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This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events,

establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give
the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. Other names, characters,
places, and incidents portrayed herein are either the product of the author’s
Imagination or are used ‘fictionally.’

This book, which I have always referred to as the Work. Is dedicated

to all the people in my life, who knew me well enough to stop continually asking, “What are you
doing?” And just figured I was really working.

Copyright by IDS 2006 U.S. Library of Congress

Cover art: taken from photograph “Philadelphia Museum of Art, Lit by Fireworks, Independence
Day 2003” by Max Buten. Used by permission.

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 SA

Soli, Cilicia, ~400 BCE. (10.47g) Radiate head of Sun-God Helios facing
right/Athena, Goddess of Literature, Art, and Industry, seated facing left.
Green patina. Worn imprint: ΣΟΛΕΩΝ (‘Soloi,’ in ancient Greek)

333-323 BCE. (10.95gm). Draped bust of Athena facing

slightly left, wearing triple-crested helmet and necklace/Baltars(“God of Tarsos” also
God of Thunder) seated facing left, holding lotus-tipped sceptre; grain ear and grape-
brunch before, annulet (small ring, symbolizing strength and eternity) and monogram
(Sigma, Σ = S in english) behind throne. Ancient Gold Patina.

A So·le·cism of Terms
Solecism:
Pronunciation: soul'-ah-si-zum
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin soloecismus, from Greek soloikismos, from soloikos: speaking incorrectly, literally,
inhabitant of Soloi, city in ancient Cilicia where a substandard form of Attic was spoken.
Date: circa 1555
1 : an ungrammatical combination of words in a sentence; also: a minor blunder in speech
2 : something deviating from the proper, normal, or accepted order.
3 : a breach of etiquette or decorum
- so·le·cis·tic / adjective

At·tic
Pronunciation: 'a-tik
Function: adjective.
Etymology: Latin Atticus of Attica, from Greek Attikos, from AttikE Attica, Greece.
Date: 1599
1 : of, relating to, or having the characteristics of Athens or its ancient civilization.
2 : marked by simplicity, purity, and refinement <an Attic prose style>
3 : a garret loft or uppermost floor.

Sex
Main Entry: [1]sex.
Pronunciation: 'seks
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin sexus.
Date: 14th century.
1 : Either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species, and that are distinguished
respectively as female or male.
2 : the sum of the structural, functional, and behavioral characteristics of living things that are involved in
reproduction by two interacting parents and that distinguish males and females.
3 : a sexually motivated phenomena or behavior.

Sex also means six in Latin, The ancient Greek mathematician, Pythagoras, who thought that
the world was organized by, and could be explained in terms of numbers, considered six to be the
most perfect number. Biblical, as well as Pythagorean numerology, calls it the number of man
and creation, Sex, then, is the divine multiplication of dreams, worth, temper, and stuff from
which larceny is made.

Sex Attic
Born outside Philadelphia in the state of perpetual loserdom, I awoke one day to find an empty
parking lot sprawled out in front of my store, and a Thai salesman who couldn’t sell sex to a
rabbit in a wavenously westive world. I had no time to figure out how I got here. I was in the
middle of a very eerie reverie that my fingers couldn’t pry open…I had to just go with it…
There was this huge backlog of regret and drug use that was crowding me out, and left me
dangling in a jungle full of drooling Thailandish foot-soldiers with nothing to do…
I was running out of contracts to sign and cars to sell. There was a dearth where there had
been a huge assembly line of un-bought cars that wouldn’t budge without my leverage. There
were no more anti-lock brakes on my life. I was as likely to skid off the road now, as I was when
I started in this venture. I got into this business to warm the seats, and now seat warmers came
with the car. Things were not looking up. They were as bad as they could be...or so I thought.
Did you ever notice that sometimes everything sucks and life just seems like one bad decision
after another? Spell check is the on thing that’s been invented in my lifetime that’s actually
useful.
Some executive washroom this turned out to be! Hansom, yet foolish, Meisan Tran stood
oddly centered in front of my showroom window.
“Could you back up Mei?” I asked nicely. “If there’s one thing I know it’s that …” and then
my thoughts trailed off as they often did, before I’d had my second cup of coffee.
Something about how some people make better doors than windows. Something about how a
picture lasts longer, get a room why don’t ya, and if you like it so much, why don’t you marry it.
Something like that. All I knew was that today was not going to be a negative day. Today was
going to be more than an exercise in the angry retelling of the nature of my nature. Today was
going to be the first day of the rest of my you know what….So I’m slow, so I’m witless, so what!
It couldn’t be that bad; most people are so stupid they don’t know I’m full of shit. “What was he
looking at anyway?” I mumbled into my coffee cup—warm but empty, and precociously
resonant.
 I knew there was a headache conspiring to get a foothold…what I really needed was a kicker,
and what did I have at hand, nothing but Mei’s irritating presence.
“I love America.” He said, then added something in Thai.
“Oh, great, here we go.”
Musically, to the tune of God Bless America he continued, “ lan that I love, stand be-sigh her,
and guy her, in the light of the night from above.”
I sat there calmly picking the working ends off a radish with my thumbnail, listening.
Note to self: remember when we read we only read the first and last letters in a word and the
others fall into place. Tihs is waht I maen, and tihs is aslo how Mei taakls msot of the tmie. He
starts off right, ends up right, but if you don’t pay attention, all the middle stuff gets screwed
around with. That was my job, and I did it well—paying attention to details. He, Mei
(pronounced: my) was incredibly predictable. So, knowing what he was going to say, made
listening for subtle flaws practically impossible; there were no new words, and I’d gone over and
over the old ones for five years now. They were as good as they were likely to get, not bad. His
English was as good as it was.
From the mountains of my streaming consciousness, the fog of last night’s misadventures
began to lift…“Oh, that’s good…White Christmas.”
“God b`less America.” Mei said.
“Oh, what do you want? It’s Irving Berlin, and it eight AM.” It all came back to me: we were
drinking to our false sense of security last night when I decided to offer Mei the job of teaching
me Thai, in little pieces—I suppose, whenever he thought he had something interesting to say. I
had it all figured out between the second and third 7&7; I’d learn Thailandese in bite-size
morsels, like potato chips I guess, one less salty than the next—bag after bag….Offered, I
suppose, over the course of the next few years in crispy monologue fashion. He, Mei Tran,
would teach me a foreign language like a black haired, not so young Irving, ‘always-a-show-
stopper’ Berlitz. “How do you say hypomanic Tran?”
Mei threw his coffee cup, all scrunched up, directly into the waste can in the corner by the
map of New Jersey, and the 2003 Dames I Never Did calendar, which was exhibiting Miss
August, Paulette Crinkle, not her real name, I’m sure.
“Ahh AH!” he said.
There was a constancy with his confluent speech that frequently made me think there were
other people in the ‘store,’ as I like to call the Hudson Motors Dealership Showroom —and he
never missed…Mei knew more about punctuation than anyone I have ever known.
I decided to get up, and walked over to the blackened, almost-furry coffee maker, and then
decided to make the second pot myself. My protégé was less obsequious now, than he had been
when he first stuck his head in my Lincoln-Mercury showroom—in my pre-Mitsubishi days, and
I decided long ago not to take advantage of his culturally-backward notions of histrionic cow-
towing just for a cup of coffee hand-carried. But it wouldn’t have killed him to clean up after me
a little. He was, after all, the dirty one, in this dirty little elf knot that neither one of us called
work. I was verging on another decision, then laughed out loud in that funny and throaty way my
father used to, as though there were a whole lot more to say than could be fit into one’s mouth
without frothing-up and spitting.
I negotiated a Ping-flood of water into both the toaster and coffee maker, spilling and abruptly
halting any conversation from my hydrophobic partner. As I unplugged the device Mei went
through the rigors of ‘crossing’ himself by hiking-up his shoulders, pinching his face, and pulling
himself inward—buggy like a rickshaw.
Mei had two main fears, of which his own religion seemed to be based: fear of fire from
watching Joan of Ark when he was still living in Bangkok, and couldn’t read the subtitles. And
fear of electrocution—being so conductible. My sloppiness caused, not a little consternation on
mornings when I didn’t have time for all this OSHA observance—and rank consideration of
others. Then, satisfied that all was well, and Mei was only braced, and not paralyzed, I took a
napkin and cleaned up the radish stems from around the trashcan and wiped the floor of, and
with, the water I’d spilled. Then I turned the toaster upside down on a perfectly rectangular
shaped napkin to catch all the water and, of course, crumbs in whichever order they might appear.
I put a rounded piece of radish under one end to allow for ‘air-flow.’ Cumpulsive? No one ever
asked me about it, and I was afraid to bring up the subject with myself, but I guess I’d have to say
I was, yes.

Yes, like any other day

I thought Mei was Japanese for the longest time; I don’t know why, I guess because I never
thought about it, which by that, I don’t mean to imply that a person’s race, color, ethnicity,
maturity, nationality, warts, wrinkles, spots, piercings, coarseness, background, social status, age,
creed, motto, credo, handedness, accent, height, weight, dentition or clothing choices doesn’t
prejudice me—it all does, it’s just that Mei was a complete freak to me. He made the whole train
freaky so what’s the difference which stop he gets off at?
“Mei, it’s not in the light of the night from above…it’s actually, believe it or not… through the
night, with the light from above…these are subtle distinctions but something that every good
American knows.” Tutorially speaking, I had it all over that squirming, crowded-faced, light
absorbing, historically French, water fearing collapse, that passed himself off as my number-one-
man. Today as much as any other day, hung-over or not, he was no match for me—even if we
were two silhouettes on the shade—Ah dada duh.
In the larger scheme of things, we were conspiratorially related; our ideas co-mingled, but
now they were going to be, conspiratorially speaking, his ideas, and I’d be the handy angle.
I’d fix his wagon before the day was out. From the pupilary point of view I should have
known better. I was a natural born teacher, a lousy student, and a Prima Donna to boot. I’d never
allow anyone to teach me Thai, or anything else I didn’t already know …that’s how I got here in
the first place, let’s face it.
Mei was no angel; I knew what he was gawking at out the window, all slitted-up like that.
The fact that he doesn’t sneak up on high-kicking teenagers doesn’t make him principled, it just
makes him prudent. If there’s teens kicking around the neighborhood he’d put in for some—of
that I’m sure. And that’s probably why Mei loved the look of a full lot—more places to hide, and
fewer witnesses. All he wanted was what he wanted.

The car lot was suffering through a transition phase very similar to my own. I floundered in
my decision to get out of the transportation business altogether, versus let Mei take over some of
the reins, or keep my hands off and let him run with it. The number of ambient foods in our
grocery was declining; all we had were the perishables and the frozen stuff. The empty car lot
looked queer, crumbly, not flat anymore, like something was about to happen.
I decided then and there to devote myself to a life of anarchy and random acts of kindness.
Yes, I would give Mei 78% of the business, for a lump sum, and a guarantee that I could come
and go as I pleased in perpetuity—And I’d never have to bag the groceries or talk to a banker. If
he agreed, I’d have carte blanche to march my hopelessness around to my heart’s content,
scattering whatever seedlings would grow, all with complete immunity and noblesse oblige. I’d
strive to be the good bio-invasion. The last hope, the natural disaster that sells out the store. Mei
would get the Lion’s share of my largess, 78% to my 22%. That was plenty, I couldn’t give that
artist colony any more of my ants. He’d have to execute his pointillism some other way.
Maybe I’d go into something Architectural Digesty, that is, unsuspectingly broad and
imperious—like polygamy. Perhaps I could become 78% self invention? I just stared.
 One of the unexpected things about change is how illusory, and a good deal more fun it makes
the otherwise common-place depression-cum-mania seem. Not only more fun, but easier, still
deadly, though—but your species is out of season.
As easily as tripping up the stairs turns into a joke about falling, free laughter stays pretty
much free. I poured more water into the coffee maker. It might be too strong.
I had allowed the orders for new cars to taper off ‘till it became uncomfortable to walk to
work. There were so few cars in the lot it looked ridiculously demeaned, like a fashion show with
only poodles, or a prostitute with her jacks spread out all over the sidewalk for everyone to see,
bouncing a big black ball with no takers. So shy, flies wouldn’t even land on it. Of course, the
lot wasn’t that empty, just comparatively so. The most important car was still there. My Touring
Machine. Like the last donut left in the box after everyone has gotten his or her chance; there is
always one, or sometimes a half-a-one that no one has the nerve to take. It’s human nature, and
the lot I once owned was a victim of human nature, except this time they left the best for last.
“And what was that first thing you said Mei?”
“’I love A`merica.’ You got a ‘prob`lem’ with that?” Mei’s English was practically
flawless—considering. He loved to pronounce words that the rest of his family couldn’t, just to
prove how one-of-a- kind his uniqueness was. I was lucky to have him, but the thought of him
actually doing something was much more satisfying than actually watching him do it. He was a
dick, but he was my dick.
“No, no prob`rem.” I said, “I just didn’t know what you said. And I’m too hung-over to
guess…I think I just need some coffee. Want some?”
“No, you drink too much.”
“ Coffee?… What? What are you talking about?…You were drinking last night too, as I
recall.”
“Not so much tho,” Mei said in his no-shit way. “You don’t learn,” he added. “Remember,
last night you sold two cars to that bum Paris?”
“Oh, yea…I was feeling so up…I just had to close someone.” I mumbled to myself.
“Well, you gonna give back the deposit, right?” Mei asked.
“A deal’s a deal—Oh, of course I’ll give it back…he’s an ass anyway. What does he want
with two Mirages?”
With a strong penchant for alliteration and a fortune in mal a props burning a hole in his
pocket-protector, Mei inclined forward in that minor league pitcher style of his, and posited that
Paris was a hole past any possibility of plumbing.
“Practically,” I mumbled. “Have you ever talked to Paris, Mei…?”
“I have no time for him, he’s dirty, and I don’t like to be near him. I have to hold my breaths.”
“Breath,” I said.
There was a long pause. I looked at my radish, then Mei looked up, and took a breath…
I continued, “Which… well, he is a mess, but under all that hair and El Moroccan tapestry is a
glimpse into the past. A very colorful past I expect.”
“Like archeology…like a dig.” Mei interjected eruditiously.
“Well, like a real life, though. Everything Paris sees is in the past…Already. He doesn’t just
live in it. He lived it. You ever notice: his shoes are old; his jackets are all 1984, with the fake-
leather look, wide lapels, all post-disco storm-trooper. And star warrior buttons, epaulets some of
them, with the short-waisted, high up on the shoulder—so you look hunched especially when
you’re waiting for a latte. Sleeves past the wrist, no arms showing at all. Didja ever notice all his
pants have pleats, even the dark blue work pants. Pace (his real name) sees everything in the
past…”
“He’s from the past.” Mei offers.
“…He talks about everything as though it were over and done, all the time smelling like today
smelled yesterday. More memorable, and less obnoxious.”
“He’s timeless,” Mei summarizes.
 “…He smells like yesterday.”
“But not just yesterday.” Mei said.
“…He never lets anything go. He holds on like grim death. All that cigarette smoke tied up in
little gray knots inside his weave, that unravel themselves as the day wears on,
but they keep unravelling—they never stop…” I said, as Mei turned from the window.
“…if you put his jacket in the dryer with other clothes I don’t think it would drop the odor figure
one notch— everything would reek, it would probably make it worse. Ever notice he always
carries raisins, Mei?”
“Oh God, I didn’t know what those were. I thought it was popcorns.”
Ignoring Mei…“Raisins in his pocket and when he shakes your hand you smell like raisins
too.”
“Raisins and urine, that’s worse than formaldehyde and colostomy wafers. Back when I was a
magician’s assistant…”
Mei often referred to his days as a mortician’s assistant, a job which held little allure for him
now that he was so Americanized, as…‘Back when I was a magician’s assistant.’
Mei was so American he thought Coca~Cola came in five flavors: Coke, Classic Coke, Diet
Coke, Vanilla Coke, and Pepsi. He thought foreign films were a form of diplomacy. He thought
afternoon TV was edgy. He thought nothing really started till he got there. He thought Woodrow
Wilson was one of the Beach Boys. He thought everything was related to everything else. Mei
referred to his early days in this country as magical, so often, I habitually thought of him in
magical terms, Abracadabra: Mei! He was penniless from dove hiding, and attempted
disappearances—or less than obvious appearances I should say. Mei’s humor, lost a lot in
translation, took some explaining, and was rarely worth it. As dogs go, he was a mongrel, and he
couldn’t take a joke, but it was our last Friday together, and he was a truly happy dog.
“Everything to Paris is over, you know? Like already in the past, unrecoverable, done, like
mayonnaise at the annual Greegsboro community food fair and retrospective. His house is like a
science project—Look what happens as we speed up time: look at the mousetrap there, did you
see that? Now watch how the mouse is slowly taken away until there’s nothing left but…skin,
bones and part of a face. Wow, look what happens when we point the time exposure camera at
his kitchen table. A blur of food, then a bowl of fruit, then a black banana, then nothing for
centuries. You can actually see paper yellow. You can watch a faucet stain a sink side blue in ten
seconds, it’s truly amazing there. “You oughta see his house sometime.”
“Huh. Ugh. Been there done that…”
“…A house shouldn’t be an exhibit; you ever watch him when he comes in here to see you?” I
asked.
“To see you.” Mei says quickly.
“…He is so watchful, he gathers it all in as though he were memorizing someone’s
penmanship for forgery class—Or cataloging correct answers to potential Jeopardy questions—
just in case.
Translating Hamlet would be a piece of…you know…Paris is writing a book, not maybe a real
book, but those wheels are a turnin’ and inside a that head is a gull dern book somewhere, in
some dusty recess he’s got volumes.” Speaking more to my self, and in a peculiar self-satisfied
tone that I didn’t care for at all…“Paris is writing a book. I’ll bet he’s memorized names, dates,
places, everything about this place. He must go home and write it all down somewhere. If he
doesn’t he should, we need our own archivist.
I bet you didn’t know that, did you Mei?…He knows your birthday, and mine. He knows that
Hudson Motors is a Libra. He knows that Hudson Service center is a Scorpio. He knows all your
birthdates—when you were born, when you started working for me. He knows what you thought
about Bangkok when you first moved there, why you left Thailand altogether.”
“Huh?”
“When you got your last erection, I bet.”
 “…Why, was he there?”
“Just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.” I said. “He studied over there at your
academy of calendars. He knows we have three: one there, one there, and one over there. Yours,
mine, and the girl in the corner—where no one can see her except you; you’re so private.
Everyone knows you like clean American girls.”
“…and you?”
“And each calendar on a different month. Look at you…just like Paris, can’t turn the
calendar.” I said.
“That’s not a calendar, that’s an excuse to look at something nice when it’s you and me alone
here.” He said. “What about the three boxes of calendar with the old company name?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. Give them all out today.”
“I want to give them all out the new calendar.” Mei said, attacking the situation forcefully.
“Do we have any?”
“Sure,” he said. “Look.” and then I noticed his calendar had the new name on it.
“Oh,” I said, half expecting a naked woman to be the new logo. “…It’s as though the old
smelly thing lives continually in the past; all roses are old roses. All beer has to match wits with
Loudernow or whatever the name of that beer is he used to drink when he was stationed in
Algeria, Tunisia, French Morocco or wherever…When he ‘pops’ the top off a Pepsi he always
sighs did you ever notice that? And he screws the lid back on between sips…Why? Where’s he
going? What’s he preserving—The fizz? He mourns the fizz like he longs for the sound of his
own footsteps, counting how many there were, as he walks up the old post office stairs. D’ja ever
ask him why he doesn’t just stick his letters in the mailbox like everyone else? You know what
he says? He’ll tell you he likes the way the post office smells: ‘like business: paper, teamwork,
and inky fingerprints.’”
Mei was bored with the subject and felt his whole body starting to go numb…“How can he
smell anything over his own,” Mei flaps his coat, “smell, peehew.”
“You know what he told me? The post office won’t be here too much longer. And he wasn’t
talking about Brokerton’s Post Office, he meant all post offices (quoting)… ‘They won’t need
them soon, besides no one wants to hand carry anything.’”
Mei stared.
“You know the great Arab Revolt…the last one, in 1903 or 1911…stopped almost before it
got started, because no one wanted to be a member of the tribe that carries the water…it was
regarded as a low-life job…Can you imagine, they weighed freedom and pride, and came up with
pride! They gave up, were ready to give up freedom, so they wouldn’t have to carry water. And
they lived in the desert!”
Mei sighed.
“Check your list and tell me what we’re doing today.”
“How did you know I was thinking about my list?”
“You’re always thinking about your list.”
“I’m writing a book.”
“Anything to avoid work.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You shut up.”
Old Pace (his real name) lives in the past right now. He relives the past, relives it because
even the moment his toes feel the bottoms of his shoes in the morning, it’s something he did
today; he walked to Hudson’s. Correction: Tran’s-Hudson.

Trans~Hudson
 Paris never calls this ‘Billy’s Place,’ or ‘The Lot,’ or as I coached him, ‘H.M.,’ (Hudson
Motors) or “The Dealership,” even ‘The Store,’ it’s always “Hudson’s.” That was my Grand
Dad’s name for it. Paris says he knew Grand Dad, but he couldn’t have, at least none too well.
He didn’t know my Grandfather’s real name was James Allen.
He called this place Hudson’s I think, to keep my father in the business, and because he
wanted me to have it someday. Maybe, like he said, Hudson sounds kind of homey. Allen Town
Cars meant nothing, and was unpronounceable. He changed location, name and wife before he
sold his first car. That’s his story anyway. His ideas were all location neutral. There weren’t any
such things as Town Cars being made back then, he just liked the name.

Dad went to work for his father-in-law, briefly in the 70’s, a year or so before he died. It was
a strained father son-in-law relationship, and it would have fallen apart, had my mother not
beaten them to it. The name was a political decision like everything else in my patched-flat-
family back then; I think my mother had a lot to do with it. Name it right and it’ll become that
thing, should have named it Gems, or Intact Motors.
Mei raised an eyebrow involuntarily at the mention of my mother, hearing it for the first time
in a long time.
“Anyway, he had a lot of reasons to change the name of this hand-me-down, before he handed
it down. I would have kept the name too, it sounded like home. Not that…you know…” I would
have kept the name whatever my Grand Dad decided to name it.
“I know…” Mei had heard the abridged, embroidered, and romanticized versions of Hudson
Motor’s pedigree so many times they all made sense to him.
“I have a sort of sentimental attachment to tit…it. I think he built it for me, really.”
Mei smiled.
“Paris lives…” I continued extemporaneously, “in one last reminiscence. Maybe he always
lived in the past.”
“Maybe he was born in a time warp?” Mei offered.
“…and even when he’s most present, like when he’s unwrapping something new from the
vending machine—usually a peanut butter cup—is in a process of saving. It’s tragic to watch
him un-wrap candy; it’s so sad.”
“Just eat it!” Mei says, pointing a finger at the idea of Paris, standing head-down, shoes
pointed in Mei’s direction as if the old busy body were right there in his all too familiar pose:
jacket still zipped, his back to the bank of ancient red knobs, looking at his hands and ‘the find.’
I giggle to Mei’s provoked tirade, Mei makes me laugh with his monumental helpings of
sincerity. The more he heaps them on, the funnier it becomes. We talk in shorthand.
The candy machine, circa 1960, never timed him out. His quarters kept his decision open
indefinitely while he poured over the possibilities. “Damn it! Pick something! Not licorice! Put
it in your mouth and stop peeling and pulling! You stretch it all out!”
Mei could imitate himself wonderfully, he really was talented.
“You stretching out your life like a, ah...” he paused, looking to me for the right word.
“A pull of licorice.” I said, knowingly.
“A pool of licorice…it was ent meant to be eat en that a way. You wearing it out.
I want to scream, Just Chew It.”
By now my assistant is practically bent in half, looking up at the imaginary lecturee, and
shaking his finger.
Mei addresses me, “He licks it! Uggh! Swallow it. Stop picking your teeth. Pick your teeth
later.”
One thing Paris does well, if I must say, he handles disappointment (and change) well. “He’s
the only one who never got ripped off from Bessy,” the name given to Brokerton’s only legal
gambling machine—the ancient candy dispenser with the red knobs that I keep in tip top shape,
and secretly love.
 “When Paris doesn’t get an equitable return he just shrugs, and that’s it. Life is full of those
kinda things. He never complains, I think that’s the secret. If you’re going to complain do it with
your feet. That’s what he says, anyway.”
“Good, because he is not wel`come here after Monday.” Mei says seriously.
“…He also handles change well.” (I added parenthetically)
Mei shrugs.
“… The usual problem people encounter is sweeping disappointment aside, and overlooking
change.”
Mei says, “Can we talk about something else please? I’m over bums.”

Brilliant Rescue

“D’jew ever see him at Crosley’s?…He gets shoved around in that dive. They spill his beer—
he doesn’t say a word…they knock into him…nothing. You know why? Because it’s already in
the past, and there’s no changing it. That’s what I think…”
“Good. You think!” Mei says, “you re good at that. You’re not good at public relations. You
think you understand Paris, you understand nothing. Paris is an embarrassment to have around.
People think we’re funny, not in a good way…for putting up with him.”
“…Oh he gives the place charm.”
“The only charm he gives is…those lucky charm in his pocket.”
“Raisins.”
“Raisins with yellow stars, blue moons and green clovers?” Mei says, and stares.
“…He saves all his money. He’s rich as Rockefeller…you know Warren Robbins, Baskin
Roberts…Robert Buffet, Jimmy Bobbit—what’shisname? You know who I mean, that
billionaire, big investment guy, Gates’s friend…Warren…” I said, trying to head off Mei’s as yet,
unspoken objection to last night’s inappropriate transaction.
“Buffett. If you know so much, how come you don’t know you can’t sell a car to…”
“I just didn’t want him…I wanted to rescue him from a life without anything beautiful to
enjoy. Something somebody might want. He could look on it as…”
“I know,” Mei interrupted, “a souvenir.”
“A souvenir because he’ll probably never come back.”
“Good.”
“If he comes back…at least he’d have one thing that wasn’t past its expiration date.”
“…So,” Mei says. “You sold him a car he’ll never drive…”
“He can drive it. Did I ever tell you the time he sent me a postcard from Ardmore?”
“Yes,” Mei says, mumbling silently to himself.
“…I asked him, why did you send me a postcard from Ardmore? Who cares if you were in
Ardmore…” Then as an aside (the same aside Billy always makes), “I didn’t even know
Ardmore had its own postcards…can you imagine vacationing there—a train runs through it! But
Paris said it in such a cheery and heartfelt way…‘I wanted you to tell Mei you got a post card
from Paris, just to see what he’d say.’ Wasn’t that tender?”
“As a twenty.”
“Oh Mei, have a heart, he likes you. He told me he thought you were funny.”
“Funny?”
“As a twenty,” I added, knowing that sense of humor is as crucial to Mei’s social standing as
good hair and sexy underwear.
“With you gone, and no more Paris, I’ll be beside myself.”
Mei delighted in this particular expression of which there was no equal in Thai, French, or
Malay.
“…He likes to walk,” Mei said, “He walks every where and besides, he wants that!”
 Mei swivels around in his Brewster-green, sloped-arm, office-chair, and pointing with his
donut-holding hand indicates The Calderon, the 1947 Delahaye, a superb machine, my touring
car, the only good thing Vichy France ever produced, truly one of a kind.
“You know, I let him sit in it the other day.”
“That’ll stink it up for sure.”
“…No,” I said, “actually the leather spray, coats the seats and you can’t smell a thing. You
know what he was fascinated by?”
“What?” Mei asks, “The dinner bell?”
“The clock. He kept checking it with his watch. He said the green dots that made up the hour
display were painted with radium—half-life 1600 years.”
“D’Jew ever drive him around in The Calderon?”
“No, Jew?” I shot back.
“Don’t try to change the subject.” Mei said.
“No, we might end up in a time warp, besides I won’t take him…I mean it…The Calderon out
for a couple weeks at least.”
Mei was not happy that I closed a sale on Paris last night. He went on to tell me in enormous
detail that when ‘words goes forth’ from Crosley’s that I stiff-armed Paris, they’re gonna…the
whole world is going to think: 1) ‘I’m crazy.’ 2) we’re desperate for business. 3) we take
advantage of the slow and weak minded. 4) we carry contracts around with us so we can force
sales on children and slope headed sexagenarians, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
“I was just kidding…I’ll get him out of it tonight if he wants to.”
“Too late now, it’s done.” said Mei, “Our, (meaning Mei’s) reputation is tarnish.”
“I know…I know…It can’t be un-done, but it can be fixed. Mei it’s a car!”
“Not two?”
“I was just kidding. Mirages come in two’s…it was a joke.” I held my hands up dramatically
and concluded, “It’s a car-sales tragedy. It’s the proverbial automotive shake down.” Then in
my thickest Mexican accent—“I’d like to help you out, but the bank’s got all my money, man.
I’d go down there, but the police got my car.”
Mei smirked. I continued: “That place is a rip off, man. Hudson’s…home of the famous
double dealin’. The rip-off ranchero…soon to be known as a Tran’s action…I know.”
“Shh, shh” he said. Just in case Manny, Moe, or Jack came into the office to find a form.
“You’ll make it worse…how I can undo this? I think I’ll give Paris a birthday party at Crosley’s
and buy drinks for everyone...one round.”
I wince.
“Two!”
“Good idea,” I said. “I knew you could fix my gaffe, my faux pa, my mistake…It’s a good
deal, though…tell people that we sold him a 2003 Mitsubishi for $13,000…unheard of!”
“I heard of it,” Mei retorts. “Besides, he don’t drive. And besides, it’s a 2003 with 12,000
miles at $15,505.00 and some change. Don’t use a flat to fix a flat!”
“Okay, you made your point. The place will be yours to run as you see fit after Monday. This
is Friday.”
Changing the subject, Mei asks, “And how come when I get in the Calderon, it’s check this,
check that, roll down the window, turn the mirror…more to your left …”
“Because I told you Mei, you’re my eyes and ears. You’re my main man.”
To which he responded, “You never take me anywhere.”
Later, when it was too late (for me), Paris’ friend, Jumpy, came into the store and told Mei
there would be no more car sales to old, semi-retired starvelings, and if I, or he didn’t like it we
could go talk to a lawyer. Mei tore up the contract right then and there, which empowered the
always critical, fearlessly judgmental Jumpy, to no end. By way of executing his liberation from
bad company, Jumpy stood up, staunchly thrust his hands in his pockets, fingered the ten dollars
the old man gave him for doing his dirty work, and waited for the owner of Tran’s to open the
door for him. “Very well,” was the extent of the long anticipated critique Mei knew was coming,
and would cap off his first day as boss; he just didn’t know it would be said so sarcastically. He
had long anticipated many flirty expressions of thanksgiving and delight, trebling from the throats
of any number of Tran~Hudson employees the day he took over. The long sought ‘well done’
was slow in coming, but he knew it would eventually get there. His first day was my last.
Thrilled that things were going so well, he decided to turn on the charm for Jumpy.
“The Bible uses the word ‘which’ 971 times, which is astounding and very hard to get into a
conversation.”
“Witch?”
“Yes.” Mei adds obliquely.
“Amazing.”
“I thought so.” Finding impressive facts was a sideline of Mei’s. People especially seemed to
enjoy trivia about the Bible and common everyday English words. He wowed them down at the
local teahouse, the Tahnahnangh Potakhan. Loosely translated: Standing Skin Inn. Mei and
Jumpy became good friends, so much for Paris. Sic Transit Gloria. Easy Come, Easy Go.

