Commissar Konev & the Pit

     I was at my post  early on a Friday morning, smoking a cigarette, feeling rather chipper. It was November of 1989 and I was a border guard in East Berlin, working the guard station along the Aleksanderplatz. Konev, several years my elder and three ranks my superior, had the prime watch and showed up late that morning. The news out of Moscow had been dispiriting to him. He was a hardliner. Gorbachev’s perestroika had been restructuring the country to the point that the natives were restless, and getting quite uppity. Daily patrols about our position would reveal to us many East Berliners not quite happy with our longstanding détente with the West. They were itching to get at us,

you could feel it, and the daily rounds of rock-throwing by teenage hooligans were ever-increasing.

     It was in just such a climate that we saw it. It was coming from over the West side but it had obviously circled around a bit- a large transport plane about the size of a fin whale.

Inside were about 200 Ukrainian Jews on their way toward a new life. Gorbachev had bought them a new lease on things, and they were in their own way, now escaping us.

   

     The guard station looked out over a large expanse of the Aleksanderplatz, including a section which had been transformed into an archaeological dig. Recent investigations had

shown the exisence of extensive underground chambers and bunkers (no, not the Fuhrerbunker) which ran underneath the city out toward the Brandenburg gate. The historical societies had managed to gain permits from the city to allow them to create

a large, soccer pitch-sized hole in which they everyday would bring shovels, picks, and paintbrushes, wheelbarrows and buckets, and work at deciphering some of the conundrum which had been the legacy of the fascists on Berlin.

    To be fair, some of their finds were often quite fascinating, and would receive big writeups in the newspapers. But on this day we had reason to attend to the pit for other reasons.

   

     The plane taxied in on the middle of the avenue. It was certainly odd enough, and all I could do to keep Konev from discharging his weapon in its direction- after all, flying in from the West, it seemed to be perhaps aimed at the Wall like it were a missile. But it didn’t. It taxied to the end of the block, and you could tell the pilots were doing all they can to apply pressure to the brakes to keep it from skidding into the pit.

    But that was exactly what happened next.

    When the plane reached the edge of the pit it had almost acquired inertia but the final push of its wheels toppled it into the pit. My concerns were for the pilots, taking the brunt of the fall, as the plane teetered and toppled headfirst into the sixty foot deep hole. However it was not long before the passengers and pilots emerged from the vessel and milled about on the floor of the pit, gesturing to us, asking for help, a ladder, anything to bring themselves up to ground level and back to civilization. The idea of them being trapped inside a Nazi-era fortification must have been both highly ironic, as well, the idea of their being yet trapped behind our border had to have been doubly disconcerting.

    Konev looked about the edges of the pit. He did note that there was a tall ladder of about fortyfive foot height nearby, and he set about positioning it on a ledge so that the refugees might begin ascending it. The first of these was a babushka of about seventy five years of age. She retained some measure of pluck, however, and began to take the ladder one rung at a time.

    “Come on, come on up, come find your taste of freedom!” Konev assured her, and the look on his face became quite quizzical. If I could say he appeared to be the cat who ate the canary that would be a good approximation of his expression.

     Meanwhile, I was watching Konev’s hands. He was fingering the safety on his Kalishnikov, and setting the mechanism to single-shot. I barely got the words from my mouth “What are you doing, you fool!” when the old woman reached the top of the ladder, and Konev put a bullet right into her chest. She toppled headfirst back down into the pit, and was soon swallowed up by the crowd of babushkas at the bottom, wailing lamentations and defiantly shaking fists.

    I knew what I needed to do. I realized there was no other choice, that if this went on, it would become an international incident. I set my own weapon to single-shot and drilled him. His body toppled and he fell himself, down into the pit, landing face first on an archeological grid of twine and dust. I said a prayer for his soul, and indeed, one for my own. But had I not done this, he would have continued his taunting the refugees, and he would have continued firing at them, perhaps until they were all dead. I knew he had done it for in his opinion they were attempting escape. Such it was in those years.

    I looked down into the pit and called for the next woman to come on up. “Come on, taste your freedom, I swear, I shall not fire!”

    It was with much trepidation that the next babushka began to climb the ladder in my direction. When she reached the top of the ladder I set my weapon on the ground and helped her off with both hands, so that the others could see I was no longer armed.

   I cut the wires that separated the pit and the lip of the pit from the free air of the West. I helped seventy of them across before the guards from the neighboring guardpost came and assisted the rest of the refugees up and out themselves. The Wall would be coming down in the morning. We too were tasting our first breath of the new wind.

