Sometimes the general stupidity and injustice of this crazy world of ours is too much to fathom, and all a thinking person can do is launch a rant to purge the system and restore some perspective, compassion and humanity.
A line from a song sticks in my head -- “I want a reason for the way things are…” -- or something like that. It’s quarter to six in the morning and I can’t pull the precise quote from my tired brain; it’ll come later, rising from my subconscious when I don’t need it. I’ve got Springsteen’s new album, Devils & Dust, playing at low volume, and a cup of java at my elbow.
Indeed, give me a reason for Tom DeLay, a morally corrupt sonofabitch who rose from exterminating vermin in Texas to leadership of the House of Representatives, where he employs his awesome powers to service the whims of wealthy campaign contributors.
Give me a reason for the stark disparity of wealth I see when I stroll past Santa Barbara High School on my way to the job; Mexican kids pouring off the MTD bus while their white peers swoop into the parking lot in sparkling VW Jetta’s BMW’s, Range Rovers, Volvo’s, and Mercedes SUV’s – sixteen and seventeen-year-old kids coming down from the high ground off APS and Sycamore Canyon or the super exclusive private lanes of Montecito. Life is good in those locales, money no problem, possibilities almost endless, college a near certainty. Daddy will provide. Daddy will rescue when the trail turns rough or the world strikes back.
With no wealthy relatives to call my own, or any money to speak of now, a twenty-three year old rattletrap Honda in the driveway, I have trouble understanding where the money comes from. How do the parents of those fortunate kids make the jack in the first place?
And then there’s Arnold, the celebrity Governor of California, who appeared on Sean Hannity’s conservative echo chamber the other night to denounce the evil “special interests” who have our state in a death grip, failing to mention, of course, the millions of dollars he has taken from Big Business, millionaires, car dealers…Arnold is either stone stupid, delusional, or a better actor that most of us have given him credit for. To sit there and claim to be the “people’s” Governor with a straight face…Jesus…
When will we learn to see through the celebrity flash and dazzle and pass when people like Arnold decide to leap into politics? Such people are ill-equipped to handle the rough and tumble that politics entails. It requires mental agility to make the switch from the movie racket, where a bankable star is fawned over, pampered, served like a pasha, and deferred to at every turn; where the media offers nothing but cream-puff questions about trivial bullshit, and nothing you do really affects people’s lives.
Arnold’s a doofus, out of his depth in Sacramento, out of ideas, reduced to ranting about greedy public employee unions and incompetent teachers. You know damn well he longs for the days when his crowds were happy, adoring, and eager to “Join Arnold.”
Hey, pal, those days are gone. Welcome to the real world.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Thursday, April 14, 2005
"News" You Don't Need
It’s a typical day here in the coastal Paradise, sun coming up and birds chirping. As 8:00 A.M. approaches, traffic on Milpas Street picks up, parents and students heading for the high school. The Mexican man who lives in the apartment complex behind us coaxes his battered blue GMC truck to life; one of these days he’ll get around to replacing the muffler.
I’m standing at the kitchen counter, eating oatmeal and reading the latest Vanity Fair, marveling at how fake the cover photo of the chicks from Desperate Housewives appears. Vanity Fair is filled with photographs of impossibly beautiful people one rarely, if ever, sees in everyday life.
I finally find the article I want to read, an excerpt from Robert F. Kennedy JR’s book entitled: “Crimes Against Nature,” that laments, among other things, the decline of American journalism and the consequences for Democracy in this country.
This is a topic I’ve long been interested in, particularly the standard characterization that the American media has a “liberal” bias. The charge is absurd on its face, a creation of the right-wing of the Republican Party. A quick examination of media ownership in this country disproves the accusation. Rather than a liberal bias, the American media has a “corporate” bias, and anyone who claims otherwise is a pinhead.
The Right dominates the public airwaves, both radio and television, to such an extent that what most Americans see and hear resembles Journalism about as much as a miniature poodle resembles a Great Dane. Limbaugh, Hannity, Liddy, et al echo the Party line and one another. Meanwhile, the once formidable major networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS – have gutted their news divisions in order to transform them into profit centers. They are driven not by what’s important news for citizens to know and grasp, but by what attracts the largest possible audience in a given time slot.
