The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

I see a pattern forming- a carrot-on-a-stick thing in which the powers that be- the big-money fat cats who manipulate the government- essentially keep the people anaesthetized. There are a lot of reasons this would be to their advantage, and there are a lot of ways this is implemented.
Back in the sixties a couple groups of citizens formed organizations which the government perceived as an imminent threat to the carefully constructed order of things in the United States. Prior to the sixties the public had largely accepted certain norms which began to lose their believability as the Vietnam war began to expose just how inept, criminal, racist and classist the United States Government had become.
The two groups of activists- the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground- proved effective enough to throw the FBI and local law enforcement agencies in cities around the country into a reactive campaign of harassment, oppression, civil rights violations, and illegal methods of investigation. These kids, through their extreme actions, incited the law enforcement agencies to shine the light of day on their own corruption and unethical practices. The ironic thing is that the two groups began with civil, peaceful protest. Peaceful protest is apparently ineffective in the United States.
On October 15, 1966 the Black Panthers formed in Oakland, California setting forth a doctrine that called primarily for the protection of African American neighborhoods from police brutality. They were essentially protesting civil rights violations against blacks, and the acceptance of racism in the United States both with injustices within law enforcement and judicial systems as well as accepted norms of racism amongst a large percentage of the white American populace. The difference between the Black Panthers and the Weathermen was largely one of skin color, as the Weathermen’s views were quite similar to those of the Panthers. But because the Weathermen were white (and also because the Weathermen were much more covert from early on, and therefore hard to keep tabs on) I think until Haymarket Police Memorial bombing October 7, 1969 the Weathermen were treated with more deference than the Black Panthers.
The Weather Underground began in 1969 as a student organization known as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which was involved primarily in peaceful protest. In June of 1969 at the SDS National Convention a splinter group known as Progressive Labor took over the organization. Progressive Labor were comprised of students leaning towards more radical action, and soon changed the name of the group to the Weathermen (a reference to The Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” which featured the lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”) They went on to become a radical group which bombed many public buildings from 1970-73. These bombing made it very easy for the press to vilify the organization, and they eventually realized that while they had certainly raised the awareness of young people in America to the many gross injustices the U.S. Government perpetrates every day, they could not go on doing this forever.

Between 1977 and 1980 most of the remaining Weathermen turned themselves in so that they could eventually live normal lives. Most of them did not serve time in prison, as the FBI had broken so many laws in their overzealous pursuit of the group that they prosecuting Attorney had a very weak case.
In today’s United States I don’t think a violent revolution would work, for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is that the U.S. Government is bigger and more oppressive than ever. Another reason is that law enforcement organizations now more than ever are groups of overbearing bullies with sophisticated weapons and diminished intellect, chiefly doing the bidding of the large corporations and special interest groups that hold the politician’s marionette strings. Another reason is that the press is complete rubbish and will print whatever sells, but rarely any actual “news”. Mostly the large corporate press is printing whatever the government will let them know. Censorship is alive and well, and I think maybe the press has devolved to believing that “infotainment” is journalism.
No- violent revolution would be quashed early on in decisive military actions which the press would glorify (the police would be portrayed as “heroic” while the political activists would be referred to as “terrorists”, their message purposely lost in the shuffle) and nothing would be gained.
A fantastic example of non-violent protest that produced profound and lasting results would be the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery Alabama. There are two stories to this, one in which Rosa Parks (link below) was riding a bus and when told to get up so a white man could have a seat she refused, making that decision spur-of-the-moment. The other story- one which was recounted by a Black Panther from the Oakland chapter (link below) said that the whole thing was planned by various ministers and neighborhood groups. Either way Rosa refused to get up and give her seat to a white man and she was arrested, a boycott was formed and the community stuck together despite physical violence, church bombings, police harassment- and 381 days later the black community prevailed and The Supreme Court ruled that segregated seating on public buses is unconstitutional.
Back to the carrot-and-stick idea, I believe what the powers that be are doing is either keeping the public distracted by shiny baubles or keeping us anaesthetized. The middle class are slaves to their wants and needs- they have to work hard to afford the most luxurious lifestyle of any working class on the planet. This leaves little time to organize a revolution. Flashy commercials set super-loud keep the public brainwashed that they must have the next I-phone, the new SUV, a Harley, fake tits, handheld video games, portable connectivity- whatever- and the people blindly eat it up. Basically television is a device used to “educate” the weak minded. I don’t care if it’s a commercial, a situation comedy, a drama, the news- everything on there is selling you something, and none of it is real or true. People should look at television and ask themselves, “What is it they don’t want me to be seeing when they show me this crap?” Because there is news out there- out in the real world- you just have to take the blinders off and ask the right questions- which is exactly what they don’t want you to do. Cheap beer, illicit drugs, vapid movies and television- all anesthesia to keep the people medicated.

