Prologue to Chapter 18, "The SwiftPad Extinction"

 ERICK DUKE, MERCENARY, MEETS HIS TROOPS
Early October

 

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Erick Duke’s father, Parnell, had made a fortune in direct marketing. When Erick was born, his family lived in a single-story, three-bedroom red brick house in St. Louis. Parnell was an Army helicopter mechanic, but he left the service under a cloud after the failed Iranian hostage rescue during the Carter years. Erick was only an infant then.
    Parnell joined the first Pentecostal Fellowship Council and started a multi-tiered direct marketing company called NewLife with a partner who later died under mysterious circumstances. NewLife sold ammunition, handgun components, and various other combat paraphernalia. It also sold women’s make-up and “survivalist feminine hygiene” products plus self-help books (How to NOT be a Homosexual, Clean and Sexy Makeovers, The Psychiatry Cult, Jesus in 30 Days, etc.).
    It took almost eight months for Parnell to cull through all of his potential business partners, who were promoted as an exclusive group, and he was very public in his sermons at his growing church about the need to be very selective (as well as the sacredness of the number 12).
    He sold the lifestyle to the associates. He made them feel special and exclusive. It was the lifestyle of the committed evangelical. Lots of meetings, deep regret about nothing, deep amnesia about the really bad shit. But that was just theatrics, the “small talk” before the short strokes. Parnell
instinctively knew he needed to convince them to be “slaves” (to the spirit of Jesus), and make them believe their business served a higher cause. For the first six months  they war-gamed their plans. They were to burn through family, grade school buddies, buddies’ parents, plus anyone else they could guilt into paying 5–10 times more than they would pay at Target, or Cabela’s or even online for stuff they didn’t need.
    Maybe 1 out of 20 people had the willpower to go outside their own “circle” and find strangers to buy the shit. They had to be determined not to end up with boxes of the shit in their garage. That’s the trick. Find those people, the 1 out of 20. Parnell taught them to be their own cult leader. They had to be as careful in finding their first “12” as Parnell had been. Once they learn the trick of lying, the rest is easy; there are an unlimited number of suckers out there.
    Those people who shamelessly promote the shit are your “bottom bitches.” You just need to find some good bottom bitches. Everyone has those people in their lives. They depend on you for their self-worth. So do them a favor, and put them to work. It’s what they want anyway. They understand what’s going on, but what they get out of it – self-worth, a reason for getting up every day – THAT is all the payment they need or expect. Just teach your bottom bitches to feel like royalty, better than royalty, and for them to do the same to their bottom bitches. There is an endless supply of BBs. And once you show them how you did it for (to) them, they will know how to do it themselves, and they will all believe that they are going to get rich too. Erick watched his father carefully through his youth and early teenage years as he grew his business.
    In actual fact, 98% of all “associates” in all multi-level marketing schemes (pyramid selling), regardless of the products, lose money. The math proving it is simple. And his always ends up the same. You need the maniacal qualities of a psychotic narcissist to be a leader in multi-level marketing. It is Cult Leading 101.
    Erick, or ED (not Ed as in Edward), understood his dad’s business and knew he could do it better. He thought his dad was lame and declared loudly that he didn’t need his fucking money or his bullshit company (or his evangelical religion for that matter!). He left home after finishing his homeschooling and getting an approved Missouri GED, joined the Navy, then quit that and with the secret help of his dad’s money got into Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Graduated with a degree in Geopolitics. 

    Joined the Navy (again) via Officer Candidate School. He got very fit and made it onto SEALs and within a year, on his second deployment, was charged with machine gunning 19 Arab villagers. He spent six months “under house arrest” but was never brought to trial. He was thrown out of the SEALs, but the murder case disappeared. Rumors said a lot of money flowed for a little silence. Congressional investigations circled all around his “honorable discharge” but again, crickets. Nobody would talk.
    Meanwhile his younger sister Martha became a Christian Internet sensation. Little innocent sister – caught in the maelstrom of our perverted culture! She was shrewd, built her image as a cult slut – long bizarre rants about how rap music and vaccines had stolen her sense of right and wrong – called out over fifty celebrities for “psychically” raping her as a child, had actual sex with three rich, local notables, all older men, one after the other, over a single week, videoed it all, and then outed them. She started an S-Plog that morphed into a high-production popular show on RFD network about the Satanic influence in popular culture along with cooking tips. She dressed in white, and wore daisies in her hair.
    On Sundays she delivered screeching video sermons in tight t-shirts and often would spin around when delivering a punchline, to show off her tramp stamp of Jesus on the cross just above her low-slung, cut-off jeans. She claimed prominent Dees were recruiting young girls into a sex cult and she had nearly been caught in it herself! They came for her, but she had fought them off, attacks which she described in graphic detail, attacks that nearly lost her newly restored virginity! No place or person was safe!
    On her show Martha interviewed another young woman who claimed to have been violated in her own bed by demons (“They told me that Black-Prez had sent them and that he was laughing and jizzin’ all over me!”). The woman gave tearful, long detailed descriptions of being raped repeatedly by big men – white men, “Chinamen,” and bringing up the rear, a Black man batting clean-up with a huge dick! How big? asked Martha. How is that possible, she asked, looking at how far her hands were spread apart.
    Martha talked about the power of her visions, and how those visions told more truth than anything – they told her the future, and most importantly, they told her what was in the hearts of people. Millions of views.
    She soon was preaching at her father’s mega-church, and quickly became the star attraction, driving attendance and collections too of course, higher and higher. And then – ED’s little sister was asked to be the Official Chaplain of the White House.
    Erick, a civilian again, hiding from his SEAL fuckup, had taken over his father’s business. His father had died on the pulpit while preaching. Some say he was trying too hard, competing with his daughter, who watched in what appeared to be fascinated horror as he flopped around on the stage like a walrus trying to get off the beach into the water. For the first 30 seconds of his death throes, the congregation clapped in unison to the strange rhythm of his convulsions. But when the true nature of his moribund condition was finally evident, they all burst into “Nearer My God to Thee.” When he died, Parnell was worth nearly a billion dollars.
    The autopsy found strychnine. The church had had recent infestations of rats, and the theory was he had accidentally eaten some of the poison left out. An investigation failed to find any evidence of foul play.
    ED sold his shares of his dad’s pyramid marketing company, NewLife, to Amway for $16 billion. He immediately kick-started a domestic protection force, based on the SEAL model. It was all white men (except for Echo Devious) and came to a certain kind of fame during the rise of Hassan Coleman. There were kidnappings of squatters, shootings, and social media campaigns against Hassan. Some of his guys got caught and begged for forgiveness. But there was no extrajudicial action; trials were judged fair by all accounts. After the (V)ICE debacle in Portland, when it was slowly revealed how Coleman had been closely involved in the defeat of the (V)ICE forces, the battle for Memphis’s soul was over and a warrant was issued for Erick Duke in Memphis.

From The Fall of It All – A History of the Big Dump

Reviews from READER VIEWS

 I occasionally write reviews for the book review site Reader Views.  

Reader Views 

It is a great site that helps new and mostly self-published authors (such as myself) to be reviewed.  The philosophy of the site (and of Sheri Hoyte, who is the main curator of the site) is to be firm, honest, but gentle if possible.  Because these are new and often unedited authors, their prose isn't always the most scintillating.  And  - those who live in glass houses etc.  - Reader Views has also reviewed my stuff - which I include at the end of the list below. 

I sometimes verged on being a bit mean - especially if the content was unartfully titillating or was too blatantly riding the coattails of current events - you know - "ripped from the headlines" stuff.  But I take the job seriously  - I am paid an honorarium for each review. I am currently taking a break from reviewing for the site,  as I am working on a new project and recovering from the election, but I hope Sheri will let me return to join her cadre of reviewers down the road. 

I have learned a great deal doing this - about spotting mistakes and weaknesses in my own work by seeing them appear in others - but also I find some really innovative narrative techniques that push the boundaries, yet often do work very well. And the ideas presented or the characters portrayed are often very unstereotypical, and can be boldly crafted.   One other reason I am taking a break is that it is hard work. Because I get paid, I take it very seriously. I read the novels closely, taking notes, and writing and revising the reviews to provide some value to the authors as well as their potential readers. Anyway - if you are looking for new fiction (and non-fiction too) to read and support authors who deserve a chance to be read - check out Reader Views to look for some interesting titles. 