Mother Nature: Her Last Stand in Silicon Valley

     It's been a nice half year living here, but it's come time to close out, pack up the pile of fruit, and be headin' out. Since this past May I've been fortunate enough to call the second-oldest house in Mountain View my home...  The Abbott house was built in 1880, just four years after the Battle of Little Bighorn, eight years before the telephone, and ten before the close of the Indian Wars and the Massacre at Wounded Knee.
     From the attic room, you can look out on an acre and a half of a former walnut farm, the sixty or so trees standing tall as cathedrals, themselves, comprising one of the most wonderful natural settings still extant in this burgeoning suburb.
     And burgeon it will. The house, which was in the same family for over half a century in the name of the "Bakovitch house", after its former owner, the long-surviving daughter of a pioneer family which acquired it in the early 1910s, will be "relocated" on the property, angled catty-corner and set on new foundations.
    I moved here after the untimely passing of my best friend's brother's best friend. Kurt Kieffer was a guitarist making do as a carpenter for most of his life- as skilled a carpenter as he was a guitarist, and probably, himself, more attuned to his musical soul than his pragmatic woodworking. Kurt took on this house as the renovator and transformed it. After the death of Ann Bakovitch the land and the house fell into disrepair. The building had become a crack house and a haven for transients and squatters. Kurt and a couple of his friends came along and began to make interior and exterior renovations, completely transforming it. Even after he had been living there for half a year or more, he was still routing them from the walnut orchards. Two years later I was also pulling abandoned shopping carts out of the kudzu-like jungle which abutted the property.
    Originally, the Bakovitch family had possessed two to three times this acre and a half. The land which is now Landels School, directly behind the property, had been a part of their walnut farm, and they ceded that land to the city of Mountain View sometime in the early 1960s or 70's, I think. It's hard to imagine now but this entire area was once all walnuts. The Black Walnut trees which were grafted to English Walnut rootstock have now aged beyond their prime. While they still give some fruit, it's not of a commercial grade or quality. The many squirrels which call these trees their home have existed here for generations...
    And that's all about to end. Not only for the squirrels, but also a couple of raccoons, who make their home in a hollow trunk of a still-living tree, at least one possum, whose grey and black flecked body was, one recent morning, a reasonable facsimile of my roommate's cat's, and a wide variety of bird life, including at least thirty to fifty crows, numerous mourning doves, robins, woodpeckers, sparrows, finches, jays, and a pair of red-tail hawks. The crow population alone will engender fierce territorial battles amongst those of their species who have settled (in an "epidemic" fashion) the trees and the easements of the surrounding Old Mountain View neighborhood. But thoughts still will resound around the idea of all this displaced wildlife and the disrupted ecology.
     Most of these animals will be reduced to finding new habitat for themselves along the Stevens Creek corridor which abuts the Landels School property. This piece, which is, and will be up until this spring, the last large undeveloped patch of mother nature within residential zoning limits in the city of Mountain View, is scheduled to become 19 condominiums, with an underground parking garage, and the great majority of the standing trees will be cut down.
     Our friend Kurt, who played for a fusion jazz band out of Palo Alto called Expresso, put a lot of time, love, and energy into making this particular landmark house a valuable piece of real estate again. Last year, the anniversary of which is soon arriving, he passed away in his sleep of a coronary failure, leaving behind my current roommate (a lifelong friend and associate of his band- the band's official photographer- and besides his bandmates, at least a dozen other affected friends as well as a twenty year old daughter). Kurt's vibrations are still here in this house, and though it's soon to be wrenched from its foundation and placed closer to the street, it's going to be the bittersweet memory for a number of us for whom Kurt's ineffable and inimitable sense of humor and melody will be sorely missed and fondly remembered into the future. Perhaps is best he won't be here with us to witness the change... We are moving on, but he's quite beyond it all at this time. Here's a prayer for Rocky Raccoon.

   

The Unlikely Redemption of Andrew Dempster (Part Two)

     On a crisp morning a few weeks later, Andrew sat at his kitchen table, doodling on a sketchpad. His coffee and eggs and toast had filled him, and now, with a few minutes to himself before heading out for another day at the office, he felt aimless and restive. He found his pen working almost independently of any real will on his own part. He was doodling for doodling’s sake, and seemed not to be bothered at all by the fact it was with no conscious intention the pen worked its way across the page.
     His wife entered, a little ragged about the edges. She leaned over to see what had his attention. “Oh, that’s beautiful!” she said.
     But Andrew heard: “Oh God that sucks!”
    “What did you say?” he grumbled.
     “I said really, I like it.”
     “You think that’s art, you should look what the cat dragged in last night” he heard her say following,  as plain as day. Andrew gave her a puzzled look.
     And that was only the beginning.
     That night, after he had come home and was trying to settle in to his couch and his pile of reading-to-do, the doorbell rang. He grudgingly got up and answered. It was a Girl Scout. She had long brown braids, a fresh look on her face, and a happy smile. She stood in his doorway holding the box of Girl Scout cookies like it was some official proclamation being read from a scroll.
     “Oh, I can’t, we’re fresh out of dollars,” he said, and began to shut the door.
     The Girl Scout, however, was quite determined, and wedged a toe into the door, preventing further motion. “We take checks!” (“Come on, you fat slob, buy the damn cookies!”)
  “What?”
  “Please, buy these cookies, they’re at a special rate today!” (“for fat-assed old pervs like you!”)
   “I certainly will not! WHAT did you just say?”
    “I said, sir, they are at a reduced rate. You get three for five for today only!”
     “Hmmm.” Andrew fished out a five from his wallet. “All the cash I’ve got. Take it.
Now, scram, you little ocean liner, before I send an iceberg to crush your pubulescent forecastle!”
      The Girl Scout gave such a look of horror and incredulity, she turned straightaway and fled down the walkway back to the street, where Andrew could see a station wagon with several more Girl Scouts waiting inside and somebody’s Mom at the wheel. The Girl Scout opened the door, said a word or two to the driver, and the station wagon lurched away in a squeal of tires.
    Andrew stared at the boxes of cookies he held in his hand. He put one into his wife’s purse, he set one on the top of his refrigerator, and he set one in his lunch bag, to maybe give to Thaddedeuce at work in the morning. He shook his head and went back to his reading of Erastothenes. The modern world could be such a pain in the ass.
     When the next morning came, instead of doodling or reading more of Erastothenes, Andrew hurried the process of showering and dressing and left before his wife even left the bed. Didn’t always happen like this but this morning, he wanted to have a chat with Thad.
      Thad was in early himself, checking book prices against a tall stack of contenders.
      “Look, we’ve got this new Henry Fuldham book in!”
     “Fuldham’s been dead for ninety-five years.”
     “Yeh, but we’ve got a new book for us. First Edition!” (“Lookup shows it’s selling for $250 minimum!”)
     “How did you know that?”
     “I don’t know, I just do. See, it says here on the flyleaf. Firsssst… Edi….tion.”