The revolution will not be televised.
Change will come from education, a collective realization that we should be out creating something, adding value- that we aren’t the sum of what we buy, but rather our individuality comes from within- and in a sense from what we don’t buy.
Change will come from a collective refusal to be a mindless pawn that just consumes. A consumer revolt is in the wind. Right now corporations make brands, not goods- they market and sell by plastering their brand all around us, brainwashing the people into believing it’s cool. It is so NOT cool to purchase your identity, to goose-step in time with all the other “individuals” in a culture that emulates glossy magazine ads and derivative corporate tackiness. Today corporations basically tell us what we get- they don’t ask us what we want. Refuse to buy from them for a month or two and see how their attitude changes as they come to their customers on their knees asking what they can get us.
Prices are inflated, the goods we’re offered are mostly garbage, plastic tackiness who’s production was outsourced to sweat-shops in slave nations. There is too much plastic, which the earth can’t get rid of (getting rid of petroleum completely would be a great start towards extending our stay in this universe, BTW. Sure- we need cars and trucks for emergency and service/delivery vehicles, but otherwise public transit and bicycles are a great answer. We’ll need to go back to the old way of developing a community around stores, schools, and public buildings- but is that really a step backwards? Right now most of our communities are faceless and ugly.)
And of course maybe a lot of people in the United States will be indignant about their motor vehicles- like their cigarettes and cable television, they might not be able to live without them, despite the negative side-effects. And that’s okay- people should fight for what they believe in- but bottom line is that people should open their eyes and take a stand, one way or another. People should think- research- whatever- but they should not just accept blindly because some parasitic entity tells them that is what they should do. And in the end, if people take radical action like a consumer revolt- maybe a complete absence of petrol-driven motor vehicles isn’t the outcome we’re looking for. Perhaps we just want to light a fire under our bought-and-paid-for government and the corporations who own them, inciting them to enact change for a more ecologically conscientious mindset sooner. Because none of us want to fuck ourselves up- and none of us want to live in a place we don’t have access to the basic needs- food, shelter, potable water and clean air. It’s time to enact change, to change the way we live, and to demand change from our government and the corporations that tell them what to do.
Definitely the people of the United States need to wake up and look around. Our culture is vapid and greedy- we live more luxuriously than other countries not because we work hard, but because our government is overbearing and has a lot of weapons. And while we live luxuriously with nice cars and houses, do we really live better lives? Would it be so terrible to ride a bike or skateboard to and from work? Because truth be told you don’t have to be a scientist with a degree to see the folly of burning more fuel- you just need to smell the air in any modern city, and look at the color of the sky in Los Angeles or New York city.
For every vehicle we melt down and turn into bicycles and steel train rails we should turn under parking lots and plant gardens and fruit trees. Then in the absence of the deafening roar of a million engines we might hear the wind through the trees.
• Live healthier
• buy less
• think more
• create something beautiful
• be kind to each other
• and above all, be free.
The Weather Underground Video:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/118170/the-weather-underground
Culture Jammers headquarters:
https://www.adbusters.org/
John Trudell on the futuristic police state:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6id8kGegln0
Montgomery Bus Boycott:
http://www.africanaonline.com/montgomery.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Rosa-Parks-Dickson1dec05.htm
Comments and feedback: Disfunctional.illiterate@gmail.com


:) :) :) DON’T BUY THE HAPPY MEAL :) :) :)

The Angel, the Devil and the Agnostic

Angel_TheDevilandtheAgnostic.mp3

Me- I like to claim I’m agnostic
It’s a label I identify with pretty solidly
But I’ve lived my whole life on a steady diet of
Bullshit and denial,
Circular patterns of reinforcement,
Black coffee, aspirin, alcohol and vicadin
I Split my time evenly
Between getting sober and getting drunk
I have this devil on my shoulder
And he drinks and drinks and drinks
He whispers in my ear sometimes
And tells me what he thinks
I aim my car homeward
And he grabs the wheel and steers
And when I wake a week from then
Piecing together where I’ve been
Hearing about me from my friends
I shrug my shoulders and pour myself a beer.
There are no atheists in the trenches
Truth be told
I’m closest to god upon take-off and landing
Agnosticism- that typically American religion
That is my one true vice.