I never could decide when it was, that the idea first entered my head. And I was prepared to
spend all day thinking about it. Perhaps it was when Grandfather Allen gave me a light green
plastic 1966 model Thunderbird for my birthday and I discovered it was the perfect size for my
dark green plastic soldier to sit in. Or maybe it was when dad bought that turquoise and white
Bellaire with the Salvador Dali cow-in-profile tail lights …that I first decided I wanted to be
around cars and drive cars and sit in the front seats of cars and look out their windows and bark
like a dog, etcetera. And feel happy, just being around them, knowing that no matter how cold
the seats were, when you got in, they would warm up eventually, and rival the warmest most
comfortable thing in the world. Plus, we could only afford Falcon’s when my family was helping
me grow up, and some of them had upholstered engines. So helping cars along was kind of the
deal about car selling, to me. I came from a long line of pony fixers, horse-teeth filers, and mule
proper-uppers. I had never sold a car in my life but I could prop up a mule with the best of them.
My older brother, the race horse, told me Dad used to put one of those oval woven-woolen-rugs
that we got from Sears on top of the engine in our square, low-riding Ford Falcon to get it to
warm-up on cold winter mornings. I saw pictures of the car, and the rugs, though, of course, the
picture I have of the rug on the engine is a picture in my head.
I had seen a slew of pictures of our house, Clarke and me, my sister Claire from the time when
she was a baby. No, I didn’t say anything about happy times. I overcame the mulish temptation
to romanticize about my earliest memories. What I remember was nice but not all that nice. The
word angst was invented so children would be able to talk truthfully about their lives when the
time for talk was upon them.
I saw in the photos that Clarke kept locked up under the beds all over Peoria, Clarke’s name
for nameless places, little bits and pieces of a string of far misfortune. Clarke was the only one I
knew who could give names to nameless things; but then Clarke always had something wonderful
up his sleeve. He told me all those stories about our early childhood as we traveled across
country, from bunk bed, to full size bed, to sofa bed, to spring loaded porch bed. He always
implied the next stop was the street. It’s no wonder I’m in the transportation business.
I have fond memories of my father, Clarke says, even though I was almost seven, when he
died, and once or twice five, depending on how old Clarke is in the telling of the story. Some of
the stories I remember very clearly. Many are a blur, and the stories shift and shimmy like a Slip
’n Slide.
Clarke always says, when mom’s away the rules get changed (bent), and promises get turned
on their head.
Dreams and real life sometimes overlap. Like all those times when dad was negotiating the
sale. He always took me into the car dealership with him, and it always had a flat roof, and he
always looked worried and tense, and hemmed and hawed, and made me wonder if we could
‘Ford’ it. They must have been dreams.
According to all reports I was a skinny kid, very small for my age, with big expressive brown
eyes, so dark they were almost a void. I wore horizontal stripes often in the pictures I’ve seen.
Long sleeves rolled up on summer days chasing someone around the clothesline as the sheets
billowed in the breeze. I remember the purples and blues of those days, and the stretchy
shirtsleeves that came down tight to the wrist. Mom picked my clothes and dressed me—for
years I was clothing neutral. I also made a nice manikin: long waist, straight neck and wide eyes.
She liked to try different combinations on me before I was sent out of the shop.
My mother isn’t in many pictures, but almost all the one’s she’s in are color photographs. She
was probably the one who took all the black and white pictures, and I guess my dad took most of
the ones in color. I know by heart the colors of the clothes we wore—so the black and white
doesn’t bother me. I remember mom’s flashing camera even on sunny days, and winding the
camera with her hair in her eyes, smiling as she brushed it out of her face with the back of her
hand, to see us through the viewfinder, to capture us, to slow us down; God, I wish I had had a
camera then.
Many times, it seemed, and always in the morning, dad would take me on one of those trips to
look at cars. Some of those trips to the dealers couldn’t have been right. I was much older in my
dream memory than I could have been in real life. He would ask me my opinion always, and it
was always a sunny day. I touched the cars, and no one said, don’t touch the car. Those
memories can’t be true. They just couldn’t all have been sunny days, besides I hated the
morning, that’s probably why I got dragged out with him. And I would never say anything when
we got there, but the men who sold the Greek chorus of cars to my father would know I was
listening, because I would never look away. I melted them down and made them feel sorry for
messing with my dad, and making a smart man feel stupid.
The trouble with my childhood was, I didn’t drink, and there was a surplus of reality.

“Coffee?”
As sure as a driving rain on white-shoe Wednesday, Mei told me “No thank you” to a cup of
coffee. The clock said half past eight and I was nearing that odd state of coma- panic that was, I
think now, the inevitable result of too much of everything.
My pendulum was swinging and as far as I could tell it was the pitch of the floor as much as it
was my feet that propelled me out of the showroom on that ghastly, gray-white October morning.
Pretty soon Hudson Lincoln Mercury would become Tran~Hudson Mitsubishi. Okay, big fuckin’
deal. New sign. Same town. I still lived in a town where people said, “sine niss” instead of ‘sign
this.’ Or, “O’m not gowin ther ta`noit, Oy gow ther Mundy’s.” But, I still signed. Yeah, but
today was the big day, I was giving Mei a good chunk of the business. I just thought it was time
he got the business….he’d been giving it to me for so long—not funny, but that was my line
when people asked why I was selling—practically giving, the store to Mei. Some thought it was
because the neighborhood had changed or was changing, but I thought the neighborhood might be
changing for the better. To borrow a line from Gone With The Wind, “dem white folks’ is sure
overrated.” Other people thought, or I thought they thought, that it was to make sure Mei stayed
on, since all the loose change in the area was all, (ka-ching), in Asian pockets.
That wasn’t really true. Truth was, I’d had enough. I’d done it all. To borrow a line from the
angelic Rosemary Clooney; “It’s all behind me now.” But today was the day, damn it! My last
day, and nobody knew how I really felt. Three times I laughed so hard I cried. Wish I could
remember what was so funny…Oh, yeah, one of the new guys was trying to show Dave-the-man,
something or other. That’s right…and I stood there because I knew this oughta be good. The last
person that tried to show Dave how things go together, got his hat handed to him. So…the kid
gets Dave’s attention, so he can show off, grabs one of the other kids, and says to him, “Here you
lift the gear box…no by the shaft dick! This! Look, get under it a little…We’re a put it inta here
on the upswing from here to here at an acetylene distance, equal distant…from the torch! Jeeze”
“Okay.” the kid says. I couldn’t read the oval name, sewn into the shirt, but it looked like it
said French Fry.
I move in closer. This had accident written all over it, but Dave was the keeper back here in
‘Service,’ so I just thought about Freaky Friday and held onto the door jam.
“Look!” Dave says finally, to the kid who’s helping the other kid, “…to my side on the count
of one …One!”
With that, the kid who forgot who he was talking to, or listening to, or working with, or
helping out, just about herniates himself. “Aaaugh!”
Dave turns sideways, starts smiling, and says as he chuckles, “One!” As the kid spins in mid
air like a fly on a potato, the old man begins to laugh. He loosens up something deep inside, and
begins coughing, and every once in a while between coughs, he says, “One!” I walked on the
scene with the coughing and laughing, and Dave and I had the biggest laugh we’d had together
since Mr. Murray told Clearborne to give him a brake. For the rest of the day, all we had to say
was, “Okay, on one…One!” It was a guarantee.

One
So in they came, the Lawyers, ‘nuf said. And it was “sine niss, an niss, an niss.”
“I know, sine nees.” I wasn’t protesting; every paper got me further toward my objective. I
was horny for what was coming. Just like that Arab kid on the evening news last night: they
showed him being taken away down the street, all bloody on a stretcher; wearing only a dirty shirt
and black underwear with this huge hard-on and I thought—how can that kid be horny? He
might be dying (maybe it was a rocket-propelled grenade)? But, I figured, he wasn’t horny—he
was just eager for what comes next. I felt the same way. Sometimes it’s not the prospect of sex
that excites you; it’s just being ready for what’s coming, that makes you hard, horny for what
comes next, and so am I. What I wanted—the new thing—the next thing, and I didn’t really
know for sure what that was. Kind of exciting if you look at it. I mean, these are the kind of
things you think about…maybe a girl will bathe me; maybe I’ll get a ride in an ambulance;
maybe my jersey will rip…whatever runs through your head. Kind of fun, all that speculation;
my pants are so low maybe they’ll fall off; if they fall down I’ll lay here uncovered till someone
covers me; I wonder what they’ll use? It’s easy to mistake something original for something
funny, and something funny for something profound, and something profound for something
juicy, and something juicy for something wholesome, and something wholesome for something
that you know will drive you out of your F-ing mind. Ask any geek in any school what makes
them laugh—it’s never anything funny.

All I knew
All I knew, about what I was going to do with my life, was, it wouldn’t be so stupid. And no
one was going to look at me with that gape of an expectation, that loose capped front-toothed, ‘I
guess I gotta go to the dennist now,’ look. The stare you can’t refer to. Or that insipid, ‘don’t be
like that, talk!’ gaze. The look that meant: you do it, go ahead; it’s your turn again.
Christ, you do it! There was a lot of work to be done, and for me, a lot of signing. I should
have let Juan Valdez go home, but I had this dismal feeling that he could learn something, and
that that would be a good thing, and, after all, my prosperity might be tied up in whether he gets it
or not. Even though I felt completely empty-handed, my gesture was full of hand.
 “Mei’s the boss.” Really he is, prob’aly always was. He speeds me up when I’m feeling lazy.
Mei can angle himself in such a way as to let me know he’s listening to my conversation. In the
dim light of afternoon he flicks on a light switch that encourages me to treat people on the other
end of the phone, or the other side of the desk with the same simple, ‘you know…you know,’ you
know attitude that I give him, and get off the phone, and onto the next thing. Mei Tran would
never out and out imitate me, that would be too deliberate and simple minded; he causes me to
imitate him. It’s high-camp sometimes.
“Get a me a beer slim!” I say, and then angle myself over to the ‘bar,’ and wedge myself
between the back counter and the wall—about room enough for a fist.
“Hurry up wid that theng,” he’ll pound on the table.
Then I’ll shrink myself to half my size, and hunch over to him, dragging a leg.
“Here worshipfulness, your favorite, a ho-ghey an a coak.”
Or like when he’s irritated at something I’ve said. He’ll say, “ya know…” in a sharp
Philadelphia accent. “Thurs a name fer people like you.”
“Affable?”
“Laughable.”
“Unguarded?”
“Retarded.”
“Intriguing?”
“Fatiguing.”
“Plain spoken–plain broken.”
Sometimes we trundle out the routine for perfect strangers. It always starts the same: “thurs a
name for people like you…”

My Wait Program
Suppose you had this idea of what you should do and you were, well, not comfortable with
the standing in line (behind) velvet ropes part, but you knew you had to do it in order to get, you
know, to the front like. Whatever. And then let’s say by an act of God you became comfortable,
and all of a sudden instead of having velvet ropes to frame you and lend that special air of je ne
sais quoi (mystical something), you found yourself leaning very heavily on the ropes. Maybe
someone was taking your picture or maybe you were Jayne Mansfield, and you didn’t know any
better, then, maybe ostentatiously languishing all over the ropes like a trumpet player in a
harmonica band…. Well that’s exactly what happened. I passed right through the cue of worry,
uncertainty, disbelief, fear, shame, guilt, and anger, directly to the front of the line; into the last
classic car on the lot, my refuge. Yes, The Calderon, my big smoky baby.
Clarke told me there was this great car that our Grandfather owned. He said it was im-
possible to drive, and fish-tailed like a chowder boat. He made everything sound so much like an
adventure it was im-possible to go to sleep sometimes. He said this car needed new shocks and
struts, and that just about did it for me—what next? But that was the tail end of the 20th century
and this was the beginning of worry time, and I wasn’t really up for it.
I became the surprised, just stubbed my toe, un-drunk. And decided somehow that ‘my lot,
my rules’ was the order of the day. In hindsight what I took away from that horrible wonderful
last day was the characterization: seeing my own weirdness in someone’s eyes (and how it made
them look). I don’t think I’ll ever forget the untranslatable look on Mei’s face through the
rearview mirror as I sat in The Calderon talking merrily to myself in that undecipherable lingo
and began actually honking the horn for some reason. All I really remember was a very animated
conversation with myself about the finer points of hood ornamentation, and the lost art that was
lost by implication. When out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of ‘Sir marrys a lot,’ a
not so popular feature in Brokerton, getting into his car. As he pulled his leather coat into the car
behind him, I shouted, “rich man rich man rich man” to no one in particular, from two blocks
away, in the car, with the windows fully rolled up Calderon style. And it was right about then
God took the wind out of my sails and Mei began pointing at me and motioning for me to look to
the horizon. And now I have the image indelibly etched in my memory of a large truck turning
into the lot, rocking hideously back and forth as it barreled down at me, carrying a sign, a future,
and about a hundred kilometers of cable, as I sat with the gun under the seat yelling, “Rich man,
rich man, rich man” to someone who was no longer there. Eyes went wide. Oh, fuck ‘em if they
can’t take a joke.
If I had it to do all over again, I would have turned the reins of my runaway sled over to my
startled assistant right then and there, but what, to my wondering eye should appear but a truck
and an icon and 3 burly reindeer. ‘My lot, my rules.’ Unfortunately it was not Christmas and I
was not Clement Moore, nor even John Livingston, the actual and un-credited writer of those
verses. The sign got hung by the showroom with care, and Mei in his window, and I in my burl
just couldn’t agree about how it should twirl.
Mei was a clockwise kind of guy; something I didn’t know, but should have, and I was a
counter clockwise kind of guy, which anyone could tell you. So to my eternal chagrin we
somehow decided to rotate it, the 15 meter-high, red white and blue sign, half clockwise and then
back the other way round, so it did a kind of half-wave like a lit Queen Elizabeth how jew do.
Well that wasn’t bad enough—the sprockets would ratchet themselves every 5 or six turns and
the sign was forever waving disinterestedly to no one in particular off to extreme stage left. The
sign-poster guys would never come back and my good name was probably going to be
hemispherically absent most of the time. From my angle it appeared to spell ‘Thud’ but it was no
longer my problem. That should have been my first clue, some things are exactly what they seem
and when they are–look out.
Tran Hudson wasn’t my name anyway, it was Mei’s adopted name. The name partially made
famous by my Grandfather, artist, inventor, small businessman, who made stars and canoe
paddles out of a plastic before most people knew what it was. He had a thing against Japanese
cars. He would have died if he weren’t already dead.
My Grandfather Allen had this most marvelous oxidized blue-cum-purple Packard, with a
round back window and invisible tires. I loved him even though he didn’t rescue us from Peoria.
I had many dreams of the old car pulling up, dazzlingly plum, and him bringing luggage and a
trunk; and in the dream, that meant we’d just been sprung, but it never happened.
After the sign was up and we were initially satisfied with its quasi-axial rotation I decided to
let Mei go home while I cleaned up and got ready to leave. For good.
There is almost no way of knowing which direction I’d go. Of certainty, none of us can say
anything certain. All we know is the desperation of desperation, the frustration of frustration, the
redemption of redemption or the certainty of certain things (ty); (don’t lose me, I’m on a roll)
only the finer points of the word, never the thing itself. The world isn’t generally acknowledged
to be Platonic, though many parts of it are. It is, more accurately, respectful of the nature of
language than it is, the nature of reality. Reality is, in effect, not a word, according to certain
people’s twisted ‘somewhere-else-not-here mind field.’ I expect to be un-covered slowly like a
kind of infinity, not by certain people’s words or injunctions; nor to tell the truth, even by my
own. I can make my own self, thank you very much. The redundant pleasure of your company
precludes us both. If you live for company you are vastly misguided, and will end up smiling
from an exhausted sequential arrangement, and not a smile at all. My fan belt broke, just then,
and I was once again overheating. To be, as my father might say, looking in the wrong spot.
Stop me if you’ve heard this, but I’m reminded of the guy who had too much to drink, stayed out
late and when he came home was seen bent over, looking under the streetlight for his house
keys…“Did you lose something?” the passerby inquires.
“Yes, my keys.”
“Where did you last see them?”
 “Up at my front door,” pointing to the steps of an old brownstone.
“Well, why are you looking here on the corner?”
“The light’s better.”
By Monday morning I knew Mei or I, would have the world back on a string; and five of
everything: five real salesmen, five bums; five natural born killers, five you love, five you
hate….always the rule of five. Five fingers, five ways to get to the place you’re going, five
chances; the normal human lifespan: five times five times five, minus fifty-five; the fives of your
life. Today was also Free-Friday (5th day of the week); that meant someone was gonna to get a
free car. It was my last day ever, in the car business, ever. I was going into the money for
nothing business. And yet, I knew from a daydream I’d had yesterday morning that came to me
unsolicited and so clear—that I had 3000 days to live, and those three thousand were dwindling
down very quickly. Better get packing. I was loose-jointed. Something was making me crazy,
but what? I became a packing machine. I was literally distracted, partially detached from my
ability to reach my goal, if I had one. I had just put my first real sign up, and now I was leaving.
But what to take? First thing I’d take was good will, and if I attended to the objective of this
special day I would be happy. Paris would be happy, and he might even drive out of our lives.
Mei would be happy, thinking about all the free advertising he’d get from that old gat-about;
telling the world at large that he got a free car—for nothing. Everyone would be happy.
I turned around to check my, myself in the mirror, and saw the first item on today’s to-do list
tucked into the bottom right corner of the rear view mirror: ‘clean driver’s side window of
Calderon’—the window that reflected a bigger, wider, happier me.
Mei would never understand me giving away a perfectly good car, but it was my last day ever,
and what the hell. Barbarians would never understand the purpose of handing the dealership over
to Meisan Tran. He was, after all, the great wall that was going to keep the barbarians out.
A near calamity saved me right in the middle of me saving myself. I was, after all, walking
away. It was meant to be. It was fate, because, as I see now, I had no idea where I was going,
how to get there or what to pack. I know now that I was only looking for trouble, but Mei knew
it 4 years ago. I didn’t know until today that I didn’t pick Mei; he allowed me to pick him. After
all he’s the one who didn’t say No. He was the only one who was willing to suffer me, and in an
ironic twist, it was my presence that he wanted, all the time evincing a willingness to do without
me—because, those were the fucked-up terms.
That Friday, Mei got more information out of me than I had planned to give. It was a stop at
the Last Chance Texaco that Rickie Lee Jones made so famous.
“What are you really going to do? You say maybe run an antique store part-time, maybe write
a book—about what?”
“Maybe,” I offered, to the one question in three that I chose to answer.”
“Maybe? What you going to do Billy?”
“Well” I said, since I had nothing to lose; Mei was already acting like a boss, I couldn’t give
him that. I could encourage him in his livelihood by telling him how great the world outside of
the rat-race was and maybe he could go for the brass ring someday, etc. etc. Or maybe I’d scare
him a little and make him glad he had two layers of clothing on, one under, and one outer.
So I said—the truth. “Well Mei, I don’t know. I want to be a healer. I’d like to open a
Healist Shop and sell hope or vitamins or soap or something. Give my opinions.”
Mei dropped a pen, and groaned loudly as he reached to pick it up.
“I’d like to be powerful and wield great political influence in ah, a one-block radius, on a
small scale you know, like not take over the world but like be the king of Morgan town.”
“Morgan town?”
“You know…Morton—whatever it’s called. I want to help old people across the street, like I
did for my merit badge in cub scouts.”
I helped an old lady and 3 of her oldest friends across the street about seven times. So many
times, in fact, that Dan, from the market on the corner came out with a pork chop still in his hand,
to see what all the old ladies were talking about, and gave me a sort of six finger, pork chop hello,
as if to say, ‘You got the old-lady-vote, kid.’
“That’s what I’d like to do,” I said, as though it were an unattainable dream (hear music swell
in the background). “Fetch, carry, hold out false hope, and curry favors to get elected mayor of
the Munchkin City, and a line item veto to help the working poor.”
“Sounds like a career in medicine or politics.”
“A what?”
“Did you ever see the movie Brazil?” Mei asks.
“A duct-work repairman?”
“A nurse, like you want to be a nurse…like what’s her name, Mulva?”
“Shut up.” I said, and went to the bathroom to steady my nerves over the sink. I was reminded
of that argument my parents had so long ago. My feet were crossed, sort of tangled, as a kid, and
my mother used to wrap my legs around a post of the bed or a old calf-bone or whatever the folk-
medicine thing to do was at the time. And dad yelled at her once and accused her of trying to
bind my feet like the Japanese do to little girls. I didn’t understand it then. All I knew—it was a
hell of a fight. The idea of so much latitude in my life was more than a little disorienting. My
thoughts went back and forth, sign-like, and wavering. I might want to think of something more
circumscribed and structured and less open-ended, when I get back from the sink. I took 2 bars of
soap.
“These would be real vitamins,” I told him a few minutes later. “I know a lot about vitamins
and all that stuff. I don’t suppose you know that?”
“I know. You take vitamins and I get stronger.”
He’s always got to have the last word. Sometimes I felt like throttling him in public.

“It’s Free Friday!” Standing, to make 1 last point, and struggling to get in the last gesture—I
stood…hands loosely at my side, turned my thumbs inward as I held my elbows slightly bent;
then with my fists clenched, and my tight little-fingers out away from my body, I struck a body-
builder’s pose and gave a most excellent imitation of a guttural big cat roar, in pantomime, not
unlike The Calderon itself.

Sa-
laam
Going from high to low was the nature of my existence in those days, and no sooner had I
decided to further my career in exploitation, than an opportunity came upon me that no one could
turn away from. I walked to the front door of the store just as a little old lady was coming in, and
she opened the door for me. I said, Thank you, and shook my head when out of her sight. Why
does everyone open the door for me all of a sudden? That was my last thought. As I crossed the
meridian from about 11:59 to 12:01 I was blind-sided by a rueful and vociferous squealing of
brakes. And before I could act, I was hit on my entire left side, and propelled a dozen meters by
an object of unheard of power —Natalie.

Here I was, tried and true, through and through, a liar, a cheat, a self-avowed loser with
enough cash and confidence to leave a world I knew so well, behind. A world I knew even an
everyday man like M.T. couldn’t fuck up. And as I left for my newer life I was saved from a kind
of death by an approximation of death.
 My head!—has it left my body? My eyes can see, at least they could a second ago. And now
all I can see is the inside of my eyelids all rosy and backlit like a strobe-light-parade down Club
Avenue, in Anytown USA. Someone was handing me something, someone else was pulling it
out of my hand. It was me, being all, all fingery, and tentative… I was full of blood, except in my
ears. As if I’d heard, somewhere, that death could hold your head up, if you kept your mouth
open.
I tried to open my eyes but my forehead couldn’t wrinkle. I thought it was because I didn’t
have one. I thought my head was going to explode—I felt sick and weirdly un-worldly like dead
reckoning, like momentarily all-knowing…ahh short gasp; now speak!
“Lift my shoulders so I can fly.”
Knowing…..knowing that I have looked closer into the eye of the bee than anyone should ever
look. A fragment: my former self. I was ‘boy no wonder’ to the caped crusader’s most reckless
feat of daring do. God, am I going to die? Am I going to be all right?
“You’re going to be okay,” God said. And then my head landed on the grass. Thump.
I had become excruciatingly sensitive when thinking about my new life and the egregiously
banal job of packing, and now that I was broke and flying, and landing, I felt nothing. Odd.
I feel so beyond pain, yet there’s little doubt that this slingshot is going to snap back, and soon.
I’ll be propelled directly into the pain that I was just projected from.
Damn, I’ve been hit. The famous last words of a million mortal men. And that was the last
thing I can remember, though apparently, I never lost consciousness, until they moved me.
Pain is my hat, speech is my tie, loquaciousness my cummerbund, and I’m dressed to the
nines. Oh, God! My blood is on the black street. Back There Street. Back Street, I can’t speak,
come-back streak…two minutes three seconds…two…three rights make a left. Don’t cry for me
Ar-gen-tina…the truth is……Oh God, (I’m in) hell!
Circumnavigating the obvious, burying the lead, missing my own main point. There was great
relief at being overlooked, I thought: ‘I wasn’t dead!’
After inventory—relief at the part that damage didn’t play in my conscious-not- conscious re-
booting. Willa Cather came to me all dressed in blue and said, “Remember I told you, now is the
time to stop admiring and start remembering.” Tobey McGuire flashed a 22 pistol at me from a
distance and said. “It belonged to my mother.” A Tibetan lama dressed in orange robes, snapped
his fingers and walked backwards, “Things change Kundu.”
I tumbled down the stairs at home in Point Spread, and landed in front of my stocking on
Christmas morning. That was the ‘Bicycle Christmas,’ and soon I would be able to go anywhere.
My high school sweet heart, Lynne, took a shiny red and gold china mushroom from her dresser
and handed it to me. I kept it close to me for years; mostly locked up, representing as it did, my
own dalliance into the land of beautiful, hard mushrooms, which I was working on, and looking
forward to. Cat Stevens began to sing Oh, baby baby it’s a wild world, it’s hard to get by, just
upon a smile. There was a chord change—how did I know that? I never played guitar, and
another chord change with a pick-up beat, then, more Cole Porter than Johnny Mercer—a
syncopation—as if I didn’t know that, as if I didn’t’ know my own bed. Aaaas if I never noticed
how she combed her hair from her forehead –Paul Simon. And I knew that was Paul Simon’s
voice, and I knew all his songs, and I knew he wrote Red Rubber Ball, but never sang it because
everyone would have been disappointed that it wasn’t the Cyrkle version, and wouldn’t have
sounded nearly so happy. And it was, after all, supposed to be happy, but he’d have buried his
lead, missed his own main point if he sang it. To let everyone just be happy would have to be his
main point—all of a sudden I knew too much—that was a first.
And then I saw a golden room with record albums scattered all over the floor, some dark blue,
all with beautiful jackets that I had never seen before, and artists whose faces were familiar and
photographed like they sang; and I knew the albums were great—they were priceless, yet there
were dozens stacked on end hardly touched, all ‘one of a kind.’ Brand new. If I turned my head I
could see them all, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. One of the albums was Caribou, by
Elton John, and the jacket was empty and I knew from my own dream language that everything
was going to be okay, it wasn’t lost —it was on the turntable, and I was going to be all right.
Creativity was abounding ‘Solar Prestige a Gammon.’ I was on-my-way—back-home. This time
alone, I thought.
The sun shone brightly into the cab of the ambulance, visible between the backs of the
paramedic’s heads, one shaven very close, and blonde, the other dark-haired with a compelling
counter clockwise swirl of hair moving rapidly from his pinkish cowlick. I had to close my eyes,
everything began to spin. I had to move, there were others there, and they reassured me. We
headed to the hospital, and it was all down hill.
In my mind’s eye I could see past the driver’s head through the windshield past the blue May
’00 inspection sticker, to a highway, familiar, but not from this angle; I moved further ahead of
the vehicle.
I was in the surgery room. I didn’t speak the hospital lingo, but I knew everything else. I
knew about the poster of Marilyn Monroe with a drawn-in moustache, that the second-year
resident’s put face-up on the highest shelf, above where the hot blankets were kept, to determine
if anyone who claimed to float above the table actually ever did, and could prove it. I felt the hot
lights and cold sheets and a small man with a needle said, “Pretend this hurts.” And then I floated
out into a cascade where everything rhymed; words, flowers, ambience—the hills matched the
clouds perfectly, and the pink horizon was a mere echo of the blazing purple twilight above it.
When purple colored curtains mark the end of day, tonight at twilight time. Oh God, (I’m in)
heaven! The Platters sang and then we all left for Portugal in a bus.
Here in the afterglow of day, we’ll keep our rendezvous beneath the blue… yet… bang! we
were in Portugal. The day was so bright everything was incandescent— arrayed—so bright I
thought I was happy, I thought I rhymed. I didn’t, but our entry onto the square was a sign, the
church bells chimed as if the whole thing were timed, and I tried to say the gammon in the
original Portuguese, but I couldn’t, it wouldn’t…(playing those mind games forever) happen,
though I knew it so well, It wouldn’t at last come out. All the buildings on the square gave way
to a hill, just one, so big, but so ‘California’ I knew I could climb it.
By muddy death is drown the violent spring. I was saved! But what price rent? I wanted to
pay, I did, unwrapped like an infinity, but I had wanted that when I was trying to pack, and ended
up in the bathroom stealing soap. It was the last of the rhymes so up we went. Someone had
subtracted who I thought I was, from who I was, and I got this, a man who couldn’t do anything
but fly. I smelled fresh mown grass and I tried to say it was ‘new-ly-cut,’ the black quintet all
laughed as I pulled a handful of grass and sheared it between my fingers like a lawn mower. All
six of us laughed. Then we climbed new mown grass ha ha ha. There were green leaves to eat,
and Herb Gardener fell, one time, just to roll down for the fun of it, and soon we were at the top
again. The sun shone so brightly I had trouble seeing my llama clearly. I got on and he took us
magically to surrender point—the farthest west you can go before you hit New York City.
“Liberty Island sounds so nice, let’s go.”
“Okay, you’re the boss.”
“But now…how…I don’t see, exactly…”
“The easiest way is through the tunnel, and it’s super-protected by the berm of the hill starting
here.”
We walked a long way in darkness, and soon we converged with another branch of the cement
tube and this one with tracks running down the center, that reflected what little light there was.
“Come on.”
“Hurry!”
Alex said, “Hurry!” with such authority, we just about jumped from a standing position on the
ground to the passing car—hurtling and shaking down the rickety tracks—so fast no one could
hear themselves or, hardly, talk at all. Flash!
 “Seven-and-a-half or eight? This Sucks! I need a seven there’s a lot of blood here, I don’t
know what I’m looking at.”
Someone grabbed my head.
One of the guys started tapping a metal rod on the car’s handrail, soon another, then we had
music and ya had ta smile. Sonny smiled and began to sing. I don’t know what it was exactly,
and I don’t think I ever heard it before but it was a song about getting there before you’ve
forgotten what it was you went there for. I cried and my legs hurt so bad, but I wasn’t crying
about pain I was crying because the song was so sad and beautiful.
You can sing boy? Alex asked.
I couldn’t speak, to tell him I couldn’t sing.
He said, “You just sing along then, when you’re ready.”
I tried to make a sound but tears flowed, my throat felt so tight, and my lips and jaw felt like a
vise, there was a pressure from my chest. If I cry out loud now, I’ll…probably be out of tune.
“He’s okay, he’s enjoying it. Keep singing; he’ll join in when it’s time.”
I couldn’t stop, and I wondered how he knew I was enjoying it, which I was. I cried all the
way to New York and the six of us played and sang. I stood at the front of the car because I
couldn’t sing; also, so my tears would dry faster, and so I could hide my tumescence. I put on
such a brave face and held my head up so high we stopped the entire show by the time…
“Nothing, begin compressions...”
we got there.
When we arrived at Grand Central Station there was…Everything stopped, no one moved; you
could have heard a pin drop on the ancient marble floor, and then there was this incredible
applause and my face shone and a…I finally could smile.
Sandra bumped me in the ribs, “Keep on, keep on, you doing it. Don’t stop now you doing it, go
man, go.”
Flash.
We walked from the terminal into the great hall. I got there, and the sounds were all around
reverberating loosely off the walls and the people called us by our names. A man stepped
forward from a train into the, the, the crowd he clasped us around the shoulders and asked how
we ever managed with a rickety old thing like that.
“Oh Billy, he ain’t so bad. When he laugh everyone laugh and when he cry hmmmm”
A great single—non-harmony went up, and the crowd bustled and moved in, closer.
‘We were lucky we made it at all,’ I tried to say, but couldn’t. the crowd moved even closer
Then the man, he conducted us up the stairs to the street where the reception was uproarious; we
were swept away by the crowd, but managed to stay together somehow.
All of a sudden the man declared, “We’re here” they let us down and he said, “This is Time
Square.”
‘I didn’t even know where it was they were taking us,’ I tried to say, motioning to the crowd.
The crowd covered every centimeter of Times Square. They were visibly responding to every
gesture and to every word with a sigh or a chuckle. They roiled and reacted to our every flicker
with great yet immaculate magnification—projecting our feelings throughout the entire crowd
and out into the air, they kept it up word for word. Passion and purpose pulled them one from the
other. “Breathe.” Thought for thought, idea for idea, laugh for laugh with utter precisional
antennaence. I had never been so happy and so overcome. I felt like dancing. That’s when we
sort of turned to each other and said silently that we had come full circle and soon it would be
time to go.
“Okay, report off.”
Everyone sang along then, and we sang every song that driver knew. I thought I’d never
worry about another thing as long as I lived.
 New Best Friend
Climbing out of Grand Central Station that way, was not like another thing, it was stars to
farmers. It was sunshine to moss marigolds. There was no comparison that could be drawn. If it
was LIKE anything it would have to come with a huge disclaimer. I was exhilarated by my
inability express myself. It was exhila—exhilarating beyond any possibility of rating. My uncles
yelled my name. I was truly beside myself. It was like discovering a new friend. One you come
upon unexpectedly:
“Are you going to the library?”
“Yes.”
“Could you take this?”
“Why, is it overdue?”
My new friend, the one I couldn’t keep. The one who suddenly made me funny. The one who
was too good for me “…Breathe...” Though you feel from the first, like you’ve known them for a
very long time. And if they ever told you that you met many years ago but you forgot, you’d
believe them. You’d believe them if they said they fell in love at first glance—you’d believe
about anything. That’s what it was like, anyway. It was like being with Morris, all elbows,
except this Morris was really nice; this Morris had wavy brown hair, smiled readily and often. I
knew this Morris instantly. I knew he loved candles and white sand but not together. He was like
iced tea—he went with everything but marshmallows. I knew he was self centered and could run
very fast around corners. I knew he was athletic and I knew he liked cats but ‘wooden touch’
them. I knew this Morris was afraid of sparks and I knew he had reason to be. He set fire to his
father’s car once at a gas station or, what we used to call in Missouri, a filing station, from a stray
spark that jumped the gap between his hand and the pump somehow. This Morris had no worries.
This Morris called you ‘dude,’ and would use your name in a sentence. Go dude! shake and
bake. Morris was the kind of friend you’d name your first kid after; even though he’d be Moe to
everyone else he’d be Morris to you. ‘Taking the Buick out for a spin?’ ‘Skim milk or heavy
cream?’ ‘I’ll have a slice of that… I’d like two pounds of that grind.’ This Morris used all kinds
of off the cuff expressions. This Morris lived in a very exciting world and he was my new best
friend. Zap!
This Morris was dog-friendly this Morris wouldn’t calm down or behave. This Morris hated
all kids. This Morris was a no-holes-barred riot. No holes barred tennis. No holes barred tag
football. No holes barred golf, croquet, horseshoes—no shoes barred horse hockey. This was the
John Lennon of Morrises. He wore the pants off David Bowie’s “Across the Universe.” Wear
your summer shoes to the picnic, Morris. This was the bare footed Morris. This Morris learns all
about life from his dog Meriwether. Meriwether is perfect, and makes him the world’s best
petter; and teaches him how to lap up water from a paper cup…well, you get my meaning. This
Morris was wasted. He was great, but he was wasted on Everneedin, Missouri. A hop-skip and
jump from Sedalia.