 Here are my reviews.

Knights of the Alliance” by Stefanie Chu - a very engaging novel for teens into fantasy

 

Mutually Beneficial - a blackmailer has sexually provocative pictures of the Vice President 

The Encounters of Quintas Livius - A young, orphaned Roman living in Israel arrives late to Jesus’s miracles

Splendors of Quanzhou, Past and Present -a history, as well as an archaeological and architectural tour of the Chinese city

 

The Serpent Underneath - Describes a “Near Term Dystopia”—what can happen to our society and country if, in the next twenty years or so, things go off the rails. 

 

The Evolution of China’s Anti-Poverty Strategies - A collection of 20 stories about Chinese people who have risen from poverty to have successful careers. 

 

 The New Empire - set in Northern California in the mid-1700s, alt-history of how the Chinese beat Europe to the punch during the 15th century’s Age of Discovery.

 

 Casadora Island - A burnout retreats to a Caribbean Island - a story of rediscovered love, and a dreamscape of escape, an idealized vision of the perfect life with wonderful friends

 

Vietnam was a Just War - An unabashed rejection of any viewpoints sympathetic to North Vietnam or the Vietcong or anything critical of the US.  

 

The Intrepid Brotherhood - A memoir of a long running bureaucratic knife fight between the author, an IT systems manager, and his organization’s CEO 

 

No Peace with Hitler - is a 700 page survey of Churchill’s life and why refused to parley with Hitler in the spring of 1940 

 

The Plot to Save America - Springtime, 2024 – the January 6, 2021 insurrection succeeded – the rioters broke through, captured and killed Vice President Pence, set the Capitol on fire, where half of congress died, and the other half were put in detention.  

 

Dancer of Death - is based on the life of the Spanish bullfighter, Manolete, who was the most famous matador of the 1940s 

 

 Full Circle Freedom's Firewall - An android cop intercepts an intergalactic cargo ship, beginning a civil war between the corrupt humans and the androids (and their human allies).

 

The Hidden Game - A thriller about modern American pro football, and it brings together the mechanics of how and why games might be fixed for the benefit of “the product.”  

 

Trump Dog – Wild Tales of Lies, Hair Dye and Dog Poop - A funny, light satire that is very prescient, about a world divided over politics, where people can quickly find their allegiances in all sorts of cultural markers.  

 

The Truth Effect - a story of a fearless woman journalist who’s trying to warn England of the government’s plan to impose an artificially intelligent-powered thought control regime in 2030. 

 

 Here are some notes about my novels by other Reader Views reviewers

Farewell the Dragon - With twists and turns and surprises unraveling, this book depicts China’s cities and sounds extremely well...This makes the book not just entertaining to readers but also eye-opening.

 

Digging Up New Business: The SwiftPad Takeover - Satire that is brutally honest, hysterical, and unforgettable. Not a dystopian world; this is a very real, bare bones, trash-talking world that all of us are still living through to this day.  

 

Digging the Golden Fungus: The SwiftPad Insurgency - SwiftPad, Inc, becomes the number one social media site in the world. Based in Portland, Oregon, the company is also the prime ‘enemy’ of the President of the United States.  

 

Digging Around the Pandemic: The SwiftPad Extinction - - Kip “Chubby” Rehain (who is SwiftPad’s co-founder) is journeying though Alt-world, meeting up with the fear, terror, and panic that’s all around. A trail takes him across Asia, Siberia, and eventually to the very source of it all. 

 

And an interview with yours truly..

 

Interview with S. Lee Barckmann – Author of “The SwiftPad Trilogy”

Has Anyone Seen My Toes? by Christopher Buckley

   Has Anyone Seen My Toes?, (HASMT?)  is an acerbic, comic novel about an overweight, aging screenwriter in the throes of writer’s block. He fears and shows the apparent signs of approaching dementia.  He lives “two hours” outside Charleston South Carolina, and is a fast-food and social media addict.  He is struggling with a screenplay about the Nazis kidnapping Roosevelt from Bernard Baruch's South Carolina estate of Hobcaw Barony, which was Roosevelt’s trysting hideaway (with Lucy Mercer).   

I read HASMT? because my friend Carl sent it to me. I had sent Carl a copy of a screenplay that I had recently written, (based on my first novel “Farewell the Dragon”).  Carl is a great letter writer, but his reply seemed to skirt around anything critical of my screenplay.  But still his letter had a sly understated tone that I read as,

“Lee are you OK?”  

And he told me he was mailing me a copy of Buckley’s book, HASMT?, (which almost sounds like the acronym for “hazardous  materials” – humm…).  When the book arrived two days later, I tore the brown wrapping paper off the hardcover novel, thinking OK, maybe Carl is sending me a message...

 Or maybe I am just reading too much into it. Carl is a very private person, so I will only say we have known each other since high school, where we trained together and competed against each other for three years.  We were both decent high school distance runners and I beat him more than he beat me, but – alas -  he beat me the last time.  

All that was more than fifty years ago, so we are old now. Carl is much the opposite of me. Where I am a vainly boastful, loud, class clown type, Carl is very soft-spoken, shadowy, (his nickname was “The Assassin” for his ability to suddenly “appear” where he had been lurking all along). He’s a man of few (but always meaningful) words.  I promptly read HASMT? cover to cover. (As a opposed to starting in the middle and reading it backwards.)

Mr. Christopher Buckley is perhaps most  famous for the comic novel and subsequent movie “Thank you for Smoking”. He is the son of the Godfather of the Pre-Trump Conservative movement, William F. Buckley.  He is about my age.  Both Christopher  and HASMT?’s unnamed screenwriter, (who I will call "Chris") have many biographical points in common.  

Mr. Buckley also intrudes into my biography because Christopher Buckley went to sea after college, working on a merchant ship and wrote a book about it. It was the last book my father read before he died. Dad gave me the book but I never finished it. It struck a sore point with me because  I was supposed to go to sea with Dad after college. Dad was a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Marines.  But I punked out of the gig because of my fear of losing my college girl friend (another story I will probably never write). Dad had gone to some length to arrange a very rare “Cadetship” for me with his company, so I could train to be an merchant marine deck officer down the road, but I never took that road.  I know it was a disappointment for Dad, and Buckley’s sea story brought that disappointment back up for me during Dad’s last days.
 

 I was a fan of his father’s show “Firing Line”,  and later briefly chatted with William F. Buckley, which you can read about here. (Review of Saving the Queen ).

 
Well, anyway, all that aside, "Chris" the unnamed screenwriter,  is married to a woman who slowly becomes concerned about Chris’ forgetfulness and growing confusion between real life and his slowly evolving (or rather devolving)  screenplay.   From Chris’s point of view it all makes sense, and we ride along on his bizarre AD-HD-like inability to focus. He has a huge trove of historical and literary knowledge stored up in his fragmented mind, and he is constantly Googling offshoots and tangents of his untethered thought process. What makes it so powerful though is how this Googling and tangent chasing mirrors what it is like for many of us in the Post-COVID and possible Trump Interregnum period. (I write this five (5) days before the 2024 election, so I don’t know NOW how this is all going to turn out. ) “Chris”  is sly in his slightly hidden disdain of Trump. (“If you can have “alternative facts” why can’t you have “Alternative history?”). But the possibility of  a 2nd Trump term lurks behind much of Chris’ fearfully scattered imaginative romps, which is all in search of the “finishing touches” on his Roosevelt kidnapping screenplay, called “Heimlich’s Maneuver” (Heimlich is the Nazi U-boat commander in charge of the kidnapping).

“Chris” is an etymologist, (like Buckley’s father) who constantly searches for the original meaning of words.  The running joke through out HASMT? is that "mayonnaise is one of the few words in English of Carthaginian origin". (We finally learn in the post script that Mayonnaise was “invented” in the Minorcan city of Mahon which was named for Hannibal’s brother.  A cheap kind of Carthaginian origin.)

