. Her brother was her armor, her shield against the ugly world of the father.

She rode the train with her brother to the docks at Hoboken. Waving from the shoreline and crying, her slippery ‘go to town shoes,’ becoming soaked in a cold, torrential rain. The young girl, not quite twenty, watched her protector sail away that day, never to return.

One late summer day, as she was loading baskets of sweet and tart Macintosh apples onto her truck-bed and smiled at the crisp air and blue sky and oranges and reds coming to life in the trees surrounding her, a man, an older man approached her. He carried a letter that said her brother was dead, a hero. He was a hero to her long before he went off to some world war in a place called France.

She knew the man with the letter. He was a friend of her dead father. This man and her daddy used to get drunk together and some nights he’d stumble drunk into her bed, but he never raped her, and to her that was a point of honor.

Soon they married and she left the orchard and her apples and her truck. A part of her died when she left that place to become a mother. The children came as did the Great Depression, and it hardened her heart more than her father’s rape or her brother’s death.

Her protector gone and alone with the stranger that would be her husband she stopped living and turned ugly in the heart and inward.

The depression years reminded her of the brutality and injustice she knew as a girl. She lost two boys to the time, 1929 and ‘31 and from the cold of the babies’ first winter, and no money to heat her home, and fever and hunger. When the second boy died, she realized her daddy’s rape stole her childhood and her memories and dreams, but the fever that took her boys killed her.

Unable to face her truth, she fabricated a better story and found that story telling suited her and allowed her to create a place where living hurt just a little less, and she was able to walk in the dark again, without fear of attack.

One day she looked in the mirror and she had no idea where the pretty young girl had gone. She realized, but never admitted to herself in that moment, in the mirror, she’d lost her mind, and it was never coming back. Everyone and everything she’d ever been was now and forever lost to the wind.

The story around the farm and the little town is that she poisoned the man she married, and then a few more, but that’s all it was, just a story. Sometimes the world doesn’t mold you like clay, it breaks you like a China cup. The cuts and rapes and beatings the world pushed in her way made her who exactly she claimed to be. Her broken pieces swept under the rug, hopelessly scattered, ignored, and forgotten.

A swindler and an opportunist, a forgotten song, a life spent in the cracks between truth and lies, her affections weaponized and contrived. Each of us afforded our own individual piece of the shattered chalice, each confused by her love.

I wonder these days if her daddy knew the weight of the damage he caused in that darkened room.

Spiraling and rudderless, she sailed into the remaining decades of her life, dead long before she knew it was time to take her last breath.

That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

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Then there was that one summer when we killed that fat ol’ pig. We called him Sam and he was a friendly enough pig; I mean as far as pigs go, he was friendly.

We killed him and ate good that year. And my daddy said that felt odd, for us and odd for me, for sure, what with us being dirt-floor poor. That’s what my mom told me we were anytime I asked for something, anyway.

I got to confide that there was moments when I missed ol’ Sam and it felt wrong to eat him, but my daddy said to shut the fuck up and be grateful so that’s what I did.

I suppose it’s fair enough to say I’ve been fairly perplexed by life and the things we do to survive this life since ol’ Sam. But I don’t ask no questions.

I don’t think I’ve been able to eat ham or bacon right since then, I keep seeing old Sam’s face. He had a kind of smile some of the time. He didn’t have a smile that day we killed him though, so for the most part I choose to not eat ham or anything else from a pig and I try not to think of ol’ Sam too often. Sometimes in the dead of night, I wake up in a sweat from dreamin’ of that day and Sam. But, in general I don’t tell nobody anything about them dreams or much of anything else.

See, I grew up around tough men, hard men, and one or two went to prison for shit I choose not to discuss or ever ask too many questions or details. Men, who’d just as soon pop you one across your lip for just standing there doing nothing as doing shit what that might have deserved a good slap. Men who didn’t have no time or patience for boys who wanted to spend their time crying over some goddamn dead pig. So, I learned to keep myself in the shadows and be quiet.

I suppose I’ve carried that not asking questions stuff a bit too far these days, what with the way things seem to be progressing.

I’ve spent my life in the ditch with my head down doing what I was told because that’s what I thought they wanted me to do. I never dreamed big, I dreamed small. And I kept even my small dreams to myself and never told nobody I had dreams at all, and never about poor ol’ Sam fer fear someone would call me simple.

And you know, there was time, yes sir, when I’d see a big ol’ fancy car or a real pretty woman who smelled sweet like flowers or something and I’d think maybe I deserved me a fine car or the company of a woman like that, but I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody I just kept it all inside and kept my head down, fearin’, I supposed, another slap across my lip. I did my job, I worked in my ditch. I did what I was told to do, and I did it the best I could manage to do it.

So, I did like they told me and I stayed in line and I didn’t ask no questions, and I didn’t start no trouble, and I called men in ties and the fancy cars, “sir” and I stayed in my ditch. I learned my place, I learned it fucking good and I was ok with that because I know’d deep inside me, I know’d that they was smarter and better than me, they was the leaders and if I did my part and I worked hard they’d take care of me and we’d all be fine.

That’s what I believed in my gut. And I kept on believin’ it, even when it looked to me like shit was startin’ to go haywire and fall apart in some ways, and it wasn’t big ways, it was small ways at first, like I had a toothache and I called the dentist and ask how much to fix it and I didn’t have that kind of cash so I asked how much to just pull it and I couldn’t really afford that either. Then the time I wanted to buy new work boots and saw the price and decided the ones I have will have to last another summer. Or when the road in front of my house had a rut along the side that was deep and wide enough to wreck a car if someone drove into it so I asked a guy who worked for the town why don’t they fix and he laughed and said the town ain’t got the money.