The Ambulance
I was just starting to get comfortable with my misanthropic persona and now they were
organizing a sandbag line there in the mud by the broken levee, and they were going to save me.
See…nothing ever works out right. I was miles from getting in touch with my deep-seated fear of
people and here they all come in a rush of ambulanci. I was also light-years from understanding
the main theme of my life: the one that I thought was: no one understands me because I’m so
deep; but was turning out to be, you’re as scared of them as they are of you.
 As a child and a young man my major regret was that I wasn’t someone else. But, now my
major regret was years of invisibility. As the ride neared its end, and I was still buckled in, I
wondered if anyone would find me before we took off again. I knew I was on a stretcher but I
thought they’d have to move me onto some kind of stand up hand-cart so I could be wheeled,
shaking and sweating to the ticket counter. ‘Five for Cleveland please,’ was going to be my
rehearsed response. This was turning out to be an ungovernable day, all this, just then, with no
time to wonder.
As the ambulance pulls into the trauma bay the fat guy says to the skinny kid, “Look Mr.
Hudson, I can balance your future on one…finger, oops,” crash.

The content of your character

Meanwhile, in a world where you are judged by the content of your character, and not
other ruses, some people are still fucked. Castors are for sofas and coasters are for drinks but
drinks are not for sale. You can’t build a mountain out of sand. Acclaim became aspire as I was
dropped down a peg. Subject verb object, I was fucked up.
In that horrible desert-landslide of a hospital I could not speak or make a sound, but they
wouldn’t let me die—at first a comforting feeling, then an uneasy one. Like a kind of sad
baseball game when no one allowed for the fact that in this game of numbers and statistics
someone was going to end up being the ball, slammed around with all the might of an Aaron or
Ruth.
Crack!
All they cared about was that endless tally of hits, runs, and errors. I saw signs all around me,
I just couldn’t interpret any of them. No one talked down to me or forced me against my will, but
no one sought out my advice either. Stop X Look! Was about as close as they ever got to the
railroad crossing. I knew I was in an airport, all I wanted to know was, ‘where’s my luggage?’
I’d broken several important bones and lost as many important functions and nobody seemed
to care. They still asked me how I was. I hadn’t been feeling all that great about my life before I
walked headlong into that sidewinder of a steel fist she called, ‘My car’—the newest meat
tenderizer process, The Hydrodyne. The Holy Grill. How was I supposed to feel now, when the
worst part was over and the new worst part was about to begin? At least I hadn’t gone crazy.
God said I’d be fine. That was a relief…I think.

Kids and God

People might say that fictionalizing a connection with God is the height of pretension; but why
wouldn’t I have a relationship? We go way back. Why should I be sensitive to calling Him by
name? He has none. I am no more sensitive to saying his name, than I am sensitive to his
gender. He hasn’t one of those either, or none, in the, two-for-one, sense that people have gender.
Or his title, one used self referentially, mostly; as though he were a snail, a dog, or the ricochet of
pain when you stub your toe—all curled upon itself.
When I was five turning six, I saw God. Not the kind of thing you can mistake, however,
definitely the kind of thing you can’t define. I was on the backyard swing. It was red and white
striped, before we painted it solid Rustoleum-red. I was about to be six and I could swing very
high. One day, while I was letting my imagination fly, I found myself hanging almost upside
down on the narrow red metal seat; the ground came up so fast the trees became invisibly big.
The grass was 2-days mowed; the tires of my bike split the air between them, as it lay sideways in
the yard. Hands grabbed at chains, and the sandbox waited for the fusion of dream and embargo
that proclaimed its nature and reason for being. The red wooden frame dove and rose, to the
rhythm of my vision; the sky and sun rose and fell to the rhythm of my swing. Blue brown and
yellow.
I had a beach ball, lost in the forsythia, it was blue turning black on one of its petaloid sides,
doubtless (shaped) from unrest within the world of mud, which stood between me and the world
of play.
That cropped morning sat like string on my shoulder. Like marbles on my lap, spilling off
and, spilling off again, incandescent like the eyes of the people from the bridge of San Luis Rey.
My thin, five year old arms strained in a wonderful way, reflecting each other, and did exactly the
movement that united me with sun, grass and sky. Frame by frame by frame.
I didn’t believe there was anything I couldn’t do. If I had subtracted who I thought I was from
who I was I would have had this. And that’s what I had, so I flew. Throwing my head back,
pulling harder, stretching my body and me longer than ever. I could grow.
Dogs looked, a butterfly laughed in that soulful and snorty way that they will, when surprised
by the situation at a glance, as all of us will, when so surprised. A praying mantis did a double
take. Two birds looked down, and did wish there were more mice, and less people in the world,
but didn’t mean me. The n-edible berries on the gray green bushes behind me were dropping to
the ground (as though) from the diving board of my higher being. I was likewise, shoved in a
corner with the furnace of my higher self. And after a few songs and a few missives I must have
blanked out; and though my hands were tight on the ropes, I came-to with a feeling of being, a
feeling of not ever having to hold on to anything ever again, and I looked up or maybe down and
there before me was a bright white image I thought it looked like a goose or duck.
A great goose—a cartoon duck. I can’t say duck; it was a goose; and it looked at me and I
stopped swinging. Then I started swinging again and the goose was gone. Then it was there
again. I would say what I saw if I could, white, big head, neck; very two- dimensional now that I
think of it, body no legs or… and no standing or anything.
And then I felt a presence…sorry, but it was a kind of un-peaceful, “you better,” kind of
feeling; like a portent: like a thing that happens before the thing you’re supposed to remember. A
sincere but respectful, ‘so sorry to have to say this, all the same…’ I felt happy, fulfilled and
good. Really good, and I didn’t know at first what that big goose-like thing was doing in my
backyard, but it hovered in a way I had never seen before. Though at the time I remember
thinking it was kind of like a cartoon. If I said anything, and I don’t remember saying anything, I
might have said, “You, here!?”
And He said, “I am God.”
I said, “Can I have three wishes?” He got all wavy and white, and, if I asked at all, I stopped
asking the question. But then, I had to ask, since He hovered there so long. “What will I
become?” There were no words that I can recall, just a feeling that was very good. And I swung
and swung on that swing for a long time after it left, and I felt so good, and of course I cried, but
He never came back, and I never saw Him again. I never told anyone that I saw God. I had
claimed to see a sleigh pulled by reindeer way off in the sky the year before, and my credibility
was pretty much shot.

Mumbling in customs
Mei loved God, or so he said.
“How can you live an not love God? Look at the wealth of blessing He has bestow on you.”
Mei prayed with his head in his hands…if that tells you anything—probably praying for less
boney hands.
But, he was at his ideal body weight, and I was at the hospital. Mei had straight legs, mine
only straight because they were screwed to a stick—a sturdy neck, 20-20 vision, great balance,
and a well-defined jaw-line like Brad Ravine. Mei was only handsome in a crouch—he could
have been a doctor, possibly a surgeon. He looked like one when he bent over the books—he just
had that look. He was well proportioned, had great muscle tone and a face like a Stradivarius—
timeless and in tune, if not a little lined and flat.
God loved Mei, of that I had no doubt.
Someone must have had something serious in mind when they created him to look like that. It
couldn’t have been a whim. I’m sure his parents never thought about it. Somehow thinking
about Mei’s parents made me kind of nauseated. I never met them, but if they each had the best
individual features of their son—they still invoke from me no dispensation, nor presume a
scintilla of innocence whatsoever.
His appearance never changed unless he was in a hurry or excitedly concentrating. His looks
were unshakable, earnest and well, not thought out. Visually, he made me wish sometimes, he
were more repressed.
I was glad Mei came to my viewing except I wasn’t dead yet. The accident, or the IV had
tripled my vocabulary, but had taken away my power of speech. Not that anyone cared—about
my vocabulary, that is. I was the only one cognizant of the fact. Mei looked like he was about to
give me a pat on the back; a signal we used.
What if I die?
What if I throw up?
What if the pain doesn’t go away?
What if I have finished?
What if all there really is, was (occurred in some form), transpired yesterday?
Five is an odd number of what ifs, don’t you think? Here, in the 5th Information Age we can
have it wrapped up, blocked out, read, said, sung, e-mailed or slid under the door.
Five fingers on a hand; one-two, three-four; (like a waltz). And then gone. Zip.

I can’t breathe
Give me and my bad back a break. If it weren’t for pot smoking hippies we’d never have
reached the moon, and visa versa. That’s what history will teach. They think every one is part of
every thing. That’s their framework: everything is connected to everything else, and nothing ever
ends.
I probably should slow down. There are too many people looking for happiness for me to be
taking the lion’s share.
Mei Tran always had this way of making me manic. One look at that horizontally crowded
face and I’d go berserk. How can he fit so much, into a hand full of oops? Freak. It’s all his
fault. Mistaken misshapen identity? As my Grandmother used to say about the Africans, I feel
now about the Asians…‘They’re all related.’
My vocabulary tripled again and it made me bouncy and enterprising. Obvious or not, the
problem with finding happiness is not an utter lack, it’s more a preponderance of un-happiness.
In other words: erroneous sightings and wishful thinking spurs the search for the White Tiger,
when for all intents and purposes, practical or otherwise, the yellow would do just fine. Without
fraud, loneliness, good things going bad, and other such abusery, self or otherwise, life would be
an empty thing. Like parties without alcohol—hard to find. When the grease is on the wheel it
moves, and conversely when you leave it alone it fails. If I had more time to consider this whole
project I would probably feel differently, but so goes the world…a thousand miles an hour…no
time to think.
It occurred to me, right about the time the room began to fill up with bristling people, that
Freud had inadvertently discovered, that we wish our lives rather than live them: There’s the
wish you (you’re compelled) have to make [id]; the wish that you’re afraid to (repair replenish)
make [ego]; and the wish that is a great big (inured) lie [super ego]. The wishes, all three, are
integral to going.
My blood pressure dropped to zero when they moved me, luckily I had the presence of mind
to do what I always do—nothing. I ignored it. After all, It got me this far; I wished that I could
land softly on my feet, in a bed of balloons, or in the hands of God.

Great Uncles
My uncle Jerry took to the merchant marines as a young man. And he took to drink in his
prime; he adapted to survival strategies of his own devise, and befriended a black man named
Eddie Waters. Eddie had fathered several children as a young man, and had taken up dancing,
smiling, telling stories, and playing music in his prime.
He mopped floors in the fashionable 18th street section of Philadelphia in a bid for survival,
where he met a white man who owned a bookstore with very dirty floors. As I sit here thinking
about the two of them, a yellow-jacket walks onto my lounge chair and pulls on his antennae as if
trying to improve reception. He watches me. He must have been the one just buzzing me. He
lets me count his yellow strips—the yellow rings around his tail, one for every month of his life
so far, I suppose, it being the end of July and all. And…if he doesn’t quit bugging me, one for
every month of his life. Period.
My uncle Cherry was not, however, a recovering alcoholic, he was an X-alcoholic.
Where these lines converged: the lines of fear and love: fear of life; and love of life, the boozy
intersection when both are dead-equal; very little fear anymore and very little love anymore. He,
having met himself, as it were, coming down from the mountain as he walked up, could choose to
continue going up–or not. And he chose to get down. He just stopped drinking.
“All this talk about drinking, not drinking,” he used to say. “Holding each others’ hands, is
phony crap–just stop.”

As Mei prayed figuratively, in the other room, Billy was beginning the first of several delicate
operations. To save, what was left, of..…this..……life. All the while as the anesthesia burned
his lungs, ever so slightly, he confronted the decisions people made …perhaps his Uncles should
have kept drinking, stopped counting everything, and stolen the sax back. After all it was
Washington. Billy’s eyelid was ripped, his legs and pelvis were broken, he had a spike in the
base of his left index finger, and he was sound asleep.

Tic Tic Tic

Coming from no where and landing smack dab in front of a Lincoln mercury dealership which
I had just turned over to my best friend, though I didn’t know it, was more than enough for one
day, so it must be the next day. It must be tomorrow already. I lost my place. According to the
rule of fives there is an end to all this silly multiplication. I projected, was projected into the
irreconcilable future face-first. It happened that we live in the future, and I was at home there. A
dark cloud rolled overhead, my nose bled, I became pale and closed my eyes to it…I thought it
would be fine, just fine, if it rolled over me. A circle encircled me, and I remembered the blood
and the black street and that somehow gave me entry into a world of never before imagined
possibility. It.
It came to me like a flash; he was a liar also. He had lied his way into, not just this hospital,
my life, but the entire country or maybe, the world. It hit me so hard when the pleasant young
man released his grip; I felt it, saw it. Even when it dripped they ignored it. That’s red blood!
That’s mine. That blood on the street is…the floor, is mine! I, me, me, mine. In a room full of
lies, I couldn’t understand, who or what was fine, okay.
Somehow they didn’t know what it (truth) is, none of them. They thought it meant hurting
someone before they hurt you. Pronouns every one! Something compelled me to yell ‘fix it!’
And someone said, “He’s crying, that’s a good sign.”
Say what you will, I now knew that Mei Tran only told the truth when it was inevitable. He
didn’t know the truth of anything. He was a (calculating) thinking machine and he was here to be
unsupplantable. It was Alia S., also known as Doris Chisholm all over again.
In a hive not far from here, not so long ago, when I was 19, in the St. Carolyn Hospital, I had a
similar experience; a nurse named Chisholm, was talking to me about my history of smoking or
my allergy to breath mints or something, and all of a sudden out of nowhere I had this clear vision
that she had been sexually abused as a young girl. It was like seeing it. All I can really
remember was a younger Doris, with a dozen little ribbons all over her head, eyes wide, face
shiny, screaming and turning away furiously, all wet. In so much fear that everything went white
and I felt the thing—the feeling of being misbegotten; foreclosed like a property; halved like a
melon; streaked like a Navajo blanket. It was monumental. How could I have known such a
thing so definitely? But, being used to night sweats borne of regret, and being wrong so much of
the time I just sort of let it go. There was, after all, nothing I could do. She was a bitch, and she
hated men and I was a man, and there you have it…painted with the same brush. Excuse me for
living. You get out, no you get out.
I sincerely hoped it wasn’t going to be a King-size novel, this thing that my delusions were
writing, but I felt a similar knowing with regard to Mei’s cover story about him and God being
‘just good friends.’ I prefer to use my words carefully and orderly when discussing the
supernatural: I am troubled by the indifference many people regard it with.
I also knew she prayed a most fervent prayer every night, at church, Sundays, and birthdays
till she was 12. Many nights after the ‘God-bless-yous.’ ‘Please God, please make me white.’
My clairvoyance lasted only a short while, involved only the trivialities of daily reoccurrences,
and the familiarity I had with un-informed wishes.

If I could have moved on I would’ve. There were so many easy ways to do it, ways I had used
before, paths I knew well. But there were no more excuses, no more stories to tell, no more
ironically hidden stuff, so they’ll bust-ass searching; Mei was a liar. And I was a user, who
couldn’t figure out how to use the fact that he was a liar.
After all, he sort of worked for me; I benefited from his success. I didn’t want to see him fail,
and yet, I had information that was undeniable, credible and had to be used. Damn!…I am a
bitch. Masturbating with my eyes closed, legs open and asshole alternately clenched wasn’t
enough…I really was a fucking bitch…so eager to see failure, so quick to address grievances, so
detrimental to precepts of social injustice all the while proclaiming rights that would preoccupy
their sublimation.
Funny thing, I liked women. Starting with Tarry when I was five. Haven’t thought about her
for years and years.
I think now, looking back, she was very pale and had a wide face. We were so close we often
went by the same name—Hoblins…The Hopkins. I had erections and we called them Hop-kinds
or something…we got in trouble once. Tarry got a burn under her arm from when she wrapped
herself in a bed sheet and I couldn’t get to her, so I picked up one end and pulled so hard she
rolled—zip—right out of the bed. We argued about whose fault it was, she denied simplicity, and
proclaimed her right to sue, which she didn’t have. How could you take something to the judge
when you planned to tell only half the story? Did you want deliverance or just justice? Were you
looking to get away with something or to get-off for comparatively good behavior—you weren’t
supposed to be jumping naked on someone else’s parents’ big bouncy bed, in the first place.
Another signal fire, and another safe and watery day. Caught up on my own hilly island.
 Speedo
I had thought of everything in those few minutes. And reclaimed my right to ‘Be.’ Assisted
by memory I prepared yet another scene, still more entertaining than the former. Did you ever
stop to wonder what would happen if teachers could someday enter an entire term paper into a
mammoth plagiarism search-engine which would bust you every time 25 words matched or
approximated someone else’s work. How funny would that be to get an ‘F’ on a paper because
you and Cervantes think alike, or to be accused of lifting from Ivanhoe?
There I am, staring truth in the face and yet quibbling with honest emotion.
Mei was kicked out of the ER; I missed him already.
They sent me on a one-way ticket to Trauma Bay. They strip search prior to boarding. That
reminds me of one of my favorite stories—well, the one I tell the most. The one I update the
most. It’s not one of my standards yet…I’m still polishing. It’s about the Thailander, of course.
I spend all my time with him; his taste influences its majority.
So, one day this guy comes into the store, all sort of express-like. Most people come into a car
dealership like it’s a routine stop at the grocery on the way home, and they’re just checking out
the melons.
Just checking out melons?! By rights they should be fingerprinted! Anyway…Bang! We’re
all suddenly foreigners. There was mischief afloat, you could feel it, and it buoyed me. It made
me clear my throat. Mei was buoyed just to have another ass in his pool.

Mr. ‘Speed’ comes into the office and suddenly it’s all about his Datsun, this is before they
became Nissans, well anyway, he wants $6,400 dollars for this beaten up Datsun 280z piece of
crap; but he’s left handed, has long artistic fingers, hair down to his shoulders, and works for Bell
Atlantic, before they changed their name—so we entertained the fucker. As I recall, Mei was
trying to make a lot of noise to hide the fact that the guy was giving him a hard time. I had
coached Mei a thousand times about working a sale, to change tact; don’t try to sail into the wind;
tack right then left. All Mei knew about boats was how to weigh them down. If this doesn’t
work try that, if your sincerity doesn’t work try the opposite, be yourself—keep switching till you
find your course. If you’re at your wits end ‘Use what’s handy, then…like you do every Friday
night…then you’ll have a starting point, and go from there.’
Finally, I can’t stand it any more; he’s not learning, he’s hiding and lying. Fronting a security
system that boasts a one-hinge-door, called The Hinge. You can call a piece of crap a Dubius
Garnet but it’s still a piece of crap. People are smarter than he gives them credit for, and this guy
isn’t buying any of it; this guy with the little sunglasses and the big mouth didn’t fool me; he was
the reason I had a gun in the filing cabinet. There’s suddenly this loud squeal of brakes—not
unusual really, since we work just off exit 12 of Interstate 411, known as the, ‘let’s get out of
here’ exit.
I stood up to stretch and reposition… “Mei?”
“Uh,” Mei replies, as though he can’t be interrupted while kissing ass.
“Wasn’t that the Le Sabre you just sold to Mr. Jones?” Jonesing is what we used to call,
needing a fix, being addicted to drugs, and feeling withdrawal pangs, back in the day. I don’t
know what it’s called now. It was code.
“What?” He asked.
“The car with the bad brakes…that we got in the SHERIFF’S sale?”
“The wha…oh, no. You don’t mean the Firebird we got from impounds?” Mei improvises.
“Yes! That’s the one! Red.” I said.
Colors were a code but only if they were unknown. Mei instituted much of the coding system
that we used. He loved to instigate. I love to complicate.
 “Was that it? Damn! Those brakes needed work,” Mei says, off-handedly. This was before
ABS.
“Guess so. That car was in more drug deals than Swifty Limberger.” A good story needs to
be updated periodically.
The guy looks up from our thumbed-over blue book. The one he practically ripped out of
Mei’s hand.
Mei stretches his neck and stares out the huge plate-glass window, as if to see the car tear
down the street in a replay.
“Yep, loaded Firebird… that was nice… man.”
“88?”
“89.”
Mei never said ‘man’ in his life. He was pushing it, I thought.
“Red.” I said. That was code for ‘cut it out,’ or ‘just stop.’ “Extras?” I asked, as I stood
behind the galumph, and looked down the front of his shirt.
“I’ll say. Had compartment everywhere, but no trash can…” Mei said.
“Yeah, it was filthy, scraps of… papers, and little bags everywhere, as I recall.” I said.
I was ready to leave my able assistant to finish the sale of contraband, but it wasn’t clear if
‘Speedo’ heard that drugs might be in our cars. The guy reads a little too intently.
Mei drops his pen, and leans toward me as he picks it up. “Got another, ah… yesterday,” he
whispers.
“Drugs,” I whispered back.
“And sex-mobile.” He opined.
“Pimp car?” I offered.
“Strap-on in the console,” Mei intoned, as I turned to leave.
I closed my eyes and tried not to smile. “Well let’s get it cleaned up and out of here.
“Lets us mark it down…call it a ‘must have.’” He said. The word ‘must’ referred to the man
in a partnership, or just to the male generally—or to get my interest. Big tease.
“How about, ‘nothing compares $2,222.’” from the Sinead O’Connor song nothing compares
2 u, which was playing on the radio.
“How ‘bout ‘ooohhh those extras!’ ‘Nice package.’” (super clean) Mei said.
We could have taken this show on the road. We were very much in-sync.
I whispered to the floor as though sound doesn’t reverberate off shiny shoes, “We didn’t clean
it yet did we?”
Speedo looks up.
“No??” Sherlock whispers back.
“Whatever, sorry” I said, to Evalyn Wood’s only failure—‘Speedo’, ‘Sir Reads A Lot’, as if I
had affronted him by interrupting his perusal somehow, and walked out the side door to the blurr
of pistons and air guns.
Mei sold the dope a beat up Camaro before we even attempted to clean it, for twice blue book.
I wonder if GM still makes Camaros? Maybe they’ve changed its name.
When Mei tells the story: I sniff real loudly when Speedo enters, but I didn’t; I sniffed
regularly. Mei’s really the instigator, but he gives credit. He’s the underling, after all.
We used to call him ‘Squeaky’ when we told the story originally, but lately we’ve been using
a lot of phallic symbolism. Oddly enough.
“Anyone stupid enough to think they’re going to find free drugs in a used-car must be high on
crack.” Mei always moralizes when he tells the story.
Mei says the guy told him he’d heard of hiding drugs in the crankshaft. But I think Mei
probably was the one who mentioned specific hiding places, being that he was so good at hiding.
I was just happy to help.
 He was delighted to have one less ass to kiss, and I was glad to do my part. It’s all about
teamwork. Even hiding takes teamwork—can’t do it yourself. Unless you’re working under an
alias, of course. Or walking around in disguise.
That’s my favorite story about Mei because it’s so instructive: it’s about selling, and it’s about
winners and losers, and it’s about people with high pitched tents that come to find out that not
everyone lives in the woods. Plus, he got his briefs turned around for being such an ass. Some
big deal Speedo was. My vocabulary tripled again, and now I could spell upside down: sem
opaads leap biq awos. I was approaching coma panic again. The doctor with the flared nostrils
was putting a larger breathing tube down my throat, which reminded me:
This is, in the tenth of a second it took the anesthetist to wake up, my least favorite story about
Mei: There I am, standing practically naked in the absolute middle of the lot. We had hoisted a
car onto the center position earlier that day, and the winch broke, so Tran, me, and his brother
Fong or something, pushed the car ourselves, about 2 meters up this ramp to display the car on its
own little stage. It was August—about 101 ̊ in the shade, we’d made this mock-up of a lemonade
stand in the front, and I was wearing a pair of red, white, and blue boxers I got from Troy’s, and
nothing else. Back in the day we could do stuff like that; I had a decent body, and Mei would
smile innocently.
It was Summer Madness, a deal-of-a-lifetime promotion to get rid of last year’s models. I
was sweating profusely, and I had, after a while, a pair of soaking wet, skin-tight cotton trunks
with wide vertical strips, red, white, and blue—in that order—sticking to my personal effects, and
no underwear whatsoever because I had always told fucking Mei that it was (in his case),
unnecessary to wear underwear, so with my winch broke and my apparatus in full flower, a car
load of nuns or missionaries or something, shows up and Mei, the weasel, doesn’t mention it.
The guy who pisses thank you cards and apes Christmas greetings like a monkey...Well…Of
course, I hide behind one car after another, sweating more all the time. As he ushers them over to
where I’m standing, I lean into this Buick Regal’s passenger door, Stupid, gets the tiniest waif of
a sister (virgin to the teeth) to sit in the driver’s seat while I smile and then he pushes the switch
for the passenger window to roll down, I stepped back, but it was too late, my entire package
flashed before the sister, she lets out a defiant yelp, and I shouted “ hold it, hold it, hold it!”…I
still don’t know why. And there we are; boss and bossed, mostly-naked and fully dressed in
black and white, black and white, black and white, and I’m asking the Virgin of Gandersheim, at
the top of my voice to hold my cock, in the middle of my lot, in the middle of the blazing sun, in
the middle of the the hottest day on record. Some big joke.
I blame Mei for that, and for every nightmare I’ve ever had about lemons, lemonade, Buick
Regals, or forcing my penis into the open mouths of the blameless religious. To this day I believe
I saw—the novice start to reach for my cock when I told her to hold it; and for that I’m grateful,
in a way, because I’ve masturbated many times over that slight movement of her hands, up-turned
face, and childlike expression.

Hyjinx
Four metal medical instruments fall to the floor like sinks, as Billy thinks to himself: Am I in a
coma? Just when I was about to give something away—too. My replacement was all set-up,
except I never told him my idea to give a car away, and he’d never think of it.
He stands in my stead, off-somewhere, visiting the numb and speechless—the cross-eyed-
short-sighted, instead of being dutifully at the store cranking out some–game with lined up
rabbits—some shooting-gallery game that wouldn’t require a marksman to hit his mark. You
know, a pigeon toss. Billy made the internal dynamic to throw a sponge, but nothing happened.
His arm didn’t move. His vocabulary slipped a click. Fuck.
 He felt it was a good sign that he could get angry. It meant he was intact. Billy flashed an
imagined wallet, and flung it across the room where it hit nothing and ricocheted only in his
mind. ‘Get out of here Tran’ became a torrent of eyeball and dead silence. Billy turned away to
the tune of tremendous pain in his neck that gripped his entire head and left shoulder, and made
him think to himself: I’ll never do that again. Then as if it never happened, Billy thought: why
doesn’t he go… it’s time he split the take with his accomplice, or maybe demand a refund for a
job so badly botched. He grabbed the handle of his briefcase and flung it at Mei, this time it hit
him square on the forehead, and splashed water all over both of them. Whatever it was, it did the
trick.
Billy could neither talk nor swear. Implore, cajole, insult, deride, threaten, or laugh. He
couldn’t tell a vase from a valise, so he turned away, laid his head into the pillow with his bad eye
up, and the pain shot through his body again.
“Gawker!” But no one heard or understood. Mei heard only what sounded like a choked sigh
and blamed himself for not putting enough pressure on Billy’s groin as the blood spurted out onto
his own pants, and still, eight hours later, resides in his shoe. He, Mei, didn’t know what to do,
he was right there, useless as ever—As useless as a surprise song at a surprise party. The store
was now unquestionably his. He, Mei, sighed, walked out, and closed the door softly behind him.
Billy’s vocabulary tripled again as he finally found his true identity. He fell asleep, alone,
knowing he’d wake up in pain. What he said was indecipherable:

“Dreamer”

Billy was the nurses’ favorite until they heard him talk. They loved him to death for what
seemed like about a day. He was hooked up to everything, drip drip drip, and “such a nice smile,
so even tempered”; he didn’t mind the ritual washing off of blood; he didn’t mind being turned
and suctioned; he had big eye lashes and was young enough to survive this. He wasn’t going to
be another tragedy. He was pronounced lucky by the all-knowing, all seeing, slow reading Ida
Howe RN. She was the first one he gave up on; he never used the call bell when she was on duty,
instead he would call, “Beetle juice, Beetle juice, Beetle juice,” or words to that effect, and Ida
would invariably show up in one of her various shades of horribleness.
The nurses loved to see that he had a doting girlfriend who was “right there” when it
happened. Who had a cell phone, which was “brand new,” and “never been used.”
They loved him till they took the tubes out and he started to talk and throw things.
They loved her till they found this lovely “girlfriend,” “sister really,” was the driver of the car
that ran him down. And it was her driving skills that created a road rash on his back and thigh so
large they had to consult Iris, the wound care nurse, who taught them how to use the latest peel
and stick cadaver dressing, all the while talking down to them, and then pressing them to get
organ-donor cards from the DMV. So, presumably one day, they could participate in teaching
others how to do a simple dressing change.
It wasn’t long before Billy became sighed at. And she, “Miss Webber,” was offered sympathy
and encouraged to seek counseling.

