Nadastra Snivaras

     The stark white tin of the roof of the van replaced the black inkling stars of the early morning sky, as Nadastra Snivaras woke at the ungodly hour of 3 AM. First things first, he thought, rolling up his sleeping bag and heading inside to his little shop, and lighting 

a stick of incense, he placed it at the altar and began his puja.

     It had been some sixteen years since he had slept with his wife, who still mended his clothing, and now did her own share of work in the shop with him. It was cheaper than hiring more workers, who only had to have things explained to them. Some were fast learners, but if they showed any signs at all of not being attentive- if, for example, they were intellectually trying to solve something other than the matter at hand, he would impatiently drive them forward with immediacy and determination.

     Maybe he hadn’t always been this way, since his conversion thirty some years before, when a traveling swami lecturer came through his town, and was rounding up disciples. “My guru,” sighed Nadastra, with an exhalation following, “Om, Shiva.” His guru was half a world away, now milking a cow in the ashram, then distributing the pot of milk to the many village children who called him Bapu.

     Nadastra blew on the incense, waved it before his guru’s portrait, supplicated himself to the statue of Shiva, and placed fresh flowers in the vase beside it. Once upon a time, his name had been Timothy, but that was before he became enlightened. Once upon a time he had been in the service, but that was a lifetime away now also. He couldn’t hack it, they had all called him a sad sack then, but he was going to show them, the stupid morons. He’d gone into university soon after his dishonorable discharge and got himself teaching credentials as an astronomy and mathematics professor. He knew what was what.

     What he knew now was all so different. He would need to consult his Vedic astrologer for a little more information about the current aspects. The business was going to be in hot water soon. Soon he’d need to lay off more of his worthless staff, if they couldn’t come up with more sales. It was all their fault. Inventory never seemed to get displayed properly, our advertising isn’t good enough, our customers are demanding payment, rather than the deferred credit options that he preferred. After all, it was easier to pay people in play money for what he couldn’t afford to spend on anyone other than his wife and daughters, and having a son in law on his way from overseas now, he needed every dime he could get, in order to cobble a good story up for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

     As for the inventory, half of that was crap, anyway, he thought. I have to keep items here because I never know when that one person who believes that item was made just for them is going to walk in. He hated the new wave of atheistic, tattooed yuppies who made up two thirds of the customer base now. But he always wanted them to be mollified, and maybe it was his karmic lesson, to learn to need to satisfy those people he would have despised, in any other situation.

     His wife showed up at close to 9:30 and began her usual daily routine, working in the back room. Her job consisted of toiling diligently all day with a can of lighter fluid and a razor blade, scraping hour by hour to clean price stickers from past sales off the various comics and magazines the store bought to resell. Other items that needed cleaning were also sent past her. Dolls, jack-in-the-boxes, puzzles, games, stuffed animals. Snivaras couldn’t give a damn if she sucked up carcinogens all day long, and she seemed not to mind much either. He’d much rather be exposing a member of his own family to this than some actual employee, who someday might instigate a lawsuit, should they become cancerous even indirectly. Scraping by by scraping. It wasn’t all so bad.

     For Nadastra, there was absolutely nothing but the business that mattered. He could never openly show his contempt for those he employed, that would have been bad policy. Instead, he hid it all behind a cover of “striving for harmony. Our business is not to make money but to spread harmony” he’d say. Of course, the fact he paid little money out of hand for health insurance- even managed to hold off offering any, until absolutely required to under new federal regulations, didn’t bother him, nor did the idea of even entertaining retirement accounts for his employees ever mean a thing, either. The only people who’d be able to earn anything off his enterprise in retirement were he and his partner, and the two of them together believed employee austerity was a far better business model than employee profit sharing. There would be none of that in his little kingdom!

     So his day was beginning easily enough, until Craith showed up. Craith was the office gofer, the chief cook and bottle washer, the man without whose expertise in used comic books Snivaras would have been totally at sea. He had been there the longest of all the other employees, and he had worked hard for Snivaras. In fact, there were many, many things about the daily operation of the store he was on top of before Snivaras ever had a clue- that was how good he was.