I started to scream what did they do with all that money I paid them with my taxes and stuff and the town guy just shrugged and walked away.

Now, religion seems more like choosing up sides than any kindness I learned at my grandma’s knee. I’m startin’ to see this shit going the way it ain’t supposed to be goin’ and I’m getting pretty goddamn mad. I think about all the years I worked in that damn ditch, head down not askin’ questions. I should a told my daddy it made me sad we killed ol’ Sam, no matter if he fed us or not and maybe I should have lifted up my head a few times to take a look around and see for myself what was goin’ on.

Maybe I should have worked some more for me, and not for some promise I now don’t see comin’.

I’m starting to think I’ve been lied to about it all, and I ain’t got shit to show for it and I’m down here in my ditch where best I can figure they wanted me all along.

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The other day, for no particular reason, I went driving through the Black Dirt fields again, the man on the radio said it was ninety-five degrees.

Maybe there was a reason. Maybe it’s something I need to do at least once every couple of summers to simply appreciate the time that has passed between boyhood and old manhood.

The temperature coming off that dried muck had to be near one hundred-twenty-five degrees. I’ve never before or since felt heat like that peculiar heat coming off those goddamned onion fields.

In Orange County, in the 1970’s, to have worked out in the Black Dirt is a rite, a passage, it is something you did so that forty or fifty years later you could tell your stories with authenticity, and daily appreciate you no longer toil and sweat in those ungodly long rows.

Out in that dirt, come late summer, I was a dumper, a particularly good dumper, I was told. The honor and glory of being a good onion dumper was somehow lost on me - then and now.

Standing on an 8-foot-high shaky stack of broken pallets dumping eighty-five-pound crates of onions into a hopper—all day long—for a buck and a quarter an hour. Or, bent over in that roiling sun pulling weeds from the onions in rows that seemed ten miles long. When you finally finished a row, you turned around and started the next endless row.

The days spent dreaming of fame and glory and taking all my onion money to buy me a nice Corvette, while some less sweaty boss-man yelled at us to work harder in a fractured mix of Polish and Spanish.

One important thing I learned out there in that dirt was that the worst day at just about any other job, anywhere, was better than the best day you could possibly have in those hot fields.

I worked next to the migrants. We sweated and swore together. We drank from the same dirty canteen of water.

Taking that canteen from an outstretched, wet hand, and looking back at a smile missing a couple of teeth. My replies always in broken Spanish, always wondering if I said the wrong thing or the right thing; was I even close to saying the right thing?

Beautiful young girls, with long dark hair, in cotton print dresses who seemed to pull weeds with an effortless elegance, never dirty or sweaty, and old men, faces caked in black mud, inelegant and tired.

Out there in that burning dust everyone’s back was wet. I learned everything I know about equality and equity and my place in the grand scheme of the universe in those fields. I’m no better or worse than the guy in the next row pulling his own weeds.

I got to go home at the end of the day and take a long shower and watch the black dirt form thick rings of muck on the walls of the bathtub. I got to wash off the day and become a white boy again with a nice house and a TV that worked most of the time.

The migrants went back to trailers parked out on the edge of the fields. Blue and white trailers, brown and yellow, with missing windows covered with cardboard and duct tape. Other windows filled with some rich man’s discarded air conditioners, and towels and sheets and more duct tape keeping the hot air outside, while the broken machines blew some semblance of cooler, never cold air inside. The outside air was never more than just a breeze of hot wind.

I walked up and into those trailers many times, went inside and smoked and drank beer in the tiny living rooms, sitting on some jettisoned old lawn furniture some boss up the road had placed out along the highway as junk. Laughing at the wealthy guy who’d discard such good stuff. We’d smoke and drink and eat spicy Spanish food and tell jokes that I never fully understood and then I’d leave. I was always with them, but I was never one of them. We all knew somehow, I’d never end up the old man with the missing teeth, and the muck-stained face telling dirty jokes out among the tall green onion tops. I was a welcome visitor, maybe an enigma… why would the white boy come to these fields? No one ever asked me, but I knew the question was asked, and probably often.

As with everything else in my life, every experience, every trip into any one of a thousand other lives, I was simply a visitor to these fields, a witness to that somber and real existence.

I suppose that’s why I never looked down on those guys, because they were me and I was them and it sucked to be us on those hot days.

But I got to leave, I was simply a reporter.

Some days, like the other day, a part of me strangely misses some or all that, and there is no logical reason why. Maybe it’s simply that I miss being young and able to toss around eighty-five-pound onion crates like they were fluffy pillows, but I sense it was more. I miss the honesty of hard and good work and the sweat of the people and the profanity of genuine camaraderie.

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That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

The way I think and act and behave challenges me and makes me wish at times I was a different person than who I am and who I’ve become. Sometimes I wonder if my twenty some odd year moving suicide attempt with chemicals and booze was a result of exactly this.

I never did fit in too good with the fancier and finer folks. I’ve always had a hard time making myself presentable. I was always a little envious of the guys who looked all put together and fresh and some of the guys and the way they always kept their sneakers so clean, even the laces. Even in a t-shirt and jeans they looked clean and sharp. I could never keep nothing white and clean for very long. And no matter how hard I tried I was never much for managing any of that. Ma once said I could figure out how to get dirty in a blizzard. She was right, I’m sure I did on more than one occasion.

It seems to me that clothes that fit and looked good was always something for somebody else, like in a way maybe nice and clean clothes just didn’t fit me somehow. I suppose I made a lot of fun of guys in suits and ties and shined shoes but the truth be known a part of me was probably envious and rather than admit the envy I just poked jokes at them.

