Chapter 6 - Never Argue

He blinked his eyes, smirked, exhaled, and reached for his Scotch.  The smirk became a smile as he saw the slight tremor in his hand just before it closed around the glass.  He inhaled deeply, raised his glass, actually laughed out loud, and then finished his drink.   He sat it back down and did not react at all as his hand slowly, gracefully returned to the arm of his chair.

The alcohol began to hum a soft, sweet hymn through the lower basin of his mind.  The tremor, the laugh, hell, the fear, had been a welcome surprise.  At the very wrong end of the gun he was fifteen years old again.  But this time he had not whimpered for his mother.  

The gun had been too real.  Metal.  Dark.  Oily. The light had actually danced into rainbows as it ran from sleek, gleaming metal.  But the shadows had loved him.  The Gun.  He had called him the Gun.  He had a name.  He knew his parents had talked about him when they thought he had not been able to listen.  And he had a name.  But he had called him, simply, the Gun.  

The Gun had been too real.  Cold.  Dark.  Brooding.  The shadows had caressed him.  He had served drinks while slipping under the light - becoming the shadow and the obstruction all in one.  "Is that how people see me?" he wondered.  He knew he never inspired that kind of fear.   But the...mystique.  The hesitancy to interrupt, the reverence.  That seemed like the memories one found in a mirror.

He heard her key turn in the lock.  "Hi, honey! You're home!" he called out.  He sat there and waited while she turned out of her coat.  She walked into the study, saw his empty glass and he saw the hesitation.  His kiss could wait.  She turned and grabbed the bottle of bourbon and poured herself a drink and then grabbed the Scotch for him.

She sipped her bourbon and bent down to kiss him softly on the lips.  She smiled as she pulled away.  She always smiled just after a kiss.  She had tasted of bourbon.  "Well, you're alive.  That much of your plan seems to have worked out."

She settled into chair so recently occupied by the man with the gun and crossed her legs.  He couldn't see her feet from this angle but knew that one of her pumps would be dangling from her toes having lost purchase on her heal.  With her perfectly swept back blonde hair and the tan skirt that outlined her figure with a black top unbuttoned almost to the limit of good taste and a rock glass of bourbon - she was temptation.

She was not beautiful.  Something with the nose being a little too... something.   If you found yourself looking closely enough to find the imperfections in her features, you found yourself lost.  For while you would never have defined her as beautiful, you would have been caught up in desire.  She was lust, temptation.  It inspired his pet name for her.

He had learned to resist beauty and sex and money and power.  He had never thought to steel himself against intelligence.  Fortunately for him, she hadn't either.  He was making a fortune on the periphery of her social scene.  People with more money than sense, almost always the ones who had inherited the fortune rather than the ones who had earned it, were too happy to invest with him.  Some of those investments had even been legitimate.  And profitable.  And he was working his way up to bigger and bigger fish when he had been introduced to the heiress of the Farfenelli fortune.

She watched him for almost a year playing his games and hopping from bed to bed with the daughters and wives and mistresses of men with fortunes enough to crush him if they ever found out.  But they trusted him.  They all liked him.  She could not figure out why.  Whatever spell he cast, however he engendered such trust, it failed to work on her.  She disliked him almost immediately.

And then, one night at one party, over drinks of course, they talked.  She told him that she thought he was a fraud.  He said of course he was.  She told him that she thought he was out to make as much money as he could off of the insipid and arrogant.  He said of course he was.  She pointed out that he was basically a whore for every bit of silicone and plastic and hair extended trollop that subsisted on the arms of billionaire cuckolds and fools.  He sipped the last of his Scotch.

"I have had far too much to drink and I am trying to pick a fight with you, but you just aren't going to commit, are you?"

He smiled at her.  She had not seen that smile before.  She wondered how many of the women here had seen that smile.

"I learned long ago to never argue with a woman smarter than me."  He smiled again and this time seemed to notice her noticing his smile and quickly sipped his drink.

''Why did you do that?"

"What?"

"Cover your smile with a rock glass of mostly Scotch flavored ice?  Don't think there was even a sip left in there."

He looked at her and then at his glass and then smirked.  She was strangely certain that no one else here, male or female, had seen that smirk before.  It was... awkward.  It was embarrassed.  She felt the tip of her tongue touch her upper lip as she realized that smirk was... honest.  And she was acutely aware that he had seen her wet her lips and blushed slightly as she knew he would misread this.

He looked down at his drink.  He looked her in the eyes, "How many guys have tried to kiss you after you wet your lips like that?"

She found herself laughing and just managed to wave her left hand in the air - the hell if she was going to sweep her hair back over that one - charming - comment.  With her right hand she lifted her glass of bourbon to her lips and too late realized that it was basically just ice.

They both laughed at that.

They often laughed.  Mostly at themselves.  As she sat across from him with one shoe dangling from her toes, they were not smiling.  "What was he like?"

"He is smart.  Smart enough to not let on how smart he is.  Calculating.  Cold.  A killer.  If the dollars hadn't been so preposterously big, he would have shot me on general principle."

That hung in the air.  They had talked over and over again about how much of the truth to tell the man with the gun.  One train of thought was to keep the dollars reasonable.  Believable.  The truth, the actual amounts, was literally ridiculous.  They had finally decided to not decide.  He would make the call based on what he found with the man and the gun here in the room.