I call myself an agnostic
That’s something I can wear proudly
Alone in my individuality
I celebrate my solidarity loudly
I’m anti-everything
From Walmart to Starbucks to Christianity
(Trademarks not withstanding)
Even so- I can’t deny some ethereal presence
Sometimes I call it “living a charmed life”
Other times its just luck
Or destiny
There’s this angel on my shoulder
Annoying as fuck over there in my peripheral vision
But she gets me to close out my tab and makes sure my wallet is in my pocket
She gets me to the car and guides me home down narrow roads
Through red lights and one-way streets
and parks me safely on the neighbor’s lawn
gets me down the stairs to my basement entrance
She never chides me for my digressions
Just throws my hat in the refrigerator
Turns off most of the burners and locks the front door
And tucks me in on the bathroom floor
Safe and sound

Angel_TheDevilandtheAgnostic.mp3

Down at the Lithium Bar

LithiumBar1.mp3

I’m standing at the lithium bar broadcasting black thoughts, carving a gun from a bar of isotope soap, contemplating something desperate while absentmindedly scraping my skull plate with a slab of broken stone. Dark thoughts, black thoughts- deep, hurtful thoughts that would make the most hopeless cynic cringe and shield his eyes.
It’s really futile, given the neighborhood demographics- there's more clueless dipshits in this city than there are warts on a whore's ass- but even so I’m hoping to finish my drink in peace without a lot of pedestrian rhetoric about insipid bullshit that no one really cares about anyhow.
Needless to say every asshole within a hundred mile radius risks cracking their collagen injected maw to give me a shit eating grin as they touch the seat next to me with their professionally manicured nails and ask, “Is this seat taken?”
Thankfully my poor upbringing kicks in (I’m fluent in cro-magnon and picked up a minor in back-alley hooligan at Matilda the Hun’s School for Bad Acting and Rugby Sideline Epithets) and I grunt my reply and cover my mouth, attempting to repel the urge to cough up wicked comments (a lot like large caliber shells aimed directly at the land of my upbringing) about complicated facial hair and watches with flames on them, the amount of metal in your girlfriend’s face and whether you by some odd chance happen to have an incredibly strong electromagnet nearby?
The next time it’s a bimbo with fake tits and synthetic yak wool robes wafting off enough patchouli to choke Ravi Chancre- dreadlocks that make even that dip-shit from Korn wince- and she's hiding the keys to an SUV that burns authentic fossil fuel brought in on the blood of a thousand pilgrim slaves.
Three minutes later it’s an eleven year old baby faced kid in a corduroy hat (properly monogrammed in Muave with the latest corporate logo) set the proscribed 13.03657 left of center, seven pounds of gold on the roll, pants precisely 2.379201 sizes too large and a basketball jersey printed with the signature of the last remaining professional basketball player who didn’t get blackballed for drugs, dog-fighting, RICO violations or illicit activities with a minor. “What up, yo?” HE sits down next to me and flags down the bartender. “White Russian and a gerber shot, yo.” He glances sideways and makes no pretense at sizing me up, smirking and nodding his head as the bartender places a white Russian in a Paul Frank sippy-cup before him and sets the gerber shot down with thinly veiled disdain. He nods towards me and laughs, apparently unimpressed. Picking up the gerber shot he toasts some nubiles across the bar and says, “Later-YO! Enough uh’me for all-yall!”
The girls across the way giggle as I give Danny the standard finger for one more drink. Danny laughs a bit and shrugs, turning his back to me for a moment and then setting a pint in front of me next to a large shot of straight strychnine in a water glass. “Shot’s on the house, Lifehater. Fuel for the fire, eh?”
I glance sideways at baby-spice next to me for a half a click and then smile up at Danny, pick up the shot and toast him. “Thanks, Danny- it’s just what the doctor ordered.”
Danny laughs deep from his belly and wipes the counter in front of me. “Yeah- Doctor Kevorkian."
I give him a quick wink and toss off the whiskey, setting it lightly on the bar in front of me as I wipe my mouth with my forearm. I inadvertantly elbow the proposed rap-star next to me and notice him again for the first time, laughing, “Hey little girl- what’re you doing later tonight?”
He sputters something unintelligible at the comment and spits as I reach over and tip his drink into his lap. As he jumps up I hook his left foot with my right leg and jerk him off balance, slamming his face into a bowl of toothpicks sitting on the bar in front of him.
I give my best menacing leer to the ladies across the way and toss off his knit hat to grab a handful of hair, holding his head up so that they can see puff baby, eyes rolled back in his head with twenty-odd toothpicks sticking out of his face at odd angles. “Porcupine!” I can’t help but laugh. Life’s like this. Fuck ‘em all anyhow- it’s all just a lark and a good time- nothing so serious that it wont heal in a couple weeks.
I toss off the rest of my beer and place two twenties on the bar next to my empty glass. “Thanks Danny- I think I’d better head on home and get to bed. There’s some bad characters come in here late and I’m getting a bit tired.
Danny laughs and hands me a pint for the road. He gives me a grin and a wave and I wave back. We’re two of a kind- obsolete, outdated- and the town we grew up in grew up around us and now that the music stopped there just doesn’t seem to be too many places for guys like Danny and I.
I look back once as I exit the pub and Danny has Baby Spice by his hair and the waistband of his. Danny catches me looking back and laughs, "Taking out the trash!" We both laugh and I turn the corner out of sight. Good enough explanation for me.
I whistle a familiar tune as I walk home, and I laugh to myself as I lean a little hard into the groups of tough kids on the street corners as I make my way. They talk a hard line but they give way. They must be smarter than they look. God knows they'd have to be.