One day I’d like to find me a suit, a fancy one, one of the suits that cost as much as a man could make in a week and try it on, but I know for whatever reason it wouldn’t fit and the cuffs of the pants would be too short or long and the crotch would bunch up make it feel like it was trying to cut my balls off. Maybe that’s all just part of the show. Maybe I just never figured out how to be a guy who could wear a suit like that or the clean shoes with the shine.

It ain’t no lie when I say that every piece of clothing I own has at least one grease stain on it somewhere and somehow even though I bitch about it, again, truth is I think I find the grease because I don’t know how to be clean and presentable. I find my comfort in the dust and grease and grime. I always found my peace in a barn, never a classroom or office.

It’s that way with my circle of friends, too, I suppose. Most of the friends I’ve known are a gift to me. They must be a gift because I don’t know anyone in his right mind that would just befriend me, not me and all my bullshit. They are all a bit like cousins, I suppose. I always had cousins as my friends first because I always saw them as somehow obliged to be my friend and all the friends I had who wasn’t cousins I count as cousins, because only cousins would somehow look past my square peg attitude in this round hole of a world.

It ain’t like I enjoy being this way, of any of it. I don’t, in fact just the other day I was looking at a pair of sneakers and thinking how sharp I’d look in a clean white pair, but I know I’d fuck them up. But my ratty greasy shoe laces on my sneakers do piss me off and I just want one day to walk around for an hour or two and not look like I just crawled out from underneath something dirty or that was dripping oil.

I secretly want to be the guy in the clean sneakers with the white laces. I want to be the guy in the four-thousand-dollar suit.

And I’m envious of all those guys who got clean and sober and swore off the booze and dope and found Jesus or Allah or Buddha or whoever they found. I couldn’t ever find that either, and it’s much to me the same noise to me as the white sneakers or the fancy suit. Like my clean and sober never was clean, it was always some kind of dirty. Some kind of tainted, like I never really learned all that much about making amends and being kind and forgiving or asking for forgiveness. I’d rather just say fuck it and move on to the next thing, that’s why I can never call myself sober, just less fucked up than I used to be.

I secretly want to be the guy who has it all figured out. Some people think I’m smart, but I’m not smart, I just figured out how to do some things, but never the socially important things.

I’ve never had a car without at least one thing wrong with it at any given time. When everything is working and functioning as it should I suffer a great uneasiness. I have three cars now, the oldest is seventy-six years old, the newest is twenty. To me they are rolling science experiments.

A couple of weeks ago I was driving through Patterson, NJ with a guy, a client I’ve known for thirty years. A friend, but not a cousin friend. I told him my Toyota FJ was having a weird steering problem I couldn’t figure it out. The steering gets tight when it’s hot outside, and I think it’s the power steering pump, but I think the hot weather would make it steer easier not harder.

He kind of freaked out and asked me if it was safe. I told him I just drove it down the NYS Thruway at eighty miles an hour, I think it’s safe. He didn’t say a lot the rest of the ride and got someone to pick him up for a ride back to his other office.

My friends have nice hot cars coupes and sedans, and everything works on them. Some guys cars are so nice I feel like I need a shower before I can sit in one. I like their cars. I like them a lot, but I doubt I’d ever figure out how to make such a car work for me.

And I always figure out how to fix stuff, but my way always feels a bit off and I wish I didn’t feel that way. Like it works ok, what I fixed, but it could be better if I was smarter.

But I guess that’s really the thing when you boil it down; I ain’t a lot different than I was as a boy. When the other kids would build a snowman and it was all round balls and proportional with coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose, mine was just kind of a fucking mess. And I know it was only a snowman, but I think even then I knew coloring inside the lines and nice round balls of snow and white sneakers—that guys actually walk around in and don’t fuck them all up—and suits that fit and ties around the neck would just never worked for me. I always wore a cowboy hat, even when we played baseball, while the other boys wore baseball caps. I don’t know, to me it just made sense. Because nothing that fits in the box ever made sense to me.

I kind of want to believe that aliens are real and that I lived some important past life and like the Hindu’s believe I’m here trying to understand things. I know a girl who burns sage all the time to ward off evil. I want to believe that works too, but in my mind I know it’s just a weed.

When I used to play guitar I really only knew three chords and I was pretty bad at playing them. Some guys tried to play with me, but they gave up. Sometimes they’d turn my amp so I’d not embarrass myself, I appreciated that and I understood, but I wish I’d bothered to learn more then three chords.

And I behave in these ways not because I think I’m better than any one. It’s quiet and exactly the opposite. I know I’m just a junkman trying to figure stuff out and that’s all I’ll ever be or aspire to be.

Maybe this is part of the brutal self-assessment they told me to take make in the NA/AA meetings a lifetime ago, but I doubt that. I’ve always been painfully and fully aware of exactly who I am.

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I guess it was maybe ‘78 or ‘79, I knew a woman a handful of years older than me with a child’s smile and laughter that lived deep in her soul. Her name was Virginia. She spoke with a heavy twang and had a reputation as one of the best coon dog handlers and raccoon hunters in any of those parts. Those parts being an isolated section of New York State, deep in the thick pines and mossy brooks of the Adirondacks.

She’d migrated here with her husband and kids from West Virginia, but she said she was named after her grandma, not any state, and she was born in Louisiana, not a city girl from New Orleans, she was oddly and fiercely proud of that. She was a girl from the swamps and bayous.

I asked once why she hunted raccoons or what she did with them when her dogs treed one. She told me it was about the hunt, never the kill, and she lived her life modeled around that same philosophy. She was forever looking for a debate; philosophical hunts were her bent and fascination. A fiercely bright woman, she’d argue with me or anyone until we, like the racoons, were trapped, with nowhere else to hide, we surrendered. Satisfied her hunt was a success we’d retire to her front porch. I learned a lot seeing the world through this country girl’s eyes.