     On plenty of occasions, Craith had saved Snivaras’ ass, of course, and even those occasions went right past Snivaras. The time the fire marshals had breezed through, looked the joint over, and written up a thirty-three point citation. Craith had handled that directly, and had set a couple of the other workers to busy correcting the problems before Snivaras even knew the Fire Department had been by. It had been three weeks before he received a letter, informing him that the store was not in compliance.

     “Ask them to come by again,” said Craith. When the Inspectors came through again,on the very afternoon, this time they were quite pleased. No longer were the stacks and shelves topped off with another row of books, reaching to just inches of the ceiling. No longer was the asbestos fiberglass in the attic of the store drooping from the roof and contributing to the general fire hazard. Of course, a store dealing in comic books, old phonograph records, and magazines, would be bound to be a tinderbox for any suspected arsonist. But those matters had been handled under Craith’s diligent eye, and for now, at least, Snivaras knew he could depend on another great write-up from the Chamber of Commerce.

     Craith never liked interrupting Snivaras. Sometimes it was indeed necessary, as when the delivery truck, which took many of the newly bought comics and records off to the online center where his partner worked, didn’t show up on schedule. The truck not being there might mean a huge backlog of transport cartons and banker’s boxes would pile up in the rear entry hall – another situation the Fire Marshall would be unhappy about. The backlog could sometimes take a week to clear out, in that case, since the store continued, daily, to buy more and more material. Some of it would go immediately out to the shelves, some of it would immediately be sorted for the online, and a lot of it ended up in the back room, where Mrs. Snivaras scraped and scraped.

     At precisely ten o’clock, the next of the dedicated crew turned up- two elderly ladies, who had supported the store from its inception, and Pandanus, another one of the more experienced hands. Pandanus had spent a great deal of his younger life working as a musician, although for now, he found the comic store all-consuming. It was also gaining him friends, and that was another benefit. Besides being able to borrow and read any new comics, or listen to any new (used) records, the store afforded him a social life he could neither beg, borrow, or steal on his own efforts. Pandanus was something of a humble geek, in other words. He didn’t possess the self-assurance of Craith, nor the ability necessarily to hide out his own flubs from Snivaras. Snivaras’s eagle eye, of course, could spot a miscue from around a corner and behind a blind wall. It had to be that way, of course.
     

     The two of them, Pandanus and Craith, spent a great deal of time chatting each day with the two elderly ladies (Joann and Pisces). Pisces had spent her childhood in Argentina and loved the memory of the wild, free flat pampas, flinging a bolo at escaping grouse, hotting and hollering like a true gaucho. Joann came from the Rocky Mountains, where her own childhood had been spent shooting rattlesnakes and mountain lions. She was nobody's fool, either. They had both, however, become a part of the religious order to which Snivaras belonged, and through it, had become his employees. So they served with impressive loyalty and were probably the most well-remembered point of contact for the store’s many regulars.

     The regulars were a cast of characters deserving a story all their own. But to serve this one, we’ll only mention two or three, the most problematic, perhaps, from the point of view of the clerks and owner, but also the ones who had contributed primarily to the welfare of same as well, due to their addiction to the comic trade.

     Perhaps one of the most vexing was their friend Tracy. Tracy was paraplegic, and so, was precluded from actually visiting the comic book store personally. So he would call, four times a day at times, to ask if they had the most recent Batman the Twilight Avenger, or X-Men, or just whatever it happened to be that he had been reading about online. Almost every phone call he made to the store, Tracy would mention how he was reading a blog that mentioned (said comic) and so he was interested if the store had it yet. Pandanus would roll his eyes – usually, no one had let go of the recent releases- rarely anyone ever did until they were at least six months old. So Pandanus was often the one the other clerks would turn to if Tracy was calling. Generally if anyone knew that something was in or not, it might be Pandanus.