One of the major networks had a slogan a few years back that went something like: News You Can Use from People You Can Count On.”
The slogan should now read: “News You Don’t Need from People Who Don’t Care.”
Frankly, I don’t know how ol’ Charlie Gibson gets up every morning and puts his happy face on and goes into the studio and reads headlines like, “Does Peanut Butter Cure Hiccups?” America wants to know.
Jesus, you spend your professional career in the journalistic trenches, working on stories of real significance, and in the twilight of your career find yourself reduced to reporting on the nexus between peanut butter and hiccups. If Gibson had any integrity or self-respect, he’d tell his corporate bosses to fuck off and retire.
Not to be outdone by peanut butter and hiccups, or the strange, isolated case of a severed finger showing up in a can of chili, the Today Show on NBC played Infotainment with this earth-shaking query: What Do Garden Gnomes Protect?
That question has troubled me for years and I’m glad NBC finally put the issue to rest. Thank you Matt and Katie.
I think what RFK JR. was trying to say is that we are royally Fucked, and if you need proof, look no further than the last election. Dubya’s record of incompetence and failure was a mile long and should have qualified him for an early retirement to his Texas ranch – and if not for the Right’s media machine, that’s exactly what would have happened. Bush supporters voted as if they were blind, deaf, and dumb, believing for instance, that WMD had been found in Iraq, believing that there was a verifiable tie between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, believing that Bush is an honest man with a big heart, who takes direction from Jesus and is not in the pocket of Big Business.
Consider Ohio, a state battered by Bush’s disastrous tax and trade policies, where large numbers of voters marched to the polls and voted against their own economic interests.
The Right has the upper hand politically and economically, the two sectors feeding and supporting one another, backed by an efficient propaganda machine to spin their point-of-view to the easily misled dunces in the heartland. The Left is disorganized and has no competing philosophy or message to offer, so for those of us who consider ourselves liberals or progressives, it’s a bleak time with only occasional flashes of light.
But sooner or later, when the economy is completely in the toilet and the Chinese are buying Euros instead of dollars, and the Republicans have fouled the air and raped the land – or invaded another Middle Eastern nation – people will wake up and run the Right wingers back into the cellar where they belong.
I’m standing at the kitchen counter, eating oatmeal and reading the latest Vanity Fair, marveling at how fake the cover photo of the chicks from Desperate Housewives appears. Vanity Fair is filled with photographs of impossibly beautiful people one rarely, if ever, sees in everyday life.
I finally find the article I want to read, an excerpt from Robert F. Kennedy JR’s book entitled: “Crimes Against Nature,” that laments, among other things, the decline of American journalism and the consequences for Democracy in this country.
This is a topic I’ve long been interested in, particularly the standard characterization that the American media has a “liberal” bias. The charge is absurd on its face, a creation of the right-wing of the Republican Party. A quick examination of media ownership in this country disproves the accusation. Rather than a liberal bias, the American media has a “corporate” bias, and anyone who claims otherwise is a pinhead.
The Right dominates the public airwaves, both radio and television, to such an extent that what most Americans see and hear resembles Journalism about as much as a miniature poodle resembles a Great Dane. Limbaugh, Hannity, Liddy, et al echo the Party line and one another. Meanwhile, the once formidable major networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS – have gutted their news divisions in order to transform them into profit centers. They are driven not by what’s important news for citizens to know and grasp, but by what attracts the largest possible audience in a given time slot.
One of the major networks had a slogan a few years back that went something like: News You Can Use from People You Can Count On.”
The slogan should now read: “News You Don’t Need from People Who Don’t Care.”
Frankly, I don’t know how ol’ Charlie Gibson gets up every morning and puts his happy face on and goes into the studio and reads headlines like, “Does Peanut Butter Cure Hiccups?” America wants to know.
Jesus, you spend your professional career in the journalistic trenches, working on stories of real significance, and in the twilight of your career find yourself reduced to reporting on the nexus between peanut butter and hiccups. If Gibson had any integrity or self-respect, he’d tell his corporate bosses to fuck off and retire.
Not to be outdone by peanut butter and hiccups, or the strange, isolated case of a severed finger showing up in a can of chili, the Today Show on NBC played Infotainment with this earth-shaking query: What Do Garden Gnomes Protect?