"The truth was so stupid, I had to be telling the truth.  If it had been reasonable, he would have smelled a con and I would have an additional nostril."

He hid his smile behind his glass of Scotch.  She did nothing to hide her disdain at his gallows humor.

"How much does he know?  You played the brother card..."

"He knew we were brothers.  Or he knew I would say we were brothers.  He knew the story about Junior shooting his mother.  Don't know if he believed that either."

"He is smart"

"Told you."

"Does he really pretend to work for the Russians?"

"Calls them the Neckless.  And yes, he maintains that appearance."

She sips her bourbon.  He notices just a bit of her lipstick at the edge of her glass.  She exhales deeply and looks over the books on the shelves just to his left.   The tip of her tongue finds her upper lip.  She frowns.

He looks down at his Scotch.  He looks over at the bottles of liquor just over her right shoulder.  He drinks deeply and realizes through the numbness of his lips that he is most certainly drunk.

"I love you," he says to her.

"Of course you do."

End Chapter Six

Chapter 5 - The Neckless

Joseph "Joey" Suka and his brother James "Jamie" Suka spent twenty years speaking with their best idea of a Russian accent to Italians and Mexicans and Jamaicans and Crips and Bloods and various others.  Joey had explained to Jamie that Russians were scary.  Being scary could be profitable.  People paid debts to scary people.  People changed testimony for scary people.  People paid for protection from scary people.  And Joey explained that while anyone could snap fingers or break knee caps or effectively place an ice pick in a liver, Russians were especially scary.

Nobody, not the Italians, the Mexicans, the Jamaicans, the Crips, or the Bloods thought they were Russian.   But the story of how they brought back Anthony "Chicklets" Abato's teeth, all of them, to Giovanni Oddi made them scary.  When they mailed pieces of Andrew "Chopper" Nocerino to every other person on the witness list against Paulie Schmidt made them scary.  What they did to "Nuts" Pagono made them scary as hell.

They were ridiculous, but absolutely lethal.  And scary.  That made them valuable.  That meant they were well fed.  That meant they eventually had no necks.  Just heads popped up six feet above the ground on round mounds of surprisingly muscular flesh.  Six feet six inches of 322 pounds of twin - TWIN - terror.  They saw the world in black and white and left it in red.

If the client wanted someone to disappear, then the Suka brothers were a waste of money.  They could DO that, but...

If you wanted something done that involved a cleaver and a blow torch, the Suka brothers and their "moose and squirrel" fake Russian accents were a sound investment.

Brutality.

People paid good money for brutality.

But for good money, people wanted results.  Proof.  Driving around (never flying) with proof was risky.  But people paid really good money for risk.

But there is a funny thing about risk.  The first time you sneak out of your parents' house at one in the morning, it is nerve racking.  The 33rd time you do it, it is just climbing out your bedroom window at one in the morning.

The first time you drive around the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex with a dismembered body in your trunk it is terrifying.  The 33rd time you do it, you stop for chicken fried steak at your favorite chicken fried steak place.  And then you curse in broken Russian when you find your car stolen.  All your plans for the intestines of Jimmy "Spaghetti" Spinnetti gone with your favorite cleaver and your vintage copy of James Agee's A Death in the Family.

For the first time in ages the twin terrors were afraid.  They knew they amounted to middle management at best.  Consultants maybe would be an even better description.  If their Caddie turned up with Spaghetti in it and a cleaver and fingerprints and a certain ledger that even Jamie didn't know about, then both twins were sure to be expedited death penalty candidates in the extremely mortal state of Texas.  Either by the citizens of the Lone Star State or the members of the Detroit Men's Swim Club.

That was when they met the young black man from Houston with a gun.  He never showed them the gun.  They never needed to see it.  He knew it was there and so did they.  The way he walked right up to them but stayed just out of reach.  The way he kept the hip with the gun nestled against it away from them.  The way...  Joey was the one to notice this but once he said it out loud to Jamie it made sense.. the way his right hand looked empty, incomplete without a gun in it, spoke a violent dialect that these two violent men could understand all to well.

Things for the Suka's changed almost immediately after that.  The car turned up.  And the body was undisturbed.  It was so convenient that Jamie thought the man with the gun must have stolen the car or at least arranged it.  But the man with the gun made no demands on them.  He just did them a favor.  A favor that kept them out of hot water with the state of Texas and more importantly, the Detroit Men's Swim Club.

Things changed for the Suka twins after that.  They still took freelance assignments and still made fear a fog, a film that settled over the ones meant to be afraid.  But they added book making to their duties once they took out a bookie that had cheated the Swim Club of their proper cut.  There was a drug dealer that had decided to testify about his bosses.  Did you know that testify comes from the root word testes?  The twins or the man with the gun apparently did.  And so the Suka's entered the drug trade as on of the most secure networks imaginable.

They developed a reputation for over paying their help.  People chocked it up to them remembering what it was like to be lower down the ladder.  But if you worked for the twins, and you were good at your job, and you kept your mouth shut, you could make a lot of money.