     Andrew looked at Thatdedeuce, and rather stopped Thad’s train of thought.
     “You know, some weird stuff’s been happening to me lately.” He heard Thad’s thoughts: “Yeah, that’s for sure! You’re about to lose your friggin’ mind, if you don’t pay attention!”
     Andrew gave Thad another of his puzzled looks, and continued. “I think I am becoming mental. I mean, mentat, telepathic, or something.” (“Think so, uh?” thought Thad.
     “And what of it? Don’t you realize, some  of us are able to think around corners, fly without moving an inch, and influence fair and foul balls, all on the strength of a thought…”)
   “Is that so?” Andrew found himself responding to Thad’s thought, but Thad was still standing there, as if waiting for Andrew to continue explaining. He might have a hard time, if this was the crap he had to deal with before lunchtime.
    “I mean it’s kind of creepy,” Andrew continued. "I hear what people are thinking. But I only hear them thinking after I speak. Like I need to intiate the conversation.”
     Thad still said nothing. But Andrew could tell what he had on his mind, sure enough.
     (“Do I have to spell it out for you, Andrew? The universe has bigger plans for you than you’ll allow. It does for everybody. If only you accept that it’s the boss not you.”)
    “Insubordination?” Andrew was getting a little more frazzled.  He reached into the desk drawer for an Aleve. With a swig of his half-past-cold coffee, he gulped it down.
   But Thad’s train of thought charged on, unimpeded now. “Yes. Your insubordination, Andrew. Sure you are entitled to an opinion of your own, but it is your insistence on it being the only resolution which is forcing the universe to send you these… little examples.”
     Back in “the real world” Thad spoke up. “I think, Andrew, that you should find an outlet for this. I think the cosmos picks some people for weathervanes, at times. Some people  (the mad ones) get a little overamped and their fuses blow with the possibilities they are handed. Others seem to master it, and go on to bigger things, understanding of course that destiny has chosen them for it and it’s not their decision, it’s the upstairs guy’s.”
     “The upstairs guy’s.” Andrew harrumphed, but all he could hear next was Thad shutting off his computer and shaking his head. “You’re a tough case, Andrew. I think you’re going to need a lot more than the last few attempts it’s made to bring your self awareness into the perspective it’s asking you. But hey, it’s your life, it’s your fate, it’s your karma. I think you need some time off.”
    “Hah. My employee tells ME I need time off. Listen, Thad…”
    At that moment in burst Romero. “I think I broke something!”
    “What! Either you did or you didn’t. What something? Are you going to keep on being clumsy or do I need to fire you, too?" Andrew’s glasses steamed up, and his headache began pounding and all he could see was Romero’s sheepy little face with his brillopad hair pleading with pathetic beady eyes, innocently waiting for the drop of the axe.
    “Yessir, I think I broke something. You come see, if you want.”
     “IF I want. The last thing I want to see is more crap. Nobody can explain what’s going on to me with any satisfaction, but still I have to fight fires. Christ Romero, what the hell was it this time?”
    “You come see and I show you.”
     So with a nod to Thad “I’ll talk more with you later” Andrew headed out onto the warehouse floor to see just what Romero had done, this time.
    It wasn’t too hard to figure out. The chain that pulled up the warehouse delivery door was coiled in a sad little pile at the side of the door.
     “Oh no…” Andrew wanted to blow his stack, but this time he decided he’d play it cool. The chain could be reset but not without sending up Thad (the tallest of the crew) to rehang it on the pulley. And that would require Thad to lay off whatever the needed chore was he was already engaged in. Multitasking was hardly a possibility in this type of working environment. Andrew didn’t stick around to hear any of Romero’s thoughts, because he was too pissed off for that.
     But just as though Thad could have read Andrew’s mind already, this time, he had silently gathered up a ladder and climbed the wall with the chain and was already working on the problem. Almost as if Andrew had meant to say, but voluntarily, and darn, he had it all done if a jiffy.
     “I don’t know how you do it, Thad. Thanks.”
    “Neither do I, boss. Thank You.”
      The afternoon passed without futher incident.When Andrew drove back home, he pulled out his sketchpad again. And once again, he found the pen pulling itself across the paper almost independent of any personal plan. This time, he ended up with what seemed a reasonable finished product. When the pen rested, he had drawn a picture. The sketch was of the harbor down the road, with boats and docks, and the familiar restaurant sign as well. It was a scene he saw each morning as he drove back and forth to the warehouse.
   “Not too shabby, if I say so myself”. He admired it. His wife wasn’t home yet, but when she arrived he showed it to her and aksed, what did she think of it this time.
    “Better.” -she snapped. Uh-oh. Andrew had some trouble coming on, he could hear it in her voice. But he dared not project his attention on her thoughts again, for fear of what he might be in for. However, there was nothing following which was unusual. Maybe really he wasn’t ‘in for it’ after all. But he did notice she had something reserved inside herself.
    Well if its important she’ll let me know.
    That night he went back to his Erastothenes and she read a vampire romance. They turned out the lights and headed into slumberland. In the secret space of dreamtime he experienced something new he had never realized before in dreams. He could experience his consciousness on several levels simultaneously. It was as if he could project himself anywhere. If he asked to fly to Istanbul Turkey, by damn, there he was flying over Istanbul Turkey as if on a magic carpet. He asked to see Kiev (not such a far distance if you go by magic carpet, after all) and there were the walls of the city beneath him. He projected himself acros the great plateau of Asia, on across the Pacific, took a look at Hawaii, and continued until he reached the bay area. He could see it as clearly as if he had been passing by on the space shuttle.
     With a final “poof!” he found himself propped up in bed, awake, and once more, wondering. All this stuff keeps on happening and it’s doing it without my asking. Damn that was a great dream!
     And so Andrew worked through the day, through the night, for a fortnight. At the conclusion of his pay period, he realized he had accrued enough overtime hours to be able to buy a ticket to Paris for himself and his wife, for a trip they had planned for years but somehow never budgeted for. They could take their trip that summer- if things continued on as well as they had for the past three years.