That question has troubled me for years and I’m glad NBC finally put the issue to rest. Thank you Matt and Katie.
I think what RFK JR. was trying to say is that we are royally Fucked, and if you need proof, look no further than the last election. Dubya’s record of incompetence and failure was a mile long and should have qualified him for an early retirement to his Texas ranch – and if not for the Right’s media machine, that’s exactly what would have happened. Bush supporters voted as if they were blind, deaf, and dumb, believing for instance, that WMD had been found in Iraq, believing that there was a verifiable tie between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, believing that Bush is an honest man with a big heart, who takes direction from Jesus and is not in the pocket of Big Business.
Consider Ohio, a state battered by Bush’s disastrous tax and trade policies, where large numbers of voters marched to the polls and voted against their own economic interests.
The Right has the upper hand politically and economically, the two sectors feeding and supporting one another, backed by an efficient propaganda machine to spin their point-of-view to the easily misled dunces in the heartland. The Left is disorganized and has no competing philosophy or message to offer, so for those of us who consider ourselves liberals or progressives, it’s a bleak time with only occasional flashes of light.
But sooner or later, when the economy is completely in the toilet and the Chinese are buying Euros instead of dollars, and the Republicans have fouled the air and raped the land – or invaded another Middle Eastern nation – people will wake up and run the Right wingers back into the cellar where they belong.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
The CTM Chronicles - San Antonio
I met Chuck T. Miller on a bus rumbling from the San Antonio, Texas airport to Lackland Air Force Base. It was June and miserably hot, a suffocating kind of heat I never experienced in coastal Santa Barbara, where the on shore breeze keeps the temperature mild. Chuck was sitting three rows in front of me, talking loudly to a big black guy across the aisle from him. Nobody else had the nerve to say a word for fear of ticking off the sullen looking Staff Sergeant perched behind the driver.
But Chuck was jawing away and I found his voice and manner annoying. I assumed he was talking so much because he was just as apprehensive as the rest of us about the major life change that awaited us when we passed through the front gate at Lackland. We’d already had a taste of the strange new world we were about to enter when the Sergeant cussed us out for moving too slowly to the bus.
The real abuse started the minute we got off the bus and formed a ragged line in front of a diminutive Tech Sergeant named Garcia, who whacked a clipboard against his thigh to emphasize the orders he was shouting at us. Garcia’s job, of course, was to scare us shitless, and he had a knack for the work. There was this pudgy kid from Ohio named Joe Grassley that Garcia started picking on the minute the poor sap stepped down off the bus, and he didn’t let up for the next six weeks. The way Garcia saw it, Grassley couldn’t wipe his own ass properly.
Garcia played no favorites. He made it clear that he hated all of us equally, regardless of where we came from or the color of our skin, though I think he reserved special disdain for Californians; he claimed we were all radicals and dope fiends. Every guy in our flight was degraded by Garcia at least once. When my face broke out near the end of the first week Garcia took to calling me “Pizza-face.” He caught a kid named Davis jerking off in one of the toilet stalls and thereafter Davis was “Jack-Off.”
One of Garcia’s favorite tricks was to pop in on us around one or two A.M., just to see if the airman on guard duty was at his post, awake and alert. It was on one of his nocturnal visits that he nailed Chuck, sound asleep in the bunk he had dragged clear across the barracks and wedged into the guard station.
The difference between Chuck and the rest of us was that Chuck honestly didn’t give a shit about anything. He actually started laughing when Garcia lit into him. Even the heaviest sleepers among us shot out of our bunks when Garcia’s voice boomed off the cinderblock walls. Garcia ripped Chuck up and down, calling him every name in the book, even tossing in a few choice phrases in Spanish. And through it all Chuck laughed, and the more he laughed the madder Garcia became.
By the time I worked up the nerve to slip out of my bunk and tiptoe closer to the action, Garcia’s wrath was losing steam. The sergeant wasn’t used to anyone defying his authority, let alone a stringy kid from California who seemed to have a real problem understanding that here he, Garcia, was God.
I’ll never as long as I live forget what Chuck said or how calmly he said it: “That was a weak rant, Sarge. I know you can do better. Tell you what, retool the act and come back for another try.”