While showing disdain for Henry James and Proust, he reveals he is in fact the product of those upper class prep schools that teach “The Western Canon” of the literature of Dead White Men. Much of the story is of “Chris” threading the needle between the enforced political correctness of our age with the eternal truths of those great books that are being read less and less.

He covers much of what we have been living through since 2020 – George Floyd’s murder, Confederate statues coming down, fierce partisan-fueled local elections (in his case the weird South Carolina tradition of electing the local coroner. )  He riffs on suicide, especially about writers who killed themselves.  He of course Googles it and we read a long list of self-slaughtered writers.   He searches for an appropriate quote to leave behind as his own suicide note. He writes about a 20th century artist (who paints Victorians in Togas) who kills himself and leaves a note that the world isn’t big enough for him and Picasso, but then notes that Picasso never heard of him before or after his suicide.  

The novel is filled with hilarious, pathetic self-referential jokes that rotate around  and connect with other jokes that appeared earlier, as if they are interior concentric circles of humorous asides that constantly, (and almost randomly) recur.  It is the kind of satire that has the reader looking off from the pages in embarrassment at his own reaction of laughter combined with a feeling of deep loss. We (me and “Chris”) are almost at the end of it all, whether we pull the trigger ourselves or let nature do it for us.

He has a  “Concierge” doctor, (who he pays a healthy retainer to be on his speed-dial) a beautiful woman recommended by the hound-dog husband of his wife’s best friend.  She puts him on some meds to deal with his self-reported, very unspecific ailments. This leads to a pretty good ending which makes it all the more worth getting to that end.

It certainly didn’t read like a “great book”, when I was in the midst of it, but later, after thinking of how it affected me, I think it just might be – a very serious and worthwhile read, maybe even  - a great one.

The Apprentice

 The Apprentice

Written by Gabe Sherman, Starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong and Maria Bakalova

 

 “The Apprentice” is a biopic of the early days of the rise of Donald Trump. It is a brilliant work, especially considering the hurried, momentous timing of its release. It is an artistic triumph, especially for Jeremy Strong, but also for Sebastian Stan, an actor who I had never heard of before.

It is a hard film to watch in many ways. It is gritty and its low budget shirttails hangout (like Donald’s white dress shirt in several scenes as he is pulling on his pants getting ready to hit the Manhattan night.) The camera doesn’t flinch from glimpses of raw gay and public sex, marital rape, or Donald’s liposuction and scalp reduction surgery. It captures the trashy streets of 1970s NY. 

It begins with Donald in a cheap suit, driving a big (but dirty) Cadillac sedan through one of the outer Boroughs to a low-end high-rise apartment building where he proceeds to knock on doors collecting and shaking down rent from very poor, old, but mostly white tenement dwellers. The hallway smells, and the barking dogs and crying children and the profanity-laced complaints about his demands for back rent disgusts him, and shows his self-righteous anger and self-pity. But compassion? Zero.  The actor Sebastian Stan realistically portrays the empty callousness of a small time loser dreaming of something he knows is out there, but is out of reach.

But then Trump meets Roy Cohn at a restaurant and things begin to happen for him. Jeremy Strong exudes evil from the moment you see him. He brags about how he conned the Judge (illegally, "ex parte") in the Rosenberg case to sentence both Ethel and Julius to death, in-spite of the weak case against Ethel. Roy Cohn is a gay Jew who explodes with hatred against homosexuals and is a virulent anti-Semite. He teaches Donald three rules – attack, deny, and declare victory no matter the outcome.

The film portrays Donald growing from an very average NYC schmo, not too bright or socially perceptive, into the monster he became under Cohn’s tutelage. His early attempts to impress bankers and developers is grossly transparent, revealing a total lack of interpersonal adroitness. But gradually, as he follows Cohn around the Manhattan Party scene we see him pick cues better, and become something of a real estate player. Then he meets Ivana, who marries him in spite of the insulting prenup Cohn writes for Donald, and she begins to smooth out some of his edges.

In the end roles reverse – Cohn becomes almost sympathetic, as he is betrayed by Donald, who evicts Cohn’s AIDS-stricken, long time boy friend from his hotel. Stan the actor shows Donald as he becomes even more desensitized, and begins to repeat himself as he ages, even in the early days. Donald, masters Cohn’s three rules (see above) and pushes his way into Atlantic City and beyond. He is no longer the "Apprentice", but the over-confident blowhard we all know, even as Cohn warns him that he is becoming over-leveraged. But nothing can tame Trump’s greed. A light suddenly comes on in Cohn’s eyes as he sees what he has created. Donald’s older brother Fred, addicted, sick and dying comes knocking on the door, desperate for help, but Donald pushes him out, in a scene where Ivana sees her own future.

Trump’s relationship with his father is shown but not deeply explored. I suppose some might see it as a weak point. But this to-the-point film has a clear warning message that FOX News will undoubtedly call “a hit-job” and - and – so what? (As Trump said when told the Jan 6 rioters wanted to kill Mike Pence.)

I had a professor in college who said that Shakespeare's Richard III was not appreciated as a great play until the 20^th century. It was considered by early critics as too over the top, and a caricature, because surely no one could be such a baldfaced liar, so unconditionally evil. But then we had the 20^th century dictators who showed exactly how it was done. Yes - it is possible to be that empty of humanity and still finds a way to climb to the top. Now our generation knows that as well.

Politics had nothing to do with the way the film moved me. I was shaken as we left the theater.

It is a travesty that HBO or Apple didn’t pick the film up to stream 24 hours every day until the election. Mary and I went today, opening day, and there were only two (2) other people in the theater.

 

Chapter 6 "The SwiftPad Insurgency"

Doing abstract work while staring at a computer was about the only thing that paid anything anymore, and much of that had been outsourced to low wage intellectuals on the Indian subcontinent – until their war. But even with the loss of the outsourcers, the pool of cheap labor was deep and was now moving into the northern province of the recently united Korean peninsula. But in the States many, if not most, people were unsuited for abstract employment. Fones had destroyed the nation’s attention span. And some of course, just preferred freedom to digital slavery. 

From The Fall of it All – A History of the Big Dump 

 Buy it here!

 

KIP RETURNS TO U.S. AND MEETS NATE AND PAULA IN SAN FRANCISCO 

 

  CHUBBY KNEW THE BAY AREA, AND HAD SEEN REPORTS of the earthquake, but seeing it up close was a jaw-dropping shock. The “cab” they had taken from SFO was an armored SUV, with a pop-top roof, and a hydraulic mount that could quickly push up a medium-sized “minimi” machine rifle on a swivel mount, but the guy in the front passenger seat, riding “shotgun” (who actually had a shotgun on his lap), said he had only deployed the “minimi” once, and that only to shoot over their heads. 

E-book here! 

Coming north from the airport, the catastrophe was not evident until just off 101 as you first came into the city. The Portola District was practically flattened. Homeless people picked through the rubble. It was like springtime in Berlin, 1945. All along, the streets were filled with hollow-eyed people pushing shopping carts filled with blankets and various other personal items. 

Paula had insisted the cab take the long way, to show Kip the city, since he was planning on leaving the next morning. They drove around the Embarcadero, which, judging by the clean, smooth pavement, had just been rebuilt. 

“The geologists say that a fissure a half mile down collapsed. Nothing to do with the San Andreas fault. Popped like a bubble, and then when the bay rushed in, that was it – North Beach wipeout. More people died than on 9/11 in New York. A lot of people survived the collapse of those apartment buildings, but then ended up drowning. After the first shock, people in the Financial District all ran down here to the Embarcadero when whoosh – the bay came in. None of the buildings up there even cracked, much less came down. Very strange.” 

“And it looks like they are rebuilding in a hurry.” 

“Yeah,” said Paula. “You can do anything with money.” 

The next morning, the sun woke Kip up. He pulled a pair of shorts and a tee-shirt out of his backpack, and made his way out of the little guest room and into the living room, and then out the front door. As Kip came out on the porch, he smelled smoke and human shit. Paula reclined on a beach lounger, snug under a fleece blanket that doubled as a robe. Paula was drinking coffee on the porch above Fell Street, overlooking Panhandle Park, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The earthquake had passed by the Haight and it was like an island that had been shaken but still was standing; there was very little damage to the neighborhood. 