    He managed to make it through the next three weeks without any sense of “the voices” haunting him. Perhaps he had finally shucked them off, he thought. There was something about it that really bugged him. Being able to understand what others really thought of him made him a little angry, and a little edgier than he had been before “all this” had begun.
      And then it really hit him. He almost tripped and fell over a lampcord in his bedroom when he heard it, loud and clear in his head “Don’t stop, pay attention. You think you’re in charge, but we know you aren’t.’’
     “Who are you?” asked Andrew, half knowing what the answer would be.
     “We are the watchers. You don’t know it yet, but we’ve chosen you.”
     “What? Why? Why ME? Why not pick someobody… who actually believes in you!”
    “Oh you believe Andrew, you believe. It’s why you try so hard to deny us.”
    “I don’t have to try.”
    “You ‘ll have to now.”
    “Who are you talking to Andrew?” asked his wife, sleepily rubbing her eyes, lying in the bed in the midnight moonlight, wishing he’d just stop this silly arguing with the dark and crawl in beside her and maybe give her some other sort of entertainment, than to need to consider his sanity at risk.
    “I am talking to…” He stopped. Who was he talking to!
    “We will be ready for you, Andrew when you are.” And there was a buzzing sound in his head like the strings of Buddy Guy’s guitar when he’s got it pulled out fifty feet into the crowd and they can’t help butreach for a piece of it and the stage is so far away you think he’ll trip over  the plug – like Andrew just about had with his bedside lamp- and Andrew knew, whatever the heck it was speaking to him, it was as real as sin, as real as the dial on the bedside clock’s LED display, as real as his wife there with her questioning and doubting eyes. Whatever this was it was bigger than him. And he had had so little experience of anything he could not rationalize or explain through the fulcrum of his senses that he thought  he’d go nuts, right there, himself, if he couldn’t fall back asleep and dream to escape these new voices.
     Dreams were no escape, he would learn, however. Because in his early morning dream on this new day he met his parents. He even met his parent’s parents, whom he had never had the aquaintance or the pleasure of either. And they stood, not wraiths from the smoke and wrack of the airplane crash that had killed them both, but as if they were in the peak of health, and the accident had never happened- or IF it had, they had somehow been transformed into superbeings capable of transecting space and time in order to bring Andrew to… this new consciousness of love. The perfect love that holds no bounds and both needs nor has no words to speak its existence, other than I AM.
    Andrew sure was a lucky fellow. Because the trip was on, he had something else to live for than the office. Because the trip was on, he had something to look forward to which included bringing his wife along, and would contribute to years of happiness in the future. Somehow, he knew it would. Everything would be OK, once we get to Paris.
     The world will be different once we get back.
     Seeing his parents in his dream helped him to realize he had little to fear from a transAtlantic plane trip- the fear of a crash had left him in mortal fear of planes. Now he felt as if there were nothing involved in dying which could make him fear it, not the least. In fact, he almost could see himself thinking, there’s nothing in dying to be afraid of at all– if my parents can survive dying, as they just reassured me they had- then maybe I really do have a couple of things wrong about this… this whole ball of wax!
    The weeks ahead were, to say the least, both interesting and disconcerting to Andrew. The more he thought about his parents, the more they would show up in his dreams. In one of them, they sat, all three of them, in a circle, on old stadium chairs which his father had got for them from a minor league baseball stadium being torn down in the late fifties.
   His mother told him they had been working real hard “on his case” for a number of years, and that his atheism hadn’t really helped things. At that point of the conversation Andrew had wanted to beg off and get out of the dream as soon as possible, but his father cut him off.
    “Andrew, we have really tried. We wanted to make it something you chose all your own, of course, and you still can. But if you deny us this opportunity, to reach you in your dreams, then you help to kill us, in your memory, and in our relationship to you. And we love you. We would have done anything for you. It wasn’t exactly our choice, that we were in the accident, but it happened, and it happened perhaps for a greater good. You need to see that everything is connected, and that there’s no real end to anything. Unless, of course, you choose not to believe in us. But we believed in you. We believed in you so much we helped you every step of the way you made alone, although we could not be there beside you, for you to see it. We hope you will allow us to continue these discussions we have been having, because it allows us an opportunity to grow, also. You don’t realize it, maybe, but when the accident happened, we were really ready to come here and do some of the work that’s always- up here to do. Your mother and I decided we would take you on as a part of that, but you are only a part of that. There’s so much for you to wake up to! You should take the chance, you should take the risks, you should enjoy the time you get there where you are.”
    “If this all sounds too much for you, Andrew you know, you can always choose to deny it all. We know you though. We know you have your doubts, but do you doubt this?”
    In his dream, his mother stretched out her hand to take his. “Please, Andrew, choose good and choose life and choose wisely, honor your life, your wife, and honor us by allowing us to give you what we may. You will have more reasons to be grateful as the years fly past. Before you know it well all be together again over here, so please, be careful in everything you do.” They both smiled to him. It was time for him to awaken.
     The morning kitchen didn’t seem to be so sullen and abject that morning. He made the coffee, he read the paper, he did the dishes, and everything finally felt like it was in place.
     He was lucky to own a round trip ticket to Paris and that he had the perfect woman on his side to travel beside him.
     The drive to the warehouse was also a little bit happier. In his car he listened to some bebop jazz, which put him in tune, he felt, with the trees flying past on the highway.
     Even Thaddedeuce seemed to notice the change in Andrew. But if he did, he didn’t need to say a word. The payoff was the kick in his step and the new light behind Andrew’s eyes. Even the furrows of his brows seemed to be slighter than usual. It was going to be the best year of his life… he just knew it.