LithiumBar1.mp3

CrucifiedSunday.mp3

Crucified by a pretty young girl
For nothing more than glancing her
direction
How graceful is youth
She reveals the truth with a dour look
She
looks right through me like I’m not even there
You can do that when you’re
young and beautiful
See you in 20 years, my dear
After the gears of time have
ground your dreams to sand
You wake up one day to find that everything you
believed was wrong
You find wrinkles and sags in all the wrong places
Finally
you’ll have to listen to that tiny voice in your head
Telling you that you’re
only human
Hopefully then you’ll have learned
That in the absence of
perfection it’s compassion that you lack
Maybe then you’ll be able to give me
my smile back.

Forty pounds over my fighting weight
I’m still the same guy
I used to be
Years of hurt have taken off the rough edges
Leaving me sad and
tired
I used to think I was a tough guy
Til I came up against a dark haired
beauty
five foot zero an even hundred pounds
It still aches right here where
she used to kiss me
And here where she used to tell me that she loves me
And
here where she put a hole right through me
It’s kind of funny after all I’ve
been through
That such a frail little flower could bring me to my knees
But
butterflies are most beautiful free
That broken heart took the fight right out
of me.

Maybe I’m just your average white guy
I used to think I was
special
I still like to listen to old Jazz
And make up stories about
strangers at the table next to me
I used to wait for that girl I love
To
change her mind and come back to me
I hope she’s happy wherever she is
I hope
he treats her like his queen.

Me, I get the same old bullshit again and
again.
The girls like to bait you in
They act like they are interested in
the guy
But really they seem to be interested
In another opportunity to
shoot a man down.
I asked out a bank teller the other day
She seemed to take
great relish
In telling me no
I had handed her my name and number
written
on a piece of paper
As soon as she said no I knew I’d missed a great
opportunity
To write another message on the back
So when she flipped it over
she’d see
“I have a gun
keep your hands where I can see them
don’t look
alarmed
fill the bag with money.”
Armed robbers get mad chicks
Good guys
finish last