The fog was still clinging to the sky like lint, and it was chilly. Kip didn’t notice an older guy was sitting in the chair next to hers, until he nearly sat on him. The old guy’s eyes, still half closed, cracked open. He wore maroon sweatpants, flip flops, and an old blue sweatshirt. A candy apple red Beretta 9mm sat on the table next to him. Early as it was, still, there were many people already in the park, some who had crawled out of hidden nooks to continue sleeping safely, and others just sitting in the patches of sun that broke through from the east. 

A (V)ICE cruiser, or Crush, or ICY (the nickname used on a wildly popular vlog entitled “The Vagrant Sluts of Sector Nine”), crept slowly across the park. The front driver’s side of the ICY’s darkened window was down and a dark-clad, commando-styled crew-cut blond dude was leaning out, clearly enjoying the pan- icky effect he had on the people in the park. The cruiser, with just-for-show spoilers jutting out of the armored hood, was a modified Ford Sandcat, SUV-like, armored all around. Mounted on its roof was the standard issue unmanned big-ass gun that purposely swiveled around, automatically following the crowd. People quickly hopped up off the grass, some just leaving their sleeping blankets, moving, some fast, while others stood rooted in place. Others gathered their stuff into old packs and bags, some posing with defiance. Nobody got out of the (V)ICE truck. 

“Wooh!” Paula said, holding her nose, while checking the drama in the park. “Fog’s almost gone this morning – kind of weird actually. Sleep OK? Did you feel that aftershock earlier?” She threw her fleece robe off, revealing an oversized red pullover and blue knee socks. The old man with wild bushy, straw-like hair, who was sitting in the lounge chair, looked at Kip briefly, smiled and nodded. He was munching on a half-eaten bagel and a slice of hard white cheese. Kip looked at the little blue Beretta 70 strapped on Paula’s ankle. His and hers, patriotic colors.

“If they see you packing, they keep moving,” she said, noticing Kip eyeing her piece. “It is awful we have come to this. I have never had to point it at anyone.” She knocked on the wooden door-frame. Kip shrugged, and looked over at the guy next to him, who reverted to half sleep. 

“There’s a batch of scrambled eggs in the kitchen – help your- self. This is Nate.” 

The old man slowly reopened his eyes. 

“We get aftershocks pretty frequently. But hardly had any damage in the neighborhood – yet. You saw what it did south of here.” Kip gave a quick, disturbed glance at the old man, who was staring off into the oddly sunny morning. “I slept well,” the old guy said. “Not too foggy this morning, huh?” 

Kip watched the people in the park while stretching and twisting. It was the first time he had slept in the US in over eight months. Where had he seen this old guy? “Yes! I was dreaming, but I definitely did feel something last night, dreamed I was floating – drifting on top of the waves. I am glad the house didn’t fall on us.” 

Actually he had dreamed about Paula and Milana all on a big rubber raft. But the whole thing was indistinct and – foggy – and the shaking came at a peculiarly auspicious moment. 

“Just a tremor. Kip, this is Nathan, my…roommate. Well…” 

“I’m her boyfriend. She just uses me for sex, but I am fine with that. Maybe you’ve read my autobiographical novel of China…” 

The China memoir! Yeah, Kip had read it, maybe a quarter of a century ago. Kip looked at the old man closely now – Nathan Schuette! Holy shit, he used to be so young…he had once been one of Kip’s heroes, back in the ’90s. On the cable talk shows, discussing all the hubbub about China back – years ago, maybe right after Tiananmen, or maybe before, it was a long time ago; that was the last time Schuette had been on Kip’s (or anyone else’s) radar. Two foreigners murdered in Beijing, and then a spate of stories linking Nate to them, and then – nothing. “I remember you,” said Kip, shaking his hand. “I mean, I remember the…the China story…” 

Schuette turned with some difficulty to face Kip. “It is heartening that you read, although you could pick better writers. China no longer seems to exist in America’s consciousness. Since Real-Prez’s tariffs, trading has practically stopped. But one and half billion people are still there.” Nathan took a sip of coffee. “I know you too. Tech billionaires are a dime a dozen, but SwiftPad is different! And here you are, crashing on a couch in the Haight. Exactly as I would expect! The famous Kip ‘Chubby’ Rehain, the Steve Jobs of Portland, the creator of SwiftPad! I guess what they write about you is true. Paula says you two just got back from the Black Sea…” Paula was grinning. 

“I wasn’t the creator of SwiftPad…just – sort of the midwife.” 

“It’s good you’re spending a day or two here before going back to Oregon,” Paula said as she poured Kip a cup of coffee. “We are in some hurry, because your dad’s accountant wants us at the upcoming SwiftPad board meeting, very soon and there are many things to arrange, as well as…” 

“We need to explain some things,” said Nate. 

Dad’s accountant? 

"Heber?” What did she mean – us, thought Kip. 

Paula made a little face he couldn’t decipher. “Yeah.” 

It began to concern Kip how much this woman was creeping into his life. What did she want? She had ripped him away from a good life, a life he was sure to which he could have adjusted. She just showed up in Georgia and he ended up leaving with her. 

Now he was back in the fucking shitshow. This woman had a grip on him – in that mother-sister-wife-mistress way. But now, something about her was…different… And Nathan Schuette, the writer who opened a bizarre door into the history between the West and China. Her boyfriend? Clearly he was old enough to be her grandfather. 

Out of the country for eight months, more or less incommunicado, in the wastes of Central Asia, and then finding refuge on the Black Sea, when Heber sent Paula to get him. Why send her? Didn’t she say she was Alice’s friend? Too strange to be a coincidence, Kip told himself; take a deep breath. 

“I am going to jump in the shower,” said Paula. 

Old man Schuette stared at Kip watching her walk away from behind his coffee mug, and then said, “The grossest, most bottom of the barrel aspect of any matter related to people will always override and blot out everything else. It’s the universal Gresham’s Law. The bad drives out the good. Gossip and trash beats beauty and facts. It is getting worse. We are in the garbage dump of history, the stinky hole at the end of the road that we have always hoped to avoid.” 

“Oh?” 

“Yes, yes you are. You poor fuck – how old are you?” 

“Forty-seven.” 

“Gen-X! Mr. X-Man. Sorry, you got the shitty end. Now it’s all about to turn to shit. We have arrived in the time of dread. Sorry, sport, it’s your burden, mine too, but not anything like yours. I am, as you can see, old. Nobody listens to the old and we get to get out, to exit before the curtain falls. Most of you X-people blame us. Sorry. But that won’t help; you can’t run from it anymore. We didn’t run, but just got rolled, in slow motion. I suppose if we had fought when the times were good, and we were young and strong, we could at least say, ‘Hey we tried to warn you!’ Which we did, some of us, but not very seriously, or in a direct way, not loud enough, obviously. That is on us, but saying so does you no good, sport. Sorry, It’s time.”

Kip looked at Schuette, but didn’t say anything. 

“No,” Nate continued, “you are going to have to spend your best years dealing with the shittiest things in life. Sorry, but I don’t make history, just report. These should be your best years, and it is going to suck. As I said, sorry.” 

That seemed like a pretty rude way to start a conversation, thought Kip. “I don’t believe in the guilt or innocence of ‘generations.’ People are just bounced by the forces of history. From the past and future it seems obvious, but not as it happens. That human nature is a fixed variable. You guys tried to pretend it wasn’t fixed.” 

“Well, you may have something there.” Nate nodded his head in agreement. “My best years are back there. You can have what’s left, but…” Nate drifted off for a few seconds. “Ever since they overthrew whatshisface, or whatever it was, we have been pretending and acting as though everything was OK. Section 4 – the 25th amendment saved us from all the drama and we thought, shit, maybe it is turning around. Yeah, half the world becoming rubble, or parched, or broke, or just plain unlivable, but we wanted to come back from commercial break and find it all to be OK.” 