Gentleness
In the hospital for some time, the first nurse Billy can recall, asks him his name, and he
responds, “Gentleness.” That was the first time Billy noticed anything was wrong. He must have
been just waking up.
“What honey?” she said, all fake-interested. Like a picture of Mother Theresa taped over a
picture of Madonna, the other one––out of place, but well intentioned. He looked at her, and the
more he focused the more he saw what was behind her—wall mostly. Green, pale, gypsonian.
Let’s put it this way—she didn’t fill a room. He couldn’t tell if she was very short or very skinny.
She came and went and was very hard to catch sight of—shit.
“Where are you?” she asked and before he could say, ‘Behind the wall I think,’ she
immediately changed the question: “What kind of place is this?”
“Hyjinx,” Billy said, matter of factly, exactly as he’d intended to, say.
“Ski-do” she replied, with a laugh as upturned and frosty as her nose.
Chasing the rain away would have been easier than explaining that moment.
‘What happened to me, how did I get here?’ Turned into a non-grammatical inter- jection of
sorts, almost a song lyric, that his favorite Aunt used to sing after she became demented; it meant
nothing to the wall —“A word that means the world to me. A bigger bed, Margate over the
drive...” It didn’t even go up at the end, the question, not the drive.
She offered clarification, as though it were advise. Her name was “Kim-ber-ly,” and she was a
“nurrrrrse,” though she said this like she’d never said it before, and left all the room in the world
for doubt.
“Cigar store… Indian” was as close as Billy could come to a reasoned response. What started
out as, ‘Why are you talking in such a wooden, un-earthly and artificial, albeit, welcoming way,’
came out suddenly, sounding like he had just said, ‘Cigar Store Indian.’ So suddenly, in fact, he
hadn’t actually heard it, that first time, and it wasn’t till his third attempt to repeat it to-her-
precisely-exactly, that the proverbial folder he was carrying under his metaphorical arm, dropped
all his figurative papers—research articles, notes, sketches, to the floor, and everything went
flying—so he winged it, sat up in bed as best he could and said clearly, “Tin- Tin.” This he
heard—and as he turned his head in the direction his bad eye alluded to, he got an image of the
Belgian comic-book hero, of the same name, running out of the jungle with a head on a pole and
his trusty dog Tether, or Seltzer, or something, running behind barking encouragingly.
The discovery of his new phrase book changed the look of concern on Billy’s face to a look of
astonishment and accomplishment. But he fell back to bed just the same—exhausted—the onus
of pride weighing him down, not to mention the slings and tight wrappings that were keeping his
pin wheel from spinning and making him short of breath. He waved the nurse away or tried to,
but his muscles were under the guidance of a shadowy force, and he was compelled to give up
without a fight. Satisfaction comes at a high price sometimes, he thought.
When she came back she stayed in his room for a long time probing his intellect, his memory,
strength, hearing, vision. Everything with words. Turning page after page of the new phrase
book. All the while racing to the last page to see how it turns out.
Kim, the nurse with the unpronounceable last name was actually looking for the glossary; she
knew that sometimes these books had breakable codes, legends or maybe a concordance. This
one only had an inscription: To me, dear me— enjoy! She sat for a while doing paper-work while
he smiled unconvincingly…asked him to cough—but did it without using her hands or gesturing
in any way, in fact she never looked up, just listened—then checked off the box: globally aphasic.
Billy wanted to cough…couldn’t.
He was checking off his own boxes about her, but couldn’t find the one marked: enormous
spermicidal drag. He thought he kind of liked her, but just knew it would never work out, purple
hair notwithstanding. Billy tucked his phrase book under his pillow and went to sleep. She woke
him up. “Say, no ifs ands or buts.” Billy stared at her briefly, then yelled, “Supervisor!”

He hadn’t been able to talk for almost two weeks—seemed like two days to Billy, and now
finally, he was ‘Leonardo’ in his ability to graphically represent information. All along the
margins of his ‘papers,’ all scattered about, were octagons, opened tetrahedrons —spinning and
catching light—bisected spheres, multidimensional shapes, rampant perspectives—while the
destructive weaponry that was the text, became moot and self-serving, and completely
inconsequential, as they say. Billy had buried his lead.
Billy was redundant in his word choice. He would say the same thing over and over. And
each time people would take away from this, something different. Something only they were
interested in. It was odd. Billy felt like an inexperienced newspaper reporter—a cub, on the
Jungle News Service. Instead of, Viper on the loose, hide! He ‘wrote,’ This is a walk in the park.
You almost had to use your imagination.
DaVinci had discovered a way of showing all sides of a multidimensional object in a two
dimensional plane. Ironically, his ideas for fortifying the castle of a Medici prince became
geometric objects that moved the dust in his head as if it were nothing but paper.
When Billy became conscious of the power of his language, he takes over a world. He
operates wholly differently in the world-drawing. His vision is changed along with all of his
senses. Fa-lip.

Here
The Japanese woman takes off her robe on the steps, as it falls she places her trust in a man.
The vastness of her surrender changes them both. He becomes strong. Temperate. Free.
He stands and walks through a centuries-old doorway 1,000 years ago. She follows, and he
makes love to her. The first step she took, over her robe, lasts all night, and continues for many
days.
In the act of restructuring time, she and Billy are one. Something begun does not just end. It
goes on—interceding, unprotected, lasting—eccentric to the world.

He could now tell people what he wanted them to know. It was a joyous moment but there
was this little problem. Billy’s vocabulary had grown arithmetically over night; he no longer
asked people for ‘quiet,’ he asked for “quail sounds” (quietude), or implicated a muffler by its
brand name. “For problems call Selby Suspension—car parts, auto-emissions.” Or if he needed
to repeat his request for a suspension of clatter. “Clap!” It was a simple language. He was so
happy he’d found it. It was like the Philadelphia Anthropology Museum, and he wondered did
everyone feel the same way when they encountered it—What’s this doing here?
If a reprimand was in order, he once shouted out “Termagant! Shrew!” To a crowd of nurses
gathered too long, too late, and too high pitched. It wasn’t that quiet was so important all of a
sudden, it was that he couldn’t hear himself think.

There is nothing secret here, all is knowable. The mysteries are yours. Time moved him to
its own ends. ◙

If this was a hospital, which he had no reason to doubt, it was chock full of some of the
dumbest nurses that medical science could disclaim—not only, could they not understand a
simple declarative, although insanely well declined, English sentence, but they wore rabbit’s feet
for rabbit fur—supposing the lucky part of a rabbit was his foot; they looked both ways before
crossing themselves; they hit the gas when you told them to stop; And no one got the number of
the carousel that was spinning them around. Metaphorically speaking, they had forgotten to wear
their grass skirts and it was Hawaiian History Day.
With all his great ideas neatly packed; mitochondria staggered; diodes reset; polarities aligned;
the great, good horrible idea took off. Leaving him, briefly, The Great Immoveable One. If Billy
had been able to laugh, which he didn’t think he could, he was afraid he would never be able to
stop.
 The ending, made to make sense of all that came before—meant to assure fit—made sense.
Then suddenly became Awareness of being. Billy was alive.
When his doctor walked in, Billy turned his head and said, very clearly, “I am here.”

Alien Conversation
The silence didn’t last long but I wished for it to end about five times before it did.

“I hope you’re having a sale on sledding equipment. I’m on a mountain.”

Fa smiled, and asked the already too familiar questions: “Can you tell me your name this
morning?”
Without meaning to, I looked down at my crotch, realized it looked like perhaps I didn’t
know so I said, “Yours I know I know mine is mysterious and dark”
He looked at me intently . I remembered him from many other visits, and yet we had no real
history together. Once again I had been able to stop the flow of conversation by just being
myself . The silence didn’t last long but I wished for it to end about five times before it did .
There is no real way to describe our first conversation it, went something
Won’t you , no will you follow my finger he said as he moved it in front ohollow myllllllllow
like this.
facelllll ..face
It overlapped so clumsily; idea for idea that I don’t think anyone in the
so
room could possibly have understood it. There was so much left un-said. The
more I spoke the more he spoke; and the more it was un-knowable. Then
through a strange persistence toward understanding we reached absolute zero
and then began to change our starting and ending
points, and then I think he understood. This was like a crime of some sort. It
had a kind of comical meanness that was totally out of sync with what had
gone before. It was also irreversible, something that is not usually the case in
normal conversation. It became clear to us both, I suppose at about the same
time, that this was a very alien conversation.
888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555
If language like other informed senses had a fast processing center and a
slow processing center it was clear from the out set that his fast center was
down. Billy’s language had all the time in the world. It was perhaps the most
resourceful thing Ferraj had ever seen.
It sparked his imagination. He thought he understood it. Miles from
nowhere, he made the mistake of looking to the horizon. Amazed that he had
never thought about trying to take someone’s words apart and put them back
So
together again he thought, ‘I can translate this into English.’ but what he
I hope you
didn’t know was he wouldn’t be able to translate it back again ever.
that I cannot will you
better.”
“Sometimes people in your position have told me that they experience profound happiness in
these situations. So keep your mind open to that possibility.”
That was my cue to be quiet, and I took it. The rest of the exam was spotless and no more talk
was addressed to me, just a lot of furtive glances and sulky self touching by the younger men,
shoulders, palms, scalps and all that.
 I wished I’d had a mirror so I could see if this was affecting me adversely. I checked off the
box: ‘ability to interpret facial expressions:’ … … … 5 (still got it).

The Otter
Billy had conjured up this idea years ago that he had a great talent, a secret talent—because it
was not one so unambiguously poised, well circumscribed, or defined, as math genius, painter,
sculptor, writer, actor, handyman, inventor, or maestro; it was secret because of its fit, it was too
big, too un-wieldy and too widely dispersed to be easily narrowed down, or attend him every
second of the day. This secret talent was like a kind of knowing, it was fierce, subtle and as
gentle as a hand. And crazy, this talent is a wild thing—like an Otter, and that’s what makes it
crazy, but he believes in it anyway.
The Otter never let him down, and he had never named it. It was always there, since he can
remember; it never changed except to startle him with its ability to remedy a situation or put an
entire evolutionary line into a conservatory of humid prehistory. The Otter ran the show
sometimes, because it never doubted its own genius. And it, this intangible talent, was never, ‘til
now, named anything.

Hanging out at the Hospital

Hanging out at the hospital was like hoping for Everything. When someone came into his
room he knew they would eventually say something like, “Well, I hope you get better.” He
would inevitably think: I hope everything gets better, start now!
Your score is 80% period. That was the Otter talking. In everything you do, the chance of
success never exceeds 80%. “Because you’re you,” was about as far as any speculative re-
reading of this would get Billy. Apparently, everything gets better about 80% of the time. Billy
was trapped. After all, it was a hospital. We were all going to die, and that was absolute. And
what he had to remember was that it was not musical chairs. Every sit down brunch is musical
chairs for someone, of course, this is, after all, as Archimedes said, a finite world. We were
limited and now we’re cleaved.
As far as Billy could ever tell, it went something like this: 60% is what you get when you try,
based on the wild assumption that you will do better than fifty percent, if you put forth effort, and
there are two distinct outcome possibilities.
Now, if you try again, you won’t be able to get a full 60% of the 60% you started with (the
40% being still an unknown quantity); that would leave a sort of 96% chance—Fat chance.
Basically when you try again you’re as likely as not, to find what you found the first try, which is
half that number. 60% of your 60% is 36%, half of that being 18. 60 plus 18 equals 78, and
that’s the percentage you get when you try (rounded off to 80%, tops). If you try and try and try
again you’re actually not changing the odds, you are bringing down upon you the law of
diminishing returns, and winning can become losing. Sometimes moving on is better. If you try
too hard you’re doing something else which the Otter says is mathematically moot, and akin to
making some fundamental error, something about the law of effort and outcome which fucks with
your karma. I never understood it, and I was always sorry I asked. Though the Otter can’t
explain it, often times what you want to do is the easiest thing. That’s what you’re best at. The
Otter thought everything operated in some form of immediacy. He was impatient in the sense
that when he showed up, something was about to happen. He was all the proof he needed
Billy knew from his experience with the Otter that he lived in a musical chairs world. He or
she told Billy pretty much everything on their first and only meeting. Billy had just turned six
that summer and the Otter came to him while swinging on the swing set in the backyard in Point
Spread Pennsylvania, where Billy grew up. Shortly after that, his father painted the swing set
with dark-red, rust-proofing paint, and that was that. The swings weren’t meant to last forever,
and soon they were gone.

L
Billy had scar tissue following the accident of a few weeks ago. The accident, when Natalie
turned a short walk—into an 11-meter slide into the outfield. The flaws on his face now had a
meaning, unbeknown to everyone but the third year naval lieutenants at nearby Fort Dix AFB—
and became manifest, like the golden letters on a book’s cover. In the standard dot-dash-dot-dot
symbolism of Morse Code, his forehead read, from bisected right eyebrow, to more or less solid
black, left eyebrow –– “L.” The letter L.
Not: love, Billy, or lots of luck, Bill; not, loose lips sink ships, just plain letter L. The
letter on the computer keyboard you press when prompted to type any key to continue. That L.
Billy had the famous L for loser on his forehead as surely as anyone ever did. Even Dorrie’s
five-finger salute back in ’95 couldn’t match his own encoded message, this one stuck; that one,
was but a ripple on the sea of bad dates.
Unfortunately it was not long before the warning, written on his face, could be read by
everyone whether they new Morse code or not—L for loser, permanently written as if with black
Magic Marker. The whitening scar below his eye, but a teardrop to solidify his alien status, also
ran. Shrewd assessments of his prospects could now be fore- shortened to something
approaching light speed. He needed help feeding himself and maybe he always would. In a
ravenously restive world, everyone must either offer something, or inspire its release. He
couldn’t even smile, unless he couldn’t help smiling.

A kind of therapy
Billy had had dozens of alien conversations with twelves of people who could read him letter
for letter. He became incidental. Uncountable. Huge. He went from being funny to being funny
in one short hop.
Billy now could spend five minutes washing one dish—that, and flog his still perfect self to
Leno’s first guest, who was always the sexy one, and sometimes to his second guest who always
had the funny story, as his roommate, Ted at the time, kept telling him. For Billy, picking
something up was as hard as putting it down, broken or not.
‘Ted at the time,’ felt it was his job to keep a steady stream of weely weely wonderful words
wafting over the pulled curtain right onto Billy’s side of the woom. Lightswitch guy said R’s like
W’s, and L’s like he was trying to catch flies with his tongue. ‘Ted at the time’ didn’t care much
for eye contact and didn’t seem to take body language into consideration when pitching his high
rising, under handed balls to his aphasic, apraxic audience of one. Billy was unable to speak or
move properly. So he did it improperly.
Masturbating was so simple, and so real it took up all the space available and most of the time.
It was the only thing that could drown Ted out and, may have silenced him altogether, since Billy
never heard him comment on guest three, four or five, unless one of them was a baseball player.
But this was late October and all the real losers had been put in their places, except ‘Ted at the
time,’ of course.
Occupational Therapy was the bottom of the barrel as far as “Mr. Hudson, now”, could tell. It
was like Sports Channel’s In-Depth-Focus, after they discussed how close the game was,
trampled down the definition of ‘almost,’ and denounced luck as a fickle mistress, they’d pretty
much covered it for the day. There was nothing to it, hardly any substance at all. No one ever
once mentioned the benefit of knowing what you’re doing.
Billy’s apraxia rarely manifested itself when he was angry for some reason, and the
occupational therapist that week made him mad when she refused to toilet him:
Billy had made it abundantly clear that day, that he had to go, and the therapist knew it, but
kept ignoring his request and continued calling for the transporter to come get him. Where, but in
occupational therapy would one go to take a piss, when it was here that the lines of over-coming
obstacles and not-peeing your pants met? So he attempted to un-zip and shake it at her, and said
broadly, clearly, and finally, “In the name of the father the son and the holy shit—is everything
on hold here? I can’t wait forever! Wake Up!”
He might as well have told them he was a fake. Suddenly his aim was dead on.
“If he can expose himself, why can’t he feed himself?” But, Billy was getting-with-the-
program, as they loved to say, also, he realized that Dr. Bonham-Jarhad, the other name on his ID
band, had arranged this. Arranged this, in order to keep him there longer —to mull things over.
There were a few other things he was realizing too: gold is not always gold, it’s also a color; just
cause it tastes like chicken, doesn’t make it chicken; there are two sides to every coin, and if this
were obvious, everything would be obvious; he was ten seconds away from realizing there must
always be a reason for an action, and a perspective on truth, but he was always ten seconds away
from realizing that. Incidental to this: justice only requires complete objectivity, except there’s
no such thing.
*

The nurses had some unspoken or incomprehensible grudge against him, and that, said grudge,
had filtered to other departments including OT, which to his shock, was not located in the
basement.

OT
By the time ‘Ted at the time’ left, Billy had become “Mr. Hudson now.” No doubt a cynical
reference to his many faux pa. His crap attic if you will—his struggle to be understood, as well
as he understood them—if you won’t.
As Morris’s Aunt had told him many years ago, ‘Never forget, you could be wrong.’ This was
powerful stuff to a ten year old. She rarely missed the heart of any discourse except, of course,
where Elbow was concerned.
After their father died Billy and his older brother, Clarke, moved to Everneedin Missouri for a
while. They lived with their Aunt Maris, Uncle Foster and their adopted son Morris,
affectionately known as Elbow.

Rules
A simple thing like keeping him in the hospital longer, seemed a terrifically sensible idea, and
if people in general couldn’t go along with it, well, what was that to him? Everyone benefited,
everyone got paid, and he had great insurance. Rule number one had never been violated: the
boss gets the best insurance, and they could mind their own GD business. Unfortunately, ‘Do I
chew your cud?’ came out just plain “cunt” in the word’s world Billy lived in. A world that, most
of the time, was greeted with high dudgeon by nurses, and therapists alike, especially the male
nurses, who began referring to him in the future sense: Will.
 “Will you sit here.”
“Will I mean it.”
“Will you do this—it’s for your own good.” They asked questions that didn’t sound like
questions—and probably weren’t. They were good at that. Billy liked them very very much, and
went along out of respect—it was also easier. “Will you make me laugh.” He’d say, “googy
googy googy.” “Will you slay me.” He’d say, “would I, would I, would I!” But he could never
think of anything to say to: “Will I want to help you.” “Will I know why you’re so upset.” All
these boys were very nice, but, he knew it could never work out. Billy missed Mei’s genius for
punctuation. Zzap
They sounded like they were reaching back in time for answers to very present issues. They
baffled him; it was no wonder men love sports.
Billy knew this dish washing therapy was designed to keep him in the hospital, and under the
doctors’ watchful-eye and de-constructive tutelage as long as possible… so, ‘let me be’, became
“beat me” and that was pretty much the end of it. The Lingua Franca of the Occupational
Therapy Department was ‘just keep reading.’

It was Tuesday according to the blackboard. Therapy was giving him frown lines. Billy looks
up at the Otter who’s sitting, shoulder-less, across from him…The prostitute, formerly known as
Willow, stood by the door to her office examining, blankly, 11 people engaged in their own tidal
waves of vertical bobbing unaware of the weight implied; the strength of the room; it’s moorings,
its flooring; or the life span of the human heart.
Willow was more than a water experiment: she was spermicidal, homicidal and suicidal—
which is why, as she allowed her native blankness to settle on a hidden face, she made the
decision right there and then, to dress up in the folded mini skirt, and strapless top she’d saved, as
a gentle reminder of a past you could fit into a box—and kill a would-be assailant tonight, with
her 22, on the street, in the dark. Billy hadn’t driven her to pitched homicidal mania, her lack of a
penis had, not Billy’s, her own.
The one time in his life that it would not be possible to tell a story, was the one time in his life,
the world filled up with stories––all of them real. And all of them true. The Otter slid down from
the chair, sidled over toward the door, sniffed at Willow’s dry shoes and slipped out. Billy’s eyes
slit down to angry halves as he pondered the existence of an angry soul. If Billy were a dog he
would have known the Otter had no asshole, and therefore wasn’t real. But, being a man, it was
possible it was. When the Otter left he took the fear out of the room—as one might say, he left
with it.
Briefly, a fearless world surrounded everyone in the room, and then slowly they each forgot
what they felt, and the fear returned—it was within, in between, their moments of forgetting that
Willow remembered where her big-bold-steel-toed red-high-heeled shoes were, and a little man,
in the ‘say brain-attack-not-stroke’ class, named Arnie, found a word he could say, “Hallelujah!”
Among all that forgetting, remarkably few heads turned.

Billy was the embodiment of the expression: out of sight, out of mind; unless you were right
there with him, you’d take nothing away from what he had to say. Not only would a transcript be
useless; it would have little or no meaning without its own thematic dictionary and accompanying
thesaurus. For Billy this was like living in a story. Having people tell one-another his own story,
the story he was in—so deeply—was Heaven. And Fa was an angel in Heaven, an angel with an
agenda—Can’t have everything, so they say.
Billy was not a bit surprised that stupid people thought he was stupid and smart people thought
he was smart. This had always been the case. He was, however, surprised that there were two
camps concerning the veracity of his lexical abstinence.
The people, who saw his word choice as a hoax, saw guile in his lack of improvement and
awaited his recovery with glee. His supporters saw, in his lack of improvement, a mounting
assurance that he was the real thing and began to stop testing him, perceiving some affront. He
refused to take sides—if he did he’d have to abandon his friends and embrace his enemies.
He had doubted this world was real, from his very first slap.
The people who were rooting for him, wanted to see him fail; and the ones that wanted him to
succeed, refused to help in any meaningful way. So this is fiction. Hmmm.

Billy is not particularly curious about the world, he considers himself speculative, and he often
thinks: What if? He can feel stories being told all around him, and he learns to write them in his
head. If he notices or praises the stories, they continue. When they end they end.
Billy can read but not write, and he can’t use an alphabet board for the same reason. Only if it
were responsive to his eye movement could he use it, and maybe not even then. Billy’s problem
with reading is a deep inaccuracy he finds in everything. This is probably baseline for him. We
may never know the depths of his dissatisfaction with the world as he finds it. It cannot be
plumbed.
Billy has never made a single comment about the small gaggle of speech therapists in his
employ. Two or more speech therapists are technically known as a breath. None of them ever
tried to learn his new language. All of them thought he should just drop it, and move on. Billy
used to greet them by snapping his fingers; Billy offended everyone. They never once wondered
how an apraxic could snap his fingers. Billy offended, in order to be heard. Without anger, or
deep emotional resonance he made no sense at all. This was bound to cause problems.

So Much Testing
Billy already knew the harder he tried, the angrier his words became. Anger helped.
Somehow or other he had to control his anger as he taught himself to control his words. He
would swear a blue-streak full of frustration and head jerking, when he tried to say: ‘I am trying
everything, because I love you. You may never ever understand.’
He didn’t need to read the transcripts to remember the casual christening of appellative
whores, fuckers, and dykes (etcetera), to people who meant him no harm. As he made evident his
new ability to say hello to anger and let it go—to let it wash over him passively—he realized
something. He would have to fuck himself! He’d have to abuse the ones he wanted most to try
for; the ones he loved the most. Without anger he couldn’t communicate for some reason. But
wasn’t it sort of too late? If the ones that he didn’t give two shits about, starting to see him as
quiet, gentle, and loving. It was bound to make them sinister, sly, and suspicious. Something
inside of Billy laughed, and said: It’s almost like everyone is trying to get you to talk the way
they already hear you.
The only way out was to get angry at the ones who really cared. And he knew he couldn’t do
that anymore, it was too painful. But he couldn’t try without getting worse. He’d have to take
sides: mean people saw lack of improvement as proof of the lie and nice people saw lack of
improvement as proof of the truth. There must be someone who needed to be fucked besides
himself. He’d have to find another way.

Word choice is a joke, if you’re telling everyone the same joke, ‘I’m angry because I can’t tell
this story and that story, and you don’t understand this point or this description so, I’m this
upset.’ His choice of word was intimate, personal, not for group digestion salivation or group
turmoil; it was his stake in the dime. He shit money, and they were dimes; but they were his
dimes. He grabbed the table’s polished light tan faux wood surface and with a streaking
squeaking sound, pulled himself toward it. Now—table, picture, picture album, hands, go ahead,
do!
 The Otter sat across from him and feigned disinterest. Billy’s bottom teeth slid in front of his
top teeth, this was, in his rainbow of expressions, his mavrodaphne look. This was his ‘aura,’ it
meant something was about to happen. Pictures passed in front of his face. The Otter’s face,
impassive and self-reflectory, took little interest. Billy had turned some of the photos to face The
Otter, and others to face his self. Everything was likewise becoming unreadable. He motioned
for the window sitter to help him glue the pictures down exactly as he had placed them on the
pale construction paper, but she wouldn’t do it, and Billy was not allowed to do it himself.
Apparently, he’d glued his hand down once, and then claimed not to be able to lift it. Fool me
once, shame on you. Fool me twice—no one likes to look like a fool. The album was a
catastrophe! The Otter had more stickem on his nose than on all the pages in Billy’s entire
project. This was how Billy realized the stories’ stability was permanent, because the Otter
showed him how the pictures were separate no matter how one tried to make them otherwise.
The Otter did nothing, everyone else tried. Billy threw himself over his work when the glue
assistant finally showed up. It was meant to be this way! You’re too late! Billy’s hand shook.
He began to tap out a very complex syncopated rhythm, that had a staggered, accented beat. Billy
felt, deeply, like some thing or some one was helping him do this. It got faster and faster. It was
teaching him how to move by command. Then all at once he understood the whole thing—IT.
He felt as if he were taken over by a spirit, a spirit he had been expecting, or had reason to expect.
His hands, still stretched out before him, began drumming the table slower and slower, still in
perfect unison: do do do, da da da. It reminded him of something. This time the answer came
immediately: “All I want to say to you.” Billy slid his sweaty hands along the table top. They
made a tremendously loud screeching sound. Like brakes. Now he knew everything. No one
noticed.
Billy thought.
He looked up. The Otter blinked wet eyes at him, Billy pushed himself away from the table—
stoned on phantom glue fumes, he tried to throw something. Then, discounting any hope of that,
made every effort to overturn his wheel chair. He was unglued, bang!
“Saboteur!”
The one time in his life when he was never more able to tell stories was the time when he
couldn’t even arrange photos in a book. The wheel chair thumped his fingers. He tried to pushed
it over. He finally yelled “Ostrich!” Billy’d planned to say, ‘Desist!’
Hands stretched, a tumultuous rendition of God Save The Queen prevailed. A flavorless
stampede drove one idea home: The soul is not a happy thing. It took two tries but Billy managed
to nearly stand. He understood nothing, imagining the future won.
“Let’s have some lunch,” he yelled, overcoming his desire to destroy the album just for the
hell of it. The thought that it was time to move-on posted itself to his fridge—a needless activity
occupied everyone in therapy and Billy’s efforts to roll were stymied.
The Otter was gone, and nothing changed. Billy made up his mind that he, the Otter, had
come to take a picture and stayed for the stories. He was much more crafty than he let on. No
appetites were whetted during Billy’s exit from the third floor neo-gymnasium therapy-room as
Patrone, the transporter, wheeled him out. He heard the therapist call the nurse; he didn’t hear her
imply that Billy had had a seizure. Billy spent the rest of the day with wires on his head; and, in
MRI scans; with wires-off; all the while Fa’s minions skirting around this very subject. Billy
knew no one understood the Otter’s sense of humor (it could be, and was, wickedly funny);.)
Billy looked around, there were ‘X’s everywhere, on doors, walls, the arrangement of
furniture, in the way legs were held, in the direction time traveled. And a voice, his own, recalled
another voice from the distant-pass and he mumbled, “This must be the place.” All in all it was a
good day and everything was as it was supposed to be. Or so it seemed.
Stories made less sense, even true stories made less sense than dreams. Oh good! Well, it’s
about time someone told the truth—anything so open to additions, revisions, interpretations, and
irony’s, as yet, un-assumed purpose was, structure-less. And yet, vividly real. From this side
anyway. Off in the distance Billy saw an exit deck…sign.
Unlike dreams, these stories make sense. He shuffles them, organizes them, deals ‘em out,
plots them, story boards them; they’re a wealth of fantasy but vividly real…to him.