I knew a guy once who was a real hard case
Treated women like
absolute shit
Played around on them
Fucked with their heads
The women really
seemed to be excited by that
Sick little twists- he really pulled them in
I
caught him on the day after his first date with a new girl
I asked him how he
liked her
He shot me this crooked smile
Winked and said
“I like her a
lot
Man- she can really take a punch.”
I refrained from pointing out the
hard fast rule
That roofies and duct tape never constitute a proper first
date

I spend my nights alone with the city
Deteriorating, crumbling
Right
along with it
It’s an unfriendly place where we keep our heads down and try to
not make eye contact
They don’t get me- they don’t even want me-
I’ve got
news for them
I don’t get me either
Just another piece of flotsam in a sea of
ineptitude
Thousands of people crowd the city streets
They ignore me so
well
Sometimes I think I’m invisible
Riding my skateboard on Kapiolani at
midnight
I see this young girl about old enough to go to her senior
prom
Walking the streets like an alley cat
Really strutting her stuff
She
had a pair of legs and she knew how to use them
I got her attention when I
barked out a crude laugh
Like I’d coughed up a bad excuse that had got caught
in my throat
It had crossed my mind that a betting man
Might put five bucks
on whether or not she was wearing Hello Kitty
under her Tokyo Schoolgirl
miniskirt
She gives me a strange backwards glance
When I ask her how much it
would cost me
To get her to go grocery shopping with me
And help me do my
laundry
And maybe go to a movie
Apparently old punks on skateboards
Weren’t
figured into her marketing analysis.



I come home to an empty
house
Two cats and a roommate
The cats don’t annoy me with small talk
The
roommate doesn’t piss on the carpet.
I’d like to be able to tell you
That I
get lots of play with the ladies
But I was apparently cursed at birth
With an
honesty that is unappealing
I’ve been told I give it all up too quickly
That
women like mystery, unpeeling you layer by layer
I won’t blow smoke up your
ass
I won’t laugh at your jokes if they aren’t funny
I will tell you how
beautiful you are
But you’ll laugh and roll your eyes
And go with the guys
that’ll tell you lies
Leaving me and these fucking cats
Who can’t tell me
where all the pussy is at.

CrucifiedSunday.mp3

Lion-Country Safari.

LionCountrySafari.mp3

Summer is almost over when we piled into the Winnebago and headed out to Lion Country Safari. Dad’s been threatening to make this trip all summer, and we’ve been telling him there’s no fucking way we’re going. He’s been drunk pretty much all summer and the Winnie lost second gear on the way back from Burning Man but miracle of miracles, today’s the day and here we all are- as if we had anything better to do.
Luckily I have a half full bottle of valium that grandma dropped behind the toilet. Stuffed in a backpack Jeffy and PJ have a quarter pound of the best quality hydroponically grown Amsterdam hybrid money can get you- a particularly potent strain referred to simply as “Hogsbreath”. They also have a quarter ounce of Peruvian flake and four sheets of blotter acid in four separate zip-lock bags, one hidden in each shoe. Last year they were obsessed with model airplanes. This year it was just the glue.
Grandma has been holding a one sided conversation with grandpa for seven months, since about a week after his death. The Winnebago was grandpa’s pride and joy and despite it’s age he kept it clean and well serviced with a fully stocked bar. The Winnie was also the instrument of his demise, as it was she that rolled off the jacks and came to a rest on top of him as he attempted to lubricate the rear end, which come to think of it is an awfully Freudian way to go.
So dad is carrying on a semi-intelligible monologue, weaving this big boat out Pacific Coast Highway, driving by Braille. He seems to accept the brief moments when he passes dead center as perfect driving but really he spends most of the time well off the actual roadway, barking out short bursts of sinister laughter at the terrified looks in the eyes of both the oncoming traffic as well as pedestrians well off of the roadway. Grandma has a terrified look too, clutching her Pomeranian, Barfy, and mumbling to grandpa like she does. I don’t know if it’s her usual terrified look that she gets when she has the squirts or a result of witnessing a businessman on a Harley Davidson glance off of the front left fender a block back. Conditions lead me to assume that it’s a combination of both.
Mom is passed out in a lithium haze on the bed in the back of the Rv but I think PJ and Jeffy wedged her between the mattress and the sidewall of the Winnie when they started to really come on to the sheets of blotter in their shoes. It’s tough to keep the zip-locks closed when you’re pulling your shoes on and it’s hot in the Winnie with a family of six. Plus both of them had to walk through an inch of piss in the bathrooms at the chevron just off Santa Monica Boulevard.
PJ was the first to realize they were in over their heads when dad nearly took out a traffic cop giving a citation on the side of the road and grandma jumped up, screamed and cut the cheese so loud and so hard that the dog yelped and hid under the driver’s seat.
If Barfy found that alarming he had no idea how close to his own mortality he really was. Driving into Lion Country Safari we passed several signs that stated in no uncertain terms that dogs weren’t allowed in the park, but dad figured that a tiny Pom wouldn’t be any big deal and he force fed Barfy a shot of Crown Royal to keep him quiet and stuffed him in the glove box while the ranger had a look around.
This proved to be less than prudent as Jeffy, peaking on an undetermined amount of high quality blotter acid, chose to “liberate” the Pomeranian back to the wild- just to see how it would react in it’s natural habitat.
Surprisingly enough Barfy actually held his own for a bit, standing his full 9 inches tall and yapping ferociously as the lions paced and slunk in a circle thirty feet out. We were all pretty amazed at the speed he got up to and really I thought he had a chance until he had to slow and corner at the end of the fence, where a lion made up some ground and eviscerated poor Barfy with a quick shake of the head, hurling the aft parts off into the weeds and landing the fore parts across the windshield face-first directly in front of Jeffy and PJ. Sitting in the front bench seat they both let out a low “Hol-ee fuck.” simultaneously and then returned to the back of the vehicle where they stayed and smoked furiously throughout the balance of the trip until we reached the Bob’s Big Boy on Hollywood Boulevard.