Kip nodded. From what he had been able to gather from Georgian TV reports (especially after the Русски E-invasion that took over all the media everywhere east of Potsdam), the former first family had drawn the curtain, occasionally releasing a picture of the Ex (or the temporarily recuperating Real-Prez, depending on your preferred narrative). When they showed him in the media, some evidence of the date was always displayed, such as a TV news crawler reporting a recent event, like a note from a kid- napper proving his victim was still alive. Then, when @Real-Prez notes appeared like rocks thrown from a prison window, they sent out his first wife to give funny interviews about his dottering dementia, to satisfy the need to avenge the two and a half year national nightmare. 

But now his replacement, Temp-Prez, had been emasculated in the primaries, and everyone thought it was going to finally be over – that it would get better. 

“But we are in the same spot," said Paula as she came back on the porch, and sat down while drying her hair.  "only we are starting from a much worse position than before. Nothing has changed.” Paula shifted in her seat, and her robe opened just a peek. “Your foundation is thinking about getting involved with money – and maybe even – fine-tuning the SwiftPad Machine, to maybe put your thumb on the scale, if you catch my drift.” 

“Slow down, you are way way ahead of me.” Kip stood up and slowly poured himself a cup of coffee. “Who and why…” 

“There are some things you should know…” 

“And what do you mean, my foundation?” Kip knew they had a few billion lying around looking for something to do, but didn’t realize they had a “foundation.” “I really have no idea. I have been out of the country and…I…” 

Kip had read Nate’s China story years ago, about the discovery and then the loss of the physical evidence of the Old Testament in China, hundreds of years before Christ. It was all too heavy, the implications so bizarre that it was rejected by just being ignored. The world just didn’t want to hear how interconnected it really was. China was a mythological place, with no reality for the West; it was almost like the time before Marco Polo had returned. 

Kip picked up the tablet that lay between them on a table and read the open tab. 

According to voices friendly to the Temp-Prez,  the Hoover dam was blown by the “Geronimo Unit”, which was actually a consortium of the drug cartels, revenging air attacks by the US against them inside Mexico. Speculation is that they bought the bomb from Islamists, who stole it from Pakistan. Lake Meade was now completely empty, along with much of the South- west’s water supply. 

“It is not even clear who the ‘commandos’ were who destroyed the dam. (V)ICE claims there were no survivors, but that’s just the administration’s explanation. Rumors say the bombers all escaped. I can tell you one thing that only a few people know – it was an inside job. The bomb was made in the USA.” 

Kip said nothing. 

“Doug Turdashian picked up the most of the idiots who put us here in the first place, and then some,” said Paula. “Cadez wants to take the next step – round-ups of opposition – any opposition.” She had fire and anger in her voice. She looked hard and angrily at Nate. 

Nate paused to sip his coffee, “Yes, Cadez is scarier. He doesn’t scare you though, does he, dear?” 

Paula pointedly ignored Nate’s comment. Kip looked at her and back at Nate, but neither would give him a clue as to what he meant by that, or why he didn’t scare Paula. 

Kip knew almost nothing about the recent politics, other than that Temp-Prez got crushed in the R primaries. His first thought was he was being hustled for a big donation by a bunch of scam artists. Sometimes he forgot that he was extremely rich. Now it dawned on him that Heber controlled his fortune. 

“The Post is trying to control the SwiftPad phenomenon,” said Nathan. “They are riding a tiger they can’t get off. They don’t dare switch it off because it’s a drug, feeding the Post’s bottom line, and sedating the country’s anxiety.” 

“The persuasive power of SwiftPad,” said Paula, “has over- whelmed the circuits. Everyone knows that this app is fucking with the public opinion in ways that no one understands, but they are so afraid of it, no one is suggesting it be ‘shut down.’” 

“Your fucking application is a monster,” continued Nate. “The Post thinks they control it, but really it is controlling them. SwiftPad has a mind of its own. You guys should never have sold it – you should have deleted it. But obviously the money…” 

We have a way to shut it down, Kip thought. 

Paula looked at Kip as he was thinking this, and stared. Kip stared back, so she continued. “Hmm. Well.” They stared at each other, and neither said a word. 

“The money…” interrupted old Nathan, who suddenly had a coughing fit that went on for a while. “You need to find a way to fix this – with money!” More coughing. “I don’t know if you can do anything else, but at least you have money. I have a feeling just talking to you that -”. 

“That what?” 

Nate smiled. “You don’t seem too keen on fighting to keep your company. If you don’t someone else will. I am asking what are you going to do about it Mr. Rehain?” 

“Well…” Actually, Kip hadn’t given it much thought. He and G had talked about it some back before they built it and released it, about the various meta features of the app. One was a destruction or self-destruction function. It would delete itself and then remain in somnolent alert to prevent it from being relaunched. It required a zombie system that wakes, attack, and passes on the function to another zombie. It was just theoretical then, at least for him. But he knew G had designed that “feature” into it. He knew how she worked. 

Nathan just stared, trying to recover his respiratory equilibrium. 

Fuck, Kip thought, he had to talk to GG and figure out how to shut SwiftPad down. They could do it, but he didn’t know how. First he must convince her that it had to happen. Need to talk to G. Kip realized he didn’t really know how the backdoor was activated, only that it could be done. He tried to remember what she had said. 

“You know something that you’re not telling us, don’t you?” Kip stared at Paula. She would not break him like she had done by the Black Sea. 

“What do you two have in mind?” Kip asked. “I know Ben Cadez will actually be competent at taking us the rest of the way into some kind of permanent fascism. He is smart and will jail or kill the rest of us. His cold bloodiness flies out of every pore when he is on camera. We all know he will do it. But knowing it and doing something about it are two different things.” 

Paula looked at Nate, who was smiling and breathing slowly to keep from coughing. “What do you think, Paula?” Nate said theatrically. “Is Ben Cadez really that bad?” 

She glared at Nate. “Back at you,” said Paula sharply. “How far will you go to stop them? That is the question we all have to ask ourselves.” 

Kip sensed an odd vibe between them. “What is going on? Do you two know Cadez?”

“Yeah,” said Paula. Nate smirked and shook his head and silently pointed at Paula. “Yeah, we do. But answer me, how far? Or are you just in it for the glamor?” Paula asked again. 

It was a point of honor that he held his ground for now. Kip looked back and forth at them. 

“How do you know Alice?” “Alice,” said Paula with a wide smile. “I met her right after her husband …your…friend Jim… when his father…died.” 

“What! That was 40-some years ago. How have you have known Alice that long?” 

Paula laughed, and looked at Kip closely. “I remember you and Jim coming in from one of your adventures on the Mary’s River. You were both scamps, intent on some mischief, that was plain. You don’t remember me, Kipling?” 

“No, I – maybe…” The vertigo hit Kip again. That funny feeling he had about her in Georgia suddenly came back. A weird, color-strobing dizziness came over him. His perception of Paula began to shift as through a prism. Oh shit, he did remember her! He remembered feeling when she showed up in Georgia that she was old, much older than himself, much older than she appeared. But he hadn’t believed his own perceptions. And still didn’t. 

He looked closely at her. With well-toned skin and clear sharp eyes she looked like a woman in her thirties. Early thirties really, maybe even younger. He looked at her hands. They were the hands of a young woman, a teenager. She smiled. 

“I think you should listen to Nathan’s story…if you want to understand – all this,” said Paula, almost in answer to his own doubts. “It is not just his story…and I know there are things you want to ask me.” 

Kip grabbed a bagel and said, “Yeah, let’s hear it.” 

“OK,” said Nate jumping in. “but I have to start at the beginning. I am in this story,” said Nate, “so you have to make allowances. Fifty years ago, wasn’t it…” he looked over at her, as she laughed and nodded with a fresh sparkle in her eyes. “Yes, fifty years ago last January.”

"I was a freshman at the University of Kansas, just having finished the fall term, and was home for Christmas vacation, in New Jersey. 

January 1970 was cold. I had the phone number of a guy who lived on Long Island who was headed back to Lawrence. Elwood was his name. He lived in my dorm, but, as I said, I really didn’t know him. He said to meet him at a shopping mall in Paramus, New Jersey. 