It was vintage Chuck, a verbal broadside that knocked Garcia for a loop and sent him reeling out the door cursing at the top of his lungs. After that episode Chuck was the undisputed leader of our flight. But don’t get me wrong – Chuck paid a price for mouthing off like that – KP duty for the duration of basic training, a shit job, though Chuck made the best of it. When asked how he could stand four or five straight hours in the sticky hot kitchen, Chuck just smiled. “Boys, there’s women in that kitchen, and I hereby promise you that I will screw one of them before this is through. Next time you go through the serving line check Maria out.”
Chuck claimed that he banged Maria no less than a dozen times in a storage closet, though we had no way of verifying if it was true or just one of his many tall tales.
And that was Chuck in a nutshell – a born bullshitter. During that long, hot six weeks of basic training, and later, eighteen weeks of technical school in Wichita Falls – another of Texas’s garden spots -- I heard Chuck tell many variations of his story, the details morphing depending on who was listening.
Version 1: His father wrote for TV shows and his mother was an artist. The marriage was tempestuous and marred by excessive drinking and violence. Chuck was an only child.
Version 2: His father was the business manager for a “world famous rock band,” while his mother worked as a professional mystic in Hollywood, reading the vibrations and auras of A-list movie stars. Chuck had a younger brother named David who had perished in a flash flood at the age of four. Pressed for the name of the rock band his father managed, Chuck would say, “Think Hotel California.”
Version 3: His father worked for an “agency” of the federal government and was out of the country for months at a time; his mother was a homemaker who took in sewing to make ends meet. Chuck had a younger sister named Kasandra who was born with only three fingers on her left hand.
Version 4: His father was MIA in Vietnam, shot down over Hanoi. His mother was a mentally unbalanced emergency room nurse who spent more time with her boyfriend than with her son. Virtually on his own from the age of five, Chuck was forced by cruel circumstance to cook for himself, do his own laundry, and bandage his own wounds.
Version 5: His parents were dead, killed in a car accident in Peru when Chuck was only a baby. He’d been raised by his maternal grandparents on a ranch in Wyoming which he hated and had fled when he was thirteen. He had hitchhiked from Wyoming to California with the clothes on his back and a few possessions in an Army knapsack. He drifted from Denver to Vacaville and from there to San Francisco where he lived with a family of anarchists and dope peddlers with ties to the Symbionese Liberation Army.
I’m sure Chuck had two or three or seven more versions reserved for contingencies.
But Chuck was jawing away and I found his voice and manner annoying. I assumed he was talking so much because he was just as apprehensive as the rest of us about the major life change that awaited us when we passed through the front gate at Lackland. We’d already had a taste of the strange new world we were about to enter when the Sergeant cussed us out for moving too slowly to the bus.
The real abuse started the minute we got off the bus and formed a ragged line in front of a diminutive Tech Sergeant named Garcia, who whacked a clipboard against his thigh to emphasize the orders he was shouting at us. Garcia’s job, of course, was to scare us shitless, and he had a knack for the work. There was this pudgy kid from Ohio named Joe Grassley that Garcia started picking on the minute the poor sap stepped down off the bus, and he didn’t let up for the next six weeks. The way Garcia saw it, Grassley couldn’t wipe his own ass properly.
Garcia played no favorites. He made it clear that he hated all of us equally, regardless of where we came from or the color of our skin, though I think he reserved special disdain for Californians; he claimed we were all radicals and dope fiends. Every guy in our flight was degraded by Garcia at least once. When my face broke out near the end of the first week Garcia took to calling me “Pizza-face.” He caught a kid named Davis jerking off in one of the toilet stalls and thereafter Davis was “Jack-Off.”
One of Garcia’s favorite tricks was to pop in on us around one or two A.M., just to see if the airman on guard duty was at his post, awake and alert. It was on one of his nocturnal visits that he nailed Chuck, sound asleep in the bunk he had dragged clear across the barracks and wedged into the guard station.
The difference between Chuck and the rest of us was that Chuck honestly didn’t give a shit about anything. He actually started laughing when Garcia lit into him. Even the heaviest sleepers among us shot out of our bunks when Garcia’s voice boomed off the cinderblock walls. Garcia ripped Chuck up and down, calling him every name in the book, even tossing in a few choice phrases in Spanish. And through it all Chuck laughed, and the more he laughed the madder Garcia became.