She wore her long brown hair in braids that ran past her shoulders and cradled her breasts. She was pretty in a Willie Nelson kind of way. Work boots and jeans and flannel shirts, some with the elbows work-worn through, even on the hottest summer day. Her husband left her and the kids for a woman who was prettier in tune with more common American tastes, I suppose. Virginia was never stroke book pretty, she had no desire or need to be, but she was pretty enough in her own way.

An independent feminist, vehemently anti-racist, and smart as anyone I’ve ever met, yet she could kill, clean and cook a wild turkey and lay out a dinner spread on Sunday that would put any 1950s TV mom to shame. She’d even place a skinny vase filled with wildflowers from her meadow to set perfect the scene.

Her son left the mountain when he was seventeen and that broke a part of her heart. He ended up working for the government in Washington DC, and she told me once in a phone call, long after the last time we’d been together she thought she raised him to be better than that.

Her daughter, also named Virginia, but everyone called the girl Ginger, was as smart as her mom, she had a couple of PhDs of her own. The two of them were intimidating for someone like me, who barely survived high school. When I met them both, I actually had to look up what PhD meant.

Ginger was pretty but not in any Willy Nelson kind of way. Her mom made it abundantly clear to me, or any coon hunter who straggled to her house coming down off the mountain she’d cut off the dick of any of us who even looked sideways at young Ginger. I took her at her word, as I’d never known her to lie. I half believed and half didn’t want to believe that in some corner of her old ratty woodshed there might be evidence that this wasn’t just an idle threat. I never ventured inside to find out.

Virginia smoked a corncob pipe almost all the time and grew her own weed and other vegetables and herbs in a small plot on the big pine and mountain facing side of her homestead. She spoke a lot about God as nature, and I believe she stood in awe and humility before all of life that surrounded her.

Sometimes in the summer on a sweltering and buggy evening and sometimes in the cool autumn air and sometimes in the frozen dead of winter I’d sit on that front porch of her cabin, and we’d smoke weed and look at and listen to the night. The winter nights were dead silent, but for the wind or the muffled crackle of the fire in the pit just off the front steps.

Summer nights were the best when spent on that porch. Virginia would play the banjo and sing Gershwin’s “Summertime,” in a shaky drawl that made me believe she truly missed catfish jumpin’ and fields of high cotton. As she sang the Treeing Walker coon hounds would sing in a mournful disjointed harmony. It was always this time of year, when August was queued up and on the horizon and in her words, “July was fixin’ to leave her again.” And the days, while no cooler were growing slightly shorter and she told me her August never made her sad, but September did and she died a little in the winter and she hoped I’d stop by the next time I passed through, winter or summer. Like me, she desperately needed her summertime, and each year dreaded its passing.

As the late sun set, and the porch was enveloped in the fast-coming night, Virginia sat in silhouette picking her banjo, she was prettier than Willy Nelson on his best and prettiest day.

Every year, about this time, when July is fixin’ to leave me too I think of her and that shack. She must be very old by now, or dead. I heard her estranged husband died a few years back. I kept in touch with Ginger for a time, until that became a pointless burden for both of us.

I think often of the characters that have painted my life. Many to most have left me now. Sometimes I wonder if they were real or just remnants of some past time’s hallucinations. I remember the most fondly those who taught me and challenged me, or even fought me. Virginia was a little of all that, and as real as any, I suppose.

That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

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Late at night when the day’s beard has grown out white and my face is covered in snowy stubble, I can look back and see the unkind years as they’ve piled on.

I’ve got to stop going to the gym and wrapping my hands and strapping on the gloves. This is no place for me. I’m not even slow anymore. A decade ago, I was slow, now I’m pathetic. The young bucks are still polite, but now they are afraid of me, not because I’m fierce, but because I’m fragile. The respect for the OG is now pity. A solitary soldier in a private and undeclared war, I lay down my sword.

I walked out of the smell of sweat and deep gut-punch dull thuds of the young boys and into the moist and hot summer air.

Looking down, my senses are slapped by the fresh cut grass, that sweet summer smell, and how it stood firm and undaunted against the blades, the tops trimmed off, but still strong. It took me back to the farm, and I felt the weight of those years too. Be it hay cut into heavy damp bales or the lawn grass of a city lot, I’ve always connected to the wild and persistent weeds. Grasses and weeds are the few constants, the few things that never change or fade and fail with age.

In moments of reflection, through too many decades of fog and chemical castration, I wonder if anything I remember was real or just another hallucination.

This hot July sun is real. I know this to be fact and true, and I sit down in the sad and short city grass and feel the day and lament those summer afternoons like this I let pass without notice.

Here, now I suffer the anxiety of every one of those days when I never took the time for a lazy moment, laying down in the weeds.

Back at home, and far from the ugly reality of the gym, I like to sit on the now cool grass with the grandboy on those nights when it’s too hot to be inside and the sky too full of wonder. I try, and fail, to explain to him space and time and in that moment, I realize his nine-year-old eyes are looking ahead at the wave racing toward him. I see the same wave rushing away, leaving me in its wake and flotsam.

In a silent moment as he wonders at the stars my thoughts turn inward and back to the gym. I feel the hot and fast July days slipping away. I feel it more every year as my precious summer starts to age and show signs of gray and turn toward September. And think back to the kind and fast boys. I ponder how many more of these summers will I be allowed.