My father drove me, and I told him not to wait around, but it was cold so we sat there, in the gray early morning, Dad with the window opened, smoking. It’s one of those scenes in your life that sticks with you for some reason. 

An old AMC Marlin pulled up. The driver was a woman wearing a black stocking watch cap, brownish blond, mid-twenties. In the passenger seat was a tall, burr-headed guy, Elwood, who I vaguely recognized from the dorm. The Marlin was two-door, white on dolphin blue, a hatchback with a pretty cramped backseat and barely any room in the trunk. 

The driver lit up my eyes, even bundled up in a thick blue peacoat. My dad saw her and I could see the smile on his face as he got out of his Caddy to help. She opened the hatch door. I had two bags, and there wasn’t room for both of them. 

“We still have to pick up Wally,” said Elwood. 

“I’ll ship one of them to you,” Dad said, then turned, smiling at the woman. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” 

“Why? You gonna call me up for a date?” She looked at my dad over her granny glasses. My dad gave her a Jack Benny shrug, but kept smiling at her just the same. Her eyes were piercing, certain and clear. She didn’t flinch. And she was older too – at least 23, maybe 25. I had only turned 18 the previous October. 

“Well, son,” Dad said, still half smiling at the woman in the black stocking cap. He reached out to shake my hand, probably wondering if I understood what I was getting into. “Have fun.” He clapped me on the shoulder as I climbed in the backseat. 

“Please get that suitcase shipped,” I said. “I’ll need those clothes.” 

My dad nodded with an annoyed look, waved as we pulled away. I don’t think he ever took his eyes off of her. So we took off, down the Garden State Parkway, where immediately she hit us up for cash for the tolls. 

Paula let out a stifled laugh. “She thinks it’s funny. Am I lying, darling?” “No. Not yet.” 

Anyway, the engine didn’t sound all that good, and we got on the Turnpike near the Raritan Bridge and then headed down toward Pennsylvania where we had to pick up Wally in King of Prussia. 

I sort of knew Wally from that first semester in the dorm, better than I did Elwood anyway. Funny guy, always up for going on a toot, ready to get high or drunk anytime of the day. It was lunchtime when we got there and Wally’s mom invited us in for kielbasa sausages and perogies. Finally after a while, Wally said we had to go, and he had even more stuff than I did. He was determined to pack it, and what didn’t fit was crowded into the small space we had in the backseat. My knees were up to my chin and I was not looking forward to driving 1200 miles like that, but we all agreed we would rotate seats often so no one had to sit back there for too long. 

There were four of us in the Marlin. It was probably a 1962 or ‘63 model, honestly I can’t remember. I was at a low point in my life, stuffed in that sputtering piece of shit Marlin, wondering how to get off of academic probation, or even if I really wanted to go back to school. Sitting in that goofy car, mile after mile, I started to fall in love with her. I was still an unfucked virgin, you understand. 

“You are making me blush, Nate!” Paula smiled. 

“Yeah – right.” 

We headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It got dark early, and we made a wrong turn and ended up driving toward Pittsburgh, where we ate dinner. By the time we got back on the road, we were way behind schedule and it was about one or two in the morning, somewhere past Zanes- ville in eastern Ohio. I was in the back seat, wrapped up in my heavy coat, settled into the journey across the frozen wastes of the heartland, innocently expecting to be snug in my dorm bed by late afternoon–early evening the next day. 

Then a desperate cry of fear and horror suddenly woke me, a screaming plea of terror blurted out like a long island– accented DEATH RATTLE! 

“The wheels are falling off! The wheels are falling off!” 

The car was shaking and there was a sudden lurch, and we were hurtling off the freeway at 70 mph, into the deep and still accumulating snowbank. 

It took us two hours to push the car back on the highway. It was so fucking cold. I was shaken out of a very deep sleep, slashed to the bone by the shock of getting out in the biting polar predawn, and pushing that heavy Rambler out of the snowbank, somewhere deep in the Ohio woods. Fucking torture. Elwood continued to swear that the front wheels had been shaking violently and driving into the snowbank was the only thing he could do. 

Wally took over the driving and said it was steering fine. But, in fact, it would take us four more days to make the trip to Kansas. 

Wally got a speeding ticket somewhere around Columbus and we had to pay fifty bucks to the cop right there or he would have run us in. Wally only had about twenty, so the rest of us had to cough up the remainder. We spent almost all of our money and I didn’t think we had enough for gas for the rest of the trip. We pushed on. She said she had a friend in St. Louis, so our plan was to see if we could get some cash there. 

All this time I was dreaming about her, wondering if I could somehow get naked and – I was going nuts, couldn’t stop thinking about her. 

“Kind of like now, right, baby?” Paula was laughing. “Exactly! How about you?” Paula shrugged her shoulders. 

Anyway, I would have masturbated to those dreams, but it was crowded in that Marlin. She was so good looking, and so seemingly unmysterious, clean, direct, with a tomboy femininity, and me being six months out of high school, thinking she was somehow – it is hard for me to under- stand my 18-year-old self from the vantage of 70, but, well I believed in “purity” back then. 

The Marlin made it to Vandalia, Illinois, less than two hours out of St. Louis, and bang. I was driving and I went to pass a truck, when, as I said, Bang! The sound of the piston rod breaking through the engine housing jarred my teeth. The Marlin coasted to a stop. Dead. 

We would end up spending three days in Vandalia, and two nights in the local Fayette County jail, Vandalia being the county seat. 

We had the car towed. Wally and I both negotiated with the owner of the garage, an old blind man named Wiley, who just yelled and slapped his cane on his desk, saying he wasn’t taking any shit from a bunch of rich Easterners. Wiley said he had a young guy who was “a damn good mechanic for a retard.” The mechanic was one of the most handsome men I had ever seen; he looked like a young Montgomery Clift. 

Monty’s girlfriend had a horrible case of acne, and some- thing was wrong with her hip. But she was smart and relentless, walking Wiley and us through every imaginable repair scenario, figuring every way imaginable to get us on the road. 

We tried to push off the decision to our lady friend in blue peacoat and black watch cap, but she insisted the Marlin belonged to a former boyfriend, and that she was fine with getting rid of the last vestige of him. 

The four of us finally got out of Wiley’s garage to talk it over and decided to head out to smoke a reefer somewhere. We walked east until we hit the edge of town, and wandered past the last house when we found a path into a wooded flood plain. I was walking with her and she seemed to like me, but I didn’t know how to act on it. My mind could not get away from what she must have done to get a car from a guy, who she apparently no longer cared about. 

We wandered into the woods, and the crunching untrodden snow. As we got closer to the Kaskaskia River, the trees thinned out. When we got to the edge of the embankment, we fired up a fat one, and passed it around. 

It was cold and although it was only about 4 pm it was already getting dark. It would be another night in the Fayette County jail. The deputy at the desk there had said we could stay one more night, but that was it. The stoniness hit us all about the same way, and we just stood there on the frozen riverbank, smiling and shivering. 

Elwood, who was still premed then, and eventually a botanist, saw some frozen white fungus on the bark of an alder tree. “This is pretty cool looking,” he said. He picked it off and broke it apart. Inside, it had an orange peachy color and it appeared to be growing on a number of trees on that embankment. Elwood put it on his tongue. “Wow. It’s tangy.” 

“How do you know it’s not poison?” Wally asked. 

“I don’t think so. I think it’s kind of a sulfur fungus.” He took another bite. “It’s pretty good.” 

“You’re fucking crazy eating that tree shit.” 

The Marlin woman in the blue peacoat took a bite too. “Wow – I bet this would be amazing cooked. What the fuck, right?” 

Wally and I looked at each other and shook our heads. “It’s fucking freezing, let’s get out of here,” he said. We all headed back into town to claim our free, heated cells in the Fayette County jail. 