By the time I worked up the nerve to slip out of my bunk and tiptoe closer to the action, Garcia’s wrath was losing steam. The sergeant wasn’t used to anyone defying his authority, let alone a stringy kid from California who seemed to have a real problem understanding that here he, Garcia, was God.
I’ll never as long as I live forget what Chuck said or how calmly he said it: “That was a weak rant, Sarge. I know you can do better. Tell you what, retool the act and come back for another try.”
It was vintage Chuck, a verbal broadside that knocked Garcia for a loop and sent him reeling out the door cursing at the top of his lungs. After that episode Chuck was the undisputed leader of our flight. But don’t get me wrong – Chuck paid a price for mouthing off like that – KP duty for the duration of basic training, a shit job, though Chuck made the best of it. When asked how he could stand four or five straight hours in the sticky hot kitchen, Chuck just smiled. “Boys, there’s women in that kitchen, and I hereby promise you that I will screw one of them before this is through. Next time you go through the serving line check Maria out.”
Chuck claimed that he banged Maria no less than a dozen times in a storage closet, though we had no way of verifying if it was true or just one of his many tall tales.
And that was Chuck in a nutshell – a born bullshitter. During that long, hot six weeks of basic training, and later, eighteen weeks of technical school in Wichita Falls – another of Texas’s garden spots -- I heard Chuck tell many variations of his story, the details morphing depending on who was listening.
Version 1: His father wrote for TV shows and his mother was an artist. The marriage was tempestuous and marred by excessive drinking and violence. Chuck was an only child.
Version 2: His father was the business manager for a “world famous rock band,” while his mother worked as a professional mystic in Hollywood, reading the vibrations and auras of A-list movie stars. Chuck had a younger brother named David who had perished in a flash flood at the age of four. Pressed for the name of the rock band his father managed, Chuck would say, “Think Hotel California.”
Version 3: His father worked for an “agency” of the federal government and was out of the country for months at a time; his mother was a homemaker who took in sewing to make ends meet. Chuck had a younger sister named Kasandra who was born with only three fingers on her left hand.
Version 4: His father was MIA in Vietnam, shot down over Hanoi. His mother was a mentally unbalanced emergency room nurse who spent more time with her boyfriend than with her son. Virtually on his own from the age of five, Chuck was forced by cruel circumstance to cook for himself, do his own laundry, and bandage his own wounds.
Version 5: His parents were dead, killed in a car accident in Peru when Chuck was only a baby. He’d been raised by his maternal grandparents on a ranch in Wyoming which he hated and had fled when he was thirteen. He had hitchhiked from Wyoming to California with the clothes on his back and a few possessions in an Army knapsack. He drifted from Denver to Vacaville and from there to San Francisco where he lived with a family of anarchists and dope peddlers with ties to the Symbionese Liberation Army.
I’m sure Chuck had two or three or seven more versions reserved for contingencies.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
The CTM Chronicles-Phoenix
From time to time I'll post stories about Chuck Thompson Miller, a deranged and degenerate man I consider my alter ego. These stories contain sexual debauchery, foul language, domestic violence, and basic criminality. These are not for the prudish or the faint of heart. Be warned and beware!
My old Air Force buddy, Chuck T.Miller, called at midnight the other night, from Phoenix, where he is shacked up with the wife of a dog track mogul. The last time I heard from Chuck was in February, when he called from Olympia, Washington to wish me a Merry Christmas. At that time, Chuck was hooked up with a woman who owned a matchmaking agency, though she herself had neither boyfriend or husband. It was a quirky story, full of bad luck, odd twists, and serious male-female conflict – in other words, par for the course.
But let’s stay on track. It’s midnight and Chuck is calling from Phoenix. He launches right in as if we’d seen one another that afternoon: “Yo, T-man, what up? as all the young dawgs say. Shit, there’s nothing more pathetic than a white dude trying to act black. How’s it hanging, T-man? Listen, you would not believe what I’m into here. I’m betwixt and between two people who make my most tumultuous relationships look like a fucking picnic. They are up to their butts in lawyers, accountants, and private detectives, each doing their absolute best to inflict maximum pain and suffering on the other. Rachel’s got the big house and the daughter, Bob’s got the idiot teenage son, the condo and the Mercedes SUV. You know what Bob’s license plate says? Buzzsaw. How do you like that shit? Buzzsaw. That’s what his business associates call him. Rachel says he’s tied in with the mob, but she’s probably just bullshitting.