If you like this story, you can read it complete in As I Was Telling You While Sleeping, a collection of short stories (use this link to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/308624 ) 
or you can follow Andrew and Fern as they travel to Paris in 
Bus Of Fools (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/348575).

The Unlikely Redemption of Andrew Dempster (Part One)

     A morning kitchen is just a minefield of angry noises waiting to happen. Andrew Dempster, age 59, was trying right at this moment to tiptoe through his. There was always the possibility that he might wake up his wife, who slept the sleep of the innocent away back in their bedroom. Every morning was like this for Andrew. He had a lot of time on his hands but it was all taken.

     Andrew didn’t mind things being the way they are. He felt it was a cruel world, and simply put, there must have been a good reason behind it being so. He would sometimes get into great philosphical disputes with his young colleague, Thaddedeuce, about these types of things. They weren’t much though, they weren’t often, and he wasn’t put off at all by the reasons others had their doubts. Andrew just knew things are the way they are because they are the way they are, and if he seemed distant, offhanded, and slight to other people, that was just their problem.

     While he fiddled with the makings of coffee and rustled up the chicken abortions and sliced pig corpses for his breakfast plate, he toasted a slab of ground crushed processed wheat in his antediluvian, antique, 1930’s toaster. It was one of a few treasures from his parents, dead these thirty five years, killed in an airplane crash outside of Oklahoma City on their way to a Masonic convention. Andrew’s father had been a third degree of 30 master Mason, and his mother, while not one of the boys, had always accompanied him everywhere they went. Their deaths sent young Andrew into a terrible depression, not to mention, an orphanage for adolescent boys. All that was light years away and back in the past, now, because Andrew had fought and scratched and clawed his way to something of a place in the sun of his own. He owed nothing to anyone and didn’t care if it showed.

    Now while Andrew often seemed to his colleagues and his associates as a ‘devil may care” type of guy, to his wife he was “surely one of the most fascinating men in the world.” As it happens how most happy wives do feel toward their husbands, in a manner of speaking. Some are content to let their husbands mind the bank, others not only mind the bank but furnish the nest right out of house and home. Life is like that sometimes.

     And on this particular morning, nothing was really bothering him much. His bank account had been feathered well, he had made the proper investments, he even felt he knew enough of the right people that whatever might happen to him in his life, on this particular day, he was going to come out a winner. Because that was the way it had always been. Sorrow and weeping were for losers. You only had so much time. There could only be one way out of life, and he was in no hurry to get there.

     This was supposed to be the day he and his young partner were supposed to get a new shipment of books from an esteemed publisher. Andrew didn’t really enjoy publishers, but he liked thinking of himself as a patron of the arts, and cultivated frienships with novelsits, poets, and “ciritical thinkers.” In some people’s minds, he was like a literary groupie, but they were wrong, ever so wrong. Andrew’s keen eye for talent should have placed him in an editor’s seat at just this very same publisher he’d be signing the bill of lading for. But it hadn’t, and for that, well, it was the world’s loss.

     When he drove up to the loading dock he found Thaddedeuce already wrangling pallets off the bobtail truck that had driven up for the delivery. The bill of lading was right there on his chair as he entered his office, set his coat on the corner hatrack, and put his portfolio on the desktop. He picked up the papers and filed through them. Siteen of this, seventeen of that, eighteen, nineteen, twenty percent of 2000 equals…

 He didn’t mind crunching the numbers, but this was perhaps the most dreary part of his job.

     Tires squealed as Thaddedeuce swung the forklift back into position to bring up another pallet. The pallets themselves were being unwrapped by a third man, Romero Cistercian, a patient, quiet, unassuming immigrant son of a Oaxacan stevedore. Stevedorianism ran in the family, and so far, Andrew considered, it didn’t seem that Romero had a destiny for anything but.

     The forklift shimmied under the new weight, however, and the pallet crashed to the floor.

     “Thad! I thought we had this better organized! Don’t dare try to put too much on that old beast! Haven’t I told you?” Romero was hopping mad, and you could see the beads of sweat forming on his brow as he awaited the expected storm that would be Andrew, once Andrew appraised the new situation.

     But Andrew surprised him today. No storm, no gnashing of the teeth nor curtness of word. Andrew just smiled, and with a wave of his hand, returned back to the office.

There was something else eating at him.

     The night before, he had had a most unpleasant dream. In this dream, voices and faces and places he knew came through in a terrible stream. Was he accused of a blasphemy? Had he been living life unrepentant? Was he unexamined, heedless, careless, demonic?
     The dream had set him in a large meadow. It had reminded him of a certain meadow overlooking the Pacific, on the hillsides behind Mount Tam. He and his wife had picnicked there once. That afternoon had remained with him as one of his most perfect days…

     But this Elysian memory now was only a fragment in a larger tapestry, that he called his life. And his life, at least, his dreaming life, was being challenged by powers he felt he didn’t need to believe in, indeed, he had not believed in since childhood, if ever.

     He was mulling all that over when drawing a fresh cup of coffee from the office coffemaker. Stirring in a packet of stevia (for he preferred it to sugar- at his age he didn’t care to become diabetic) he sat at the desk, looking out the warehouse windows to the wide green expanse beyond. For ten years he had run this warehouse, and for those ten years, he had never had a single employee he didn’t like. Until, of course, Thaddedeuce.

   And wouldn’t it just be fate but that at that very moment, who entered the office but Thaddedeuce. Sweat, worry lines, and extreme blush constituted his countenance, his long hair beneath his baseball cap wet and lank. “I’m sorry, boss. I didn’t mean to let that pallet get off-line.”

     “But are the books OK?” smiled Andrew. Of course they were. There was no need to wrestle with Thaddedeuce’s ass over things like bent book boxes. Bent book boxes were dime-a-dozen. He could afford to be gregarious. It was a new day. Save hassles for the

times later on, when we hash out what is going where and how much we are going to mark them up to generate our own cut.