Fa had this notion

Fa had this incredible notion, which was completely incomprehensible to Billy, that his
utterances were fraught with meaning but devoid of comprehension, knowledge or in fact, any
evidentiary understanding of what was going on around him at all. In other words you had to be
there to get it. His patient was physically incapable of making sense—like so many others—but
this one had found a way around it.
This idea fell on Billy’s Neurologist like the proverbial ton of bricks when he walked into
Billy’s room one day and asked him how he was feeling. “Bitten, by my own springs,” he said, as
though he were an old body on an old spring mattress all one and the same. Doctor Ferraj Jarhad,
fondly referred to by the residents under him as Fa, paused in his thoughtful, ‘I don’t have a clue’
way, and was about to speak when Billy repeated with head slightly bowed, “black marker, black
outside, so black inside. Discount this …mark me for magic or mark me down.” Fa realized
Billy knew exactly what was going on. Like so many of his patients they knew, but could not
say. This one, however, was a little different. He was not aphasic. He was asking the same
question everyone asks; can you help me, will you help me? But this one added something to the
all too familiar question, something about choice. Something about the choices doctors make as
though he knew how much work a doctor would have to do to find a cure for something rare. Or
new. As if he knew how many strings a doctor would have to pull to get him to talk right. But it
wasn’t coming out of his mouth all jumbled up, it was coming out un-jumbled.
He spent a good deal of time with this new patient. He was certainly unusual. Scans were
normal, considering his closed head trauma. He was unable to make cognizant speech so he was
technically aphasic. He was also apraxic, he obviously couldn’t initiate an intended action but he
never knew an aphasic to chose nonsense words so deliberately. And string them together so
effortlessly with so much meaning. He had never known an apraxic patient to have a sign posted
over his bed, “Caution AIMs.” With the descriptor: ‘active involuntary movements,’ written in
tiny script below. To which someone had added, “duck” All Fa knew for sure was that
something was out of order. Something real.
As he strode thru the campus that evening, he couldn’t get Billy’s remarks out of his head…
the marker of magic…touch me and heal me if you can with a wave of your hand or dismiss me
with the stroke of a pen…to the discount rack and move on. Did he think his doctor was black or
did he think this was black magic? He meant something by that.
Dr. Bonham-Jarhad was two generations, and half of Europe, away from his Arabic roots. He
was very fair, and he was not black, his beard was black. The area around his eyes was dark, as if
by shadow. And how bout that young girl with the turquoise eyes that sat in the front row during
his lecture on homonymous hemianopsia?….Wow!
He couldn’t get it out of his head. What was he trying to say? God grant me the grace to
change what I can… how did that go…? Desiderata. Or was he asking for a pen? Was that it?
Does he know he can’t write, or does he think he can? Does he understand the very nature of his
condition? Is that possible? Why was he not fluent in his aphasia? How could he speak, and not
make sense to some people, but make perfect sense to others? How could he make perfect sense
if you had the time, and no sense if you didn’t? And yet he couldn’t or didn’t repeat anything.
But, Fa wondered: do we always ask the same question in the same way? Not really. Note for
tomorrow’s rounds: ‘listen.’
 It was possible that every word had absolutely no meaning to Billy, and if this were pure
randomness why did it make perfect sense to him? Perhaps he was counting these pairings as
CSU’s (clause-like semantic units), and they were actually random.
Ever since he was a young man, Ferraj knew that a person’s background spoke volumes. Now
that he was a neurologist with a specialty in memory and language disorders, he knew it meant
more than just where they came from, but also, metaphorically, it was their frame of reference—
their viewpoint.
Doctor Ferraj Bonham-Jarhad replayed those tapes till he got to his designated parking spot. It
was as if you could apply meaning to these odd phrases but only from that very peculiar point of
view—the shared relationship, his and mine—it confounded him. This was odd, something he
couldn’t put his finger on, but couldn’t let go.
He had been holding his hat as he walked up the brightly lit street, all the way to the parking
garage. The big gusts of wind that made him button his coat, died down as he walked past the tall
buildings that housed two thousand or more eager students, but he kept his hand on his hat—so
deep in thought.
The hat was a thing left over from his Father, who was also a doctor and also wore hats. Fa
felt that the donning and doffing of his hat was a greeting/leave-taking ritual reserved for men of
position. A left over from the days of house calls, no doubt. A vivid signal to the family, that
help had arrived. Always a welcomed sign. And his father’s day didn’t end until he took it off,
and tossed it absently, right onto the highest hook.
It meant so much to him growing up, sometimes he felt it was the hat itself, that made him an
adult—he kept his hat on till he got home just as his father had. His hat also disguised the thick
disorderly wag of black hair that endeared him to his students, and enabled him to walk around
campus unrecognized.
He looked up as he entered the garage, thru the columns that passed as windows. He saw an
odd site; it looked like a beach ball or a pile of laundry rolling—furling and unfurling from across
the intersection, perhaps a very starched bed sheet, thrown from a dormitory window or a curtain
finally pulled all the way out by the wind. No, it was a ball of paper skittering about loose. No, a
banner of some sort carried by the wind. Maybe a left over Pride-flag from the campus gay
festivities last Friday.
The wind picked-up as he approached his car, never taking his eye off the strange tumbleweed
that forced his gaze. He knew where his car was parked, because spot #100 had always been his
space since the day he had arrived at the University seven years ago; his car knew the way
automatically, as they say. But when he looked up he saw the number 100 painted on the
concrete floor and thought: how odd, I missed my spot this morning, and parked in 101
somehow—one space over—queer. Just then, the banner jumped a riser, flew into the cement
terminus, and landed un-rolled, and right side up almost covering his car. ‘Impressionism’ it read
in big scrawled letters, and there, off-center was a portion of a well-known painting…some
nightclub scene. It was blurred but it was a man holding his black hat. The whole scene had a
funny quality, almost mirror-like to him—but this man was inside—Fa had been outside holding
his. This man wasn’t holding it against the wind he was…tipping it. Fa took off his hat. Funny,
same hat, he thought. The good doctor had to remove the banner from the driver-side door to get
in, and it blew away with one shake, just lifted up and blew away, back into a rolling ball, white,
loose, and unreadable. Funny, odd.
He had seen the exhibit just last Friday: Toulouse-Lautrec- Monet-Degas-Seurat- Renoir;
some on-loan from the Barnes Foundation. He sat in his car and thought it was almost an answer.
Impressionism. He remembered the poster as he saw it last, crumpled and blank, skittering across
the street while the light was green.
William Hudson’s language was like impressionism, here to represent the very moment—like
the view from a passing train, or from the passion of the moment, thru ardor-clouded eyes, made
from squiggles and streaks of color in maddening disarray, but more truthful of the modern
moment; a real image in real time, more ‘real’ than a realistic portrayal could ever be. He sat
there in his car in absolute awe. The thought landed on him with a crunching of afferent neurons
on the left side of his face and spread out like a fan, up his spine and all over his body in a large,
uneven wave. His hair stood up and he thought: I never park here, I never have. His hat was on
his mind at the very second that banner flew practically in his face. ‘Un mooglisch,’ he thought
(German for unbelievable.) He felt so good he had to go home and look up this phenomenon. It
was a gala night, his lights were on well past 2 am—nothing! Not a single word, then he looked
up what was available on Toulouse-Lautrec on the internet, and soon fell asleep.
Rounds with the residents was grindingly familiar. He wanted to get one of them to do a paper
on his new ‘cause celeb,’ and couldn’t wait to test him, and explore, to see if what he thought—
which was always kept secret and never once revealed—could be true.
“What name do you like to be called, Mr. Hudson?”
“Ba Ba… Poster Boy,” Billy said quietly.
“You see, he knows what he wants to say…in fact, one of the nurses was nice enough to put
up a sign.”
The young men, and the two women students looked up at the sign that was taped to the wall,
which read. ‘Pt. prefers to be called Billy TY.’
“Billy Tie?” one of them asks, to which there arose a chorus of “Billy, Thank You.”
“Oh.” says the obvious one.
All eyes go back to Billy, lying passively in the bed—one leg still stiffly braced from the hip.
“I’m not here, but you’re welcome.” he says, addressing a momentary lapse.
“His words were very well chosen, but from what source?”
He, Fa, their conductor for this part of the ride, wanted, and tried to demonstrate to the host of
doctors, students, fellows, and nurses, the subtle distinctions between various aphasias, but he
was unable to. Billy said exactly what he meant, it just didn’t make sense unless you already
understood it, or were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Unless there was some
common ground, and someone with credentials who would agree with you—that what he said
made sense—it made very little sense, and was beyond explanation. Billy, he knew, knew
exactly what was going on.
“What’s this?” Fa asked, as he held up a pen.
“Preserver,” Hudson Motor’s chief of the ex chequer said.
“An ink preserver?”
“Sand?” Billy said, as he held out his hand as if to say, ‘What do you say; is this a hand or is
this sand?’ Billy had never had any problem saying No—in any language.
“Give him a pen, somebody—and paper.” Fa said bruskly.
Billy couldn’t grab the pen for some reason. The resident placed it in his left hand, his fingers
curled around it reflexively. Now, Billy couldn’t let go of it to change his grip.
“Can you write?” Fa asked.
Billy stared at him. His hands didn’t work—of course he couldn’t write!
“Do you want to write something?” one of the young men asked.
“L” said Billy. And a look of utter exasperation came over him. He tried to lift his right hand
to his forehead, thumb out, ‘L’ shaped, and succeeded in smacking himself in the head. If Glen
had put the pen in his dominant hand, he could’ve blinded himself.
“Lord!” Billy said with obvious exasperation.
“Slow down. One at a time…one examiner at a time. Less stimulation…and ask the same
question the same way. Do you want to write something?” Fa asked, quietly, directly, and as if
there were no one else in the room.
“Eyes?” Billy finally said, and pointed to his doctor’s eye, almost stabbing it.
One of the students handed him a cup of ice. Fa softly brushed the offer away, with his eyes
continually focused on Billy. Billy smiled. His doctor had the darkest eyes.
“Your eyes, Billy?”
 Billy tried to say, ‘ee, yes.’ He could see the word, and he knew what it felt like to say the
word, and the word was right there, right in front of him, but he couldn’t quite say it.
‘Understand me!’ became, “Black ice.” And Billy’s speech slid off the road again.
“Yes, your eyes,” what about them? Dr. Jarhad implored.
Billy paused.
“Do you want to write something?”
“The id,” Billy said as he wished the wish he couldn’t help but wish—that Fa would
understand him. He stared back into his doctor’s wide black eyes, to no avail.
“I’m sorry William…Billy…I don’t understand ‘the id.’” This made Billy laugh, which he
hadn’t done since Ida handed him a razor to shave himself with.
He was offered a piece of paper by his own personal resident, George, who was all over his
case, and had just finished explaining to the council of the rounds that Mr. Hudson was globally
aphasic as well as apraxic following his “car vs. pedestrian MVA.” MVA stood for motor vehicle
accident, apraxia stood for his inability to carry out an intended action, and globally aphasic stood
for his inability to speak or comprehend language fluently. One explained his disordered mental
state, the other, the reason he couldn’t pick up a phone to call his best friend—but could heave it
across the room after Ida burst out laughing when she caught him masturbating, and yell, “Next
time call!” But Billy understood everything that was said—because understanding is passive; it
requires only a vocabulary, just one. And because there was nothing wrong with his language
reception area, it was just moved is all. Many big pieces of Billy had moved since meeting
Natalie—some bigger than that.
Billy couldn’t even say “No,” it would have to be infer red from the situation. Nor could he
reliably shake or nod his head; the more ‘No’ there was in the answer the less likely the room
would wobble side to side; and the more likely it would move up and down. Billy was also not
large on the obvious, and held everyone either in contempt or felt intimidated by them. But that
was an old story.
When his dawg, George, finally managed to wedge the piece of paper in his fist-like
apparatus, Billy glared at him and said, “Take notes.” Then did his best to throw pen and paper at
George but his shoulder caved in and he screamed in pain until his nurse brought him Dilaudid,
the only painkiller that worked, and didn’t give him a rash.
His code for ‘No’, was sometimes a rhyme for something that was real in the room. For
example, “Are you ready to go to therapy?” Instead of saying “No, they think everyone learns
the same way.” Billy would point to the clock and say “rock?” which meant, ‘No, it isn’t a rock,
it’s a clock, and No, I don’t want to go, it’s a waste of time.’ Pointing and rhyming were almost
as easy as masturbating but not nearly as satisfying.
“What does it do?” Fa asked, regarding the pen he held centimeters from Billy’s face.
To which Billy replied, “dots and crosses.”
“What does it preserve?” one of his Neurology residents asked.
“Un-photographable ideas.”
Fearful of having a conniption, something his Grandmother had always warned against —and
claimed could be invoked by seeing the past, the present, and the future, all at the same time, Fa
swallowed hard, and commanded in his most poignant, read pointed voice: “Tell me this is red!”
“Exhale! We’ve only just begun”
Fa let out a sigh so loud and so personal that his students were audibly shocked. Billy was
what Fa had been looking for, for a long time, a reason for living, which had up till now escaped
him-—-Discovery. What he used to call study, would now be a breakthru.
Something to arrest his curiosity. Dare he even think it—Somewhere in the back of his mind he
thought he might have stumbled onto the great discovery of his career; The key; the entrance to
the unconscious; The very nature of language; The missing link; The speaker as prisoner,
trapped! Fa could read Billy like a dictionary, forward or backward.
 One of his students exhaled at that moment in an extremely loose lipped, un-tongued way like
a balloon loosing air—making what Fa thought was the rudest sound, especially in front of his
patient, especially this one!
At the end of the almost hour-long exam, and lecture that followed, Fa learned what a
conniption was. He turned to leave and said, “Thank you, Billy.” Billy doffed an invisible black
hat in a gesture with which he had great unfamiliarity but equally great apropos. Billy didn’t try
to do it, it just happened. His doctor, mentor, and now student, fell backward against the wall
practically pulling the privacy curtain down on his own little private parade and one time parking
place. It felt like Billy was…playing with him.
Incidental to the talk of the department, there came a telling event, un-witnessed by the good
doctor, his entourage or disciples. When asked, by someone who, like Fa, was intrigued by his
aberrant speech, to say ‘no ifs ands or buts,’ Billy, who had been thru this many times, and knew
that we were well past this rudimentary poking stage, paused. Those who knew what to expect
left, not wanting to witness a colleague’s comeuppance, except Ida, whose canard of an
expression allowed for additional drama…then Billy said, “The magic number seven plus or
minus two.”
Billy couldn’t follow commands properly, repeat a series, demonstrate memory, associative,
nominative or numerical. He had little in the way of executive function, he couldn’t even make a
rectangle out of a crumpled piece of paper, but he could pronounce words perfectly which they
already knew, and make a fool out of anyone, which left Dr. Smalls disinterested. When later
questioned for a peer-reviewed journal article he remembered Billy as saying, ‘the magic
sequence five or more.”
Ida, in her vituperativeness, whispered in his ear, “You didn’t say that when I asked.”
“Go look it up…in the classifieds.”
“You’re just plain rude, that’s what they don’t know about you.” And she stomped out

Dr. Bonham-Jarhad’s hypothesis was long and scientific, and appeared in its full length in any
number of journals of the time. Basically, he states that Billy is the first known case of what he
terms Gnostic Apraxia.
Billy is physically unable to make sense, yet he can create meaning for the listener. There is
no evidence that he has any knowledge whatsoever of what’s going on around him, yet his
understanding is profound, perhaps intuitive. In other words, what sounds like nonsense to one
person has very specific meaning to another, and upon close examination the ones who gain the
most in the exchange of information are the ones most proximal to the exchange. He is becoming
conscious right here right now, and you can’t see it because he presently resides in the
unconscious—not his unconscious, anothers.
The hypothesis concludes that Billy has (inadvertently) uncovered the long sought dual
pathway of knowledge and meaning. He can do nothing to demonstrate knowledge, yet his
understanding is conspicuous. He is completely locked out of language, physically unable to
make sense, perfectly well aware of this; and has found a way around it. Without knowing
anything, he makes profound sense. And, in short, is able to create meaning ex Nihilo, out of
nothing at all:

1) The patient cannot make any utterances that connote knowledge (of names, sequences, events or
measurable quantities) in any but the most rudimentary, stage 01, form, and even that is not possible, unless
you, the researcher, agrees that ‘up’ for example, sometimes means yes, and rock sometimes means no. 2)
His verbal communications, however, are full of (deep, personal, and intuitive) meaning, to the subjective
listener, and display clear understanding to a stage 04 or even stage 05 level. 3) The patient has uncovered
(for us) the long sought (interconnecting though distinct) dual pathways of meaning and understanding ipso
facto, without discernable knowledge-evidenced comprehension. 4) This is demonstrated by the fact that
even though, as in WH’s case, all ability to make sensible, logical, knowledge-based communications has
been essentially stripped, he has not lost the ability to make meaningful statements. Somewhere in the
production of coherent speech everything is missing but the essential intent. As though the sense or
meaning was provided by the listener. 5) He possesses both knowledge and meaningfulness but he cannot
construct or deliver any intelligent statements. Without a means for declining knowledge—he forms
meaning; therefore he must have found an alternative language processing center that bypasses all the
known forms of understanding and comprehension—it is as though he ‘suddenly knows’ since it is clearly
perceptible to the listener. 6) The patient is the first diagnosed case of Gnostic Apraxia in the world.

Nowhere, but in the Annals of Neurology would this hypothesis fly, but fly it did. He can’t
say anything that makes any sense except to the intended listener. And Fa had hundreds of hours
of tape to prove it.

Cock-Talk
Billy’s language was “speech-off.” Offend without end.
So few English expressions translated easily into cock-talk, the name Billy gave his new
language, that it was easier to translate them into Greek or Latin; neither of which he spoke or
was the least bit familiar with. But, somehow, shooting from the hip allowed for a racking up of
points, and the awarding of additional prizes thru a combination of bravado and slipperiness.
Greek was far more likely to impress the listener than cock-talk anyway. And struggling to… for
two minutes to say ‘pass the deviled eggs’ seemed so pointless. With little fuss, Billy would just
say, “quid pro quo” to the person sitting nearest the deviled eggs and that was usually more than
sufficient. English had so little pizzazz anyway, why struggle for, “you know wad I mean” when
you can say ‘Ergo Sum’ ‘in animo patri.’ Why reach for ‘God only knows’ when ‘in logos theos’
is more than ample. Plus you rack up double-points and get tons more pleasure out of it. If Billy
cared where he put his new language, or what people would make of it, he would have been
speechless—essentially silenced. Cock-talk is the most simple and basic language there is, much
easier than any other monologous language, even easier than twin-speak, which is technically not
a monologous language, but more about that in the arts and leisure section. It was months before
Billy realized his local paper didn’t have one. The future-tongue can be found in twin-speak, but
that’s information for another day.

Love, good a place to start as any

My friend William, came in his own way, to understand this strange language in bits and
pieces. Like falling down stairs, you don’t hit every step, but you get, in your clumsy and
disoriented way, down the stairs just the same, with, ergo—your oneness intact.
The mistake most people make in learning this new language is to fall down the stairs
repeatedly with the notion of either doing it again exactly the same, and thereby completing the
experience, or of reconciling each stair with its myriad possible effects, and overtaking the
experience thru some form of over-knowing. Or in converse logic—since the stairs cause the fall,
perhaps their momentum will allow one to bust thru to the other side by shear force—a
gangbuster of personal knowledge. Billy knew nothing, and he was long since used to its
dismissive entitlements. He just loved it.

Wagon fixer extraordinaire

 Many people on the outskirts of the sciences dismissed Billy as a “wagon fixer” and not a
neurological wunderkind. This compilation of mixed metaphors rolled out like this: Some
people who’ve had a brain injury can’t speak, however, there are language areas in the brain that
are completely intact, areas associated with automatic-speech, for example. If you were to say,
“how are you”, they may say, “I’m fine,” whether or not they are. And whether or not they are
otherwise able to speak. If you pinch them or surprise them they might swear. Some people can
even sing, but not speak. There have been cases of people who were completely aphasic, that is
unable to speak, but if the phone rang they could pick it up and say hello, and actually carry on a
bit of a conversation. One sided, of course. There were dozens, tens of discreet language centers
thru-out the human brain.
Fa said there was even an intoxicated center, overlapping but not readily available to other
areas of associative language construction. Billy’d been a bartender years ago and could attest to
this: drunks sounded the same in completely different parts of the world.
In terms of connections and associative areas, the part of the human brain dedicated to
language is huge. And vastly misunderstood.
But, there are also those who are not noticeably damaged who silently let anger and frustration
build up until they blurt out one or two words that essentially stops the offender in his tracks. As
people on the receiving end used to say of this type, “He’s quiet, but rile him and he’ll fix your
wagon,” hence the name.
Billy has more Wainwright blood in him than a little. Always has had. Like the guy who goes
to the local computer store looking for a particularly formatted laptop. When he tries to watch
movies, and run another program at the same time, it skips and falls apart or freezes. A crowd
gathers—the Wainwright’s calling card, anxiety being a huge motivator toward inner awareness.
The salesman says that these are the fastest personal computers around. But he gets cut off and
directed to look at the screen where the RD movies are skipping badly. "How do you explain this,
then?"
Salesman says, "Oh, well, nobody ever runs more than one program at a time. You'll notice, if
you look, that when you quit DVD player, the RD movies will run full-speed."
The Wainwright is excrutiatingly sensitive to any public insult—"Pathetic! $2,500.00 and it
can't walk and chew gum at the same time?" This alerts nearby shoppers, and pandemonium
ensues. To douse the argument the salesman minimizes the problem, comes up with no-solution
and pronounces it, not only fixed, but new and improved. A true Wainwright would wait for the
end of the discourse, look at his watch, yawn, and say to his audience, “everything turns into soap
eventually.”

a type of seizure
Seizure-like activity accompanied by the sensate storm of large, pink—if they had a color—
firm, rounded pillows that tongued everything and caused everything to become wet pillow—
effected a closed-in hum—leaving enormous muddy footprints all over the dimly remembered
room. His ‘seizures’ were colloquial. They affected that one little teensy piece of brain.
Apparently there was a word for everything, getting wiped out one stupid expression at a time.
Like part of a plan. It exhausted anything pink inside.

The History
 Fa wanted to talk to someone who could fill him in on my history, but no one was around
except my do-nothing ex assistant. A good history taking was an essential part of the project,
which I had become.
Fa met Mei on the second day, and was polite but unimpressed. I didn’t really think he would
be, of course.
The time would come when Fa’d jump at anything, no matter how slim, in consideration of his
hypothesis. Ideas can be compelling.
“Have you known Mr. Hudson long, Mr. Tran?”
‘Mr. Tran?’ Mei thought. “Ah, yes, long time, Mr. Charade.”
“Ferraj Bonham Jarhad.”
“Fuda Budda putta like-ya.”
He knew perfectly well what he’d said. Just say, “Yes Doctor.” Mei was being a jerk—a
position that suited him on the one hand but didn’t suite me. All of a sudden he goes Thai on my
ass. I thought I was gonna die of embarrassment! The doctor wants to get to know what I was
like before Natalie and I met, and what does Bozo do, but chime in with ‘I no speakie ah
engresh.’ Look Mei, if you don’t want to help just say so, or get out. I reminded myself of my
Uncle Cherry and his customers. In a store full of books, why didn’t he just throw one? —
Because that’s what I felt like doing? But instead, I just looked at Mei and said, “Well, Merry
Christmas.”
Fa laughed and blushed. Mei sat in the corner and lay there waiting for Fa to leave, probably,
and then for sure he’d start—Who was that? Is he any good? Where’d he go to school? What’s
he say? Has he ever treated anyone with what you got? What’s wrong with you anyway? Did
you see stars? Are you gonna live, or be a vegetable the rest of your life? etc. etc. That would be
typical Mei.
He had such a nice way of putting things—blatantly. Honest and no nonsense, just the way I
like it.
I realized soon enough that Mei was sizing the Doctor up. Mei could sell a car in any
language known to man. Never made a mistake, never said Yes, when he meant No. And when
he did make a mistake, it was always somehow in his favor. I was hoping the Doctor realized
Mei was not only my best salesman, my first salesman, but had also been my right arm for many
years—Of course he speaks English! What the hell do you think we talk about—personal wealth
management! I think the doctor was sizing Mei up too. But I always think that.
I looked at Mei derisively, and thought: ‘Well now, you and I can be vegetables together—
why don’t you look at it that way.’
Mei chuckled, I think what I actually said was, “Yes I would,” but somehow even with all
that—‘Now I’m Thai—make me understand’ nonsense, he understood me perfectly.
Fuhja, as Mei referred to him, just treated Mei like he was an arm that fell asleep—dead but
not dead. He directed a few comments to him, then changed his position, turned toward me, and
gave Mei the cold shoulder as it were. I almost laughed out loud, but I did notice he had one eye
on Mei, and Mei had one eye on him.
Needless to say, Fa moved on, still eager to learn about my past, and, was I allergic to
cellophane, BHT, re-sealable plastic containers, formaldehyde or any other preservatives? I kept
forgetting: to Fa I was like a big piece of cheese.
The last time Mei embarrassed me like that was when I took him to an English class and he
tried to talk to the teacher, Miss Bensinger or something. He started asking questions in Thai as
though she would understand him. I was afraid at some point she was just going to say, What the
hell did you bring him here for? But she was very polite and I’m sure she understood. He was an
idiot; and no matter how he prioritized it, English would never be his second language.
Ida, of course, was not so polite to Mei, and I blame her for his infrequent visits. I always
wanted to get a copy of ‘shit for brains’’ schedule so I could…I don’t know… have a party or
something on her days off. Anyway, their first meeting, she bursts out laughing, Mei backed up
(In horror) as though he were afraid of her. Thank God he didn’t throw up—he was full of his
famous Thai cabbage, which he spent all day making, and was thoughtful enough to bring some
for me to share. He was good that way, well, it was good and all, but it was about to turn…I
think—that’s when Mei liked it best. Thailand must be one ripe place.
So he said something back, equally loud and coarse. His accent was so thick I couldn’t
understand a word except it was something about her rudeness and crass crudeness. She just taps
him on the chest and says, “Out.” I suppose she was going to take a rectal temperature or
something. She could’ve been more polite and just drawn the privacy curtain—that’s what it’s
for! He flew out of the room…never called. Came back two days later speaking perfect English
to everyone, no accent, no nothing.
Mei is the total opposite of Ida; you can’t live with him, and you can’t live without him; and
with Ida, who would even try? But I’m sure a lot of people would. The thought of it tho—uggh!
Digustibus non est disputandum (there’s no accounting for taste). Woulda if I coulda.
No, I didn’t think it was strange. I felt like shouting at Ida myself. But in a language—she’d
understand. The five fingers. See? Just thinking about how much she upset Mei makes me want
to call him. So I did, and he came by with his famous cole slaw. I don’t like it really, but he
wasn’t satisfied unless he brought something. People are so funny that way. If he ever stops
bringing the cole slaw I’ll know we’re done. God I’d miss him. Oh, good riddance to both of
them. Who needs ‘em? There’re a million other people in the world. Well 8 billion. You
know, if you count the uncountable. Anyway. He’s my friend not hers.
Now, don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t introduce Mei to everyone I know. He’s like a
delicacy. A lot of my friends I keep separate, it’s just better that way.
Sometimes I think Mei thinks I’m ashamed of him, but that’s not it at all…he could do
something with his hair though, and why doesn’t he stand up straight? Plus when you want him
to go fast he goes slow, and when you want him to go slow…well you got the point …..human
nature.

Drifting
I stared at the huge cup of coffee on the table, by the window in the sun. Gray vapor came off
it in waves—upward like smoke on fire. A soft muted rainbow, made prismatic by tiny yet
visible layers of water-coffee, danced in the low wintery sun. I caught myself watching my
coffee, sighed, and wondered with faint humor how long it would be before I could talk to it. My
breath was theoretically coffee flavored.
“How long would it be before I fell in love?”
“More coffee dude?” Mark, my nurse today, asked.
“Skoal”
“Skoal, dude,” and he put the straw to my lips. I drank the first cup of coffee I could
remember, being hot enough to add flavor, but not so hot it would be unsafe to bath in. It tasted
great and my swallowing was improving—it was a miracle.
I managed to touch the left side of his chest, near his name tag. “R…you in a re-lay..”
“RN? I’m an RH. Real Help,” he said, interpreting what he assumed I was thinking.
“Lumbago bursitis diverticulitis vertigo?” I motioned for an answer instead of the straw.
Mark heard the question in my upturned chin, and the rise at the end of what I proposed as a
sentence. He didn’t challenge my wandering eyes but went out to the hall.
“Dude,” he said, as he came back in, carrying my chart. “You have…Gnostic Apraxia.” Then
he read silently for a minute or two from a small folder he’d retrieved from his medication cart.
“Can’t sing can’t dance what do-ya-do? No really, it’s a new one on me.” Maybe it’s like
agraphic agoraphobia?” I had a patient like that once…” He put the straw to my lips, “… was
afraid to go outside because he couldn’t write about it.” I snorted coffee, sputtering it into cups,
towels, and ended with a chortling dripping cadenza, that split my dry lower lip—a sure sign of a
change in the season. It was March.
“Dude, take it easy.” Mark held my head up and wiped my nose. Thinking the blood was
from a nosebleed.

I was ‘in hospital,’ as they say in England and other parts of the world, where I thought about
sex like an alcoholic thinks about Mimosas (Champagne, orange juice, and optional triple sec or
cointreau)—‘What are the oranges for?’ Oh, well…I said very clearly “When do you get off?”
and then drifted off to sleep—Maybe it was the blood. And I had great (gay) dreams: hoisting
little old ladies out the window in their wheel chairs, gliding them from roof top to roof top on a
clothes line—my first day on the job. Growing gladioli, most in color, few memorable—the
dreams.
Dreams and personality were the only things untouched by my aphasia and apraxia; I had
time for everyone and meant tit… I mean it. I meant it. “Dominus vobiscum” (may God be with
you and you with Him). My thoughts were almost virginal—cloudy, precious, and hard to come
by.
It never failed, the lights would go off and the darkness would make my own horrendous
reality that much less obvious, even to me. In fact to anyone I would appear normal—in the dark.
Out of sight, out of mind, Hmm. Comfortable Darkness.
That was usually all that the recipe required, to get the batter to rise. Dreams took shape with
the TV on; they became so clear that they were like memories; they would have the same level of
predictability; each time I’d go a little deeper in. Into my memories, and so my dreams became
living color, very Gilligan’s Island, bewitching the fish from their perches, and the men from
U.N.C.L.E. Snore…
How I could avenge my new enemy, began to come clear. Avenging can mean ‘waking’ in
my new language. It can also mean going thru the process of waking from a pleasant dream back
into an unpleasant life. I couldn’t tell the dream from the daydream —reality I could distinguish,
that was fluorescent and painful.
My thoughts swelled and swirled and occasionally caught fire. They called them ‘seizures’
without any evidence, and replaced the plastic eating utensils with metal ones. This was about
two weeks or so after they replaced the metal ones for plastic ones. I had a habit of throwing
knives apparently, which I know isn’t true because if it were, Ida would be out with a shoulder
injury at the very least.