The first time that reputation paid off for them was when the Redhead came to work for them.  She was beautiful.  Not pretty.  Pretty implied an innocence.  Pretty you could look away from.  You could not take your eyes off of the redhead.  For a hired killer that would seem to be a handicap.

But you would stand there with your mouth open and your hands limp and ... other parts of you forgetting the definition of the word "limp".  The fact that she got in to see them without an appointment was one testament to her caliber.  The ceramic straight razor that she had brought with her was another. She held it first against where Jamie's throat should have been and then teasingly against his nose when the man with the gun had shown her his properly adorned right hand.

She made a gift of the razor to Jamie whose pupils were still a bit dilated.  She smiled at Joey and his nostrils flared.  She turned to the man with the gun and pinched her lips together against the smile that wanted to blossom there.

"So you are the brains behind these two 'wild and crazy guys,' huh?"

End Chapter Five

Chapter 4 - Tells

The red head drove.  The rain was falling harder and harder and the road could barely be seen.  Her attention seemed to be solely directed at the road.  He knew better.  She never took her eyes off the road but he had absolute confidence that she did not miss a single move he made.  She had taught him how to do it.  But she was still the best.  It looked like the road was her sole focus.

He looked up to the roof of the car.  He closed his eyes.  She asked, "What's wrong?"  He smiled without ever opening his eyes.

She never asked the question again.  She drove through the rain a bit too fast for safety or comfort.  He did not love her.  He didn't.  Really.  But she was exactly the woman he would have loved.  She was smarter than him.  More pragmatic and conversely and illogically more honorable.  She was predictable in a way that made you only more disconcerted.  If you knew her, really knew her, you feared her, at least a little.  She scared him just a bit.  He treasured the fear she had allowed him to feel.

"You let him live."  The rain changed directions, working with the wind to make a fool of gravity so that it seemed perfectly normal for droplets to run parallel to the car.  She did not slow a bit.  He inhaled deeply Slow down, you are driving too fast, he never actually said.

She sped up a barely detectable mile per hour.  You have ignored me twice and I am getting a little pissed about that, she never actually responded.  They stayed that way for an uncomfortable number of minutes with her driving the route to his home more by memory than sight.  They stayed that way in a mild state of bitterness that only two old lovers can.

"I let him live," he responded without really answering.  It was a surrender on his part without giving up anything.  She had taught him that too.  She eased off the pedal - all the way back to her original speed that had unnerved him in the first place.  And so they danced.

"Money is not an issue," she replied.  Not "you have money" or "we have money" - she twirled away from him.

"Money enough to never,ever think of money again is always an issue."   His reply - a sweeping bow and an outstretched hand.

"A con man who has studied you for at least 3 years..."

"Seven according to him..."

"For three years... has promised you a fortune.  There is a joke there about Nigerian royalty."

He smiles again without looking at her.  "He either means for me to share in it with him or he means for me to take the fall for it while he makes away with the money.  I don't know yet."

She moves her head to the left.  Really, only a slight tilt to the left - a centimeter or two, barely enough to shift her hair.  But her hand, her right hand, came up and swept a strand of sunset red hair back over her ear.  IF her lips had pinched just a bit - charmed.  The lips did not pinch.  If she had followed the hair sweep with a deep inhalation - pissed.  Just the chin and the hair - vague disappointment and a little annoyed.  The fact that he had left such a dedicated, knowledgeable threat with the original number of holes annoyed the pragmatist.

"Our cut," OUR CUT - OURS - MINE and YOURS - YOURS AND MINE , "would be roughly 2 Billion."

The car fish tailed and she tucked her head hard to the left with a deep gasp and fought the road and the wet for control again.  She then peaked at him under red bangs that flirted over her green eyes and she bit her lower lip just slightly.

End Chapter Four

Stray Thoughts - Entry 138

It Just Clicks.  Or, It Doesn't

I don't know why some things are funny to me or how my mind puts things together.  I have told Cilla before when she has asked, "How did you get from here all the way to there?"  And it is amazing how that works and connects so quickly.  And then there are other times when I am telling a story and there is a word I need to finish the story and I cannot think of that word to save my life.  I will stand there with Cilla and just wait.  And wait.  And wait for the right word to show up.  With others, I have to just find the best word that will do and stammer it out.  But I am still disappointed that the best version of that thought or sentence didn't get out there.

Southeast Asian Poultry

Was watching a cooking show that was featuring chicken wings.   The host then had a college professor come out with a few varieties of live chickens. The professor pointed out that all varieties of chicken originated in the jungles of Southeast Asia.  That was fascinating to me.  When you think of wild jungle creatures, is chicken the first thing that comes to mind?

And then I started laughing.  Cilla looked at me and knew better than to ask the question.  So I answered it anyway.  "I was just thinking - dude is holding a Vietnamese Jungle Chicken.  Doesn't that sound like a racial epithet?  Like, if you called someone at work a 'Vietnamese Jungle Chicken,' you could get fired."

For the rest of the day when either of us did something stupid or frustrating we called each other a Vietnamese Jungle Chicken.

Lost 60 Pounds in 2013

Lost 60 pounds in 2013 and was sporadically good at running.  The goal this year is to lose around 60 more.  I wanted to lose 100 pounds in 2013 and was making pretty good progress for most of the year when I changed jobs and moved across the country.  Lost another 15 pounds once we got here and then flattened out with the stress of the new job.