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I well remember that snowstorm, it was December ‘94. I was working at a job cousin Bobby got for me, largely a charity project. My past skills didn’t translate well into the world of that time, the visible above ground world. That world where the safe and sane go about the daily business of hating the boss and dreaming of retiring to some far-off place, and what’s for dinner tonight and maybe baseball. Baseball seems a thread that on a very simple and basic level ties us to each other. When there is nothing else in common, nothing else to talk about, there’s always baseball.

Paying bills and the struggle to make just enough to keep the wolf from the door usurp fantasies of fancy cars and predatory dreams of banging that new secretary. But in the quiet moments, where we don’t allow reality to intrude, we will always find a place for the fantasies of the safe and sane.

For me, this new world, without chemicals and copious and ample daily measures of alcohol, was all quite new and terrifying. Like a baby duckling taking his first steps in the sober world, the reality of a world I’d never seen, or one I’d long ago forgotten.

In wonder and silence, I watched that first snowfall, what felt like the first snow I’d known. First the long autumn grasses turned white and slowly hid beneath the blanket and then the ugly and bare trees started to be covered in a frosting. People were worried and nervous about how they’d get home, but I understood none of this care and concern.

I sat at a small desk and as the phone rang and rang unanswered I simply watched the snow fall and rapidly pile up. I got up from the desk and walked quickly through the warehouse and outside to the lawn I’d just been watching disappear out my window. I dropped to my knees in what must have looked to an observer as prayer, but it was nothing like prayer and begging forgiveness to sky gods, it was a stark moment of connection.

With both hands, on wet knees I scooped up a small white and cold pile and rubbed the fresh and frozen fluff all over my face and another handful in my hair, and I laughed a little as my co-worker bees rushed to their cars, some pointing at me, probably thinking Bobby’s odd cousin had finally lost his mind. I had no need or desire to rush home before darkness fell in those terribly short early December days. I felt for the first time in a long time, maybe forever, a connection and a part of the world. No longer hidden under the rocks of my addiction and crimes, I was alive and feeling the frozen air envelope me and I felt swaddled like a newborn and whole and safe.

Decades later, wearing the bones of a still young and healthy body I collapsed after a run on a ninety-degree day in some short hot grass. Laying there feeling the sun turn my skin to frying bacon and smelling the good dirt and weeds I was once again hit with the uproar of connection to something greater and grander than me and my trifling concerns and fears. I never learned to pray, and all the therapists and anti-depressants I’ve ever been offered do nothing for me. Forget, please, the abject absurdity of offering an addict a pill to ease his consternation and confusion. I spent my youth an untethered balloon, the only thing I ever needed was to feel grounded and connected. How many near death experiences did I endure to come to this simple truth, this uncomplicated reality.

I recall these days of freezing cold and the perfect scent of dirt and grass often, and more when I sit shirtless on a ninety-eight-degree day and let the sun fry my skin, and draw out the dirty sweat that remains inside me, the dirt and sweat of the crimes of my life too grave and complex to ever allow me complete absolution. Knowing and accepting that I can never be fully present in the world. Pieces and parts of me have to remain hidden, and dead as many of my now dead compadres and confederates.

It took me a hard few years to decide if I should stay in this strange new place filled with rules of behavior and responsibilities. And many was the day I wanted to return to the underworld, but the fire of a July sun, and the ice of a December winter’s day offer me connection and an odd peace I don’t expect anyone but me to understand. These extremes force me to feel the world outside my head. These extremes of connection are what keeps me alive.

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That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

I walked up to the cemetery on this sticky and rainy afternoon. The old Hillside cemetery, the one next to Little Paulie’s house. Paulie was a change of life baby. His parents were in their seventies when we were kids. They lived in a big old house, three stories tall, with dirty and cracked windows and books, every corner packed and stacked with bound copies of the classics and old newspapers. The house was creepy in the daylight. But at night, deep in the night, tripping on acid it was flat-out terrifying. One night I became certain there were cadavers and spooks in the attic, and they told me to leave, and I never went back inside.

Little Paulie had a dog, Lobo who was really the only one in that family who made a lot of sense to me. Paulie’s father was a tired old man and just wanted to be left alone. His mom was kind, but always a little suspicious of me, like I was the one who was a bad influence on her little boy, when I fact I went to see Paulie mainly to buy drugs and paraphernalia. Some guys bought guns from Paulie, nothing big. Stolen rifles and handguns, mostly. Untraceable stuff, no serial numbers. Cheap Saturday night specials. I mainly liked his dog.

Up on the biggest hill on the graveyard grounds, under a wide and tall pine tree, was the grave of this kid named Royal H. Duck. He died about 1914. We adopted this dead kid into our crew, and we’d spend many summer nights up by his headstone drinking booze and smoking pot and fucking Middletown girls out in the weeds. Royal was only fourteen when he died and the night we stumbled on his headstone I got sad for him. I assumed he must have had a rough life, what with that name, and I assumed he probably spent a lot of his time fighting. I figured he didn’t have a lot of friends. I could relate to all that.

Sometimes I’d chew on bitter peyote buttons and try not to vomit and go sit alone and talk to Royal. On daytime visits occasionally the big maple tree next to his pine would be alive with a murder of squawking and cawing crows. The racket was terrifying and confusing. Sometimes I felt myself in the middle of a whirlwind, but within that din I could decipher words. Not so much words as thoughts my brain spliced together as words. There is a fair to middling chance I’m crazy. I never disputed that. A thousand cawing and clicking crows. The noise was terrifying. Royal never said much, what with being dead and all. But he told me to listen to the caws, not to trust Little Paulie.

That next summer I took a trip with Paulie up to New England, Boston actually. He convinced me to drive a trailer up there for him. I didn’t know what was in the load. My job was to drive and not ask a lot of questions. I figured it involved guns and really didn’t care one way or the other. My assumption was the guns were going to Boston, and then find their way overseas, maybe into Ireland, but I wasn’t sure and didn’t want to know.