     “So I’m off the hook?” Thaddedeuce was known for his self-deprecation. Andrew thought of it as Thad’s biggest fault, but there must be more to him than met the eye.

He knew that to be true of most people to begin with. It was whether or not you could see eye to eye with them at all on anything that mostly fixated him. Certain things, Andrew knew of course to be true.

   Like this idea that some supreme being, some invisible friend, got to ride beside certain people and not others. Andrew didn’t have any invisible friends, and barely got along with many of his visible ones,  at times. Apparently Romero and Thaddedeuce could rely on their invisible friends to provide for them. Andrew provided for himself. He provided for his wife. Not a lot beyond them, maybe, mattered, but staying the course, staying on track, and getting to the end of it without having to step on too many toes.

    “I have to make up with Romero, boss. He has been on me all week about where we have been filing the nonfiction. I tell him, there’s room over here for a whole new section, and he says “no, we have used this section here for nonfiction, ever since I get here!” and now that that side has been filled completely, he wants to keep on piling them up to the ceiling. I tell him “but the whole stack will come down on someone if you’re not careful” and he’s telling me because that’s how you want it. I can’t get a compromise, and so…”

   “And so you need me to tell you what I think, or, you want me to tell Romero what I think. I see.” Andrew had hoped that the issue of floor space could be saved for the afternoon, but, there it was now, impinging on his fine personal moment. Sometimes to keep from flying off the handle I have to take the reins.

     “Well Thad, this is where I am at with it. I want to be able to find things when I need them. Tell Romero he is wrong. You can use the new space for nonfiction. I need to get both of you guys in here this afternoon for a conference on just what I want, what we need, and who is going to do what. OK?”

    Andrew could tell Thaddedeuce was now visibly relieved. The blush had started to fade from his face, and the young man was standing a little taller in the doorway. Andrew dismissed him with another wave of the hand, and Thaddedeuce was off to wrestle with more pallets.

     But to get back to Andrew’s dream. Something about it troubled him. If there were no such thing as spirit and the voices were imaginary why did they take over, hijack his dream from him? He thought ideas of ancestor worship and the like to be nothing but superstition, yea, contemptible ‘fairy tales.’ Anyone who’d take such primitive anthropological evidence to be more than such was toying with flake material, so much as he had ever previously considered it.

    But the voices that night seemed to be winning his trust, as unlikely as it happened to be, or not.

    For the next week, he tried ignoring the voices. But when he did it seemed they only came again, insistent louder. It wasn;t even really llike they were actual “voices”- that was only how he chose to define them for himself. More, they were like forces of nature itself, apparent within the walls, the floors, the stone retaining walls, the flagpoles, the waters… Almost as if the very quarks of existence had been attempting to “SPEAK!” with him. And try as he might to turn off their insistent yammering, they only returned.

Not even seven cups of coffee in a day could drive them out, not even six martinis, not even a hit on a joint passed at a party. Nothing did the problem- for he was beginning to realize it was a problem- any good.

    One afternoon sitting in the office listening to Jazzbeau Collins on the public radio station, he had an idea. “If I can’t fight them, why not join them? Why not attempt to figure this out by allowing my mind to be a spectator, and just see where things take me? After all you only live once.” And so he decided.

     “You win, whatever-you-ares. You win. You can have my thoughts, I don’t care. Just shut the fuck up for a while. I need to concentrate on reality. You bug the shit out of me. I’m the boss here. But if you want you can rent the corner of that left hemisphere, if only you promise you’ll shut the fuck up and let me work!”

     At that very moment Thaddedeuce stomped in off the warehouse floor. “I have a problem, boss. It looks like that entire flat we got last week is teetering on the platform. If we don’t get some guys up there by tomorrow, the entire flat could tip over and we’ll have hella trouble getting things back where they were. Not to mention all those boxes that are going to spill and break. I am freaking out already just thinking about it.”

    “OK. Here’s what- you and Romero go get Schoenberger and Orenbow up there. The first thing we do is get the gravity off the top. Once you have most of those transferred down to the bottom floor, start rearranging things so there are more surface areas. What we will need to do is have a special sale over next weekend and get more of the stock out so there won’t be so much. I know it is off-schedule, but if we keep on overloading that platform there will be trouble.”

     “OK. I guess I will call around and see if I can get those guys to come in and some more folks to work the sale. It is not the right time of year- but we don’t have a choice do we?”

    “I agree. Wrong time of year, and yes, no other choice. But if you guys can get the top layers off and onto the floor at least we might have a litle relief.”

     Thaddedeuce went back out on the floor to talk it over with Romero. The entire operation depended now on the timely transfer of boxes. A lot of the stock would need to go into brand new boxes, and they would need people working on that, as well as hurrying the process it would be easy to pick out stock to set out for the sale this way.

     Either way, it involved more people than Andrew felt like speaking with already.

    After a full day of oveseeing as much moving and rearraging as he could stomach Andrew got into his SUV and headed back home over the bridge. When he got home, there was a letter waiting in the mailbox he had no expectation of.

    The letter was from his brother Michael. Michael had lost, gained, and lost again, a large fortune in securities and equity bonds. His penchant for gambling with his investments (partially, the money of Others) had given most of the family reason to hold him at arm’s length. If Michael ever needed money from them, they’d certainly burn his ears with complaints.

    But this was relatively good news. Michael, for once, was offering to help Andrew.

There would be a one-time non-obligatory check arriving in a number of days. He had hit it big again, and was just feeling generous. Five thousand dollars woul dgo a long way to helping Andrew feel a little less pressured. Maybe he could even go on vacation again.