“These two really need to load up a couple of .44 magnums and have a duel. The local cops and the neighbors would dearly love to see one of them dead. Let me give you a quick example of how volatile the situation is. Last week me and Rachel had tickets to see Rod Stewart – a big fav of Rachel’s -- so Buzzsaw was supposed to pick up his daughter and keep her overnight. About ten minutes before we have to hit the road he calls and says he’s tied up in an important business meeting and will be late, how late he doesn’t know. Now Tania, the daughter, is seventeen going on twenty-eight and can certainly hang out by herself for an hour or so, except that Rachel doesn’t trust her not to invite some guy over to do the big nasty in the Jacuzzi. Tania is too fucking sexually developed for her own good and the little nympho even comes on to me once a week or so, which really tests my resolve not to slip into total degeneracy and show her what it’s like to be fucked by a man.
“Anyway, Rachel goes berserk. ‘Listen to me you disgusting toad,’ she screamed into the phone. ‘Get your fat ass off the golf course or off whatever whore you’re porking and get over here and pick up your daughter! Yeah? You think you’re man enough? Bring it on, you limp-dick piece of garbage.’
“After slamming the phone down so hard it cracked, Rachel tore through the house looking for God-knows-what, cursing and screaming, her eyes like a wild dog’s. Meanwhile, Tania is downstairs watching MTV and smoking a joint as if her mother’s behavior is nothing new. I’m thinking to myself that I’ve finally been consigned to the madhouse. Anyway, cut to the chase, Rachel comes running downstairs with a silver pistol in her hand. She’s waving the thing around like Calamity-fucking-Jane, her finger on the trigger. I’m about to shit myself because I’m convinced that one of us is about to get shot in the heart. You know me – I’m a fucking coward.
“By the time Buzzsaw pulls into the driveway, almost an hour late, Rachel is insane with rage. Not only does she have the gun, now she’s got a nine-inch carving knife. I don’t even bother trying to calm her down; it’s too late for that. She runs outside in her bare feet and I’m certain somebody’s about to get killed, and I’m imagining the cops coming, then the coroner, and all the questions that will ensue. I look over at the kid to see how she’s absorbing all this and she’s still glued to the tube, as calm as can be. When she senses that I’m looking at her she winks at me.
“Buzzsaw is either the bravest man I’ve ever seen or the dumbest, because instead of backing out of the driveway at top speed, he gets out of the car and walks toward Rachel with his arms akimbo. I can’t hear what he’s saying, of course, but I can read his lips: ‘Go ahead, shoot. Pull the trigger, Rachel. Shoot me dead.’ Now realize that Rachel is less than ten feet away in a shooter’s stance, both hands holding the pistol and the carving knife clenched between her teeth. The last thing I would have said in that situation is, Go ahead, shoot.
"But Buzzsaw obviously knows his wife better than I do because two minutes later the confrontation is over and the two of them are talking as if it never happened. Tania gets her backpack and goes outside and gets in the car without saying a word to her parents. I’m watching this scene through the kitchen window, dumb-fucking-founded. This is too weird – even by my screwy standards.
“Rachel comes back in the house, all smiles. She puts the knife and the pistol on the kitchen counter and says to me, ‘Why aren’t you dressed? We gotta’ get going.’
“How do you like that shit, T-man? We are a doomed species. It’s only a matter of time. By the way, can you see your way clear to loaning me a few bucks?”
My old Air Force buddy, Chuck T.Miller, called at midnight the other night, from Phoenix, where he is shacked up with the wife of a dog track mogul. The last time I heard from Chuck was in February, when he called from Olympia, Washington to wish me a Merry Christmas. At that time, Chuck was hooked up with a woman who owned a matchmaking agency, though she herself had neither boyfriend or husband. It was a quirky story, full of bad luck, odd twists, and serious male-female conflict – in other words, par for the course.