     Craith had his own problems at the moment- one of them was, are we going to be paid on time again, or not? More often than not, no, the paychecks would be delayed again, for up to two weeks. Craith wondered how Nadastra expected anyone to survive, on a regimen that paid out only once per month, demanded that each employee budget on to the very last penny three weeks ahead (if not two entire months) and did not cash out advances, either. It was as though they were all little chicks chasing after the big mother hen who might dash them a grain of corn, if they were lucky, but otherwise forced each of them to peck willy-nilly for whatever crumbs they could fathom on the edge of the pen.

     Craith slammed the door after the last discussion with the book keeper. No, of course not, there was not enough money in the tiller to pay everyone on time. Now, each clerk would need to wait until a pre-specified day to cash a check that wasn't worth the paper it was written on- until that day. Uniformity was apparently another essential business function that had been relegated to the medieval business model Nadastra and his partner had made their own.

     Some of them were lucky actually, to have a cult to belong to, which coincidentally allowed them the luxury of being assured a roof over their heads. For at least two others, the surety of a loving wife, and her substantive income, was all that held them apart from the various homeless who would sometimes camp out on the benches outside the store.

     So it was just such a day. Craith was pissed off. There was not going to be a payday for him for the next eleven days- and this was the seventh straight month in a row that Nadastra was not paying out on schedule. “It’s all late again!” he muttered to Pandanus. Pandanus would just shrug and say, “Oh well…”

     Of course, if one asked Nadastra exactly why pay was late, it would generally be some lame excuse such as, well, we didn’t have it budgeted exactly (thank you, Mrs. Bookkeeper!) or ‘your section isn’t performing up to standard. I want to see you step it up and improve the display” or something guaranteed to switch the blame to the employee, and get it off his own back.

     Of course now, Nadastra was a pillar of his community. The religious cult he and the elderly women belonged to asked him each year to lead their biggest festival, the Diwali. But there was going to be a wrinkle in it all this year. Since the bookkeeper had not budgeted for the store’s IRS bill this year, Nadastra and his partner both were going to be forced to work overtime for several months, put most of the stock out on discount tables, and nobody was going to be getting any raises this year, either, by the way. Worst of all, he wouldn’t be able to lead the congregation in the Diwali bhajans. Horrors!

     “It’s been a long time since I was even able to feel grateful I had a job at all,” Craith completed the idea. To that, Pandanus returned another shrug.

     Now, it never really occurred to Nadastra what-all fiscal responsibility to his employees might mean. As mentioned before, employees were a necessary evil, hired only when the staff just couldn’t take another camel-straw, and as easily let go as the ones who really could not stick it out under the harsh once-a-month pay schedule broke on the rocks of their self-dignity.

     That was why it was up to Pandanus to mop the floors and scrub out the toilets every day before customers arrived, and to vacuum the rugs across the entire square footage. This had to be done each day, of course, lest customers get the idea that nobody cared about appearances. The fact the rugs were at least as old as the store itself didn’t seem to make a difference either, so long as they were clean. So often, Pandanus might spend fifteen minutes to clear a long string of rug from between the vacuum’s rollers. Adding to the frustration might be the fact that sometimes the vacuum would have had a similar problem when the night janitor used it, and they’d set the drive belt back in, backwards. Such were the petty problems. Nadastra liked to apply himself to the bigger questions.

     And so, the petty questions, the smaller things that were the glue that held his store together, were mainly handled by Cratih, Pandanus, his wife, and their younger daughter. Craith sometimes wondered what made a cool chick like that stick around. Apparently there was some family loyalty that went beyond growing up a second-generation converted Hindu vegetarian. But that was a question he just couldn’t answer. It all seemed at times to be too much to bother with. He tried to focus on the things about the work he actually enjoyed- such as, the opportunity to see books others wouldn’t, first crack at a good read, and the ability to borrow any work he wanted to. And sometimes, the odd incoming item that would prove interest above and beyond the call of shelf life.

     Such an item turned up one afternoon while Nadastra was off visiting his partner at the online office. It was a… very special comic book. The cover, for one thing, showed the very back counter where Craith and Pandanus were sorting the new used items. And there was Nadastra, sitting behind his computer as was his usual way on a weekday afternoon.

   
     There behind the counter, engaged in a conversation- were Pandanus and Craith, drawn very meticulously accurate, and Craith looked up at the seller and smiled.