I knew Little Paulie’s dad was involved with the Republican Army back in Ireland. Someone told me once that even their last name was fake, and that his dad was involved in some kind of operation here, from the house up by the cemetery between New York and Boston and Belfast.

I’m mostly of Irish decent and I know I should give a fuck, but to be truthful I didn’t. Most of the people I knew from Ireland were as sick of the Orangemen as they were of the RA and bridges exploding and the killing.

I pulled the trailer onto a dead-end street near Beacon Hill. Paulie, who followed me the entire way on a motorcycle, pulled right up to the cab. I jumped on the back, and we took off down Route 93 fast and hot for the Pilgrim Highway and Plymouth. We stopped at a place called Bert’s Bar, south of town near some place called Poverty Point. I remember ordering a shot of tequila and a beer. That’s about all I recall.

I woke up face down in the surf, bare ass naked and freezing. It was August and still pretty hot during the day, but the ocean was freezing cold. I stood up, now fully aware of my nakedness, and realized I was alone. I felt like I was tripping again, or still tripping from last night.

That was both a good thing and a pretty bad thing. Being naked and tripping on acid outside is a bit of fun in the moment until the reality and necessity of the situation confronts you. The conflicting thoughts of reality can turn out to be quite overwhelming and terrifying. Acid is funny like that. In one minute, everything is all shiny and new—an adventure, then it all goes to shit, and you can’t think or connect two thoughts that make any sense at all. I thought I quit smoking, but my brain was craving the bitter taste of nicotine. In some universe I saw myself as some acid-head, truck-driving Marlboro man.

I saw a diner across Route 44. Slouching and sneaking I hid behind a stone wall until I saw no cars, and ran my ass as fast as I could, barefoot and naked to the back door of the place, banging with my fist on the wood framed screen door. I’d not seen my face yet in a mirror, but by the look on the young waitresses face I could tell I looked worse than simply being naked. She was kind, she laughed a little and asked me simply, “What the fuck…” I think I managed something witty like, “I know, right?”

She found me a couple of dirty aprons, and I wrapped them around my waist. In the bathroom mirror, I saw I had two black eyes, and my nose was swollen, but not broken. The waitress, she said her name was Lorelei, but everyone called her Lorie, was a pretty girl, nineteen or twenty with curly blond to brown hair. She snuck me some eggs and coffee and she sat with me on the back porch in the coastal sunshine. I was fascinated by the beach sand on the black top walkway, thinking there was a deeper meaning to everything that was in front of me. I was forever looking for some deeper meaning. I finished my eggs and coffee and handed Lorie back my dishes. She was kind and funny and had a pretty smile.

Her uncle owned the diner, a fellow mick, named Colm. Lori introduced me to him. I told him my story, as well as I could recollect it. He let me work in the kitchen for a week, and he brought me some old jeans and shirts to wear and a dirty old pair of Converse All-Stars. After a week, I’d made enough money to buy myself a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and a denim jacket and a bus ticket home.

I was in the kitchen saying goodbye to Colm and thanking him for his help. When I saw a cloud of dust and heard a loud bike pull into the parking lot. For a moment the view out to Route 44 and the ocean was lost to the dust devil.

Colm and his niece had literally saved my life, and they didn’t ask questions. Even when Colm got wind the trailer was loaded with guns and the ultimate destination. He let it go and left me alone. I’d slept that week in the back-room office for diner. I’d wanted Lorelei to join me back there, but it was ok and probably better she didn’t.

I didn’t pay much attention to the motorcycle. Out by the cash register I allowed myself one last look at the wall of pies and cakes that Colm and his wife made early every morning. Looking so good it hurt to turn away, behind their protective wall of chrome and clean glass. I wanted to say goodbye to Lorie, when I heard an unmistakable voice ordering eggs over easy and making sure the eggs sat on the white bread toast. Paulie ate that every day of his fricken life, he acted like he invented eggs on toast.

In one swooping motion, I grabbed him by his greasy ponytail, gave him a quick gut punch, dragged his ass out the diner’s glass front doors, adorned with little pilgrims and the sign that read, Welcome to Plymouth, Massachusetts. I tossed him over the fragile wrought-iron railing that made the handrail for the three short steps leading to the entrance. By then Paulie was sputtering some crap about coming back to find me. On his way down off the steps, he hit a rock with his head, knocking himself out. I pondered stealing his big Triumph Bonneville, but Paulie was the kind to call a cop, not come after me a settle stuff on our own. With my dirty Converse All-Stars and my left foot, I pushed the bike over on its side, and I walked out of Plymouth for the last time and toward the bus station.

I got into an email exchange the other day with Paulie. We’ve grown old without ever again seeing each other face to face.. He says” I hear you’re a writer now?” And some other trivial crap.

I say, “I’ve always been a writer. Why?”

He typed, “I’m curious what you write about?”

“Anything and everything, Paulie. Old days in Middletown, stuff like that. Some days, like today, I write about nothing at all… but, you know what, Paulie? Royal Duck was right about you all along!”

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The news is full of stories on rising gas prices. The real story is diesel. We’ll all bitch and moan about $5.50 gas prices, we may drive less, but that’s about the extent of it. We can survive high gas prices. We are largely a nation of spoiled cucks. When diesel hits $6.00 or $7.00 a gallon or higher the shit is going to hit the fan in ways that will make us forget about $100 to fill up the Toyota.

Russia has not only stopped exporting diesel, they will soon start to import it. Mainly to feed its war machine in Ukraine.