As we walked back, I tried to hit on her, it was pathetic really, and what made it worse was she seemed to think it was cute. I remember she kept saying, “Wow” and “Wow.” But it wasn’t about me. I was still an unfucked freshman, as I might have mentioned, and she was a graduate student, a complete mismatch. She was nice, and stared at me, and I thought it must have been the pot, but we had been smoking the whole trip, and it had never affected her in the way she was acting now. She seemed to be giving me encouragement on my awkward approach, which I kind of appreciated in a resentful way. I mean I wanted to get naked with her, but I had no idea how. It was so fucking cold for one thing. And she was sleeping in the women’s section of the recently painted jail, while Elwood, Wally, and I held down the men’s side. They took our shoes and belts. Elwood wasn’t talking, only smiling and also oddly saying “wow” over and over. 

The next morning our plan was to explore the town, and after a cheap lunch head over to Wiley’s Garage to see if Montgomery had fixed the car. Elwood and Marlin girl seemed to be having a moment and somewhat mysteriously headed off together, back toward the river, while Wally and I wandered around and found ourselves in a two-story, white-shingled building that had been a meeting house way back in the early 1830s. 

Vandalia used to be the capital of Illinois. Abraham Lin-coln, then in the state legislature, hated the town, and used his powers of persuasion to get the state capital moved to Springfield, where it still is. The Vandalians, the ones we met anyway, still blamed Abe for consigning their town to Backwatersville. Apparently some Illinois politicians would congregate in this old house and discuss the future of Illinois or some such backwoods issue or the other. A couple of old ladies who volunteered there eyed us with distrustful sus- picion as we looked over the exhibits. I asked them, “Golly gee, ma’am, this sure is an interesting building, did Abraham Lincoln really work in this place?” Later I would wonder if Lincoln had eaten the tree fungus while living in Vandalia.

"Yes. I understand it is of a peculiar historical interest. To my mind he was the worst president we ever had,” she said as if it were my fault he had ever risen so high in the world. “He ruined this country and we are paying the price for it even now.” The old lady looked at us and ended the tour when Wally started laughing at her. I asked why she thought the country was going to hell, but she ignored me. 

I was a little jealous of Elwood, wandering off with the woman in the blue peacoat. I had neither the experience nor the imagination to come up with a move that would have led anywhere with her. 

So while Wally and I negotiated a deal to let Wiley keep the Marlin in exchange for some kind of transportation on to Lawrence (a short run really; we were almost to St. Louis, and then it was just across Missouri, 250 miles, and we were practically there). Paula and Elwood roamed the streets, looking and acting ecstatic over something that had happened between them. They were tight lipped, and I assumed they had found a warm, dry place to get it on. 

When it came to buying gas for the remainder of the trip, she was tapped out and insisted we (Elwood, Wally, and I) had to come up with the money. So finally Elwood and Wally worked out a deal for another car (the Marlin had thrown a rod, and was basically only good for parts) that Montgomery’s girlfriend insisted would easily make it to Kansas. Her retarded boyfriend Montgomery, who was doing all the work, giggled, and I think he might have been smarter than Wiley gave him credit for. 

So off we went, in another piece of shit car, down the highway, Wally driving. It was just getting dark as we left and it was cold. We got about five miles away when we realized that the exhaust was blowing through a hole in the floor of the car. We opened all the windows and were driving 70 mph, the temperature well below zero – note to rest of the world, zero Fahrenheit is minus 18 Celsius. 

I’m in the backseat with her, and all four of us are laughing. There was no way we could make it to Lawrence like this, hopeless. Yet all laughing, and her snuggled up against me and I so happy. Even though I was soon to die of carbon monoxide poisoning or freezing, I was ready to go. 

But then the car coasted to a stop. Another dead car. After an hour, a state cop pulled up behind us and listened to Elwood blurt out the tale of our auto adventure in Vandalia. He heard Elwood say we bought a car from Wiley with no legal plates. 

Broke, soon to freeze if left on the road, we got a ride in the cop’s Crown Vic back to Greenville, and he took us to the jail. 

The next day the same cop brought Montgomery’s girl- friend to Greenville (Janice, and she called him Luke) and she begrudgingly gave us enough bus money to make it back to Lawrence, while Monty would go back to finding bro- ken-down cars on the highway. The cop told us there had been complaints about Wiley and his gang before, although to be honest, other than “impounding” the Marlin, Wiley had done nothing wrong. 

We all slept on the bus the whole rest of the trip, not talking at all. 

When we got to the bus station in Lawrence, a long- haired, bell-bottomed guy came and picked up the woman in the peacoat. She wrapped her legs around him like a snake, and he carried her to his van. She waved to me as she got in. 

 

“So that is how I met her.” Nate looked at Paula, who shook her head, laughing. “So this all happened 50 years ago?” Kip asked. She smiled. “Your taxi is here.” “If that story was supposed to explain things, I have to tell you, I am more confused than ever.” “Think about it,” she said. Kip looked down on the street and saw a tall black guy get out of a Prius. A white guy was next to him holding a shotgun. 

“I’ll finish the story when we see you next week,” said Nathan. 

“For the Board of Directors meeting,” said Paula. “Yeah. Yeah. OK.” Chubby was ready to get back home. “I’ll get my stuff. You really are coming up for that meeting?” 

“We’ll be there."

Review of "A Man in Full" by Tom Wolfe

I was shocked  when Tom Wolfe died, (May 2018), and also surprised that he was all of 88. He was born in 1930, but he never seemed to be of that generation, but rather perpetually dapper and youthful.  I went to a lecture of his in college, and stood in the back near him as he was being introduced. Engaging, joyful, smiling he seemed like a happy guy. Always sartorially attired, with white suits and hats worn at a jaunty angle, he defied every attempt to characterize his vibe. He wasn’t a hippie or beatnik, but he certainly wasn't a straitlaced journalist either.   He danced to his own music. Wolfe received a PhD from Yale in American Studies, which could well have just been a synopsis of his books.   (Actually though, it was titled, “The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942”.  Hummm.  A hint of what he really thought...)


 My first encounter with his writing was “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”. It was also my first encounter with New Journalism, which he defined later in a non-fiction book called “The New Journalism”.  I was smitten by the style, which ignored the distant, uninvolved, “objective” point-of-view, and placed the writer into the story up to their eyeballs. He influenced many writers. Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson,  Norman Mailer, and others followed, inserting themselves into their long form, journalistic odysseys.   The style was breezy, and as the title suggests “electric”.  The events described in “...Acid Test” took place in the early to mid-sixties and introduced a generation to Acid and Ken Kesey.

Wolfe wrote that he never took Acid (LSD) himself, yet his second hand descriptions of its effects set the standard for how the world today looks at the psychedelic experience, with the Peter Max-style wavy, primary colored art, (along with R. Crumb, Gilbert Sheldon, and a host of others), underlying  the laid back quasi-Buddhist, big Fuck You attitude to authority and social conventions, all transported in VW Vans to Haight Ashbury, overlaid with back to nature life styles.    “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” was one of the primary drivers of the social revolution among the baby boomers, even though in asides throughout the book, it was a cautionary tale of overdose and mental dissonance.   

I read it  in college, and it convinced me that it was worth the risks to “drop” acid.  I spent the summer of 1972 stoned to the gills on it, and have few, if any, regrets.  But, now looking back, I have come to know there were casualties, both on the streets, and among my once healthy bright friends from youth, who never stopped engaging with the “palinopsia”, or “trails”, the series of discrete stationary images trailing in the wake of otherwise normally moving objects.  But I was careful, only took the “pure stuff” (orange barrel, or the “Owsley certified” blotter Acid), and never had a “bad trip”.  There was a lot of bad stuff out there though, but I was fortunate to have never encountered it. .    

Anyway, time marched on, and it took a few decades for me to understand how deeply conservative a product of the Old South Wolfe really was. I don’t think this conservatism  was his second-thought delayed reaction to how his book  “...Acid Test” was received by the world. I think it was a return to form, to the man raised in Richmond Virginia during the height of Jim Crow.

 There was his New York phase, “Radical Chic: and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers” (New Journalism) and “Bonfire of the Vanities” (a novel) which completely skewered the greed and hypocrisy of corrupt Money and White-guilt Politics in the bastions of 1980’s liberal New York City.  His disgust with that time and place is visceral, and his writing was brilliantly bombastic. Great reading, but hardly “objective”.  