SECRET INFORMATION
There was nothing to do but think thoughts, compare them to pain, and feel mortified. I
checked my hospital gown often for apples or oranges but there were none. When I came to, as it
were, in the St. Steven’s Hospital for Martyrs, I was released from my bonds of homosexuality;
this was the most freeing experience. I was joyful. I suspect one of those snapping sounds, I
dimly recalled from the ‘accident,’ was a hanging chad, and some, as yet, uncounted vote. The
tally of which, changed the outcome completely.
Julie, my favorite nurse, bathed me and exercised my legs. It was with Julie that I felt my
sexuality come back…One day I managed to tell the assistant to get out, and then told the nurse
to get out and send Julie in…Julie came in and was so calm and so sweet I felt that form of
compassion that’s so close to passion…she bathed me and where I was naked, she pulled the
coarse white sheet up over me. I managed to throw it off by catching it with my good foot. I
wanted her to see all of me. She, like all the others, was captivated by my peerless brown eyes
and my long black lashes and I knew I had her where I wanted her, and I knew as I had known so
many times before in that other life, that she would respond to me….My bed was wet…I was
pissy. Her tone, the tone of her hands marked me, maybe forever, she would take care of me. I
lay there and allowed her hands and allowed her trill of a voice to wash me with the hot soapy
water. The water lost its heat; the subject had changed.
“Are you numb?” she asked.
I thought, ‘yes, but it’s better.’ ‘I can feel you touching my leg.’ I thought, but said nothing.
My legs began to vibrate and I felt a warm sensation start in my side and spread over me until it
touched my neck then it spread into a smile, a devoted true emotional one. Her hands were so
soft and her lips were so red she frowned the smallest wrinkle and then it was gone just like that.
She had lashes too, and they fluttered; they made me happy; I think she blushed. I said nothing. I
tripled in size.
She was the only one who understood that I couldn’t talk and just let it be. Just let me be.
The rage in everyone’s life, the black spot that softens everyone’s resolve to do good—is
when you, at age 12 or so, you just want to be left alone and that’s all you want, and they can’t do
it. People who care, know. People who care know how to give. People who care use other parts
of their anatomies to talk, to instruct, to listen, even to preach. My Grandmother preached with
her back, her spine actually. What I’d like to know is how come I know things, 20 years
forgotten—can make sense out of them, and can’t point to my ear. If I’m all about learning to
communicate, which she saw I was, then she knows instinctively there are parts of me that can
and will and do; and there are other parts that can’t and won’t and don’t. It’s not rocket science.
I do want...I’m not a child. I can’t. My eyes focused on her and her image split. I followed her
soft gray eyes and her quick chin with my own.
“I know you can’t tell me when you have to pee, and I refuse to put you in a diaper… you are
no baby mister, but how would it be if I left the urinal next to you and you could try to use it with
your good…stronger hand, and I’ll check on you and help?”
I managed a smile and felt my cheek from the inside for the first time since Bobby Porter
smacked me in third grade, and it hurt like hell.
“Good she says, can you feel this…?”
In my eyes-only manner I said ‘Yes, Julie I can.’ ‘Thank you.’ And I added, since she was
listening, ‘By the way I’m sorry I’m such a baby.’ ‘When you’re here I feel better, that’s all.’
‘I’m sorry.’
“Can you feel in your feet?”
I thought, ‘No not yet…’ My hair stood on end; a wave of sensations passed over me
infiltrating every follicle and every hair: you, you, you and you, up! I was hoping this bath took a
long time, and I was almost glad I’d pissed myself.
My penis was less hard, my heart was emptied of self-pity, I wanted her. ‘Julie,’ I said, with
one long rotation of my neck, as though it was pulled by my eyes.
“Yes?”
I thought, ‘I have an itch, and Julie, you are the only one who can scratch it.’ The wash basin
she’d placed at my bedside was more than half empty judging by the way the water sloshed when
I involuntarily kicked it. I thought, ‘I am so sad, and so sorry.’ ‘Please…you know I’m still a
man—please’…. She moved to the other side, wet the washcloth and soaped up my ass. I felt a
chill and a warmth in her touch. I thought, ‘Julie, I’m here…Julie…I am still a man.’ She
adjusted the pillows that held my leg up and rubbed my dick from behind. As I became hard
again I felt a flush all over my body. My nose cleared up, my voice grew deep, and I was about
to turn to her and smile, but instead I smiled to myself and she worked me up and I felt a feeling
so intense so terrific that I had to turn to her and thru the pain I tried to say, ‘God… kiss me,’ ‘I
want you to.’ “14-13-12-11…11” I still counted. I’d always counted…I knew what I always
knew.
She put down the cloth. Basin empty, bath over. She walked around the bed. As she put a
sheet over me and moved my leg back painlessly she tried to speak, swallowed with her chin
down slightly, looked into my eyes and said. “You are a man William Hudson and you are still a
dude—no baby. I can’t take this any further.”
I thought, ‘Kiss me Julie,’ ‘Kiss me here,’ and I lifted my hand to my face, touched my lips, by
some miracle, and she obeyed.
The kiss was a granted wish, a great save, and an eyelid burner. I knew no other like it and
never would while working this job. I think I saw my life as a series of jobs.
“Mr. Hudson.”
I thought, ‘Don’t say it. Don’t say it.’ ‘This isn’t the climax, looks can be deceiving.’
“I…We…”
A tear just fell. I want a reduction in my sentence.
“I feel glad that you’re coming out of it… Bill, Billy, but … I’m married and you are my
patient…”
When she said ‘patient’ I winced…I thought, a nothing again, a softie. Down to zero with a
word.
I thought, ‘Julie I would never hurt you, and you must believe that’.
“Here,” she said, and put a towel over my dick as I began spurting short bursts of urine on
myself.
I turned my head…“God!”… my face turned as red as I was—streaked, no longer facing her,
in any sense of the word. She left a moment later, said she was coming back I guess. She
knew a joke when she saw one. I pissed a stream against my side and it felt good; I felt warm
again, though briefly, and cried in my own way.
I had wanted so much, too much, and my body wasn’t able. My mind had led me into another
kind of hole. An un-vanquished territory that some day I would control, but not today. Today
she had seen the ruin of me, just at the very time I thought she might see the glory of me. Fuck!
The pillow she wedged between my legs was completely soaked, as was the towel. With almost
no pain I pushed them off the bed…flop! I looked down at the wet pile. ‘I bet there’s sperm in
there.’ The nurse who picked it up said it was a good sign that I could hold so much. ‘You have
no idea,’ I thought.
I think it was then that I made up my mind that I would have what I wanted. I’d get power I’d
be powerful…it was in me, I just had to take it and God I could take it. And I could hold it too.
Someday I’d shoot a stream of cum into her and make her scream and not talk to me of place or
status, she would know no status but me within her. I’d show her a new place. Close but not
caving. I was a power seeker and I had always been. All the way back to those days when I wore
the Army dress-pants and felt like Audie Murphy in Red Badge of Courage. Now…
Fuck the piss, damn it! Fuck the white towel, leave me here naked un-done, leave me here
dead even…I would rise again and woe to those who try to stop me. Take me to the river and
drown me, Ha! All right, fool that I am, I should have known better––He’ll never get off as long
as you’re alive. These things must be done delicately. Sometimes I wondered at the circus
parading in my head. This was one of those times.
Years change a man and I guess they change a woman; but, and of course surgery helps, but,
the time came when my manhood, as they used to say, was intact, and I left that dreary all lights,
no shade hospital and never saw Julie again. Her touch became poisonous to me. I became cold
and never smiled back at her, never enforced my will upon her, never hurt her with false
assurance, or the vicissitudes of my lazy eye. Not my bad, my weaker eye.
I learned to talk…that is to say…I learned again how to make sounds that reflected my
feelings and thoughts, no more gruntingly forced, brown and elongated words, that people gather
around the toilet to see. No more blank horrified stares. Julie with her, ‘I’m sorry you must be
hurting’ look, she became the sacrifice who doesn’t even know they are a sacrifice. Severed.
Dead, not from pride, dead from being there when it was time to go. And no, I never looked
back. Overflowing with joy like I was.
 Nothing
There was a man who grew to be a boy.
He was a great man and he became a wondrous boy.
Boys lived in Palimpsests. They were worlds that now seem labyrinthine.
They were worlds turned sideways and back to front—impossible to read, by everyone—
including all the other boys.
Everyone agreed you cannot read the world, and especially you cannot read the world you
inhabit.
The project, the loss, the lies were not bottomless. Beyond wonder, yes. And, beyond the boy’s
grasp. Certainly.
When he was 10 he decided to do the thing or things he didn’t know that he could do. He was
alone and he believed he lived in an idea. He was right, and all the world was wrong. He had
nowhere to turn, no where to run to...
Knowing he was where he belonged came often to him, and that helped. He was drawn to those
who were between 25 and 35% younger than he was, and they loved him. It never stopped. It
always hurt. It was always mutual.
He made discoveries about themes. Help was on its way. He wanted to live long enough. And
he also knew the whole thing, is the whole thing.
So it became a chase, a course, and a game. Everywhere he looked it was there, and then it
wasn’t. And so, when it wasn’t there he knew it soon would be. He came to believe in
emptiness, and other funny things. He played with everyone, but he would not let them play with
him. So, he was alone—again.
Try, succeed, fail try succeed, fail try, did nothing for him. It was either too clever or too dumb.
And he was alone—again.
So years went by unnoticed. A dream would erupt and die. He went everywhere, did everything
with everyone. Highs so high and lows so low, you can’t imagine.
He began to imagine. Wow, a great idea—one: a world, no end. He loved round circular humor
and yes, it loved him back. When it wasn’t trying to gobble him whole.
What a horrible thing a happy ending would be. In the palimpsest world it would have to be one
or the other.
Wondering how you got here is where we begin our story.
Many things are purposely hidden.
Many things you’ll never find.
Here’s one: look at the disinformation that’s in the information; and keep looking. Misdirection
may be built in. Just like a dream. Fantastic, marvelous, mysterious dream.

Danny ((((perforations along the margin for next 4 pages))))

Billy sees stories everywhere. The fact that he can’t reveal them thru speech or writing doesn’t
matter, in fact it makes them stick. It makes their stickiness more obvious, they stick inside his
head long enough for rewrites and editing. Billy holds thoughts for a long time…so unlike
dreams, whose essence he always thought to be in the telling, when the choice of word would
betray the dream’s meaning. Thoughts seem to be more solid, now that revelation is impossible.
In the telling and retelling, his vocabulary triples. Billy is wrapped up, pretty much, in the fact
that reality is paramount. It tastes like ‘enough,’ and then it tastes like fantasy. Billy’s reality
was fiction, or so he claimed.
Consider: The entire broke ten chapter has perforations either marked or actual-----for easy
removal. They represent the moment, zip gone. All that scary stuff, the obscene molestations
you see lurking just beneath the surface; your fear of living, staying open to ideas, uncensored
thoughts; that you’ll somehow lose yourself the first time you realize you can say Yes or No.
That you’ll push yourself out the window if not constantly restrained—Those horrid hedonistic
fantasies that might come to life if you weren’t continually held back by all those things you give
undue credit to—free to be you. Consensual adult sex is moral. Honoring vows is moral.
Walking away from people who make you feel incapable is moral. You’ve always had the power
to say Yes or No.

Billy sat up in bed stretched his mind moved away from him into a different world one that spoke
more clearly all about what Billy would have wanted had he been able then he realized he was so
in tune with his body talking to his mind or maybe out from under it being he had plenty of
experience with this as he sought fulfillment almost every day

Broke Ten
((((Author’s note: This book was always meant to be on paper. No big deal, but in digital form, some of the disappearing tricks have
to be imagined))))

Billy was on his school’s soccer team. He was lucky to join; he was uncoordinated, only fast.
With practice, he ran the warm-up laps like silk, developing stamina until he came in first every
time. Light as air, he made the most of his long-legged stride. He grew tough and able to breathe
in a synchronous fashion: that helped; none of the other boys could speak.
One day he played defense; it was, for Billy, a great day. No one made a goal or even came
close. Boys his own age, yet stronger, couldn’t move past him; he was everywhere. The
opposition that was dressed in just white shorts moved against him, and it was just one of those
beautiful things…he took them on. Billy’s body moved ideally, boldly. His teammates helped,
but the green lawn was more of a help; it sloped where he needed it to, tho ever so slightly. Billy
was an indeterminate amount, yet he had suddenly become someone to be contended with.
Young men rushed him. It was the easiest thing ever.
Billy was not strong; he was fast; he saw openings that they were this-close to seeing. He
became, for that afternoon—fearless. As they played, they saw that this was Billy’s day. It
hardly stopped them. They furrowed brows that were hardy ever furrowed. But, I think now, the
playing changed. Yes, they wanted to score, but there was something amazing about this. What
Billy felt—they all felt, and couldn’t help it. You see, Billy was weak, and that day, became
strong. He blew them away. This is seen every day on any number of fields when children
grown suddenly into young men and women. Billy went thru them like they weren’t there; it left
them wondering: Is this how it happens to people like him? All of a sudden he can’t lose?
In time, this feeling grew. Eventually it became sexual for him: Fantastic. It also, did violence to
a pretty afternoon full of good sports, and the so-called ease of play:

I was carried to the locker room, where they’d set up a chair, a team member got right in my face.
Sit here. The chair was specially made in shop class by Ash, and so like the school itself: hard
and practical as a step, low to the floor, and as stable as the fields that clocked the upper part of
the rolling Lenape Valley. I sat there with all the time in the world, a cock in my mouth and all of
us off the ocean, while the land-locked sailors stood woody in a line. Captain Jack gave orders
while I tried not to choke on his instructions: All you guys will get your chance; this time we got
his hands tied behind his back, so maybe you can get off a shot. My heart raced, my sinuses felt
clear, and my vision was not so black and white. I think they saw me the same: —unbreakable,
useful, and more than anything else, ready willing and able.
Jack’s language was getting saltier, I was only inches above sea level, and he’d lied; my hands
weren’t tied. I wanted to be there. I was described directly, and everyone else by names that
ended in “O.”
Jocko, drop ‘em. We wanna see your ass.
Yo! Get off me!
There were the coach distracters: Brian and Michael. Make sure he stays in his office.
There were the cochrans: Benny and Mario. Create false trails: throw the dogs off-scent.
There were the guards: Randy and Mark. You stand by the doors.
There was the muscle: Ray. And the stoker: Josh. Keep it tight. Snap anything elastic.
The mock fighters: Reed and Morgan, who kept order by throwing mock punches and starting
fake fights so everyone got a chance to show how tough they were.
The order was not predetermined; all the yelling about order, just made the guys more disorderly.
Things got hotter and harder and hornier as the clock ran down. They called each other names as
ears got red and lips began to swell. Faces pinked-up, and swollen lips inevitably got tapped.
Most of the guys couldn’t stand still.
No one had showered except the rodeo clowns: Pete and Steve, who soaped-up so they could
slide between any stamping bulls. The place reeked of male hormones sweat and grass stains.
The few evident bruises received on the field that day began to shine. Billy was doing a job on
Neil when Danny started getting too wound up.
The second lieutenant: Keith held the watch. Everyone got the same amount—enough. Tony
sat like an ornament—had no assigned job didn’t want one and didn’t get one. He was cool:
Absolute proof that no matter what…everyone doesn’t participate uniformly.
The guys pulled back before anything came between them. Billy was not so lucky. His face was
sticky, his tongue slippery, and his throat had a peppery metallic taste, most of it was Rusty’s, but
no one would know that but Billy.
Danny’s towel got ripped off him and then snapped right back. Parker left a mark at about one
O’clock, when Danny was eleven strikes away from being exactly noon.

This had become a series of jobs, you could hardly tell one from another. Sometimes our
memories fit better the when the people are different. Then Ethan came, that took less than a
minute, but the job wasn’t done. Zack joined the mock fighters who were harassing Danny. An
Glen came in two minutes. Then my memory gets hazy, there was a loud bang on the lockers
behind me. The guys were getting kinda rough, Travis prob...
I saw so little team-work, I thought it was all about me. But Danny couldn’t take it anymore. I
blew them away because I was unstoppable. Danny couldn’t stand it because I was unstoppable.
I wanted what everyone wanted, but I saw thru myself. And that’s when my memory failed.
Everyone looked like a fool, as I sat there unable to wipe my own chin…..Here in the locker
room nearly surrounded, practically fixed, almost done, deep in thought…uh…throat.
The muscle and the stoker, fought with Danny; and the clowns gave him a soapy knee. He was
like a rock as always. This rock had a steep ardent angle; it went out, then up. Ray moved in to
engagement mode; the cliff face was intimidating; he gulped once, put his hand on Danny’s
forehead to push him back. Danny held his arms at his sides; his hands became fists; his forearms
grew.
“Come on, Tibullus,” Ray said. “Take a swing at me, go ahead.”
He pulled back, his clock swung wildly, like a mostly liquid metronome.
“Danny’s next,” the stoker determined by reading his steely gaze.
They ushered him unsteadily forward; the others took one look, and everyone just moved.
Danny’s knee slid into position next to my thigh. I felt his hand on my shoulder to steady
himself; he leaned forward his other hand on the locker door as it clicked into place.
His back arched involuntarily, a sensation went up his spine; the room began to glow. Danny
looked down, amazed to see his own cock moving rudderless in front of him. The room swayed.
I made a sound, someone’s cum leaked out. No more room.
The guys began to count the colossal thrusts: “One….Two….Three….Fourr….Five.” Danny
grunted for them to stop, but they got louder. He couldn’t speak but could only agree with how it
went with Billy: throat to tongue to lips to almost slipping out.
“Six….Seven….” There was a shift a stutter a pause then resumption. “Eight….Nine….
Ten….Eleven….Twelve….Thirteen. Danny came in a single sputtered rivet, then began
translucently adhering beam to beam, cable to cable, iron to iron. I thought, ‘reality is
permanent.’ As he fixed himself in place, the room erupted.
“Damn boy!” the Captain said. “Thirteen! A record!”
A record broken—a goal established, a happy ending that was, of course, no ending at all.
Suddenly nothing happened, and as I took one more for the team, I realized I wasn’t there
because I was made of sugar-candy. I came right then, just like that. Splat. Splat. Splat…
They hooped and hollered; skin got jabbed, asses slapped, and shoulders stung. What I felt was a
whiter shade of pale, but also indelible. Just like reality—or so I thought.
I gave up the rubbery basketball team, the ever plodding play by play football team, the big
mouth rugby team, the nearly always stoned lacrosse team, the swing and a miss baseball team,
the ultra orthodox tennis team, and if the swim team wasn’t mostly the soccer team I would’ve
given them up too. I was soccer to the teeth, from here on out.
I wiped my mouth as if the handcuffs just suddenly fell off. I was tired of making magic. Danny
was out of sight, so I told Jack to put in the new kid, after all, I was a senior. It was time to bring
up the next team. His name was Jimbar or something…everyone just called him by his last name,
Kasian. He knew about the symbolism: sat his skinny round ass in the square low chair, and
kissed a ball for luck, as I went off to the showers.
Danny broke ten later that year, two weeks before Billy’s birthday. No one had ever shot their
bolt so quickly. They didn’t know, and Danny made sure they didn’t; he couldn’t break ten with
anyone else, just Billy.

Reagan Republican
“You can’t start a fire, worried ‘bout your little world falling apart.”- Bruce Springsteen

Finally the worst thing that could happen happened. Billy’s strange dialectic was going to
betray him someday, but did it have to be so soon? He blames Ida…Go ahead:
I blame Ida.
One day Billy had just finished exercising, and came to the conclusion that for all the money
his insurance company was paying for a few hours of physical therapy a week, he could have 3
treadmills, two exercise bikes, an ice dispenser, a portable kitchen-bedroom -bathroom unit, and a
set of weights…all delivered to a house he couldn’t possibly afford. As it was, he would
soon…well, someday, be going home, and there was nothing there to exercise with, except the
windows when he wrestled the screens in. Some present.
Yes, it was Spring finally, and a beautiful day outside—crocuses, hyacinths, those funny
flowers that look like candle snufferouters. My vocabulary was becoming obsolete, and those
cowbell-shaped flowers were the sign…I should have seen it coming.
So, my mind keeps returning to the future: leaving here, insurance, home maintenance —
Patrone wheels me back to the floor whistling Ave Maria so I won’t talk and get him into trouble.
While we waited for the elevator I made the universal sign for ‘let’s go outside, and smoke.’ He
broke into, Oh when the saints—go marching in—he kills me.
Anyway, no cigarette no nothing, and then on my return, I found Ida in my room, and that just
set me off—all high and mighty, head up, jerking her chin, the braids swinging all around, but
never close enough for me to grab. So I was about to call her a Reagan Republican. I forget why.
She and I got into a disagreement about how much nurses are really worth in the scheme of
things, and I called out, “You nacilbuper nagaer!” She and everyone else thought I said
knuckleheaded nigger. It came out exactly backwards, “A sure sign you’re getting better,” Fa
used to say.
Ida stopped clicking her tongue, and sucking her teeth, and if she had been carrying anything,
it would have dropped. “What did you call me, Mr. Hudson?!”
“You jailer!”
“Oh no,” she said, “that’s not what you called me. You called me a nigger.”
If I had had a roommate at the time, his name would have been Carmine, and he would have
said ‘nincompoop slash nigger,’ but…I didn’t. My roommate at the time was my own
condemned self who said Reagan Republican when he meant to say knuckle- head. And instead
of doing either, he changed the channel in his head to The Spring into Spring TV show, just as the
fight broke out—suddenly the stage is too small for all the chairs, and one goes flying. That’s the
one I was going to sit on. Everything in Billy’s world seemed to be trying to talk to Billy—even
Billy. He changed the channel again.

Ida’s back was up big time—she was wild. She, in all her brightness, decided to tell everyone
what I had done; what she thought of it; what that made me; and who I really was. All in about
20 minutes, and then the record repeated for days and days.
Now I was ‘Well!’ Mr. Well. ‘Hello, Well…how are you?’ Lucky Carmine’s nameless
roommate. The ‘N’ word sayer, denier, and general liar. Hater and liar. Homosexual card-
carrying member of the lunatic fringe, who gets hand jobs from guilt-ridden women prostitutes
who are really probably call girls, and used to that sort of thing. Everything unsavory and
horrible. I became trailer trash—shart reliart. Shit.

That was Sunday evening. Monday morning I thought I’d give anything not to have said the
things I never meant to say. Tuesday I realized I’d never said them, and by Wednesday I wanted
more than anything to say it in earnest, and give it some contextual relevance. How can it be, that
the clearest thing they ever heard me say, I never said?
By Thursday, I had somehow gained credibility thru scurrilous misapprehending and the
mathematics of simple addition, gaining also, a marked increase in personal integrity to boot. I
was accused of showing my true colors by the person who saw red the moment I spoke, who’d
been waiting to see pink, scarlet, fuchsia and crimson so bad… she made up the whole first half
of the spectrum. Perhaps my underperforming speech was my just desserts.
One retributive theologist after another smirked at my rumored garter belt, supposing I hid it
from view because of what it held up—under-defined antique lacy things that were bound to rip if
they were ever worn on the outside. Occupational therapy concurred, and let it slip that it was
only a matter of time before they saw some really nasty underwear.
What I somehow lost in integrity and credibility in the real world I gained back in a world
where everything is simple and all excesses are manually paid for—all is perpetually balanced
within and without. If I told you how I thought I got there, you’d die laughing, metaphorically
speaking.
Yes, this was the bizarro world you‘ve heard tell about. My best friends thought I would
never say anything like that, without provocation—a plausible possibility since I never spoke
unless in answer to some asinine question! But I don’t think anyone thought that it just never
happened. But it never did! My big fat lying nurse was too credible. Also there were all those
clunkers I’d painted race car-red over the years. I suppose I was no saint, but I never said I was.
I was up one minute, and down the next. Good thing these were only nurses, and not
empowered to affect my future.
 Well, to my astonishment it changed everything. The people I hated began to smile and be
pleasant to me—absolutely thrilled that I called Ida a nigger. They gave me candy. They put
their best foot forward, I suppose, partially in the fear that I might call them out of their name.
The people I liked, who liked me, stayed away, and thought I was a much more disreputable
character than I was, wanted nothing to do with me, and took to name-calling like, “a-a-a-
aphasic,” and “du-du-du-dumb…Well, you know, that’s what people used to call people who
can’t speak,” etcetera. I wished I didn’t understand.
Well, that’s how it started. The world began to turn upside down and I was not happy with the
way things were going—not my speech, that was fine, it was actually great. It was the best thing
that ever happened to me. People came from all over to ask me questions that finally I could
answer. People wrote down scrupulously what I said. Fa bought a new suite. Cameras were
allowed on the floor, after it was decided I could give consent to being filmed. As long as I didn’t
disrobe or touch anyone or say anything horrendous about sex, fingers, dicks, wads, blowjobs,
masturbation, politics, religion, cunts, vulvas, valves, throats, sperm, youthful offenders, dirty sex
acts, buggery, or make any rude noises, or stick my tongue out—then I was essentially fine. If I
behaved, I could give consent. I could make it into the ranks of real people. As long as I didn’t
embarrass myself, they figured it would be okay. So when Arthur Andersen, the psych doc, came
to attest to my consentability, he asked me two questions: What’s your name?
“Oh Jesus, not this again?”
“Well?”
“Yes, here’s a cigar.”
“And where are we?”
“Get the fuck out of my room, if that answers your question,” and then he left.
Consentable! Certified bonified papered and stamped.
The thing was this: stories were sticking to my…the inside of my head, especially when I was
on the exer-cycle and couldn’t talk or remember or pass any judgment except to fart. And some
of the stories were good. The best thing that happened to me was getting injured. The most fun I
ever had was in a wheel chair. The most spontaneous I’ve ever been was during seizures that I
couldn’t remember. The worst day of my life was every day, and it just kept getting better and
better. After I said the opposite of what I meant—backwards, everyone decided I must be on to
something. My room began to fill up with flowers—yellow opening-daffodils mostly. It was
February.
So what was really going on was that everything was opposite. I was happy; I was strait; men
loved me; women loved me; even hateful people loved me. Sappy women and closeted men
stayed away.
This was not looking like the right direction at all. I had an accident where I learned I was
going to be okay, everything I loved tripled, tripled, and tripled again—turned upside down when
I saw the past clearly, then took two giant steps backward. Funny, ironic. I even had a reputation
for shooting my cum great distances, which I got when one of the housekeepers finally noticed
the pudding on the ceiling. “Oh my Lord, he a mess! I wished I’d a taken him home when I had
the chance.”
Marie Carl wanted me bad. And was going to make me a dildo and a vagina out of some kind
of acrylic polymer—floor wax probably. She loved me, she thought I was misunderstood. She
used to mop the floor till it was matte, just so I could check out her sexy ass, never once blocking
my view of the TV. I wondered can people read my mind?
 Housekeeping
Billy wanted privacy—to keep the linguistic profilers and the comedians to a minimum. He
had an idea. One time he’d spilled or possibly thrown a milk carton on the floor. It lay there for
hours, no one picked it up, no one even came in the room. They pretended they didn’t see it, and
they didn’t see him. So he made with great effort a `spill.’ The harder he tried the harder it
became, but he made it anyway, out of a urinal, a milk carton, and a piece of white cardboard. It
worked, they stayed away for days. And when they did come in, they didn’t stay. No one wanted
to clean it up.
The nurses continually brought this to Marie Carl’s attention, and she threatened to throw it
away at least twice a day.
Billy tried to make her understand…but it was her job. He couldn’t make her understand:
“Privacy is curtain number one.” Or “what is a mountain for some is nothing.”
“Would be the simplest thing,” she said, “jest to pick it up. Lazy is all. They lazy. They walk
over it. They’d slip on it—kill theirselves before they clean it up.”
“Look,” he says.
“No, you look,” she said. “You can’t tell me you put this mess here, and no one cleans it
up…they….looks the other way….. Zat the idea? They bothering you.”
He smiles.
“You want them ta leave you alone?”
“I’d like to buy a vowel pat” he said. “…an A.”
She paused, looked at him and his big eye lashes. “You wants me to keep them out and lose
my job?”
“I’m A,” Billy tries to point to his chest, and gives himself a right to the jaw.
“A freak?” she guesses.
“The Side Show, and all of it!” He says. Adding musically, “Dump dump deddle lumpah dum
pum pa-dah.”
“Oh well, I can’t help you there brother…They’d fire this sister’s ass.”
Two days later she comes in beaming. “Look…shh…shut-up…what sister got for you. You
wants privacy. I know you needs two gowns—they can only afford one. You needs more than a
pitcher board, and they puts a sign over your bed with the wrong last name. I thought you was
Chinese for the longest time.” She goes to her cart and pulls out a tableau, a prop, worthy of a
Broadway production of Annie. “I calls it: ‘Keep on outa here.’” And she laughs like a banshee.
It was a 2 millimeter-thick piece of yellow translucent plastic in the shape of a large oval, with
a milk carton stuck in the middle and a stream of white paint in the yellow and even a straw.
“And look.” She holds up a urinal with a big dent in it. “See, you put this on the floor like
this…I made it from my acrylic floor wax, and built it up layer by layer. Then you lay the
urinal…see the yellow, up to the fill line? Ha ha.” And she thrusts the urinal at me, “painted
yellow on the inside.”
I jumped. “Look like pee don’t it…ain’t. No one gonna touch this mess. Bother my baby.
Not my baby. You picks up the urinal and pop goes the dent, and you thinks you splashed toe
up!” She hollers and then laughs with a huge toothy grin. Ha Ha ha.
I laughed and almost cried.
“…See, and alls I do is slide it under the bed when they tells me…‘you dun it again!’”
I thought the juxtaposition of the milk carton, straw, and urine was particularly effective, I
used it for two weeks before nurse Kelly threw it out.
“Ain’t no one bother my boy when he need private time.” and she winked.
 I stood there unable to calm myself enough to kiss her cheek, I wanted to hug her but the arms
didn’t move right away. I put my head down to collect myself, and gather the ease and poise just
to move the way I was bent to move—with effortlessness.
She said, “…ohh, and kissed my cheek. You can’t talk is all… I think you fraid-some too.”
she came in to hug me, and I lifted my arm, and it got caught under her ass, but it didn’t matter, I
wasn’t afraid of her laugh or her size, though I thought she might re-break my ribs. “You the
bomb.”
“Is that good or what?”

One day I woke up

One day I woke up and I had the strangest idea. Fa said I was getting much better, but he was
a million miles away. He gave me writing paper and a pen—to jot down ideas, if I had any. This
didn’t work, of course. Then he gave me an audio recorder but without prompts most of my
sentences were run-ons anyway it dropped one day and broke. Then he gave me an Etch-a-
Sketch to write my deepest darkest thoughts on—that worked—the thoughts stopped. It
would’ve taken me a week to write the word ‘drivel.’
The idea was this: we can only pick options from a group of three. Or a group of four options,
I suppose, but one is bound to cancel-out one of the others almost immediately. For example,
republican, democrat, or other. Yet, we always divide our options, goals, and choices into two’s.
‘Do you want to go to the store with me, or do you want to go out side and play?’ Knowing that
it’s not really possible to have just two choices
—you can never have just two choices and that is clearly understood in the naming of them.
But this is what we offer others. And what we offer ourselves. It, I believe, is meant to account
for the Unknown, which exists in such abundance that it cannot be named (you can read the work
out-loud, say the name twice, and it’s still unknown).
An example: someone puts a coin in one closed hand, and then offers both closed hands for
you to pick the one with the coin. You have two seemingly possible choices, but you don’t, you
have three—the right hand, the left hand, or something else altogether. Either leaving the room;
standing up and stretching; tapping both hands simultaneously; or casting some judgment about
winners generally. All those other things are one choice, obviously much larger, wider and more
fulfilling, than the other two choices, still it stands for the third. To see the unknown at work, you
need to trample rules that negate it.
Another example: in the country of Illvania, there are two political parties, the bigheads and
the smallminds. Well, the people of this made-up country are faced with this choice every four
years, and every four years they make this choice. But they can only make this choice because
there is a third option, which is stay home; break something; beat your kids; get drunk; go fishing;
have sex, etc. If, let’s just say there were no other options, all voters had to vote for one or the
other…no third choice. Then you’d have two choices: namely, the bighead party or everyone
else. There’d be no reason to name the other party the smallminds, because there would be
bigheads and everyone else. Or there would be smallminds and everyone else. But if there truly
were two and only two, mutually exclusive, choices they wouldn’t have two names. There would
be no point to have two names, if you weren’t voting for the bigheads, everyone would know who
you were voting for. Naming something so obvious would be silly and nonsensical. In order to
see three choices when only two are offered, you have to rename one of the choices periodically.
Otherwise the sense of choice is lost. The game of choice is over. Leaving control freaks and
everyone else to ponder their existence.
The other problem with choice, is that I can’t keep up with all this re-naming!
The Great Unknown, all other choices, everything else, can be named. Let’s just screw the
creepy orthodox, fundamentalist, religious lunatic fringe, and call the third choice ‘God.’ Fuck
‘em! They’ve perverted the word so much I just want to shit on it. So, instead, I shit on them for
ruining a perfectly good word. There. One less choice. No one needs the pig headed religious
extremists anyway, believe me. God it is. I hope they get over it.

Coach
“What’s the issue boys?" The coach said, directly and pointedly to the group of young men
who were arguing over whose field it was.
They looked around at each other.
Jake said, “Coach Ferman, we signed up for this field last week—you can check the record if
you want. Jamie go get the record… and it’s four now…these ass holes…”
One of the members of the opposing team, who was standing right there, took a swing at him.
Jake fends him off with his right. Then looks embarrassed and beleaguered.
The Coach stared at Kip—who swung.
“Yes?” The Coach says.
“Well,” Jake continues. “Now they say it’s their field because they aren’t done.”
“We’re in sudden death overtime, asshole, you know that!” Kip says, while being restrained.
Kyle, who was doing the restraining, grabs at Jake’s shirt collar, snags the end of it…rrip.
“So.” says the Coach.
“Give it up!” shouts Jake. There’s a scuffle—it moves nowhere.
“When we finish this, then we’ll take care of you.” One of the boys threatens Jake, Josh, Jamie
and all the members of the Jay Hawks.
“You are done.” The Coach says.
“Coach, no we’re not.”
“Circumstances say differently.”
“Fuck circumstances…coach.”
“You can try…” he said, wistfully.
Birds were building nests in the trees at the edge of the field, stick by stick.
“See!” Fuller says, and takes his team, the So-Called Oxymorons, back out onto the field
before anyone had time to object, “He said we can keep playing.”
There’s mayhem for a minute, actually 15 seconds.
“Coach, that ain’t right!” Jake protests, with a retry-red streak across his face.
The boys shouted back and forth, across the grassy slope, as they admired Jake’s red mark and
ripped collar.
“Yes, I know.” said Coach absently. And I told them they were done.” He added, in mock
disbelief, shaking his head pointlessly.
“Well, you’re supposed to do something.” One of the J’s said.
“Boys, watch!” He said.
Fuller and his team lined up against The Amulets.
It’s go! And they kicked the ball forward…the team on the sidelines is purely J-dis-gusted,
feeling betrayed and totally ranked out. They can’t watch.
The coach stood alone, no more protests. He became the object of their disgust and silent
derision.
But they weren’t afraid of the other team—even if their coach was. His authority was like the
grass under their feet.
Two grasshoppers landed a few feet away, one toppled over.
The Coach just stood there, watching. The team with the catecholamine boost won handily, in
less than five minutes.
Jake and Kip swung at the wind as they passed. Kip laughed on his way to the showers.
“Now,” the Coach said, “They’re done. It’s your turn, try to do it right this time.”
 “This time?” they echoed, J.
“This time…You boys are a team right?”
“Were…” Jake said.
“All you boys are a team right?”
‘Yes.’ poured unenthusiastically into the grass. A whole dandelion floated away.
“Well, you gotta do the right thing. Otherwise there’s no reason for teams in the first
place…Teams do the right thing, people do the right thing, countries do the right thing.”
“What are you talking about? They fucked us up!” They said, almost in unison. And…“You
let ‘em…Coach, you let them walk all over us. Well, I’m not afraid of them—I’ll fuck them up if
it’s the last thing I do.” There was a litany of injustices, hatching like turtles on the shores of an
Easter Island somewhere.
“Just try not to mess up in the future, is all.” Coach said.
“Are you saying we were wrong?” Alvin, Jake’s better-half asked, incredulously.
“Yes.”
The boys were aghast. Two more grasshoppers landed and rubbed their tired legs.
The coach smiled at the perturbation, the petulance and especially at the pubescence.
“Look…” he said, as two of the boys walked off to the showers, where the winners were. “I
have one question…”
No response was elicited from the usually chatty group. Two boys walked in two smelly
circles, and one more grasshopper joined the calisthenics.
“Are all you boys a team?” Coach said. There was a long pause. “Should I just let this go?”
he asked.
“Whew…crazy.” Theo said, loudly enough to be heard, just barely.
“No response?” Coach inquired. “No….Yes sir? No, ‘Sir…Help me pull my pants down so
you can spank me sir’…nothing?”
Deafening silence prevailed, except for the sawing in the grass.
“Do you want me to just let it go this time?” he said, passively.
“Let go wad?” Jerry said—deadpan.
The boys had the annoying habit of saying ‘wad’ instead of ‘what’ when they felt entitled to
call someone a foul name to his face—with impunity—smarmy cleverness notwithstanding.
The grasshoppers left.
“If you can’t answer my question, you should be asking me a question.” “And if crazy wad is
what those were. I’m here aren’t I?”
Dead silence reigned, for all of two minutes, which is all the sweetened-up, sugar addicted
teenagers could stand.
Some began to kick the ball around, but they stayed by the coach—just to see what would
happen.
He was sane, shrewd and had enough crap up his sleeve to send armies packing.
Jake and some of the others tried to think.
No one came up with nothing.
“The question… you should ask me is: who is all you boys? You said, all you boys were a
team. Well who are we talking about? Who is ‘all you boys?’ And you know… I already know.
I just wanted to see if you did. And you don’t. I’m the ass? You’re all on the same team
geniuses! Now go out there and let’s see some football.”
“Succer.” Theo corrected.
“Yeah, let’s see some amazing American soccer!”
When Coach got back to the locker room, there were a lot of disappointed faces, mixed with
some downcast, guilty ones. Coach took out his pen, the one with the rabbit’s foot and the tongue
depressor—he was never without. And he went over to the sign-up sheet as the boys gathered
ears-out, to see what or whose name he was going to scratch off.
“Fucking Jay Hawkin’ J-hawks.” someone said.
 “Fuckin’ lead Amulets,” was the unexpectedly trenchant reply.
“Fuck you!”
“No fuck me! you trying bastard.”
The Coach took a breath and wrote at the top of the field-schedule-sign-up-sheet: ‘This is not
fun, this is about fun’—and he underlined about.
He went on to tell them what else they didn’t know: who was going to win Friday’s game with
Beaten Hall—how—and when. Who was going to win Saturday’s game with the up-starts at
Upton—and why.
He explained the benefit of knowing your ass from a hole in the ground, before he gave them
homework, which didn’t involve a slide rule, was much easier to check, and was the reason he
had so few knee injuries at Shawnee High. His authority was absolute, and he had the tongue
depressor to prove it. No one ever took it away from him.