     “How many of these in production?”

     “I believe we ran a thousand to begin with. We’ve sold a lot, actually.” Craith also recognized the face before him at the counter. It was Daniel Harmoneras, a well-known comic artist and a local character. He didn’t question why Harmoneras might have been in line on this particular day, as he skimmed the pages, he noticed… things about the comic that made it… rather more interesting, the further he went.

     Meanwhile, Harmoneras stood waiting for his ticket to be written up. Tales From A Crypt was but one of a stack of sixty comics he had brought in- all of them still pristinely packaged in slipcovers, most all of the in mint condition. Harmoneras had brought in, it seemed, his entire 1960’s-70’s underground collection-rarities such as Air Pirates Funnies, Dirty Duck, Dan O’Nelll’s Bodkins… the list went on- many Crumbs, Craith noted… also a lot of Gilbert Shelton and Kitchen Sink. This would be an expensive ticket.

     Nonetheless he wrote him up. Harmoneras needed the cash. Again, Craith didn’t ask questions. He handed him the slip. Harmoneras nodded. $175 might be a little low for some of these titles, but he had to take into account the store needed to profit by the purchase.

     As Harmoneras left to cash the slip in at the front register, Craith called Pandanus over to have a look.

     “My my, said Pandanus. It appears we’re going to be famous! Will you let me borrow it after you're done?”

     Craith nodded. Meanwhile, after another short skim and looking over, he stuck the comic in his backpack for reading at home that night.

     It wasn’t very flattering, he found, but at least, Harmoneras hadn’t made him the target of his pen. Apparently Harmoneras and Snivaras had had dealings in the past. Harmoneras didn’t feel that good about things, and each page of the comic (it was a four color press) showed Snivaras in ever increasingly critical situations. Apparently Harmoneras had some sort of third eye, some extrasensory perception, as each panel seemed to depict something that Craith absolutely remembered vividly as an incident that had either upset or annoyed him, as to some aspect of Snivaras and his personality.

     It was a lot like being inside a disappearing Chinese hall of mirrors. Nevertheless, he found it clever, inspiring, and absolutely riveting. By the time he had finished the comic he had made up his mind.

     When he dropped the comic with Pandanus the next morning, he also left a note inside Nadastra’s inbox. 

     “Sorry to do this, sir, but I am taking an indefinite leave of absence.
I am sure you will find suitable replacements for my services.” He smiled. There would be a lot of hard work ahead, but he knew- he didn’t feel like living in that disappearing hall of mirrors another day.

     Snivaras did strike some people that way. The Dickensian manner in which he had managed the shop had not only alienated his most serviceable employee, it had stranded the most tenured ones. For the afternoon that Harmoneras had visited, he had given pink slips to the two old ladies. They had sat with him for two hours afterward, crying in their handkerchiefs. “But – this will destroy my life” said Pisces.

     “Now… if I have a choice between destroying someone’s life and saving my business, well, there’s no question for me, I’m going to save my business” he answered. Apparently beneath his holy and righteous exterior he hid an inner Macchiavelli- willing to kick over anything and anyone that got in his way- the end justifies the means- who were these people, these annoying drains on his personal profit, these tax liabilities, these expenses of medical insurance he often fudged on reporting because of his contempt for federal regulations? And there was plenty of crap on the shelves- fully half of it is crap, he thought, and he made no secret of it. But still, he needed every copy of every comic book that came out, just in case that one person would walk in who needed that one book-

     Pandanus pulled his jacket down at the end of his long shift. He had read the new comic over his lunch break. He considered leaving a note, himself. But no. Instead, as he turned out the lights, he left the comic sitting on the stool where Nadastra would find it in the morning. And then, he was turning out the light, and locking the door behind him.

     For Nadastra, it would be a lonely future.

Transition- Back to Suburbia

     Moving is always a hassle no matter who you are. I am making my third move in as many years- in 2009 I moved from San Francisco to the Peninsula (Menlo Park)- in May of 2011 I moved to Mountain View and Kurt Kieffer’s restored 1880 farmhouse- and now in March of 2012 I depart “the country” for the more relentlessly suburban life across town, in a six-plex where we have a corner unit with a large backyard.