I only HAD to work 3 days a week.  But I came in on a couple of my days off just because... just because.  There are so many things that happen during the day of a work week that are unplanned, that I have always felt that you needed a day or so with no responsibilities to focus on admin and anything else you could do ahead of time or after the fact.

Work just dominated every piece of energy we had.  I went from running 6 days a week for an hour each day, to doing almost nothing.  And it was much more the emotional drain than a physical one really.  It was very much a case of "I only have so much CONCERN to go around.  I have my God, my wife, my work, and then the Braves got that last little bit."

I needed something mindless and effortless and sports are perfect for that and baseball is the best because it ALWAYS on.  Having to go out and work out and plan my workouts - it just wasn't mindless enough.  My plan is to get a baseline workout routine set up that is just that - routine.  I can always add things to keep my interest up, but also have this healthy thing that is no mental stress at all either.

Things are better for me at work now.  I can not only see a light at the end of the tunnel, I am growing more and more confident that it is not an oncoming train.  That, in the words of convicted felon Martha Stewart, is a good thing.

I Can Name Every County in Delaware

Sussex, Kent, and New Castle.

That's it.  All THREE of them.  Uno, Dos, Tres, ain't no Cuatro.

I Need a Church

I need a church.  I need believers singing hymns in honor of Christ's sacrifice and teachers teaching me things about the love of God that I don't know or that I need reminding about.  I need fellow believers who serve one another and MORE IMPORTANTLY serve others.  Serving others, being the mild, soft spoken ones that provide food to the hungry, clothes to the cold, and shelter to the homeless - those are the people that win people to Christ.

I am not mild.  I am not soft spoken.  Loving is not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of me.  I am selfish and bombastic and loud.  But I love you.  To the extent that Christ has changed me from the sinner I was to the saved sinner I am, I love you.  I look at you sometimes and I forget how unlovable I am and how He loved me anyway.  That is why I need a Church.  To remind me that I must serve.  I must serve because I am blessed.

But I also need a church to allow me to humble myself before God and Christ.  If you are able to keep in mind how perfect God is and that the God of the whole universe is just fascinated with you as an individual, it becomes hard to get too down on yourself.  If you are reminded of all the pain and brutality that Christ faced on our behalf, it gets harder to be overwhelmed with the trivial inconveniences of our modern lives.  If you understand that someone without blame at all sacrificed himself to spare you, it gets harder to hold a grudge against those folks who wrong you.

I need that in my life.

No Domino's or Pizza Hut or Papa John's

One tidbit that might be interesting to some of you is that while my weight loss program kind of stalled a month or so after getting up here to Delaware, it did not do so because of franchised pizza places.  Pizza has been my guilty pleasure for ages now.  It is the perfect FAT SLOB RAY food.  You don't even have to leave the house to get it!  They will bring it to you.  The internet even allows you to order without dealing with live humans.  The only shame you have to deal with is when your 30 hot wings and extra large Dominator or Pepperoni Lover Deep Dish pizza gets to the house is the delivery guy.  And there is no judgement in his eyes at all - unless you stiff him on the tip.

But I have not had pizza from a national franchise since we got up here.  It has been too easy and too tasty to pick up, dine in, or have delivered pizza made by people that have an inordinate number of vowels in their last names.  Since I have gotten to Delaware, I have had more pizzas prepared by guys named Vinnie that they had guys named Vinnie on the Sopranos.

And pizzas with the best ingredient almost always being the crust.  A crust that has an audible "crack" as you first bite into it but then has an incredible chewy quality that follows.  I had never ordered a plain cheese pizza before I got here.  And even though that is what I have ordered a few times now, I have never gotten a plain cheese pizza.  I have had that magical crust with tomato sauce that has never seen the inside of can married to cheese that in some cases had been made earlier that day - cheese made all the richer by bubbling for just a few moments in a wood fired, brick or stone oven.

It is so good that it is almost unfair when we release the cook to add fresh basil or pepperoni or roasted broccoli with bacon or ...  Well, you get the idea.  The two places we go have family working behind the counter, in the kitchen, or in the garden growing a lot of what we find on the pizzas.  I should have stuck to the seafood places.  Might have made it to a hundred pounds lost this past year if I had.

An Evil Man Was Nice

Many years ago when I was at my worst the city of Houston provided me a place to stay for the night.  Part of me wants to list all the ways I was worse. But a young woman in the church I attended a year or so after Houston's hospitality department catered to my excess taught me different.  She was giving her testimony and refrained from listing all the depraved things she had done before Christ found her wandering and wondering on that road to Damascus.

You could tell it was not shame that kept her from sharing - at least I could.  I knew she spoke the truth when she said she did not want to "honor the wrong things."  I knew it was true because I have sat with others talking of our sins and the hazards from those sins and I have felt that perverse pride when my depravity was greater than theirs.  So, I won't be listing all the ways I was worse.  Just understand that as bad as I am now, with the benefit of Jesus Himself sanding away the rougher, coarser edges, at one time, I was worse.

But the night that Houston kept me as a guest...  I had been drinking.  I had spent hours drinking.  I had gone from club to club with an extremely seductive young woman and her friends who really, really LOVED...  my money.  At the last club she and her friends had gotten thrown out.  I had not.