“Oh Wad?” the Coach said, after he took questions, of which there were none.
Silent consternation and twittering erupted.
“Oh, Wad?” Coach repeated, looking around.
Jerry approached, fearful of being called out of his name a third time.
“Yes.”
“I want three goals Friday, from you.”
“Ok, Coach.”
Jerry stuck three goals on Friday and the name stuck to him—with such permanence the boys
stopped using it for gratuitous greetings and the like. It was reserved all thru junior and senior
year, and never came back into vogue.
It was not long afterward, that Jerry decided to go to school two thousand kilometers away, to
a ‘real’ college—where no one knew him.
Coach never assigned ‘crazy’ any goals, or any name, and everyone knew why. If he had…it
might have been better—Theo might have spent less time locked up, but who could say for sure?
The future’s not ours to see, or so they say.
Then he drove three very cheery 16 year olds, and two leery ones home.
“Zara problem?” he asked.
“I don’t get it.” One of them said. “We weren’t wrong—they were.”
Coach paused for effect…“I think…all of you, is all of you, and you think, you’re all there is
or ever was. I’m not mistaken…you are the same—all of you. When you’re a team. That’s how
you learn. Go team.”
When Coach got home, he had coffee, carrot cake, popcorn, and ice cream for dinner with his
wife, Adele, and their three daughters. Adele forgot to take dinner out of the freezer, before she
left for the tuna packing plant.
The girls seemed disappointed.
‘Disappointed! Wait till they get a load of what I saw today!’ He thought to himself.
“Look girls, sometimes you have to have cake and ice cream for dinner—that’s life.”
Coach was so horny from watching the boys try to think, he went to bed early and spread his
wife out like a salami sandwich before the door to their bedroom fully closed.

Lollipop
The last time my family was together, was a beautiful warm sunny Sunday morning in March,
‘64. Dad took us down to the river to see the boats come in. Clair had a pink dress that was
practically a tutu, and a white purse, that matched her sweater—for carrying socks and a doll. It
was so warm we didn’t need coats. Dad wore his coat though, because he kept his wallet and his
handkerchief in it. His wallet was real thick but he didn’t have any money in it.
 There were two little tugboats sitting low in the water, with those rounded edges that look just
like potties.
One boat was painted bright colors and played music, the other was regular and dull green.
They had tires stuck to their rims so they wouldn’t get messed up. Ours didn’t need the tires it
was already messed up.
Clarke and I wanted to go on the brightly painted boat but dad and mom said our boat would
be better. It went all the way to the other side (New Jersey), instead of around and around in
circles. Besides, mom said, the music would make her crazy, and dad said he wasn’t up for all
that.
I remember feeling jealous of the kids on the other boat. They had a party boat, party music
and red balloons. We had a sad tugboat and a mournful duty. We couldn’t even rescue
ourselves.
I remember everything about the other boat even though I was never on it: the colors of the
balloons, the man in the costume with the big feet, even the kids. I felt like we were meant to be
on the other boat and mom and dad were not. I still have no memory of the little fish-green boat.
At one point in the ride, Mom giggled, “I think I can, I think I can,” like we were on the poor
little engine that could. I told her to stop it, that it wasn’t funny. That was a story about a train
engine going up a hill. The way she was saying it, made me embarrassed.
In my memory I heard the oh so tinny song play over and over. But the colorful boat
probably only played it’s theme song once or twice, “On the good ship lollipop it’s a sweet trip to
the candy shop where bonbons play—on the sunny feet of peppermint bay.”
My story was classic Withon. I remembered things I couldn’t have, forgot things I shouldn’t
have, and replayed the wrong song, the wrong way for 30 years. Memories come with things you
can’t explain. It’s where you were standing. Try to remember.
In the day, there were no CD’s, no Sony walkmans, no stereos, no tape decks, no reel to
reels—that weighed less than seventy kilos, no continuously running tapes, no instant rewind—
Nothing digital, you had to do everything by hand.
What I didn’t know about the day, was, there was this bunch of yahoos from South Philly,
with a 45 of Shirley Temple, and a cheap record player, wired to two speakers nailed to a flag
pole. Whenever the ‘Captain’ saw a family heading for the little tug boat that could, he’d turn the
play switch, and Ku-scheuw, the needle would drag on the plastic record, slide into its 1st groove,
and a low swooping wuhh sound would begin, as the record got up to speed, approximately 45
revolutions per minute, plus or minus five.
It played literally: Withon the good ship lollipop, it’s a sweet trip…That wasn’t even my
theme song. Mine was the bassoon of the five-membered quartet; Zippity do da, zippity yay; the
French horn from the hunt for red foxes; the toot of the train. I was in the race of my life and
hung over the deck to listen for someone else’s starter pistol.
It began to come back to me. The pretty day, the pink dress. It was a sad day—they all were.
Clarke and I complained bitterly—our day was ruined, the boat we were on was a sinker and a
stinker, it smelled like oil; dad was too cheap, and mom was no fun. Her depression had set-in,
and his cancer was eating holes in his lungs.
Claire cried because she wanted a balloon. I wanted to go on the other boat and be happy.
The sunny beach of peppermint bay was calling me, and I was covered in goose grease—ready to
jump. But…with pockets full of rocks. Even if I tried to swim to the other ship I’d probably
drown. Plus, I was too slippery to pull on board. As prepared as I was to jump ship, I was
already too heavy.
I never told the truth about my cheap-crazy parents. I wanted a dad with big floppy red shoes
who didn’t cough blood and a mother like Mrs. Temple who would sing along with her daughter,
or son whichever the case may be, instead of mine, who sang songs that weren’t songs, stayed in
bed all day, and looked like she hadn’t slept for a week.
 It occurred to me as I sat in the hospital motionless from brain trauma, that there was no
peppermint bay. In this world you had to get thrown out on your ear and then land the best job in
the world. Your life had to have meaning; your words have to ring true or you might as well be
mute. If you think you can just deftly go where no man has gone before on a heckle of clichés
your wrong, as wrong, as warned can be.
Most clichés come from Shakespeare, and about 200 other people. If he knew you were using
them he’d run you threw. He wasn’t great because of this tripe; he didn’t live so you could lark
about. He lived because he was great and you couldn’t touch him.

Billy fell off the chair in occupational therapy, caught his lip on the seat as he tried to get back
up—by himself. Then thought the swollen lip probably made him look sexy.

4-1-04 Language discovery

Billy can’t say his own name. Fa says automatic language is a totally different center. That
center is down, the repetition center is down, the sing song center is down, the self protection
center down, anger center, scream center, down down down. What’s the point in screaming, no
one’s listening—it’s here. The testing gets more and more horrific, then Fa has his own
brainstorm. Billy's gentle side! He has one. From where? That’s highly evolved. His language
is like a blind man’s sight. Inferred. His tone is perfect pitch.
Fa reads about the face recognition center, which is a snap-judgment center attached to the
optical cortices. He reads that blind people often react with fear to images of angry faces even
though they can’t see them. It is so critical to our survival as human beings, to know who is
friendly and who isn’t, that we have a special center for the instant-processing of that
information. That center is not part of the visual cortex, per se, it’s not a window, it’s more like a
police bulletin board—a soft green blank wall. But, put up a ‘wanted’ picture and for a second
the green is gone. Is Billy able to react to the meaning of what you say without understanding
any of the words? A flash. He can’t say the words because he never heard them right? The
words never registered? His immediate language center is down. What the hell language center
is he using!!!!
Fa wonders: Is Billy using the one that will get him a patron? The ‘reach all the way in’
center? Is this the ‘my folks aren’t home’ center, or the ‘end of the world, last man on Earth’
center? Is this is the one that would get him layed on Jupiter? Fa proposes to himself: This must
be the ‘everything to everyone’ center. How come I’m the only one who gets it? He’s a small
man who’s taken desire way too far—He’s just like me!
The community at large is the universe—all we know. That’s this center. It is the center
seeking purpose in the broadest context—not in the hands, feet, skin, human context that we think
of sex in.
The meaning of sex is a search for purpose…Look, I have a baby, the baby has purpose; the
sex I had, had purpose—the baby. I have a baby, the baby grows up, the baby doesn’t have sex—
the sex I had, had no purpose. I say, it had an unknown purpose. We look for purpose to attach it
to fun, to wealth building, sociable good luck, good-idea sharing—saving, reproducing, helping,
fixing, watering—all community-based reasons. But if the sex wasn’t much fun, and the baby
dies, it loses purpose—except as theory: You did the best you could do, it didn’t turn out, you
were stopped, but the community isn’t weakened. Fa got too close to Billy. He couldn’t get
away. It was already too late.
Fa locks himself in his room and won’t come out. Is he or isn’t he going to go crazy? One
day he’s found on the floor. The next day he walks into Billy’s room on top of the world—offers
Billy everything he owns and more! To work with him privately. Fa has ‘brushes.’ Are they
paint brushes or archeology tools? Billy started falling in public.
 This is the beginning of the argument with God.

I wish nothing else mattered Part I

It suited me to be free, open—expansive. Really. I loved with all my heart—imprudently. I saw
shapes in clouds and shapes in movement and shapes within shapes. I was not so much lost as—
unrecoverable.
So strange, love. When it boarded the masted ships and departed, I was Indian in my desolation
and grief. I wished I’d never been found at all.
The whole thing was so pitched and peaked it suited not only my fame, but my formality as well.

Part II
I’m the only man I know, who can be elbowed in the face, and not wake up.
She would apologize for nothing. “Honey. Oh, I’m sorry,” was all I heard, and it made me
smile. I’d roll over and we’d book gracefully. Arms, legs, her back, my back, my side, her
center, my chest, her thighs.
We made love in nothing at all. Bending S’s. Enlightened Y’s.
She woke me, “Oh honey, I’m so sorry.”
I never felt a thing. “I love you and it makes me impervious.” I was asleep almost
immediately.
“To pain?…Impervious to pain? You’re sweet…honey?” Then tapping me awake,
unsatisfied with my silence, she’d say, “You’re so sweet.”
“You are too.” I said, and went off to sleep again.
When I was a young boy, I said, and I believed—at times, I had a magic shield…a…a force-
field around me. Turns out I did. But, It didn’t keep me from mixing up the parts.

Crap attic
Every few weeks I’d be transported down to grand rounds and the stymied linguistic profilers
would ask me questions. Fa would explain my answers and they tried to discover fluent aphasia:
a mixed-up nonsense language—to make Fa look stupid.
There was no predictor or precedent for what I was going to say. Often times provocative,
frequently a conversation stopper. All we knew, or so they told me afterwards, was that this was
neither of the two main types of aphasia: fluent or non-fluent. It wasn’t any of the rare aphasias.
It wasn’t typical of any known language-motor difficulty. My movements were as ineffective as
a baby bird’s—everything else was completely unexpected. I learned more about all the things I
couldn’t do right, while I was in the hospital learning to talk and trying to walk, than in all the
years I spent in school.
One day, in an effort to draw a sharp comparison between my problem and the more typical
speech, language, and motor problems that other people experience, Fa brought a very nice young
woman to rounds with us. I believe was her name was Carmelita, though people frequently don’t
use their real names in these situations. She told me that flavored standing beans were helping
her qualify gummy bears for participatory lunches.
Apparently we were both hungry.
When I was asked to read, I had no trouble reading quietly to myself, though I found
numerous mistakes in syntax, structure, word choice and coherence, not to mention errors in logic
strewn about haphazardly. Reading aloud caused a commotion that Fa said came from the fact
that I read word for word, as if they were figures in a column, with no apparent understanding of
the words and how they were strung together. This aroused a torpid glacial mysophobia (fear of
uncleanliness) and proved to be a taedium vitae, which threatened to empty the three-quarter-
empty hall—it was too boring, even for scientists.
All I could say about that was, “There’s an ‘N ‘ in column.” Fa seemed to understand—a lot
of things that start out well, and hold up okay, end in nonsense.
It was amazing to me how much a group of similarly educated people could differ, but as I
would come in and out of my trance I realized that if something is absolute, and undeniably true
under all possible contingencies—that it could not be true. That for something to be true and
provable it must be falsifiable, at least marginally, other wise time stops and the game’s over.
What is is. And when just as suddenly it isn’t, it isn’t. If you were in control, well, if you were
ever in control we would have stopped at Bambi.
One of the Linguistic Neurologists, or Neuro-Linguists, or whatever…the one that you’d have
thought I rolled in an alley just prior to our first meeting, Dr. Rood, made a strong argument for
seeing my language difficulty as a direct result, and therefore arising from the fact that I heard all
language in just such a disconnected way—that for me the words I heard were being received like
long lists, and this was how I formulated my responses. Either with cool, dispassionate
disinterest, as if someone just read me a list of numbers with a total figure at the end, which I
could agree with. Or with an angry apoplectic diatribe, if I couldn’t. Which was pretty much
what happened when I tried to express my opinion, my self.
This was greeted with angry apoplectic diatribes by many of the attendees, while I lay there,
figuratively, counting my toes, but also the ratio of lights to light switches in the big oak-paneled,
almost empty, lecture hall. This, for me, was a measure of how important control was to the
people who spent time in rooms like these—and a distraction I found enlightening. Everyone’s
shoes were tied, no loafers. Rood had a foot dysplasia.
I thought maybe he was right, but no one asked me, and, the general consensus was that he
was so far out of his league he needed, and therefore should be given, extra time to go off and
study with a Neuropsychologist, Neuroanatomologist, Analytical-psycho pathologist, or
Psycholinguist, then, he could come back and try again. Dr. Shor thought.
I had a disorder of perception. Disorders of perception are referred to as agnosias. Agnosias
affect the patient’s ability to comprehend all types of sensory input. Examples of agnosias
include astereognosia, finger agnosia, auditory agnosia, visual object agnosia, and prosopagnosia
(inability to recognize people by their faces). I thought that was interesting—people were starting
to look alike, familiar. I perceived that as normal.
Most of my disorders had to do with my parietal lobes, but I had disorders all over my brain.
My cortex was consolidating memory but my hypothalamus was putting me to sleep. I learned
that the human brain possesses a property called completion, in which a partially degraded image
is reconstructed into a whole one—I remembered everything except being asleep.

F. Gage, railroad worker, 1848

Injury: The Ignition of dynamite jammed a pole behind the subject’s left eye, and out the
frontal right lobe of his skull. After the injury, he experienced a change of behavior, becoming
vulgar and extravagant. He couldn’t stick with tasks. This is the first historical example
correlating parts of brain with thinking, specific behaviors, and emotions. I had a model railroad
set once that was in F Gauge—or was is HO?
 The study of the brain was fascinating, so fascinating, in fact, I could completely understand
why these men would want to dedicate their lives to its study. It didn’t, however, explain how
they could put me to sleep in less than 15 seconds.
These adventurers, pioneers, put me into a kind of a trance. I discovered on my own that if I
tried, and to the extent that I tried, to make sense when I replied to questions the answers came
out angry, often even abusively so…but if I just let the responses happen unconsciously, I could
be ten times more expressive and more profound—thus building Fa’s case—that this was
something new. Not a language problem—a language porthole.
I was so tranquil, as I’ve said, hypnotized, after these sessions, I would reminisce for hours
about my life, how I got here, and the secret to my success. It went dink dink dink.
H, the melancholia was utterly hypnotic, orbited me and called forth a kind of symmetrical
sparticle of joyful reminiscence; I couldn’t move, talk, interrupt, or care less.

Natalie
Natalie believed in all that new age stuff. She implied, thru her sing-song oratory regarding
the deer and antelope of this world, that everywhere you go is home, and that all that clamorous
stampeding is really play. I never actually met Natalie in the real sense of the word; when I came
out of the coma-not-coma, that lasted three weeks and felt like one day, she was just there and I
already knew her because she had been there for a long time. She was the one who changed the
channel to the Golden Girls when I was relaxing watching Flipper. She was the one who put my
lunch tray in front of me and made off with my peaches because she said I choked on them once,
and scared her to death. But she was still alive, and I never got anything to replace the peaches.
She had an excuse for everything and whatever she didn’t have an excuse for she had a reason
for. Even her outfits—she’d say, “Oh I just wore this because it gets so hot in here, I have to
wear layers.”
Well who asked her! I never remembered asking anything, but then in those early days I was
frequently shocked by the way I was perceived generally, and surprised at how my attempts to
joke were taken with that strange combination of effrontery and lassitude, by a curvaceous world
intent on bending me in half.
Maybe I once laughed at the sweater, the one that rides up on her like a cowboy, and nearly
scared her to death, and now she has to explain everything she wears. I don’t know.
I do know that we had a history, and I guess I knew when it started—in the beginning. It just
didn’t feel shared; it felt made up.
Natalie was too genuine to make things up. She wasn’t a fake. She was a Toulouse Lautrec,
but a real one. She brought her kids in to visit me and coached each one not to get upset at
anything I said: ‘Really, I was… A very nice guy.’ I felt like Cabrini Green, the infamous
‘Projects’ in Chicago: where poor blacks were housed in the 60’s and 70’s. Actually very
nice…if…you don’t stay too long, aren’t easily offended, and believe everything grown-ups tell
you, about things they know nothing about.
I felt like mom’s new project when the kids were around—and oddly appetent at the chance to
fuck them up, in a particularly irrevocable way. I think that came from spending so many years
with relatives.
She was a work of art, a food thief, and the one who changed the channel to The Afternoon
Movie when Flipper hadn’t been fed since capturing the banana boat smugglers. Yeah, I guess I
loved her. She made me smile, and I didn’t have to try.

The Impossible Dream

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
 To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where
the brave dare not go

To right the un rightable wrong

To be better far than you are
To try when your arms are too weary
The reach the unreachable star

This is my quest, to follow that star

No matter how hopeless,
No matter how far
To be willing to give,
When there's no more to give
To be willing to die so that honor
and justice may live

And I know if I'll only be true

To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest

And the world would be better for this

That one man scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star.

When Sophia Loren sang to dremm the impossible dremm, Natalie’s the one who sat heavy
and dumbstruck on the bed, sending spikes of pain into my broken ribs, twisting the spikes as she
flounced to get a better purchase on the flimsy mattress that she tucked under her like it was the
bunch in her skirt.
Yes, Sophia Loren can sing, but so can Flipper! Dream your own impossible dream. I tried
to say, ‘I’m in pain—where’s Flipper?’ But all she heard was, “Tango-delta.”
“Shh, please don’t sing; this is the good part. You should be listening to this.”
To run pure and chased from afar; to roll when you elbows are broken; to swell when it hurts
to get hard…this is my quest—to land on a star no matter how hopeless no matter how
hot….To…r-e-a-c-h…the un-reach-able… s—p—o—t.
I knew she’d over-come interference, before I ever knew her name. I heard her anger forecast,
before I realized she didn’t believe in bad weather. When she was upset she’d come in for the
kill; cantilevering her broad face down to my exact level, which was mighty low apparently;
she’d get right in my face with her big tits and her Zorba smile…
“You realize, William Hudson, you yelled ‘tango tango tango’ all thru that beautiful song?
Now you have to sing it with me.”
She stopped tape, rewound, hit pause, then more rewind, then she got a minute or two of blue
screen while we both stared fixedly ahead—wondering why blue? At least, I wondered why blue,
she probably wondered ‘how can I keep the blue and hear Sophia sing.’ Her ineptness had no
limits, and I often sent her home with a shake of my head and a muttered warning to all those
hapless pedestrians and fellow drivers that had no idea what the end of visiting hours had un-
loosed. Loosened, unleashed…whatever. I hoped no one under 12 got killed.
“Okay…to dream…come on, you wanted to ruin it…now you have to make it up to
me….we’ll do bad, bad things afterwards. Come on.”
I managed a wispy “duh” sound, but that wasn’t even on key, on the beat, or in tune.
“We’ll do bad, bad things.” she repeated, with a devious, extra-ocular smile.
‘You temptress!’ Came out: “Nero…violins…Rome.”
She had stopped asking “What?” a long time ago, but this she couldn’t understand, and just
stared at me.
“Near violence roams?” she asked. “You mean nearby?” and she put her hand on my thigh.
 I stared at her and prayed the interruption prayer—from the re-laxation primer. The ancient,
deep, Tantric, Padma-sam-bhava. The neck-dancing shibboleth: “I’m Ok, You’re here.” Maybe
I’ll get lucky.
She bent forward and touched me; I had never been happier to be in a hospital gown.
‘Well,’ came out: “cubby.” She took it for ‘come here.’ Well that’s how they say it in
Philadelphia. City of love.

The nurses, Ida for one, always wore gloves before they touched me. This, I think, gave
Natalie the idea that I was polluted, infectious, and they were bound by ethical considerations not
to out me. But she was bright enough to take a hint, and put gloves everywhere, on her own
authority, which was presumptive and heady.
“We have to watch it again then”
‘Oh, cripes!’ the tape again… “My lips are swollen and wet.”
Natalie rewinds the tape: clink, sput, shutta shutta, rewind, fit, click, pause, go, flicker … Miss
Loren again.
‘Oh,’ came out: “Kareeoke!”
To grasp when your hand is still broken; to list when your load is on wheels…
To wake me up wary and launch me whatever the deal. And I know that it’s always the case,
undue time has been given to chase…
This is my quest...to rise from this bed…with The Words That I Know That I Know That Have
To Be Said…. “Toreachthe unreachable.”
“That’s very good Billy. Oh, you’re crying.”
She sat by me, and held my hand. I nodded Yes to every question, or tried to.
“You have a nice voice, but I couldn’t understand the words, it wasn’t polish was it?”
‘Third grade!’ I tried to say but it came out: “first date.” The comment—the punch line about
what’s long and hard on a man from Poland. She didn’t get it. Or did she?

“I’m Sara! I’m Sara,” subconsciously borrowing another line from The little Princess. She
was making me hard—I thought that was the whole idea. She removed my pain.
Shirley Temple must have wormed her way into my brain years ago, I never think of her, yet I
was completely fluent in Temple Short Hand, also known as Temperalis Antedotus Minor.
To reach the unreachable “crown.” I was aghast at my templar fluency. I spoke fluent
Shirley, and I could translate too. I was so keyed up by my new talent I fell right to sleep
headache and all, with Natalie dancing merrily around the one subject that could awaken me. I
realized in my sleep that my former relations with women were mere gay-rambles, bumblings,
compared to this feeling I had for Natalie. Imagine how I’d feel if she’d been traveling just a
little bit slower when we met?
She had the enviable position of being encouraged to help ‘others,’ and be help’s major
beneficiary at the same time. Somehow or other her status with regard to consequences was not
only enviable, but cherished and, in the not so distant future, reserved only for the rich and the
retarded (slowed down, or delayed).
I knew for a fact, she’d had a tough time with her ex husband. Maybe she did know
something about suffering after all.
One day melted so seamlessly into the next for me, when I was with her, that I never
wondered what had happened. All those doey unpredictable peaks and valleys got pinched
together, and somehow what I always thought were going to be cookies turned out to be a whole
pie.
What started out as a needless interruption began to seem like the real thing. I was hooked on
girlie meats, girlie oysters, tiny, dainty fish rolls, and girlie balsamic vinegar on my croutons—
with a splash of French wine— provincial yet arabesque. I wanted sex with her so bad I
practically tasted it. Earthy. I was no acrobat but I could hop the horse.
 “If this is your idea of violence,” she said, “I love it.”
I tried to remember what violins had to do with it; I might need to know someday. Getting her
to this point was terrific. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a short-cut tho. What if we
were in a hurry? There’s no word in English: The secret to love making is in the terrior. As the
French vintners say, the secret of the wine is in the terrior (pronounced: terl-wa`)-—-soil/grape,
environment/cosmology/interface thing.
Never, never change
Keep…
That breathless charm
Won’t you please arrange it cause
I love you.
(J. Kern, D. Fields/ Frank Sinatra version)
Natalie was like supper at the Four Seasons; she came with everything. Lap top, décolletage,
condoms, cigarettes, air freshener, and Ester-C Body Lotion, which I think was actually making
my dick bigger—between erections. Of course, when she left the condom on for 24 hours I had
quite a bit of explaining to do, which went something like this: though in those days what I tried
to say, what I thought I said, and what I actually said, were three different things. Remembering
a conversation was daunting and I think now, probably built-up my memory to what it is today,
sans auto-ridicule. Apponinaire: effortlessly cleistogamous (Cleistogamy: the production of non-
opening self-pollinating flowers).
“Dude what the hell is this?”
“If I had a nickel for every time.”
“Dude, we’d have 5 cents between us.”
“Heads or tails? You call.”
“Dude, you’re getting more than me!”
Natalie can be so forgetful. Oh, look at that. “To reach.”
“Dude you can’t reach it, can you?”
“The inevitable stuff.”
“I got your back dude, here goes.”
“As ugh!”
He took the condom off, and I felt relieved.
“As tho`.”
“Dude…”

Sometimes I can’t speak

Sometimes I get things out of order

The world is too beautiful. You must wait. You’ll see what I mean. Sometimes I cannot speak
but I have something to say—an answer to give, a question to ask, a report of some kind. Please
wait, you’ll see what I mean. It won’t slow you down. I don’t love too much; I think I made it
very clear in what I’ve said already; I don’t love enough.

Ferraj Bonham Jarhad collapses

This is Fa thinking, right after the meeting, when Billy said ‘Eureka’:
He, Billy, tries to say what he thinks he means to say—what he thinks. But what comes out is
completely incomprehensible except to the person it was intended for, the person who gets its
meaning. And it’s pitched to their level of understanding—their exact level of understanding.
For some reason not everyone hears the same thing I hear.
Does he have a rulebook? How does he know that sand rhyming with hand has something to
do with their side-by-side cognitive dissonance? And how can that cognitive dissonance mean
anything at all, let alone exactly what he means it to? Hand/sand doesn’t mean anything. Sand in
my hand doesn’t mean ‘No,’ it’s just sand!

For a time
For a time, Fa was abstracted into a ‘study of himself,’ resembled Rodin’s Thinker—with bad
clothes. He artfully plundered his own library, and that of his wife and family looking for just the
right books, articles, short stories—words, to fill my head so we could coalesce more fully—
communicate. Unfortunately, when Fa wasn’t thinking he looked like shit.
He ate crumbs off my plate and read Faulkner with a southern accent. He was planning to
write a book on my freak talk. A book I was going to have to author. This was way too
premature; he didn’t have a book, he had a car commercial: three fathers, two mothers, six
orphans, a bang at the beginning, no end and then another beginning.
He was so likable though, I would almost write a book for him, but not quite.
“Billing!”
“What?”
“Give Billing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You understand everything else! I have a happy plate and parmesan coming…you knew
what that meant.”
His slow happy smile got on my nerves, and when I found out what he was making per lecture
I poured crumbs on my clothes.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m a you do!”
I was just about to call Mei, to take me home, when he agreed.
“I’ll take care of you, don’t you worry.”
“I have friends in Point Spread.” I said.
to which he countered, “Never heard of it.”
“I have friends there to.”
My speech still scared people, no one appreciated my honesty, and I had few friends.
But if he thought he could write a book about how fucked up I was, he was sadly mistaken. If
anyone’s gonna write that book, it’s gonna be me. And…and I have a theme. I’ll tell ‘em how I
eat like a pig and never gain a ounce—that’s how you write a book! No, but he makes me so
mad. I know he just wants to make a quick buck, and I told him so: “…Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,
fuck, no money!”
“You’ll get better.”
‘Good, let’s write that chapter first!’ I yelled: “You know, you know, you know, you know,
you know!” Then I made the universal sign for ‘put up or shut up,’ tapping my finger to the
center of my open palm in rapidity, with the glare. My speech was out of control as per usual.
Fa’s re-reading of history thru the thin disguise of copyrighted fiction scared me and put
forgetting at the top of a menu I was afraid to order from. One of us was going crazy.

He insisted that Fa describe works of art with as much perspective as possible, provide visual
aids, and background information. He wanted to see what they were talking about. All he got
were the wind driven sands of the cover artist, N.C. Wyeth, to stare at, as Fa held him up to offer
something else. These purveyors of truth were scribbling on his chalkboard, dialing watermarks
onto his etch a sketch and refusing-forgetting to log out, so he couldn’t go back to his ever
popular, musically inspired, non-musical screen saver. ‘Irreconcilable you.’ A pictogram of
memories that light the corners of nothing.
Someone told me that the first English expression they ever learned was: “What are you doing
man, don’t you see the cops in the corner?”