    But there could be no vacation with this space and storage problem. Andrew decided to to do the one thing he always did when he needed to take his mind off work- he jacked himself up in his bed and read. There was always a stack of books in the process of being read on the bedside table. This week he was reading Rimbaud, and next week he thought he might try going back and reading Swift. There were times that he felt like nothing in this modern world held a candle to the places that the early Romantic era could give him. And few people, with the exception of his wife, could give him the relief that the minds of yore allowed him. Sometimes he felt they were the only company worth keeping.

for the full story you can go to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/308624 and acquire this as well as others in ebook format

& It Hit Honolulu Like a Tidal Wave: A Hard Day's Night

      John Lucey introduced me to the Beatles. The songs were all over the radio, but I had an interest in radio strictly for baseball up to that point. All of a sudden there was music. And the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York on Februrary 9, 1964. I am one of the millions who tuned in. When the movie A Hard Day’s Night came out, John and I went to the Kaimuki Theater in downtown Honolulu to see it.

     We had an experience not dissimilar to what Phil Lesh described in his own life- “being the only guy in a theater full of screaming chicks”. Outside on the sidewalk afterword, girls were graffiti-ing the building with lines like “I Love Paul!” or “Sally Loves John!” and the like. I guess I knew then there was something to it and music would be what I’d most like to do with my life- being a kicker for the Forty-Niners might have been fine, but then, I turned out to be less suited to football than baseball in the end.

     The Beatles music really changed the way I looked at things. All of a sudden, sitting there with my ukulele, I felt dissapointed. The heck with this ukulele! I thought, I want an electric guitar! You couldn’t rock out with a ukulele- and I’m sorry, but for all those folks who came later that took an interest in it, including George, the irony for me is that it had been George Harrison inspired me most to begin this campaign on my parents to get one.

     All of a sudden, the terrible black and white world transformed into a technicolor one. History for me begins with the Beatles, not the Oswald murder. Music seems to begin there as well, (even if it didn’t) although I do remember listening to my babysitter’s transistor radio and bands like the Supremes, and songs like The Leader of the Pack and of course, Richie Valens’ La Bamba. But it didn’t have the effect, none of it did, like the Beatles. Soon I was learning drum parts for all the songs and bopping my head like Ringo did. Small compensation for a person who was born to play on strings!

     When the Beatles Second Album arrived on the shelves, I went out and bought that. While the first record was pretty neat, aspects of the second just fascinated me. I loved the piano break in The Devil In Her Heart- as well as the double entendre “but she’s an angel sent to me…” Roll Over Beethoven, Long Tall Sally,  and You Really Got A Hold On Me, and the gloominess inherent in I Call Your Name- not to mention the cowbell!


Reprinted from No Backstage Passes In Heaven (An Autobiographical Memoir)

“Great Men” and Delusions of Grandeur

"Who ever read the private memorials, correspondence, &tc, which have become so common in our time, without wondering that "great men" should act and think "so abominally" ?  --Edgar Allen Poe, 1827

     “He was a Great Man.” “He was a Great man.” “He was a great Man”. These are often cliches sent up whenever certain people pass away in the headlines. Perhaps we could examine this concept “greatness” in light of the manner in which it may have (or may not) changed over the centuries.

     First, consider the first man to bear this title toward posterity, Alexander of Macedonia. Given unto his mother in prophecy to become a “great” ruler, Alexander engaged in adolescent competition with his father for the stakes and the glories of conquest. It’s also rumored he was behind the death of his father, although historians have never confirmed this to anyone’s satisfaction. All the same, Alexander united Greece and marched across Asia through Persia to India, until he overreached his supply lines. He didn’t make it back home. And so he went out “on top of his game.”

     Next consider another “great” man who took the template cast by Alexander and reworked it, Napoleon Bonaparte, (aka, the Butcher of Europe’). Napoleon co-opted the optimism and leftover shreds of nationalistic pride of the French Revolution and marched across Europe, uniting duchies and kingdoms under his banner by dint of war, and continued on across Europe and into Russia where he was forced to reconsider his options. Returning in a shambles, his army a broken remnant of former glory, he fell, but rose again from exile to make one last ditch effort to reassert himself. Only to be broken at Waterloo by another “great” man, the Duke of Wellington.

     From the recent past we need only look to the 20^th c. for more such examples of “great” men, be they “benign”- (Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill) or malevolent (Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong). What had they all in common?

     For the “great” man to truly succeed one trait in particular is necessary. This is to view the larger group of humanity as a whole as numbers, statistics, faceless ciphers, and to be able to move, mold, and manipulate these whole figures into some body politic which will accept both his leadership, as well as submission to his ideologies. It translates in our current era to politicians who are less concerned with actually meeting the individuals that will vote for them (much less to remember all those he meets on campaign!) than they are with acquiring knowledge and intelligence of the numbers stacked for or against him. In this manner, all the body politic become nothing more than means to an end, without any remembered individuality, and without any scruples toward the assumption of power over the domain of them all.

    Where are the “great men” for whom their fellow men are well met and met on the level of exchange as such to treat each of them with the particular care that engenders mutual respect and consideration? You can maybe pick out two, in particular or three- Jesus Christ, Gautama Buddha, and Lao Tse- although to choose these three puts you on somewhat of a loss where those who consider the philosophy of each to be not more than handwringing pantywaisted superstition. Quaint. And yet somehow the philosophies of each have survived competitively with those of Alexander, Napoleon, or Mao.

    One thing each of these representatives of Power and Dominion share is the sociopathic ability to ignore the suffering of others and wade through oceans of blood and mud over the bodies of those who have given their lives to their cause. Especially noxious the Communist, who preached of a heaven on earth, a worker’s paradise, and proceeded to outlaw strikes, and independent (non-dialectic!) criticism. Theirs would be a paradise built on blood and bones. Hardly any reason for hope, there. Napoleon once spoke of the wonderful stench of the battlefield, of how good he felt to walk amongst the dead and the cries of the dying, as if the very mother who bore him was not but a rutting stoat who’d given her all to breach this beast of doom upon the world. Every dictator had an innocent mother, or so we might have hoped.