 I had found an even more attractive woman who also LOVED my money but not only laughed at my jokes, but seemed to actually GET the jokes.  That told me she was smarter than the other one.  Maybe she was not smart enough to get the jokes, to actually think they were funny - I will never know.  But she was smart enough to make me think that she did in the moment.  That was far smarter than the other one.  If I am going to be played, I at least want to be played well.

At some point a friend of her boyfriend showed up and started asking loud questions.  He had had so much alcohol that he could not get my hearing to understand him properly.  Or I was so drunk I could not get him to speak clearly.  Or something like that.  Time to go.

I will skip over some really good parts to save them for another time.  But I wound up in a large concrete room with concrete benches and exposed toilets and a solid steel door with a shuttered window that only opened from the outside.  And I was not alone.  I was with drug addicts - some blissfully within the grasp of their chosen oblivion of self and others horrified to find themselves confined once again to their own minds, their own selves with no means of leaving behind the one person they hated the most.  I was with other drunks - most dressed as lower middle class laborers who had not yet made it home from just a few beers with the guys and a few of us dressed rather nicely from an evening with the girls and one obnoxious fellow in a tuxedo who had lost his bow tie the same as all of us had lost our shoe laces and belts.  I was with drug dealers - some of whom appeared to have been smart enough to not actually use their own product and others whom I would have put with the drug addicts until I heard their charges read later that night.  Of course the homeless and the mentally disturbed were there - arguably the most comfortable of the lot with the wind and the rain incapable of finding them in this grey on gray purgatory.

They fed us that night.  Two pieces of bologna, two pieces of bread, a piece of cheese, a granola bar with blueberries all in a plastic bag.  There was nothing to drink served with it.  I did not complain.  I was working diligently to perfect my impersonation of concrete.  As my hangover started to progress throughout the night, it actually helped by graying my complexion.  I watched the elders of this urban tribe of the concrete room empty the contents of the plastic bag and then fill that with water from the water fountains that were mounted above each toilet.  I went to the fountain and drank and drank in an effort to hold off the worst effects of the hangover that I knew was coming.

A couple of hours later an ancient black man, skinny to the point that I could have identified specific bones if I had paid enough attention in biology, woke up and was hungry.  He had missed the meal.  He asked several around him when they were going to feed us and most of them did not answer him - conversation was not a popular pass time.  Finally someone told him that they had served the food and gone.

"I am hungry," was all he said before he started crying.  Not loud sobs or wails or anything so dramatic.  Just a hungry man with no hope in the world crying at the latest example of how the world was beyond his ability.  He cried.  I turned my head away while noticing that others were turning just as I was.  He cried softly and barely audibly.  He cried.

A young black man, shorter than me by a couple of inches but in shape, sleek looking, like a runner, put his arm around the much taller, much older man.  "C'mon, let's find you some food Pops."

The younger man was a drug dealer.  I knew this because we had already been before the judge and had our charges read.  He was a drug dealer who had been arrested selling to an undercover cop.  He was a drug dealer who was arrested in possession of an unregistered firearm.  He was a drug dealer who had not looked away from a crying, helpless, hungry old man.

They walked together among the rest of us, slowly as the old man shuffled his feet, and the younger man would ask, "Yo, man, you gonna eat that bread?"  "Hey, pahtnuh, you gonna eat that granola shit?"

They walked among us until the young man had put together a meal for the older man from the things that others had not wanted.  He then took his own old plastic bag and filled it full of water for the older man.  He even asked,"You don't mind drinking after me, do ya, Pops?"  And of course the old man didn't.

It is hard to look like concrete with tears in your eyes.  I don't know that young man's name.  I have no idea if he was convicted or how his life turned out.  I know based on the charges read that he sold crack and meth, that he traded in misery.  I know he carried a gun.  He might have rationalized that he needed the gun to protect his drugs and money, but that is just another way of saying that he was willing to kill someone over crack and meth.  Those actions are evil.

But on that night, in that place, he was nice to an old man who was hungry and hopeless and helpless.  On that night when I looked away, he put his arm around a hurting human being and offered comfort.  He saw misery and hopelessness and he took action.  On that night, in that moment, he was the better man.

Not a Ron Howard Production

Before the movie was ever made, he told me this.  I hate the fact that the movie was made.  Or at least I hate that the movie was given the title that it was given.  It cheapens the impact of the statement.  It renders it derivative when it was original at its time of being spoken.  Perhaps not original.  Perhaps that is memory playing tricks or lack of knowledge coloring recollections.  But it was not        common.

My father was on a hospital bed very much like the one he died on.  He was in a hospital room very much like the one he died in.  He was in the hospital that he eventually died         in.   My mother was there.  Sitting on the bed with him.  Her left hand, or rather the nails of the fingers of her left hand, traced what must have been, by then, a decades long rotation through the hairline that almost reached the back of his neck.

A decision had been made to touch him like that, in that spot, at that speed, with that force, with that repetition.  It was a decision reached perhaps verbally or perhaps not.  It was a decision made by two friends and two partners and two lovers and two parents and two enemies and two spouses - all those things that apply to an old married couple of 27 years.  It was a decision.  Two consciousnesses focused on this and agreed - this offered comfort and pleasure in the binary.  This was something they both enjoyed and they both decided that this was something that would be done.