But let’s stay on track. It’s midnight and Chuck is calling from Phoenix. He launches right in as if we’d seen one another that afternoon: “Yo, T-man, what up? as all the young dawgs say. Shit, there’s nothing more pathetic than a white dude trying to act black. How’s it hanging, T-man? Listen, you would not believe what I’m into here. I’m betwixt and between two people who make my most tumultuous relationships look like a fucking picnic. They are up to their butts in lawyers, accountants, and private detectives, each doing their absolute best to inflict maximum pain and suffering on the other. Rachel’s got the big house and the daughter, Bob’s got the idiot teenage son, the condo and the Mercedes SUV. You know what Bob’s license plate says? Buzzsaw. How do you like that shit? Buzzsaw. That’s what his business associates call him. Rachel says he’s tied in with the mob, but she’s probably just bullshitting.
“These two really need to load up a couple of .44 magnums and have a duel. The local cops and the neighbors would dearly love to see one of them dead. Let me give you a quick example of how volatile the situation is. Last week me and Rachel had tickets to see Rod Stewart – a big fav of Rachel’s -- so Buzzsaw was supposed to pick up his daughter and keep her overnight. About ten minutes before we have to hit the road he calls and says he’s tied up in an important business meeting and will be late, how late he doesn’t know. Now Tania, the daughter, is seventeen going on twenty-eight and can certainly hang out by herself for an hour or so, except that Rachel doesn’t trust her not to invite some guy over to do the big nasty in the Jacuzzi. Tania is too fucking sexually developed for her own good and the little nympho even comes on to me once a week or so, which really tests my resolve not to slip into total degeneracy and show her what it’s like to be fucked by a man.
“Anyway, Rachel goes berserk. ‘Listen to me you disgusting toad,’ she screamed into the phone. ‘Get your fat ass off the golf course or off whatever whore you’re porking and get over here and pick up your daughter! Yeah? You think you’re man enough? Bring it on, you limp-dick piece of garbage.’
“After slamming the phone down so hard it cracked, Rachel tore through the house looking for God-knows-what, cursing and screaming, her eyes like a wild dog’s. Meanwhile, Tania is downstairs watching MTV and smoking a joint as if her mother’s behavior is nothing new. I’m thinking to myself that I’ve finally been consigned to the madhouse. Anyway, cut to the chase, Rachel comes running downstairs with a silver pistol in her hand. She’s waving the thing around like Calamity-fucking-Jane, her finger on the trigger. I’m about to shit myself because I’m convinced that one of us is about to get shot in the heart. You know me – I’m a fucking coward.
“By the time Buzzsaw pulls into the driveway, almost an hour late, Rachel is insane with rage. Not only does she have the gun, now she’s got a nine-inch carving knife. I don’t even bother trying to calm her down; it’s too late for that. She runs outside in her bare feet and I’m certain somebody’s about to get killed, and I’m imagining the cops coming, then the coroner, and all the questions that will ensue. I look over at the kid to see how she’s absorbing all this and she’s still glued to the tube, as calm as can be. When she senses that I’m looking at her she winks at me.
“Buzzsaw is either the bravest man I’ve ever seen or the dumbest, because instead of backing out of the driveway at top speed, he gets out of the car and walks toward Rachel with his arms akimbo. I can’t hear what he’s saying, of course, but I can read his lips: ‘Go ahead, shoot. Pull the trigger, Rachel. Shoot me dead.’ Now realize that Rachel is less than ten feet away in a shooter’s stance, both hands holding the pistol and the carving knife clenched between her teeth. The last thing I would have said in that situation is, Go ahead, shoot.
"But Buzzsaw obviously knows his wife better than I do because two minutes later the confrontation is over and the two of them are talking as if it never happened. Tania gets her backpack and goes outside and gets in the car without saying a word to her parents. I’m watching this scene through the kitchen window, dumb-fucking-founded. This is too weird – even by my screwy standards.
“Rachel comes back in the house, all smiles. She puts the knife and the pistol on the kitchen counter and says to me, ‘Why aren’t you dressed? We gotta’ get going.’
“How do you like that shit, T-man? We are a doomed species. It’s only a matter of time. By the way, can you see your way clear to loaning me a few bucks?”
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