There are others, like “The Right Stuff” about the kind of American men who flew first in space, fearless college educated aviators who drank heavily and cheated constantly on their wives with “astronaut groupies”. And as he almost always portrayed in his work,  he had the “other story”, the aside… That was the story of Chuck Yeager, who first broke the sound barrier, and was the most decorated test pilot of that generation, but who was not chosen to be an astronaut because he never went to college, and therefore didn’t have “The Right Stuff”.

 “A Man in Full” also has an aside, that other story,  tacked on to the main tale of money and power (social and political) in late 20th century Atlanta Georgia. The other story is about Conrad, the son of hippies who went to San Francisco, (perhaps led there by Wolfe's own book).  Conrad’s family grew, then fell apart, and he spent his teen years struggling to hold his family, and himself together. (It might have been interesting if he had broken the “Third Wall” and had Conrad’s reading “...Acid Test” - in fact I wonder if it even occurred to Wolfe how he helped create Conrad’s situation…)

Wolfe is a writer of constant, unending “asides'”, breaking off of the main narrative, with big fonts, and social media-like CAPTIALIZATION to tell another somewhat related point - as I am doing here.  Netflix has recently released a multipart movie of “A Man in Full” starring Jeff Daniels as Charlie Croker (I’ll get to Charlie in a minute). In the Netflix version, Conrad becomes an Atlanta black man who is laid low by circumstance and his own justifiable willfulness. It changes the whole tenor of the story, making the movie almost exclusively about race, which - anyway no one is ever satisfied with a movie version of a book they liked…)

So - Charlie Croker was a man about 60 in the late 90s, who had been a football star at Georgia Tech.  He then made millions in real estate, and food processing, divorced his first wife, married a woman half his age. But now because his investments are going south he is being hounded by a bank, (and its repo team, led by a Harvard trained loser who is trapped in a paternity suit and has been taken to the cleaners by his ex-wife).  The Repo team surprises Charlie at his quail shooting “plantation” and repossesses his G-5 jet, and that is only the beginning of their threats.

Meanwhile the Black mayor of Atlanta is gearing up for reelection. He is the symbol of the Atlanta “miracle” (“we’re too busy to hate”), which purports to be bringing  Blacks and Whites  together, while forging ahead to make Atlanta a top-tier city with money and culture. His problem is that the current football star at Georgia Tech  is a local black kid who,( it is rumored), supposedly  raped the daughter of a prominent (white) local businessman  and good  friend of Charlie’s.   No one has brought charges, but the rapidly spreading rumor is threatening the city’s image (and the mayor’s reelection) by exasperating racial tensions.  
 

The Mayor enlists Charley to help settle the city down, in return for helping call off the Repo dogs... and  that  all plays out - but the really interesting part of the book is the story of Conrad - the poor white kid who loses his job at one of Charlie’s food warehouses as Charlie’s financial empire crumbles. Conrad lives outside San Francisco, and is doing all the right things - working long hours in a food freezer, taking care of his wife and two kids, struggling with deadbeat relatives, and then like Job, has his world obliterated. Through incredibly bad luck he ends up in jail, but a California earthquake opens the his cell and he escapes and moves to Atlanta and becomes Charlie’s in-home aide (Charlie has knee replacement surgery and needs help getting around. )  Conrad finds a book on the Roman Stoics that he picks up by chance, he becomes a Stoic and converts Charlie to that way of thinking.  

If good fiction is about how characters grow and change, then this part of the story is the most important.  But I think most people will focus on the Atlanta angle.  Wolfe dives into the City and tears it apart in the same way he tore apart NY in “Bonfire of the Vanities”.   His depictions are spot-on and hilarious -  of “The Piedmont Driving Club”(the social club of the white power structure), of the houses and relative social hierarchy in “Buckhead”, where Charlie, and all his rich friends (as well as his well off ex-wife) live without any sidewalks, (which cause the black servants  to walk in the middle of the street on their way to work in the kitchens, and gardens of the Buckhead residents  in the morning)  - tidbits upon tidbits of gossipy portrayals of insecurity and envy - that is what most people would get out of this monster (787 pages) of a book.

With all that, Wolfe also talks about the Black mayor trying to raise money to “pay” people to vote.  He discusses how some people know people who can get poor black residents to shake off their apathy and vote - $30 per voter is the going rate.  It is a very cynical look at politics in Atlanta that Wolfe passes off as true,  and I am sure one that MAGA America believes. But New Journalism has its downside. I can’t believe Wolfe got close enough to really know that vote buying on that scale was a fact.  New Journalism doesn’t require objectivity.   

Anyway, as I said, Wolfe was a son of the Jim Crow South, and for all his acerbic wit and close observation of social mores, as far as I know, (and I have not looked close at Wolfe to be honest) he never seemed to be bothered by some of the ramifications of what he wrote.

(For a longer, more complete and perhaps more interesting, view of Wolfe and "A Man in Full" see When Tom Wolfe Wrote Atlanta  - Lee )

How to Make a Little League

  I grew up on in a small town on the southern coast of New Jersey, where baseball was king. The town had a little league team that traveled to other nearby small towns, as far away as 20 -30 miles. In the summer these little league baseball games  were the main event for the whole area, particularly in our town. Hundreds of people would come to watch them, regardless of whether they had kids playing.

One summer, going to an away game, there was an accident. (There were no buses, the kids were packed into station wagons - seat belts were unknown in those days. ) It was a horrible event that effected all of us. I was 9 that year, and had been cut in tryouts. (Only one other 9 year old made the team.) It was a terrible tragedy One kid died, and there were a number of bad injuries as well. 

The town fathers gathered in a local bar and decided too many kids were getting cut, and the travel to other towns 8 or 9 times every summer was something they wanted to end.  They decided to make a single league. Someone calculated the number of kids interested in playing and they decided they could easily run 4 teams. (I said it was a small town). So they started a league.  They had a two day tryout where we (the kids) all got a chance to hit, field and throw. They had a "draft" (held in the same gin mill) where each team had a coach and an assistant, (volunteered or acclaimed by reputation). The coaches  got 100 chits, and they used these bid on the kids. The good 12 year olds were the most expensive.

 There were different strategies. My Dad was one of the coaches, and he picked all the good 10 year olds, (who were cheap) and we got third that year. The next year we won the league championship, so the year after, they broke us up, and spread some of us other teams.   But I played organized little league baseball for 3 years, and it was very competitive. Almost every boy played. It was a great experience. There was no snobbery or exclusionary aspect to sports.  I am sure we didn't "short change" the talented kids by making them play with the average kids. We had about 14 kids per team, and every kid was guaranteed at least 2 innings in a 6 inning game. There was of course gamesmanship on the substitution strategies, but it worked out.  

 I remember when I was ten going up to hit against a 12 year old with a 70 mile an hour fast ball. (I am just guessing - there were no speed guns). After striking out twice I finally made contact and it blooped over the 3rd baseman's head. I have a lot of sports memories, (both for me and for my son) but that one is up there with the best of them.

A 2nd tRUMP Administration???

 

FROM the PROLOGUE of "The SwiftPad Extinction"

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 Real Prez was on his way to be ARRGH nominee again, probably by acclamation, even though he had entered no primaries. His dramatic return to power was portrayed in hushed adoring terms by  his minions in the press, who conjured a tale of a fanciful mid-night operation (organized by his son-in-law) that secreted him out of the private NJ sanatorium, whereupon he simply walked into the White House, reassuming power without a by-your-leave.

It was an illegal act of gall, upending his earlier removal by the 25th Amendment. But the Temp-Prez was hated by everyone, and after the failed (V)ICE invasion of Portland, something had to be done. Real-Prez’s chutzpah had worked, and even the displaced Temp-Prez (who returned rather unconstitutionally to Veep) was praising him by the end of the day. But the dramatic move was all theater – Real-Prez was the power brokers’ only hope, and they preferred Real-Prez’s unpredictable insanity to the charismatically challenged Temp-Prez. 

And since they had as yet not found a new Veep, dumping Temp-Prez would have elevated the Speaker, who was a Dee, and that would be infinitely worse. The coup had all been planned and approved by the power brokers and was accompanied by a great deal of back room maneuvering, the details of which are still mostly secret.