The only thing keeping fuel prices relatively sane currently is China playing and manipulating the world oil markets. While the U.S. has been draining its Strategic Petroleum Reserves to control prices China has been filling theirs for years. The Chinese buffer has allowed them to stop importing oil, freeing oil for other nations to import and consume. This probably had more to do with the cost of crude than any altruistic gesture. The result is the same. This has helped to stabilize the world market.

If the Houthis close the Bab al-Mandad straight all bets are off. That has never happened before. Until February 2026 and Trump’s war of choice the Strait of Hormuz had never been closed either. If this happens even China won’t be able to control the chaos.

I remember sitting in a friend’s kitchen the day this war started. My friend’s son, a bright kid, an engineer, praised Trump for going in and showing Iran who is boss. “Something Biden didn’t have the balls to do…” I should try and see if this young buck is still so wildly impressed.

Jimmy Carter was the last American president to be held hostage by Iran. He was a far smarter man than Donald Trump, and Iran made him dance like a marionette. I think American presidents learned after that administration not to fuck with this region.

The next few days could be truly critical not just for the U.S. economy but the global economy. This fool some of you elected because your needle dick wouldn’t allow you to vote for a black woman actually could easily crash the world markets.

This is rapidly escalating to a global war with ten nations now actively involved, double that to include passive involvement—as of now.

Bad things happen when a nation’s economy is on the brink of collapse. Look no further back than Germany in the 1930s.

Are we sick of winning yet?

That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

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Sitting in a tiny taberna as it rains in windswept torrents, bitter cold rain. Every few minutes a burst of snowflakes shoot past the window, melting as they are spattered on the glass.

A neon sign selling Tecate Cerveza flashes blues and greens and reds against the sweating, grimy pane. I think it looks like my mom’s Christmas trees. She liked blue and red and green. I feel a strange nostalgia wash over me for long gone, simpler days and whisky drinks by the tree with Ma.

Three ugly men join me at my table, two I’ve never met, they don’t speak English. The third is Luis, he wears a rain-damp white shirt with a Bolero tie. I ask him if he wants to be a cowboy when he grows up. He asks me if I’d like a knife in the rib-cage, specifically my “Second and third rib,” I never knew the significance of stabbing me there. But I knew if he ever did stab me it would be between the second and third rib, and deadly, I assumed.

A skinny black guy in a Santa suit, stuffed with pillows around his belly walks in and up to the bar. His absurd and oversized beard hangs off his chops. He turns on the stool, it creaks and groans. He tips his cerveza at the Madonna, silently guarding the old and tarnished brass cash register behind the bar, then he turns to us and says, “Fucking shooting, just now, at the community center. Gang shit—ugly. I don’t what happened to this neighborhood.”

A pretty girl, she tells me she is part Native American part Puerto Rican, brings by a life threatening concoction of habanero, jalapeño, red and green chilies, and onions and pork. Blisteringly hot, life threateningly hot, and good, heavy Mexican bread.

I offer Santa some the peppers and bread. Mr. Clause comments they don’t see many white guys down here. Between bites I grumble, “Everybody got to be somewhere, I’m here ‘cause of fucking Luis.”

We sit there looking out the dirty window as all this rain and snow tries to wash this city of its sin.

The radio plays Christmas carols in Spanish. My first three companions seem to be feeling nostalgic, maybe homesick. Santa just looks sad and worried.

The pretty girl returns with more beers. I sit there not understanding a word anyone is saying, laughing and sweating from the smoldering food.

Santa points to what seems to be a pistol tucked into the back of Luis’ pants. Luis looks at both of us, with eyes so cold and dark they look like black holes into his soul. In English, he sighs, “I ain’t above shooting a motherfucker, even Santy Clause, what that tired old man ever done for me, anyways?”

The girl asks me if I am all right and I tell her, “it’s the first time in years I’ve not given a fuck. It feels amazing. Feels like freedom.”

She looks at me a me strange expression on her face, and says something to my friends, in Spanish, and they all laugh. I flip them off, we raise our glasses and bottles and we all laugh harder. The guy to my left, a tree sized man with hands the size of hams hoists his beer and yells , “Libertad”

I raise my greasy glass, toasting the tree-man and scream, “anarquista!”

Luis comes up behind me, punches me in the ribs, hard, say, “I love you, motherfucker, but not in a queer way. Merry Christmas.”

People, friends, close friends, family are sometimes confused by my attitude toward things, my world view. Me, and who I am and what I think and say was all largely formed in places like this little bar with assholes just like these guys. Luis was my best friend in those days, A Bronx, NY gangbanger on the run from some very scary and very real people. We used to sit together in his mom’s apartment on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and wash down whatever pills we had with this shit Scotch: Clan MacGregor and point guns at each other. Both of us for a second or more pondered pulling the trigger, I still not sure if either of knew why.

Luis shot at me once, he swore he didn’t know it was me. He swore on his abuela’s grave he didn’t know. I had no choice but to believe him.

You can gain a unique view of the world looking up from the bottom.

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As a boy up on the farm, one sunny July day I found a huge hornet’s nest out behind the cow barn. I decided to knock it down, for no good reason other than it was there and I wanted to see what would happen. I looked around and found a good solid maple tree branch on ground out by the edge of the field.

I ran back to the barn, and in the batting stance of my hero Mickey Mantle, I took a long, hard home run swing at that big buzzing nest. I was instantly swarmed in a mass of pissed of wasps. I came to fully understand the term, in that painful moment, ‘mad as a hornet.’

Uncle Jeff, a kind but gruff man. A loving man, but not the kind to coddle, hearing my screams came running, grabbed me and dragged me to the front of the barnyard. Finding the cleanest, most cow-shit free mud available, he scooped big gobs of the smelly cool muck all over the welts on my arms and face and scalp. My butt stings calming as I sat in muddy jeans in the slop.