 The beauty, as I saw then and as I might be the only to see, was that the decision was not made that day or the days leading to that day.  This comfort, this pleasure, this absent minded mingling of one to one was decided upon years and years ago - perhaps, probably, before the existence of its sole independent witness - me - on this day so long ago.  My mother's hand played with the short hairs on the nape of my father's neck.

The window was open and cool air was blowing in softly.  It would have been fall, was probably fall - spring time in south Georgia could be unbearably hot.  But it could have been spring I suppose.  My dad was leaned up in his hospital bed with my mother sitting beside him and me sitting at the foot of his bed.  The air from outside smelled of pine trees.  My mother was noticeable happy - obviously happy - for a moment obliviously happy.  I smiled.

Years ago my father had told his doctor that he had to be left      hope.  An interesting request.  To be left with hope.  Knowing, at some point, that request devolves to "lie to me".

My mother told me once over burgers at Wendy's - Wendy's was close to the hospital - she told me, "Your daddy told me the other day, 'Mama, they are gonna start keeping things from me soon.  You are gonna have to go out and ask them if you want to know more.'"

I shifted the last bite of my burger to my cheek and asked with the taste of mustard and ketchup and beef and onion cascading through the cavities of my skull, "What did you say?"

"I smiled," she said, "and I said, 'I'll listen to what they tell you.'"  I saw her eyes grow wetter and recognized the trick I did to tighten the cords of my throat to bite down, to back down, tears and crying.

"They have been keeping things from him for months now."

I bit my burger.  I chewed my burger.  I swallowed my burger.  I counted on the act of eating to mask the tightening of the cords in my neck.

I knew they had.  I knew he was dying.  I think (I almost typed, "I like to think...",  but ) I think that he knew he was dying.  But that conversation kinda disproves that.  Think on that - the medical professionals were dancing around the truth.  For us.  For him.

Mrs. Page at church, when she eulogized him at the end of the year, the way she eulogized all members who died during the course of the year, described him as charming.   He must have been.  I found him so but that is not evidence.  No.  That is found in the nurses who told my mother before and after his passing (death) that they hoped / prayed / were thankful that they were not working when they called CODE on his room.

My sister-in-law acted through her sister to get us to address a living will.  But she acted through me.  I was the oldest.  That was why.  That had to by why.  Right?  It wasn't because I was the coldest.  It was because I was the STRONGEST - ha!  Sorry.  Self deception only goes so far.  But I was the one that took the form and listened through not - quite - Charlie Brown teacher - jazz horn - instructions.  I was the one that led my family through the form.  I wonder if they heard me as something just less or just more than a jazz horn trying to find syllables.

We completed the form.  We signed the form.  We were SERIOUS.  There was DECORUM.  There was also butterflies dripping with acid circling through stomachs.

The doctor came in and went over the form and the whole family nodded absently at the notions that we had just initialed and then signed and then dated.  He walked us through each line by final            final             final

line.



They would not do CPR.  They would not put him on an artificial heart.  And we nodded.  They would not do CPR.  They would not put him on a respirator. And we nodded.  They would not do CPR.  They would not seek to sustain his life through artificial means.  And we nodded.  They would not do CPR.  They would not do CPR.  They would not do CPR.  They would not do CPR.  THEY WOULD NOT DO CPR!  THEY WOULD NOT DO CPR!  THEY WOULD NOT DO CPR!  THEY WOULD NOT DO CPR!

"Um."

As the start of one of those sentences that you have to say, as the start of THE sentence you have to say (and at that time, it was THE sentence that had to be said) it was an admittedly poor start.

But that is the way I started it.   "Um,"

I paused.  It was not to gather my thoughts.  It was a stalling tactic.  I knew someone else would say what I wanted to say.  I just needed to drop the "um" to stall the inevitable, morbid momentum to give them the breathing space to say the obvious.  But the silence         it did not echo.  It, the silence, turned on me.  Nobody said a word as doctor, nurses, sisters-in law, brothers, mother, and


father

turned

to look
at me.

"No CPR?"

The LOOK continued.  I knew what had to be said.  Didn't they know what had to be said?  If ALL knew what HAD to be said, then just asking the question                and        pausing.








But no.  They don't see it.  I had to say what had to be said.  I had to say it in front of him.  A continuously shrinking part of me hates them all for their blank stares and their simplicity.


"I agree.  No tubes or machines.  No postponing the inevitable.  But no CPR?  To have the en...
To have," LOOK AT HIM, "to have you in pain and fear and to have them come to this room and do nothing?  To have them watch?  To have them safe behind this piece of paper with my name on it to watch with no responsibility to help?  To leave you there frightened and alone? NO.  Just no.  They have to help.  They have to come to you.  They have to do what hands can do.  They have to be here for you."

It made everyone just as uncomfortable as you think it did.  I took my eyes off of his only long enough to find my mother's - she was watching him - she would hate me for this only to the extent that this caused him pain - she does not hate me - that brings a comfort.

I looked at my two brothers and neither met my gaze.  If they had met my gaze that day, I might have found the courage to ask later what they were thinking, but, alas...