   Of course I would not have it any other way that I found a place with a yard, since Carolyn’s pets would have had to have been split up, otherwise, and I didn’t feel like living with a woman stressing out over having had to give up a pet for the ability to have someplace to go- since the farmhouse was always one of those “only so much time to be here” kinds of deals, and Carolyn is up against the limit of other things in her life… recuperating from a foot injury she got on the job working for Whole Foods when she broke an ankle and having a terrible time getting back to health, with a possibility remaining of future surgery and another year’s recovery…

No, I don’t think it would have been a good idea to move Carolyn without her dog. And neither, her cat, who’s grown rather fond of me his own self. Two unrelated and uninvolved members of the opposite sex have to respect each other’s space and we do. It’s actually kind of like an experiment for myself, to see how well I can relate to another of the opposite sex in living closely without the emotional gamesmanship that goes along with relationships, but since we had mutual friends we have a leg up on being total strangers trying it. For financial reasons, I having been unemployed almost the entire time I lived at Kieffer’s, and her being on workmen’s comp, we needed to get someplace we could afford that would afford us fewer nuisances like credit checks, references, let us keep the dog and cat and still come up within our mutual shelter budget.

The dog and the cat, well, they just have to deal. The large acreage of the Calderon Avenue house was carefree- we could let either of them out any hour of day or night and they would be relatively no bother. Here they are crowded into a fraction of the space they once had, so their territoriality senses will have issues for a few weeks, if not longer. And there are other critters about who have tenure... they need to get used to that.

    The fact Carolyn was so close though, to the Expresso band and all of its members, and that she is into photography, and is also a friend of my newest musical collaborator Bundy Browne, makes for our getting along too. Not to mention that we both grew up within a couple of miles of each other on the South shore of Oahu during the early 1960’s, and that she, her sister and I all happened to go to the same school there for a time (Punahou) leaves us with a lot to talk about. She also has similar musical tastes that range from acoustic and electric ja and blues through the Dead, the SF rock scene of the 60’s. and mid-sixties Brit-rock like the Beatles, the Stones, as well as Dylan.

     Carolyn’s relationship to Kieffer was something like “sister out-of-love” That is, while they were never lovers, they had lived together (like this) off an on several times over their lives. Carolyn has tons of Kieffer stories- my own friendship with him was so far back (adolescence) that many of them I just absorb and grin… Kurt was the first guy I knew who built his own bong- out of something other than bamboo. Long ago, my  friend Kevin’s brother John brought a bong up from Santa Barbara on a college break. The pipe grew in popularity anongst John’s younger brothers, Matt, in particular, who was Kurt’s best friend many years, began going on raids (with Kurt) in the upper reaches of San Carlos’ Eaton Avenue, for tall bamboo stalks to be cut into foot-sized bongs. After a couple of years of bamboo pipes, however, it was Kieffer got the idea first to make a ceramic bong. Under the cover of creating a coffee cup in his high school Ceramics class, he crafted a pipe known as the “Treebeard bong”- it has a pipestem shaped like a face, with the pipe bowl where the nose might be. Carolyn still has this pipe, which Kurt gave to her many years ago as a token of friendship… nowadays they are all made of pvc and glass, but Kieffer was the first person I can recall, as early as 1971, who made the personal creative step of taking the traditional Vietnamese design one step beyond.

     As a performer, Kurt’s style of playing- tone, phrasing, is nost similar to Pat Metheny, Larry Carlton, John McLaughlin, Stevie Ray Vaughn- who were his heroes. He liked Jerry Garcia, but didn’t especially go for Dead music per se-”too sloppy”- nor hope to be part of the Dead Scene the way I did. His playing was often flashy for the sake of flashiness, but as he aged and matured he became, like me, one of those “less is more” type of players. Steve Miller once commented on his prowess and offered to make Kurt a part of his band- whether Kurt really needed the boost or not, life circumstances were such as he didn’t take Miller up on it. Besides, in Steve Miller’s band there could really only be room for one star. And (in my opinion), Kurt was obviously the focus of Expresso… though I am sure the other members might argue it! He only would have eclipsed Miller, given the time.