LionCountrySafari.mp3

LIFEHATER

Lifehater3.mp3

“So you made it your first week- how does it feel to be free?” He looks at me from across the table, noncommittal in his corduroy slacks and his clean white Polo shirt, offering no hint of what he’s fishing at or if he’s fishing for anything at all.
I laugh to myself at the way he uses the word “free”. I’ve never been free- don’t know the meaning of the word. I’ve always been shackled by the constraints of social norms and right and wrong and my own underhanded moral standards and those rules and lines I’ve set for myself that aren’t to be crossed.
The guys that I know who are truly free- well I’d never let them in my house. Shit- I’d never turn my back on them. To be truly free is something that lets you do anything at all without consequence. Me? Nah- not free yet.
“Out on your own, no one watching you- gotta be some temptations there, right?”
I just give him a blank stare across the table and nod almost imperceptively to the negative. This guy’s good- I’ve played this game with the best of them but this one’s really polished his game. He should play blackjack in Vegas instead of fucking around trying to trip up ex-cons in their own tangled up stories. “Anything? All the open space giving you the creeps?” He takes a sip from his coffee as if it’s hot, even though I know by the time we’ve been sitting here mincing around it has to be nearly cold.
“I dunno….” I take my hand from the table and scratch my head offering nothing, really- nothing he can sink his teeth into. “I guess it’s just nice to be able to walk around and to come and go as I please. I never much liked being inside if I didn’t have to be.” I rest both hands on top of my legs beneath the table, letting out a long sigh. “ I sure as hell don’t miss the food.”
He doesn’t laugh but maybe I see a smile forming at the corners of his mouth. People like me- they always have assumed more than there is. Or assumed wrong, anyhow. I’m not the hard case he’s thinking I am. Everyone always assumed that I was trying to pull something off. They never could figure me- the rest of my crew were hard guys, and they assumed that I by association was a hard guy too.
But I could hold my own in conversation and had read a few books that seemed to some to be some indication of some type of formal education. Mostly people jumped to the logical conclusion that I was running a racket of some sort. No one could for even a moment admit that I was just on a big adventure- a tourist in this culture that they caught me in. To them I manifested their fears of treading in the darkest shadows- attempting to discover why our parents told us not to go there but could never tell us why. I never did really find anything too shocking out there- I was a product of my environment and there wasn’t anything much left that was worth seeing that I hadn’t seen.
Now my crew- they were different. Potter and McGinty and Crawford and I- we all grew up together but I was one type and they were an entirely different breed of cat. I layed back and layed low- I’d back them up if the occasion arose- and the occasion did- but I wasn’t a hard case. I was just someone that grew up in the neighborhood. Those guys were tough and callous and crazy- I was just crazy.
But the rest of my crew got taken down, one by one- first Potter and Haig got it under the roller coaster down by the boardwalk. Then McGinty O.D.ed one night and we found him under a tree down by the railroad tracks- he sat there till noon because everyone just figured he was hung over or asleep. Crawford got shivved in the ally off of Ventura down by Todd Bolt’s house- and Bolt got it two nights later in front of a bar on PB drive- supposedly by a disgruntled “customer”. One morning I woke up and took a look around and saw that I was the only I was left.
I shoulda split then, but where was I going to go? Somebody got to each and every one of them until I was the only one to take the fall and when the shit hit the fan it was me they came looking for and it was me they hauled away and it was me they locked up. They said they were throwing away the key but things didn’t work out that way. It was a hard time but I kept to myself mostly and rested easy and read a lot and kept my mouth shut and minded my own business and stayed out of trouble and sooner or later I was walking out of there. Sooner or later I did.