The typed up orders have a line drawn through them.  The doctor's barely legible scribble is written above the orders with all of our signatures at the bottom of the page.  It states that CPR shall be administered but that not other efforts shall be expended.  These were the written rules of my father's passing from this world to the next.

But the air smelled of pine.  My mother's nailed traced an all too familiar tattoo through the hairline of my father's neck.  I sat at his feet and ran my finger down the scar that traced across most of his foot from when a chain saw had almost given him the nickname "Stumpie".

"Why are you ashamed of me?" I asked.  The question was an evil, evil lie.  I knew my father was dying.  I knew the days were short.  I knew that we had all taken steps to be sure he never knew how close the finish line was.

I watched his eyes grow large.  Felt shame as they moistened.  Watched as his jaw tightened and the cords in his throat tightened.  I saw my mother freeze.  No expression.  Barely breathing.  Her hand settled gently at the base of his neck.  No one had yet held mine from that position in that way yet - I had no idea how comforting that was.

"I love you," he said.

I was ready for this. I knew this.  I counted on this the same way I counted on oxygen to be in the next breath I inhaled - only I was more thankful for it.

"Love ain't pride.  Why are you ashamed of me?"

"I love you.  You have the whole future open to you.  You have A BEAUTIFUL MIND.  There is nothing that is beyond you if you will apply yourself.  Don't be petty.  Don't be small.  Don't limit yourself to my horizons.  Be bigger than that.  You have a beautiful mind - don't be afraid of where it leads you.  Be greater than what came before you.  Don't be afraid.  Don't be small."


"But if you don't do a damn thing else in life - I am proud of you."

I hugged him.  He hugged me.  

My mother smelled something rotten in Denmark.

"Why did you think we were ashamed of you?"

"Besides the obvious?" I deflected.

"Besides


The


Obvious."


She met my eyes without anger.  There was not understanding there either.  Legitimate confusion.

"I know you were never ashamed.  I just wanted you to say you were proud of me.  I wanted to hear it."

My parents were flabbergasted in the most honest attribution of the word.

I was satisfied and disgusted with myself at the same time.

As I grow older, as I find more and more things that I wonder how my father would have judged, I grow more satisfied and less and less disgusted.

A beautiful mind.  A fantastic compliment.  A daunting challenge.  A horrible movie title.


Well.  Maybe not horrible.  Probably not a terribly manipulative title. That is a positive.

Whispers

She hears the whispers and does her best to ignore them.  But they tell her so many things.  Pretty little poems and stories that fascinate and arouse.  She loves that part of it.  That part is all roses and rhymes.  That part is special and while not quite innocent, at least harmless.  She remembers everything during these softer times of the whispers.  She has even become adept at listening to these silky aspects of the whispers while never letting on to anyone around her that anything was amiss.
But then the whispers are not always harmless.  They know things.  They share small pieces... slivers of knowledge.  The whispers know... They just know.  People lie.  They tell you what you want to hear when they are friendly and they will say the most God awful things when they want to be cruel.  But the whispers know the truth some how.  They know and they share.  They share even when she does not want to know.  They don't care about her happiness.  Indeed, she would be happier if she did not know the secrets of those around her.
The whispers tell stories of cowards parading as men and the venal pretending to virginity.  The whispers know.  They know and they have to tell and they can't be silenced. 

Merry Christmas

I am not ashamed to say that I am an unreformed Grinch / Scrooge.  I never really get in the Christmas spirit.  I like the song Little Drummer Boy and it can get me from somber to misty-eyed too quick, but the rest of the Christmas songs just annoy me as they blare from department store speakers.  I absolutely HATE decorating a tree - one of the few deeply emotional rifts between my tree loving wife and me.

I had wonderful Christmases as a kid.  I have no idea how my mother was able to put so many things beneath the tree for us three boys.  My parents did not have a lot of money and were not credit card type people.  We got toy fork lifts from Tonka with forks that raised up and down from a crank at the top of the overhead guard.  We got an Atari that featured Pong and the militaristic prep test, Tank Pong.  We got cap pistols with fake leather holsters, cameras with something called film, tape players that played tapes of Olivia Newton John and Michael Jackson and Duran Duran.   We got a Commodore 64 that played Wing Commander and did absolutely NOTHING else EVER.

And I give almost all of that credit to my mom.  My dad would sit and drink his coffee and smile at our excitement but also shake his head at the excess.  Mom had saved the money all year and was determined to spend every cent of it on us.  Dad could not help but see it as a waste.

Which causes me to shake my head.  Dad was no stranger to wasting money and was pretty incapable of saving too much at any given time.  I inherited these traits from him and feel only a passing guilt at outing him about them.  AAAANNND, truth to tell, they are not why I shake my head.

One of the things that sticks out in my memory is a time when I had been so rancorous and disagreeable and ungrateful that my father had to tell me just how good I had it.  I had been fighting with Mom - because that is what we did from the time I was 13 until I was 19.  He told me that I had two parents who loved me and would do almost anything to protect me.  I had a family around me.  I had all the necessities of life and many of the comforts too.