    The human race cannot continue to bear the weight of these “great men” whose ambitions are such as to turn the world on an axis of murder. Excuses are made by Machiavellians (those without morality, principle, nor redemptive character) that “this is the way it’s always been and always will be.” But somehow the Utopian spirit of mankind yet awakens each time from the nightmare anew and finds ways to assert itself against the darkness. Without this guiding Utopian vision, progress, such as it might be, would forever be extinguished, and the human race would fall into a greater and fuller debasement.

    In light then of what society like to remember as “great” men, consider the idea of “delusions of grandeur” itself. Often this is a tag given to those who have somehow come up against established ideas of normality, and the “symptom” as such is used as a condescending put down. In some cases this might be well deserved (as in the case of Theodore Kaczynski) but often as not (as in the case of Kaczynski) it’s a means of people of a lesser intelligence being able to feel good about morally judging someone of a higher intelligence. You do not have to agree with his methods or philosophy to recognize a certain genius in his logic, nor to feel sickened at the idea there are (yet) people out there (such as TK) who see their fellow humans as a “cancer and a pox upon the planet.” He certainly has the requisite of “seeing the body politic as numbers to be eliminated” and his support amongst an environmental activist community that shares his sociopathic goals can only be hoped will fade with time.

    What about, however, the person of modest means and ambition, who only seeks to further a vision of art, harm nobody intentionally, and stay out the way of these sociopathic “movers and shakers”- these so-called “social visionaries” or “reformers’? To come up against this same implacable value system can drive the most patient of artists to suicide, to madness, or to regret that enough had not been accomplished. But are these same desires any less “great” than the goals of the bloodstained? I think not. Someday I believe art will win out over idiocy… and that it is up to each of us involved on one level or another in the arts to do everything we can to provide alternative visions where hope can thrive and survive. If Napoleon was a "great  man" then surely, Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Gauguin were that much greater.

One Tough Ride (Conclusion)

V. Judgement

     “OK, Larry, have you managed to bring the court the papers we were seeking?

     “Indeed.”

     “You will hand them over. I will order a brief recess.” The Judge nodded to the  bailiff, and banged his gavel.

    “Court will stand in recess for one half hour. I am going to review the material brought by Attorney Betinsky. You will reconvene here at 11:15.”

    Betinsky walked back to the defense table and handed over a manila folder with a sheaf of documents inside. As he did so, he noticed that the staredown between Tunny and Delgado was almost at flashpoint. He gave a nod to the bailiff.
    The bailiff walked over to Tunny and gave him a stiff poke to the shoulder.”Judge says you can recess now. Come back at the proper time. Delgado smirked. Again the power felt like it was on his terms. But the Bailiff strode up to him and took him by the wrist. “You wait in here in the holding cell, sir.” Now Delgado was separated by stone walls and steel bars. And nobody was listening.”

  

     Judge Fisk looked over the papers which Betinsky had brought. He didn’t see anything related to risk insurance. Surely a man like Waldfetter ought to have come up with more decent business practices, with all that dough he made off the community. But so far as he looked, there was nothing. Certainly he had the employees covered with decent health plans, (now that the government was enforcing it) but he had not been so willing to go so far as to provide any help for situations such as these. Waldfetter would have to stand trial. So would the kid, but in his case as it was accidental, involuntary manslaughter.

     He decided to offer bail to both of them. The magnate would need to post four million. The kid, he could set that somewhat lower, say, $50,000. And if he tried to run, which he wouldn’t, not with three kids in school, then he could bench-press him.

    

     At the appointed hour, the bailiff opened the courtroom for the spectators and participants. Tunny decided to sit on the other side of the room, since they were not going to be calling him back. The Judge came in and when all had been seated again, took off his glasses, wiped them with a handerkerchief concealed beneath his robes, and made his announcement.

    “ I have reviewed the documents provided by the defense. The evidence cleary shows to me a history of contemptuous presumption on the part of the Waldfetter company. Therefore I am requiring that Mr. Waldfetter post a bond of four million dollars”…

   

     Leighton Waldfetter, who for the most part had sat almost disinterested through this entire session, jumped from his chair, his face quite flushed. “I protest this! Our company can’t take that much away at this time! We’re not even into the holidays!” But the bailiff pointed a finger at him, and that prompted a “Sit down!” from Davenport Fisk.

   The judge continued. “Shutup, Mr. Waldfetter, and  don’t give me any of that crap, I know you can afford it. You are going to be charged with the following things. One, corporate malfeasance in not providing risk insurance for customers of your amusement park. Two, gross negligence leading to gross bodily harm on four counts. And Three: conspiracy to defraud the State of California by not providing such insurance and operating an unsafe place of work.   You will be held until bond has been posted. “

    “In the case of Mr Delgado, I recommend he post a bond of $50,000 and will face trial on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. If you attempt to leave the county, Mr Delgado, you will be subject to arrest and detention. As a young father I know I can depend on you to be responsible. Please do what you can to post bail, so you can return to caring for your daughters.”

     “The case will be sent to the Superior Court and clients and attorneys will have time to prepare their cases. We will reconvene on September 17^th of this year. This court is now dismissed.”

      Tunny felt a little better, but couldn’t resist the need to upchuck into the wastebasket when he got home. “I don’t see why Waldfetter just didn’t go out and purchase jetpacks for all the people to begin with. Oh- perhaps,  the customers would’ve just… flown away… with them...”

(epilog)

       Leighton Waldfetter posted bail eventually, though he had to sweat it out for a few days. Through an intermediary, Delgado too found some means of gathering his own bail.  Tunny got his workman’s compensation and disability claims approved and extended indefinitely. As the trial was a slam dunk, the Chavez family (Bobby’s mother, at least) received an award of nine million dollars. It really had been one tough ride.

Follow Tunny as he travels to Paris in Bus of Fools at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/348575