So here’s this guy sitting across the table from me, looking me in the eye and trying to call my bluff. Trying to let me know who’s boss and what’s what and to get into my head and trying to get it across to me that he’s onto me- that he’s seen it all and his formal training as a head-shrink and a cop puts him one step ahead of me- and all the while I just have to laugh because no one’s got shit on me.
I’m just like anyone else- flesh and bone- a man, not a machine. I’m just a guy that wasn’t afraid- and to most people that’s scary. If I’ve got anything at all to hide he’d be the last guy to know. Plus, I keep my mouth closed- always have. That’s why the boys let me hang around even though I was a lot younger than they were. That’s how I stayed around and stayed alive- by keeping things that didn’t need to be talked about to myself. Nobody's gotten under my skin yet, this guy isn’t about to do it in one sitting.
“How’s work?”
I think about this one a minute, deciding how I want to answer. Taking a deep breath I exhale, something between a sigh and a chuckle, spreading my hands wide, steady, palms down in front of me. “I don’t think work is going to pan out so good.” This is as much as I want to say- work didn’t work out to the tune of some asshole foreman calling me convict all day and fucking with me- verbally- until the moment he tried to push me physically and I pinned him against one of those big stainless steel dryers and held the tip of the double edged dagger I carry in my shoe against his throat. I held him there while he struggled and told him if he fucked with me one more time he was going to find himself breathing from about six inches lower than he’s used to. Scared the absolute piss out of him- he actually pissed his pants and shook and shivered and started blubbering like a baby, begging me to let him go. Fucking princess, that one.
“What do you mean by that?” The starched white Polo shirt isn’t going to understand it- of this I’m certain- so I spare him the gory details. “I guess the boss and I don’t really see eye to eye.” He jots something down on his clipboard- I assume a note to him self to talk to the boss down at the dry cleaners where they got me working. Me? I guess I had enough of this.
He looks up at me with a surprised look on his face as I stand up against the table- confusion in his eyes but he doesn’t really look startled or scared- his eyebrows are raised and he has this stupid expression, coffee cup in his hand- just curious as to what I’m doing. The look turns from curious to startled as I raise the pistol in my hand with one smooth motion, gazing down at him as if looking at a bug through a microscope- taking careful aim, calm, unperturbed, unflinching at the dropped coffee cup and the panic and fear rising behind his eyes.
Red stains blossom on the barren plain of his starched white shirt, his eyes showing equal parts indignance and discomfort and disbelief – a hundred other emotions vying for position flash across his face in an instant. Trying to stand as he was when I put the two in his chest his legs wont cooperate and he now begins to crumple back into his chair, trying to speak- to plead with me- but only mouths the words with soft exhalations as he expends the last of his oxygen.
Barely raising my hand at all I take careful aim and give him one quick tap exactly in the center of his forehead like a punch to the face that sits him back into his chair as if he’s just come home from a hard day at the office, leaning back with his arms outstretched, legs in front of him- a small whisp of smoke drifting up from a small black hole in his forehead. No need to empty the clip. No, no need for melodrama.
“How does it feel to be free?” I ask him softly, not quite smiling, imagining his total and complete freedom. “You should never have let the Lifehater back out.”

Lifehater3.mp3

Black and White Man in a Watercolor World