And then he said how he envied me.  I had my mother a full ten years longer than he had his.  He remembered being a little boy and losing his breath as his mother tickled him.  He also remembered being a little boy and standing on a wooden tomato crate so he could look into the window of the tuberculosis hospital and see his mother's face.  And it was not a straight on view.  An aunt held up a hand mirror so that his mother's face was reflected back at him.  That was the last time he ever saw his mama.  He was five years old.

He continued to tell me how over the next year he was trying to hold the attention of another of his aunts to tell her what he wanted for Christmas.  His voice broke as he said,"And I realized, she just didn't care."  The emotion was raw and red on his face and the muscles in his jaw shivered under the pressure.  My mom said in her most reassuring and placating and loving and softest voice, "Ray..."

And at the sound of her voice you could see the calm slowly flow back over his features.  I was in shock.  My eyes were wet and my mouth was open and I was ashamed that I had led my father to that memory.  I also sat in awe at how easily and mysteriously my mother's voice speaking his name had soothed it all so completely.  I could never figure out how that happened, how it worked, until I met Priscilla.

So.

My father's ambivalence and sometimes even mild hostility at the extravagance of the Christmases provided by my mother were and remain a mystery to me.

I called Mom this morning to make sure that other things did not remain a mystery for me.  I realized this morning that I knew nothing about any Christmas my mom had as a kid.  So I called today and asked.

Turns out that every year she and her sister Geraldine got about the same gifts since they were so close in age.  Every year they would get a doll of some sort.  One of the more memorable dolls was "Betsy Wetsy".  It was the first doll she got that would take a bottle and later wet herself.

When I had first asked her the question, she started telling me things about how everyone would go over to Grandma's house on Christmas day to eat.  They would not exchange too many presents but Grandma would fix the turkey and dressing and everyone else was expected to bring some sort of side.  My mother being my mother, gave me the list of folks who came over to eat their fill and had not had the decency to bring so much as left overs to the event.  I smiled at the remembered faux pas from what must be 50 years ago now.  That's my mama!

It took her a while to get back to her childhood.  She told how they were too poor to have the fancy stockings for decoration but still hung their actual socks up on the mantle. They always got an orange in their sock, she said wistfully.  And nuts she said.  Not a package of nuts, but nuts in shells so hard you had to have a nutcracker.

One year she had made known that she wanted a chalk board with an easel.  She then went off topic (again, that's my mama!) to tell me how Granny Ethel used the area under a bed as a storage area.  You could never hide under a bed in comfort during a game of hide and seek because you had to share the space with everything that later generations would have in an attic, basement, or garage.  I was not prepared to find that this tangent tied back in to the main story she was telling - they almost never do.

But this time she pointed out that she found the chalk board and easel wrapped in a comforter under one of the beds.  She then visited the chalk board and easel every day until Christmas.  She never set it up or wrote anything on it.  Just took it from its hiding spot once per day, looked at it, re-wrapped it in the comforter and returned it to its hiding spot.  She never told Granny Ethel that she had found it.  EVER.  I find that endearing.

We talked about one of her sisters who would come up from Florida.  If she did not bring something already prepared, she would cook in Granny Ethel's kitchen.   She was the sister that Granny Ethel bought a box of chocolate covered cherries for every Christmas. They were never a surprise but rather a topic of conversation in the weeks leading up to the holiday.

This aunt, like the rest of her sisters, my mother included, was married to an alcoholic.  I asked if he was drinking during the holidays.  Would he drink in front of Grandpa Homer and Granny Ethel?

  "Oh yes," was the reply.  "He would sit there with his bottle,"

"His bottle?  He wouldn't even have it in a glass?"

"Sometimes his chaser would be in a glass."

I asked if my father drank in front of Homer and Ethel.  "Not that I can remember.  I don't think so."

I have NO doubts about the honesty of those answers.  My mother will tell you the uncomfortable truth even when you wish she wouldn't.  I also have very little doubt that to put up with Ethel, my dad probably arrived AFTER having had a sufficient amount of social lubrication.

Again, I am Grinch before the heart inflammation and Scrooge before the ghosts showed up and I don't precisely know why.  My Savior was not born on this date.  That was sometime in April if you look at the history.  We just had an emperor somewhere along the line hijack the winter solstice celebrations from the pagans.  I look at the Christmas Tree and I wonder if it qualifies as an idol just like the golden calf that the Israelis made out pinkie rings.

I work in the warehousing arm of a major retailer and we jump through hoops to get televisions, head phones, treadmills, mixers, paper plates, plastic cups, X boxes, video games, and cookies out to the stores every year.  It is long hours and tight deadlines and PRESSURE every year.

I live away from home and having changed jobs a couple times in the past 3 years,  I have not had the vacation days to go home for Christmas in quite a while.  My dad is gone.  Died just around Thanksgiving in 1995.

 But I do know that God loved us enough that he sent his only Son to save us.  I know that shepherds were visited by a choir of angels who sang at His birth.  I know three wise men followed a star and greeted the new born King and were not fooled by the humble surroundings.  I know they brought priceless gifts to offer.  And I know we emulate God's graciousness and the generosity of the wise men by giving gifts to one another.

I have never gotten frankincense or myrrh but I have looked goofy in some gold chains over the years.  But I don't feel slighted in the least.  The Baby Jesus never got to play Pong!

Merry Christmas!