     My other favorite memory of Kurt came through hanging out with the Donohue’s when their home on Frances Lane in unincorporated Deadwood was sold. We would hang out in the living room with the piano, which had not been moved out, alhough the family already had, and Kurt drew a large mural on the living room wall, a mountain scene similar to Mount Tam, and it was fun to play the piano and imagine oneself inside the picture. Certainly those few weeks between the one house and their new one (on Southgate St.) were idyllic- no adults around, and the house to ourselves, we would smoke what and when we wanted…

     However, because Carolyn and I are not an item (nor planning on becoming one), there’s the space to be ourselves without the private stress of intimacy. She has an ex-boyfriend comes round a bit, Jose, but on that I dare not speculate. Now that I am working again once more I can begin seeking out that other part of my soul who’s been hiding the last fifteen years or so, while I struggled back from divorce, uprooted from one home (or two), several jobs which took me from working class to middleclass and back again, (and now once more on the upswing) and I am ready as I will ever be for all that relationship means.

One thing I mean it to mean is loyalty on both sides of the aisle. I am never the one who leaves, who quits, who walks away from a love. No, it’s always the other way around. I am the one who gets left, (usually, for some jerk who’s less intelligent, less creatively talented, and less individualistically assertive, and I suppose by all that, "less threatening?") and I have little to apologize for in order to “deserve” a future relationship, certainly a lot less than I may have had at age 23, when everything I had worked for to that point failed me. No, if I have someone to love, they are my life and world, so this time around I intend not to give 100 % to anyone who won’t give 100 % of themselves to the “us”. Only in that way can you really achieve “50-50” anyway. And don’t you know that finding love is only the beginning? THEN the hard work begins! Too many people are running from being committed. I never ran from it, I just have done without it, since I can’t seem to find partners worthy of the matchup, or haven’t yet, at least. Forever is always scary to a coward, & I suppose I have never been afraid of living.

  

Anyway, moving helps you to focus on what you need in your life and what you don’t. During these last three moves, I have shed a little of my baggage, and yet still have one box full of ephemera, effluvium, stuff that had a purpose or has a future use which is yet cloaked in uncertainty. Things that could come in handy, “if”/”when”. And once I work my way through that box, tossing the needless and the purely dead wood, then I’ll have the ship on a trim sailing footing.

My work now involves describing pictures in textbooks for the blind. This involves seeing things in a different perspective- undertanding things from the perspective of those who cannot see but who are relying on your ability to communivate what you see, what the message is of the image, without subjectivity or editorialism.
I can’t add what isn’t being explained to any explanation, it always needs to be in the context of the text and a particular lesson. In some ways it is like being Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984- I have to help interpret history to the blind, and in some cases, make corrections (or allowances) for the stupid historical ignorance of (some) supposed professors of same. And I get off on being able to write better descriptions than “professors” and PhD’s would, in their “specialty” subjects. There is a difference between being able to recite history, and being able to interpret a historical artifact like a political cartoon, without bias…

But nonetheless, it is being paid for creative writing. Like, all I need to do now is get the publishing world to take on some of my work… there’s a lot on the shelf, in the drawer, completed work, work that can be completed on spec (if there’s backing) and work that’s just completed, needing only an editor to pick and choose and frame in a manner that’s acceptable… to those folks in those places & offices. For all the years I have spent working, getting paid for writing was always a goal, but it’s a hope that now that it’s working for me (one way) it can score for me the other way too… we’ll see. At the least I am getting in on the ground floor of a new assistive technology and getting my feet wet in electronic publishing. The way I look at it, it can all ony get better, because things have been (for far too long) going in a direction that required good financial management, deprivation, and rethinking of materialistic needs and acquisitions, and sheer persistence in knowing that I culd and woould hook up with a new ‘dream job” if only the right opportunities arose. And they have. I look forward to the next three to five years, and beyond…

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.

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& 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)