As he worked the cooling mud into my stings he said, “Billy, you’re not a stupid boy, but that was a stupid thing to do. You don’t ever go after a hornet’s nest unless you know what you’re doing. Whacking it with a stick and wondering what will happen next isn’t a plan. That was stupid.”

Sage advice from a wise man.

I sit here on this summer morning, so many days and years from that afternoon up on the farm, watching news telling me the war with Iraq has taken another turn in a catastrophic direction. I think to myself it’s a shame the President of the United States didn’t have an Uncle Jeff to raise him and tell him things like: don’t attack a hornet’s nest and not know what you're about to stir up. Those pissed off hornets will hurt you and bite you in the ass.

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That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

I well remember the Bicentennial in 1976. It was a month-long, endless party, getting wasted on Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer and pills. The red, white and blue can seemed to fit the nearly electrical patriotic fervor that ran through the nation. Gerald Ford was president at the time; Jimmy Carter was an exciting and/or humorous light at the end of the tunnel after too many years of war and violence and angst.

Jimmy’s brother’s Billy Beer was terrible shit, but it somehow fit—perfectly. The hapless hick brother of the President of the United States hawking his pissy beer and anything else he could concoct to make a buck off his brother’s fame and position set the tone until the end of the decade.

Me and my crew ended that July’s festivities banned from various bars, lakes, and parks. Funny enough, I actually didn’t return to one of those places for about thirty-five years. Finding myself oddly nervous, standing on the site of one of the many crimes of that celebration, I realized the people who had issued the ban were probably retired or dead, and I felt a strange personal victory.

We’d, as a nation, just recently survived Nixon and the disastrous defeat in the Vietnam War. For many of us, those choppers leaving the roof of the American embassy in Saigon were the moment we saw America as fallible—the moment the veneer was ripped off and the ugly, vulnerable, soft-underbelly reality beneath the myth of who we were as a nation was laid bare.

Many of us were still angry and hurt about the brothers, cousins, and friends who never came home from that useless war. Possibly worse than an ugly death in a jungle were the addiction, endless nightmares, and mental breakdowns those who survived that place brought home with them. Killing people for no reason other than the expansion of American exceptionalism and imperialism does that to a guy.

Despite all that, there was still something to celebrate. As a nation, it felt like we were on an upward arc. Nixon was a crook, and we didn’t stand for that. We sent him packing.

Civil rights and women’s rights, while far from where they needed to be, seemed to be moving in the right direction. We’d survived the political and racial violence of the 1960s, and many, myself included, believed we would continue to become the nation we were told we could be.

The deaths of JFK, Malcolm X, RFK, and Dr. King were behind us. That night in July 1969, when we all sat huddled, watching men walk on the moon, was a unique, collective and American moment. There were good and necessary questions: If
we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we feed hungry children? Why can’t we
build schools? Why is it that so many can’t afford adequate health care? The
words of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey On The Moon” echoed in me as I watched the
fuzzy spacemen on my little TV set. But I think this is the key: we hadn’t
solved everything—not by a long shot—but we were going in the right direction.

Shoot ahead fifty years. The bearded, long-haired, drunk, doped-up hippie is long gone. Sadly, so are many of his friends and cohorts. I live in a nation now that is
actively—daily, it seems—working to repeal rights from black and brown people,
that wants to jail—or worse—people for coming to this country looking for that
golden door of opportunity.

I live in a nation where rich old men have taken away a woman’s right to the autonomy of her own body. The same men want to force their poisoned view of what religion, our sense of what a higher power should be down our throats.

We’ve just lost another war of imperialism—to the very same nation Jimmy Carter learned not to challenge.

Ironically, these very same men who want to take us back to a time of white-bread America are doing anything and everything they can to undo the work and struggles of the ’60s and ’70s and are working to make us a nation we all once feared.

As a ’60s kid sitting in school—on the rare day I actually went or listened—to stories about the atrocities of the Soviet Union and its propaganda machine, I find myself now in a nation that morevclosely resembles that fallen regime than the one I believed in during thatvweek or two in 1976.

I think, for me, there is little to nothing left to celebrate, and I take my share of the blame for allowing it to happen.

I think I’ll sit this one out.

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.

I just watched a puff piece of the how the founding fathers—particularly Jefferson—while slavers, weren’t really bad men.

One intellectual actually called that group ‘the most gifted assembly of leaders all in the same place and time in the history of the world.’

He was, of course exceptionally white and he wore a bow tie, and spoke in that odd accent that is a mix of New York, New England and maybe a dash of the UK. Sort of an FDR vibe to his voice. Maybe it’s just how pseudo-intellectual elitists sound.

They even had a very bright and knowledgeable black lady speak in Jefferson’s defense. See, I guess, it was a personal struggle for Thomas owning human beings, sneaking out to the wood shed to slip a few inches of little Tommy Jefferson to Sally Hemings every now and then penning his flowery prose about freedom and life and liberty.

Every year, about this time as we Americans prepare to celebrate Jefferson’s sacred document I wonder what would be this spin if say Ol’ TJ, and Washington and Madison and the rest if they didn’t own, enslave and occasionally rape people from Africa, brought here in the belly of ships, but pretty white girls… would the historical scholars still be so quick to forgive and explain their motives?

Somehow… I think not.

See, I know I’m un-American, unpatriotic prick, but to me owning and abusing and holding other human beings against their will is a hard stop for me. I don’t give a flying fuck how kind or smart or philanthropic you may be, once you own people there ain’t no coming back from that.

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