Life’s not fair

Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone—Fire and Rain, James Taylor

There was deep injustice being served up. His hard drive was being filled in such a way that
it made his memories as implausible as his dreams. Maybe what they said was true. A big piece
of dandruff fell into his eye and I realized somebody had better wash his hair. I was here and
there. He fell asleep with the TV on, and dreamed:
He remembered the day, back in Preacherton Arkansas, on the border of the great filmy
swamp that went by a long and, doubtlessly, hyphenated Indian-name, as he rolled into town to
catch badgers. He remembers the squeal of brakes as his jeep took the last turn into town. The
people all crowded around and said, “gee.” A little Indian kid whistled thru the gap in his front
teeth. Billy’s presence was remarked upon by everyone, and still brought to bear, not a single
fact to indicate what he was doing there, except that badgers were living and dying in great
numbers and endangering all similarly devised lofts, mounds or hillocks as this one, continually
alluded to, and full of crocodile eggs.
Billy remembered running along a bog as the steam rose effortlessly in the chilly moist air. As
far from causation as he’d ever hoped to be—his shoes caught on branches and he fell damsel-
like into a roiling frothy campsite. His khakis were bunching up and his arms throbbed. He
developed a jaw-aching Aussie accent and he bit the inside of his cheek when he said words like
‘Calamity Jane.’ Note to self: don’t say Calamity Jane.
This one thing was becoming clear: his home was taken over by slow creeping mud, and
incuriously transformed him into a Crocodile Hunter. If only he had a gun. The ‘campsite’ was a
terrestrial lair for reptiles of Spengleresque rectitude. Billy’s—and his Major Domo, Jim
Crikey’s, chief concern became suddenly to trade a crocodile stampede for a badger-free zone in
Arkansas. That was the only way to get his job back.
Nature had run smack up against a wall and it made both of them ill. Billy was considering
changing his name. Anything even close to calmity would do—when he suddenly slipped on a
badger tail not attached to a badger. Forcing him and his Domo into hopeless imitative barking to
facilitate a badger round up—in order to bring badgers round, thereby averting a panic—which
ended in a whopper of a nose bleed.
In the literal German, Billy was kinder. Suddenly simple things mattered. He became
innocent in his frustration, and unknowing of how chaste and utterly virginal he had become.
Some things are not possible in this world—that was not one of them.
He was not okay with this; his hard drive was being filled by commercial after commercial
and he had taken to spending large portions of the afternoon thinking up new names for cars and
light trucks. The Carnegie—It just keeps giving. Carnegie Haul—Where you want to be…but
how to get there. The Pang—This one you absolutely hafta have. The NAFTA—progress,
purpose, cornering. The Dali Lama—enough said. The Sinatra—strangers at first si-ight. The
Judy—Why then, oh why can’t I?

Occupational Therapy
 When he should have been pasting photographs in an album right side up, Billy was fingering
his crotch with sticky hands and then dropping glitter everywhere. The thing about glitter he
didn’t know, was how easy it was to disregard.
Every stupid remark in therapy was followed by a vane attempt on his part to problem solve.
He thought perhaps a photo album with a built in turntable might be a good idea since so many
pictures were upside down or sideways and a perspective neutral picture book was bound to
appeal to everyone at the table. Ideas tumbled out, he was Fee (freed, without the expensive r&d).
Hoards invading his unglued space, and making sense out of his crazy word’s world would
have been appreciated by almost everyone, but not Billy. This was very much his crazy world,
and he didn’t want anyone playing unauthorized word-search with it. In his dictionary yait was a
word, it meant applying new meanings to new words for the purpose of shortening the game and
achieving a desirable outcome. Yait yaiting yaited: I came, I saw, I won, now go. Use it in a
sentence: If you don’t like it, yait it.
Billy’s desire to be unmarked was neither new (unknown) or expedient (beneficial), and flew
directly in the face of every problem he had, since each was an invitation to be entered, touted or
scratched. The therapists’ job was to prod—dig-in his or her heels if necessary, and peer into the
abyss of machinelessness where cogs were supposed to be.

As Late
Fa paces the room, in deep concentration. ‘Eureka’ he whispers. Eureka, means I’ve found
it.
He knows something, and now I know something, but what? Words change the world, but just
for a second, and then the world changes back.
Fa stands stock-still, “He’s got perfect pitch!” and then he collapses into a heap.
Second time in a week they found him on the floor.
As they wheeled Fa to the MRI scanner, he mumbled ‘perfect pitch, perfect pitch.’
Patrone said “Thanks” and continued whistling Beethoven’s Ode to Joy—just louder. They
slammed into the doors that flew apart too slowly for his liking. His friend’s friend was sick.
No one thought the problem so easily solved. They were kicking themselves for not having
seen it. They should have guessed, they had scanned Billy dozens of times looking for the
answer but they had never scanned his doctor. Fa was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a ‘ring
enhancing lesion’ as the MRI report stated. Could that be the answer to Billy’s odd speech? No
one could fully appreciate it unless they had something wrong with them? A huge collective sigh
of relief struck reverberating chords all over the second floor Doctor’s offices. That was a close
one. “We almost went to print with this,” Doctor Ramchandrolittianni said. It came as a huge
relief. They thought all along Billy didn’t know anything; was not special; had no new key to any
pathway; or anything but dumb luck. “And we were right!”
And they were right! but there was that little squeegy of doubt that wouldn’t go away;
unfortunately Fa’s scribblings made little sense even to him, and the circumstances of his
revelations coming in flashes as they had, made him doubt their veracity and allowed him to save
face, and take his wife up on her offer, her quest, to keep him away from his own tilting-
windmill: this crazy man. Fa’s theory about language acquisition went essentially unfinished.
One of his life themes just won out—Creating babies together is everything.
He had done it all, in order to understand what real meaning was really about, and to deny it
when he saw it, here, right here, and right now, with his own wife, made no sense. What he
understood about meaning was nothing—it means what it means now—if not now, then when?
In the end, it made more sense to just follow in his father’s footsteps.
 To search for hope as you abandon hope, level by level, layer by layer—to make one’s life a
joke while one seeks some higher level of understanding seems ridiculous. “Let someone else
deal with this,” he said to his wife’s grateful smile, and oh so pouty lips.
She, Ananmayou, became pregnant, and in a few months they had their last baby—for a while,
she said…for a while. She needed meaning too. He made them so happy just by being. They
named him Yusef.
Billy was left to understand it was a mystery. His speech improved. Fa went on, as though
nothing happened, and he got all the sympathy in the world from his co-workers, which was
nice—but how could they know what it felt like to be on the verge of the unknown and immersed
in it at the same time? Billy went home and discovered that the problem of suspended animation
could be over come in two seconds. And lived to be 77. He became a theatre critc and bon
vivant. And in the end was known for his oft-quoted remark about, Alistias Soshun, the
incredibly popular dancing diva of the 2020’s: “What happened? everything was going so well?”
His books were read by an ever dwindling market and no one noticed when he stopped. Some
say he died with a smile on his face, some say he died laughing. Regarding the future, you never
can tell. Bang!

Beulah shows up with everything

When Billy met God, after ten minutes, God said, Well?
Billy was looking at pictures on the walls. God had his back turned. He was just marking papers.
God cleared his desk.
You know, you’re not allowed in here. He said.
Billy walked thru an open metal doorway. It looked like a safe, a vault. That’s odd.
Don’t open that. God said.
I didn’t, Billy replied.
God looked at Billy, somewhat at a loss. Went to sit back down in his chair, and landed on the
floor.
Were you going to ask me something. God said, without any hint that this was a question.
Billy looked at Him.
God stared back like an Eagle.
Billy was chewing gum, and kept chewing.
Are you…Do you ride…drive a car. God said.
Yes, Billy replied.
How’s that going. God said.
I’m not driving now, Billy replied, still abstracted by the pictures on the walls.
Pause.
Yes I know. God said, leaving no room for doubt.
God pushes a completely unnecessary button on his desk, blunting its bluntness.
Are you a good driver. God said.
No.
Are you lying to me. God said.
No.
Would you. God said.
Uh…
God pushes the button again. Beulah Bondi walks in and stares at Billy studiously.
Billy says, Well, no?
God says: Beulah…twelve minutes.
That’s a hundred or more, just this week, Beulah said.
Yes, Billy says to the former question that also didn’t go up at the end of the sentence.
You would. God said.
Not on purpose.
And...! God said, like far off thunder.
Beulah walks backward.
Is this an interview? Billy asked.
Eat this. God said.
What is it?
Poison. God said.
What would I eat it for?
Because I told you to. God said again.
You eat it, Billy said.
I ate already. God said.
Billy chewed slower.
It’s not poison to me. God said.
Beulah looks at her watch.
Billy watches her and then looks at the Renoir behind her, all orange, red, and yellow. He’s
transfixed by the Van Gogh, called Reaper in a Wheatfield. The sky is green.
Well. God says, What do you think of that.
Well, Billy said, What’s poison to one person might be peanuts to someone else.
I’m not some one! God booms.
Billy stares at Him, and holds his neck.
What are you doing. God says.
Holding my head on.
It’s permanently attached. God said, as he studied Billy from a million directions at once.
Billy begins to chew faster.
Are you the devil? Billy asks.
Twenty six minutes! Beulah rings out.
Well. God says, What does it matter.
God’s God, Billy says.
Beulah, get out.
I’m going to do what I do regardless, Billy decided, after about five minutes.
You are. God said. And it might have been a question, but Billy wasn’t sure.
I got here didn’t I?
You are just like this. God says and stares @ Billy.
Billy chews with intensity, and stares back.
This is how you are. God repeats.
Billy chews long and hard.
Simple things you don’t get. Impossible things are easy for you, God says.
I’ve been to sports bars that were harder to get into, Billy says.
What do you think you are. God said.
A regular person, Billy replied.
Since when! God booms loudly, laughing.
Beulah comes rushing in and hands Billy a little rubber box.
What is that. God says to Beulah.
A very special entity beyond all price.
No, the box.
Prop, Beulah opines.
How are you with props? God asks.
Never broke a door, Billy replies.
Give me that…Please. God says.
Billy hands him the box.
Beulah runs out of the office, almost squealing, like a little girl. Billy had handed the box directly
to God. That’d never happened before. God was stunned——Billy was sighted.
I hope you’re happy. He says, calling after her.
Billy looks out the window.
I hope you’re hap…what are you looking at. God says.
Whose house is that?
They’re all mine. God says.
But whose is that? Billy says, pointing to one in particular.
Yours.
Mine? Billy had a vision of the green sunset in a space set aside at the top of the stairs in his new
house. When it was there, he’d be free to come home. It was something he felt.
You are The Preposterous One. The Unprecedented. God said.
I am? Billy says.
If you’re not too busy.
Billy thought the universe would collapse, but it didn’t. He thought he would wake up in a nut
house, but he didn’t. He thought he must be about to die, but he wasn’t. He thought he’d wake
up, and everything’d be in color, but it already was. He thought he’d get dizzy, and he did.
Light-headed. Happy. He listened for a cracking sound… anything. But there was nothing, and
God was gone.

Miss Bondi come in here…please, God said into an archaic toggle-switch-wired-hefty-

communication-device.
Yes, God. Said with only a faint hint of sarcasm. BB
He stole a chocolate. G
Two! G
Two! she says, and counts the box a third time. He knows the rules? BB
He knows he has to apologize and give them back. G
But…BB
But he can’t give them back. G
Uh oh. Beulah says.
I ask myself. I strain to understand. Why would I ever need to ask a question. G
Beulah looks awkwardly around while God thinks out loud.
A thief! a thief…I sent him to…steal their sins, I mean souls…G
Oh, Beulah…what’s the word now, for sin. G
For sins? The word for sins…Uh...Selfish soul of selfish…selfishness…in… How would I
know? Why ask me? Why do you always think I know something about these things? What if I
came around re-naming things in your world, for no par… BB
Exactly…SELF! Of course!…He’s got to be a thief! G
But he’s unclean. BB
God stares at Beulah like a mountain.
Unclean! I thought he was an angel. How did he get in here? G
Is that a question? BB
Beulah, you know what I think… G
That the last time he tried to take away the sins of the world, the world just made more?
No. I was going to say, I think he’s not used to giving things back, because he has them for such
a short time—Before he can enjoy them, they’re stolen from him. G
Tisk, tisk, tisk, Beulah clicks. Evincing an ability to take anyone’s side.
Beulah!…that’s the story of…of…of…the… G
Of what? God, are you okay? BB
God is wandering thru Heaven on a tilt.
Of what? What? BB
The Middle Child! G
Oh God, No! Beulah screams, not knowing if that’s good or bad. BB
Beulah! God moved all the chips instantly to Billy’s end of the table. To the tables! G
Beulah walks in a circle, and tries to lift a heavy wooden table by herself, to turn it over.
God went from room to room and broke every table he could find, in half, until he was done. My
Son is not only a thief of very small things. He’s a middle child! G
Beulah and God dance a jig in the middle of God’s office.
God sits after fifteen minutes, to catch his breath. Beulah…he took two chocolates. God begins
to cry….I had almost given up hope. G
Beulah starts to cry, and sets down a still-wrapped chocolate next to the phone for ‘later.’
They’ll call him fictional. G
Beulah blows her nose. No they won’t, she says, and holds God’s hand. BB
They’ll say everything is a lie. In a few years they’ll say he never existed. G
No, no they won’t. I’m sure. Oh, God…BB
Beulah dabs her face and blows her nose… God? Who gets the candy? BB
He gets everything. He loves and he keeps. G
Oh. I thought they were for his siblings. BB
Not hardly. G
God stayed in his office, and Billy continued driving to a little farm near Fix-it-Ville.

Billy was becoming something else

His inability to begin actions only highlighted his short-term memory deficit. His inability to
use words clearly, enthralled so few people it was hardly worth mentioning. And tiring easily,
was the only respite from frustration so deep you could throw your wheelchair out the window
and crawl back to bed without irony.
This was the world Fa had entered. When doves cry. His low melodious voice was soon to
break the silence so long sought, as to seem unattainable. Yet renounced in the time it took him
to say his first three words. Fa leveled him with something he hadn’t seen since the gas line
incident of 1978—an honest man. Purple rain. Purple rain.
For the same equally long, revered, and gratingly monotonous time that Billy was afraid to
listen, he was also afraid to talk, afraid that he would say only what he had been taught to say,
unable to edit or bring perspective to answers.
Because of their unwholesome lack of probity, people rarely recognized his questions as
questions, and were only interested in deciphering his answers. It struck Billy one day, finally,
that what he said either-was-or-wasn’t what he thought, and what he thought either was or wasn’t
true, and what truth had to do with anything always did mystify him a little anyway, except as it
effected outcome directly…meaning: averted or caused base disapproval.
Most of what he heard was lies. So as long as he wasn’t inflammatory, everything’d be fine.
Unfortunately, he was inflammatory. “But he lived.” People learned to live with disappointment,
that was that—maybe he’d trip over a bag of gold coins someday.

A Crack was Forming

 I had to re-learn the word for ‘everything.’ Which came out “farmer’s market” or
“jurisprudence” or “MacGyver” or “everything else.” Fa told me that the language centers were
on the left side of the brain. Mine was, and so was almost everyone’s, but there’s a language
center all programmed and waiting to go, on the other side, and that new language is what I
learned…not like the first—not so scrupulous, but more bent …intended toward my inclination,
more Judy Garland and less Don Amice.

Words, John said in his gospel, the one divinely inspired in 70 A.D., right before he died, are
created by God. John, who according to his own account, 13:23, was lying with Jesus at his time
of trial and tribulation, spoke to God about it. John, who some have charged Leonardo DaVinci
with mis-casting in his famous depiction of the Last Supper, was not universally loved. John,
who was known, and knew himself as the one Jesus loved, The Beloved, said, ‘In the beginning
was the word.’ And therein lies my problem. That’s our trouble. We’re losing our words. “Here
and now” don’t mean anything when someone says they never done been there before, not once.
When, of course, they have.

Greek to me
It takes a brilliant mind to spend time wisely. A wise mind to spend time well, and a fool to notice that time is not passing at all. It’s later
than you think—

When you can’t love everyone, you don’t love yourself. It’s about potential, anyone in love
knows that. When you are surrounded by idiots as I’m sure you will be, at some point in your
life—you are in Idiot’s Heaven, where all good idiots go when asked to trust in the Lord and here,
hold this pee shooter…I’ll be right back. Likewise, when you’re in a pool of sloth, and enmity,
are you the free one? Or are you the barber of barbarousness: cutting, pulling, advocating the
clench, and presiding over nothing?
Be that as it may…we all love everything, all the time…sorry, but from here on out, it’s a given.
It is my Sine Qua Non (without which nothing). Leaning stick. While I’m on the subject: how
long does human trust last? Some say it walks shambling, frozen—over prepared. But, how
long? A bend in the road, 3 stars, an eclipse—that long isn’t long.

Gifts
Take action for the good before you are overtaken by stealth, perplexing adversity, corrupting prosperity, disability, dotage and sudden
death –The Quoran.

Gifts, where do they fall in this menagerie? I discovered when my 55 year old kindergarten
teacher fell in love with me that I had a particular gift…Thank you…not a problem…not for me,
that is. The ladies of the coffee klatch called me a heart-breaker, same year.
I had big brown soulful eyes that could melt steel and see around corners like a deer, and
eyelashes that drew people to me, like peppermint at a ‘how much I hate camels’ conference.
Fact of the matter is, my eyes got me in a lot of trouble, and I guess this is as good a point as any
to begin my story.

Rules
When I was five, before we moved; before dad died; I had many friends: Evee-loo, Denis,
Peder, Val, Muree, her sister Tarry, Dug, Lary, Joey Yurkis, always on his bike. Sara, Bob, Billy,
Daav, Ray, Kris, his brother Greg, who painted a stone I have to this day somewhere—Jimmy
and Denees, the bottom twins; Tim, the kid who wasn’t allowed outside; Jim who was also a
twin, but his brother died at birth; Keny, who liked our bunk-beds, our closet, and all the best
hiding places so much—when he had a Packard that we couldn’t even touch; Sindy, who loved
horses and thought she was one, for a time. Kathee, Evee-loo’s sister, who was always sitting on
the fence when we asked her to come out and play; Lafon, and Mushel, whose names I taught
everyone to pronounce in that ludicrously funny way that their mother had of calling them…La
faaaaaan—musheeeeeel, it broke everyone up, especially me, but it kind of hurt my throat so I
only did it 4 or 5 times in a row; it was hard to do without making your face and neck get red and
I was afraid their mom would see me do it, though I suspect now, she must have heard it—being
so loud and all; but you couldn’t do that imitation quietly; my friend Jon Dom lived on the corner,
but you couldn’t ever go thru backyards to get there, because you’d have to pass the part of
Swamp Road where there was that accident, and I couldn’t pass it without telling everyone—and
no one wanted to hear about an orange leg in the middle of the road anymore. There was Roben,
Marjee and the other Mushel. The second Mushel was called the other Mushel, or little Mushel.
She was the second, so someone had to name her. We would never name her Mushel Karder;
everyone knew everyone’s last name, but she was only four. Naming rules were complex,
sometimes; Tommy, was very young and believed everything. He got a letter from his
Grandmother once, addressed to Master Tommy—that was ridiculous. He wasn’t nearly old
enough. We had to knock him down a peg for that, and he was at the near bottom as it was.
Rules are rules, like if two people say the same thing at the same time you have to count to ten
and say coca~cola, unless you’re with a girl, and then you can skip six, because that’s not
cheating, if the girl skips six, that is cheating because boys invented that. If one person is a lot
older you say, “You owe me a coca cola now,” and laugh, no matter who counted the fastest—
and you might get a coke. There is no 7up rule, that’s completely made-up. Then there was Bob
who ate all different kinds of candy—you could put your whole hand in a bag of candy at his
house, and keep all that you pulled out. Nobody looked. His mom went shopping once and when
she came back, she asked me if I liked those orange peanut-shaped spongey candies; I thought
that was a silly question—of course! It’s candy! Like so many things about my early upbringing
you had to be there to really appreciate the quirky surprises, and fulfilled dreaminess of it.
I did imitations and built a series of forts starting with fort Ticonderoga at Peder’s house and
ending with Con Tiki in our backyard. I used to do imitations of Thurston Howell the third, and a
spectacular, show stopping imitation of my cousin Jimmy. For this I needed a prop, a pair of
scissors, which were hard to come by; all I did was put the handles of a pair of scissors in my
mouth and stretch them apart to make huge wide cheeks and then I’d say, “I don’t want to do this
anymore because you’re too…” fill in the blank. “Why? Because, that’s why.” But none of my
friends knew my cousin Jimmy, so there was little point to do him, except it made Clarke laugh,
which was reason enough for my haphazard dialectics.
Peder, or Nik I forget his name, the one who lived almost right at the end of the corn field,
who beat up Clarke in the side yard, behind where the Norman’s garage meets the fence, the one
Mrs. ReHoboth put up to keep forts and ‘dogs’ out. And then he beat me and Clarke up, but he
had to stop when I yelled at him to. I said his name to his face very clearly and added that I was
going to tell his father, who was an ex-Marine, but not an ex-tattooed Marine, that his son stole
like a gypsy beggar. Something made him stop the afternoon beatings, it probably was his dad
because it wasn’t mine. I always thought it was my oath.
I used to think words were powerful and could accomplish heroic deeds. Before all this I was
beginning to think they were nothing; what was everything was a friend or a primed audience.
People who could figure things out was important—not more important than people who believed
in magic, but close. People who asked questions were hideous when you had as much crap up
your sleeve as I did. Questions were timed-out on my watch, and who asked when they weren’t
sure? You’ll be sorry you did that. Kathee again, because she was the only one who changed
when sometimes her hair was long and sometimes it was not long. Everyone else stayed the
same, until, that is, they couldn’t help it. At the time I thought we were all staying the same, but
now I see that we were changing all the time and it was OK, which is what made it seem like no-
one and nothing was changing. But then of course, something changed which changed
everything all together. Tarry and Muree moved away. They might as well have died, and that’s
the truth. We never saw them again and when we started moving away ourselves, we stopped
thinking about visiting Cleartew, New Jersey, and if we did, it felt bad. It was later after that, that
dad died and Cleartew was the same as a coffin, both horrible words, both really terrible, but very
different. They were very full of change and full of emptiness. That was back in the 60’s when
nothing was full of emptiness, it was either full or empty, I swear. If it was full of emptiness it
was a joke, and it was someone else’s –read—some adults problem.
Back in those days we made a great and mystical faux pa, we would say “pacifically,” for
“specifically.” What made it wonderful and mystical was that we actually said what was really
true, and, which was why that time cannot be relived, and why we are so keen to repeat it. “I
went there pacifically to see her and ask her to tell me where she found the fishing pond and she
wouldn’t tell me, so we had to go find it for ourselves. She’s a liar.” If I had gone to ask her in
any other way it would have become, or could have become, an angry fight or perhaps a grudge
or a wedge, or a reason for taking sides which was always a bad thing, but I went to her
pacifically, and it made all the difference, it’s why those times continued, it’s why I want to go
back there; I think I wouldn’t want it so much if it hadn’t been so pacific. I feel so sorry
that…Sometimes now, specifically because I’m alone and have time to think, and come up
empty-handed.
Of course Sandy from the bottom of the street sometimes baby-sat, but she was nice and we
liked her. Even though we had to walk past Brets’ to get to her house and he was horrible and
had few friends and a big forehead, which needed a big cap. But he had a driveway with a slope,
and an American flag on a pole, which he knew how to take down, so I guess he had to be
particular about who his friends were. Some big deal he was.

Beginning
When I was five I used to openly kiss fondle and commit to memory the nipples and explore
the entire body, ass-up, of my best friend Tarry. I don’t know why, doesn’t matter. I also told
her I wanted to be a girl…seemed easier to be a girl, and that was as important a thing to me then
as it is now. Ease. You know, walking around with it.
My father died when I was just a kid, from something my Grandmother Bennett referred to as
‘behavior issues,’ whatever that is. My father never liked her anyway, so she could keep her
behavior and live with it or without it, which ever would be worse. My brother and I became too
much to handle I guess. And for nine years we went from relative to relative always one step
ahead of the law, causing some horrific problem until, of course, we ran out of relatives.
My father’s mother, “grandmother,” as we knew her, was a fur-sales-lady at Lippmans and we
had to live for a year with the smell of fur cleaner which she used un-sparingly in the basement of
the brownstone that she and my uncle Cherry lived in. A cockroach infested place with back
exits and rooms hidden behind bookshelves full of paint cans, books, jars of paper clips, some
oval some round, square, triangular, some with springs, plastic, metal, every kind of clip and
every other sort or type of thing. And everywhere, old shoes…not the apartment on the third
floor, the basement.

11-30-03 Ballast. As I lay asleep and drowsily woke, I found that scar again and smoothed its
tender edges. Ingrid came in that night, she was luminescent, working the midnight shift…so
much energy. I wondered how she tamped it down when the lights were on. During the day she
looked like everyone else.…
 The lack of caring doesn’t make you thoughtless any more than too much caring makes you
necessarily diligent. A lack of opportunity won’t make you poor or keep you poor, any more than
a surplus will make you rich, it’s what you do with the opportunities, idiot. Experiencing a lack
of fear doesn’t make you fearless, it probably means you live a boring life. Lack of sex, doesn’t
make you celibate, a commitment does. And too much sex is as likely to make you a sex addict,
as it is to make you talkative. If you like it, you like it; if you’ve actually had great sex, there
isn’t that much to say. There are those for whom sex is like a balloon, and having it, makes them
want to expel huge drafts of air, thru pinching and un-pinching their vocal cords or pop it, all at
once, releasing that secret they’ve been keeping, catapult-like and feathery, just-for-you. Lack of
sex might send you on a quest, but great sex doesn’t cancel plans, or make any story worth
telling. I was an addict. I was an addict from lack of sex, made pauper by opportunity.

Lake Knockyouoffyourass
The evening is a harmony or chorus in which all take part, to which each instrument in the orchestra contributes his share. You would
see there, plenty of respectable people who have come in search of diversion, for which they pay as they pay for the pleasures of the
theatre, or of gluttony, or they come (hither) as to some garret where they cheapen poignant regrets for three months to come. —Honore
de Balzac, The Magic Skin. 1823

Clarke and I didn’t travel as much as you might think, but we did get around, and we did see
the world, and Clarke was a wiz at just about everything and he even held down a few jobs and
just as many titles. He was a croupier, an architect, a licensed veterinarian, and an artist in
residence, also a part time broadcaster. He used to tell me the news and update the sports and
weather almost every night. I learned a lot about the latest Hollywood gossip but nothing about
why the girls don’t tease stupid people and why we couldn’t just join them. We missed our sister
Claire, and once she came to visit us I think that was in Samsonite, Georgia, but it could have
been Napier. She was a cute big boned girl with a huge unruly curl of hair that couldn’t be
tamed, the hair, not the girl, and she was very sweet but too girlie for Clarke and me. She kept
declining offers of mud pies or grasshoppers, no matter how high they could jump and she
refused totally to smell my hand after I put it in the middle of the red-ant hill which left a strange
and exhilarating odor behind, though it was a little sickening and made me feel like I knew what
the red ants were thinking, which (had dismemberment written all over it) was no good. What
they were up to was mostly how to kill things bigger than them. Well one day Auntie Felicity
took us and Uncle Ralph, who Clarke says wasn’t anybody’s uncle, up to Lake
Knockyouoffyourraft—Clarke’s other name for it. And the three of us got away from you know
who, and went off to eat fishy tuna fish and I went to look for an ant colony or a frog that might
like tuna, celery, mayonnaise or bread, though I ended up eating the bread. I wasn’t that
generous or curious. We had a great day and I still remember it. We followed the lake around to
the little river that fed it, and Clarke told us it would probably be good for rafting or tubing, and
that was no doubt how the lake got its name...from Knockyouoffyourraft River. Well the history
of damming was spilled out by my older brother, and my younger sister was fascinated and
couldn’t take her eyes off Clarke so I pushed her in the water and then she looked like she was
going to cry so I gave her my sandwich which she threw to the fishes piece by piece, even though
I wanted to. She was wet but I was now the middle child and she’d dry off (to paraphrase
Churchill). Being mediary, I was forced to take sides one at a time. As I saw it, I got only what I
could deserve. We started throwing the ‘prehistoric bedrock’ from the ‘skirt’ of the ‘man-made’
lake as, ‘I-always-liked-this-place’ said. ‘I always liked this place,’ had never been there before,
and was so totally on my nerves (the updated version). At one point I stood up after polishing a
rock with my thumbs for a long time and boasted I could throw this perfectly round and smooth,
palm-size rock into the lake and skim it on the tranquil, and reflective surface as many times as I
said. I announced that it would skip 14 times. Clarke and Claire rolled their eyes—but held their
breath just the same. With great ceremony and a few warm up swings, I hurled the rock into the
lake; it seemed like a no-brainer: everything was perfect that day, the lake, the rock—me and my
brother and sister together—even the boast. How could I lose? If I didn’t get it, it wouldn’t
change the day. I threw the rock and it skipped 9 times with us counting silently, at cross
purposes. But it kept going, 10-11-12-13, then it hit a fish or a tiny wave and sort of jumped up
in the air and then plunk, after the 14th bounce it fell into the middle of the lake proper. They
both looked at me and there was nothing to say. Clarke was awed, Claire couldn’t believe she
had such perfect boy brothers, and when she left to go back with Uncle Harold and Aunt Maude,
she stopped playing with Monkee dolls named Mike Dolenz and Davey Jones and started playing
with Billy and Clarke dolls named Billy Willie and Clarkie Stevens, and a special doll called
dead-eye Dan, who she later married. I only knew my sister in the single digits. She grew up,
and I never knew the intervening years.

Hmm Natalie again

Someday
When I’m awfully low
When the world is cold
I will feel aglow just thinking of you

Day dreams and night dreams being nearly the same you wouldn’t have known it was
Christmas except that there was a life standing beside me like a Christmas tree, that I could not
engage in without knocking over. I nevertheless felt I was living my life handsomely.
Beautifully. Exquisitely timed. And something was about to go off. Death was so toned-down
as if to be conquered. I had no complaint figuratively or literally. Ida taught me this in one of
her scrunchey tautologies:
It was very early on a Sunday morning. The light was on for the nurse.
“What’s wrong now?” That was in the days when I was ‘now.’
Oh God, It’s her, I thought, and my back stiffened. As I sat further up on my elbow, I paused
to think what I had called for, and finally said, “Sunday morning.”
“Nothing. That’s what I thought. It’s supposed to be Sunday morning.” And she laughed
that genuine—‘you really are ridiculous,’ laugh. I still hated her; but she was right; I had nothing
to complain about. Of course, how did she know I didn’t just want to make a comment?

Fa watched from a distance, as

my speech unraveled, aestivating like a flower.

Enough about me, how are you doing? Pie-eyed from Percocet and a little sweaty I figured
now would be the perfect time to address that motion of all motions that acrobatic light that was
so named and so dilute as to be mostly shade. I had the conversation I specifically needed.
Natalie humored me. She interpreted my manner, my head direction, my quivering lips, or
maybe thru my tears something rang true.
“You know I’m practically blind?” I said, mostly with my hands, as only I could.
“No you’re not,” she proclaimed in light and, as-if already-pulled-off farce. As though broad,
low comedy was the order of the day.
 Natalie, how would you know? I see you like a spirit, a skein, a featherless “comforter.” You
look “like a veil” to me, and when you don’t wear white, I don’t see you at all.
“You will, I know you will. Besides if you know I’m here, when I am, that is, then what more
do you expect?”
Mixing up expecting and wanting, was not enough to make me drop a straight line…having
been in the wings, treading water so long, without so-called reason and understandable speech, I
was not about to argue with the only tramp steamer on this whole “Shirley Temple goes to
China,” ocean.

Change sucks,
Why always the same question? Why wouldn’t I have a sense of humor? Even God has a
sense of humor. They couldn’t get enough. And you know what they say: Any port in a storm. I
just love the golden purple script that turns up in the most unexpected places. It’s beautiful.
Thank you.
I know this is queer, but it reminds me of something and I can’t think what. But something
very familiar—in my past.
Things never got out of hand for me. I had always been a little crazy, so had my family, as far
back as I could remember. I told you my Grandfather made 16-pointed stars didn’t I? That he
gave to the church, still talking about the stars, and shined for many years with 60-watt bulbs, just
above the enormous front door. And above the front door of this house too, as a matter of fact.
I was safe from the day I was born and that’s the truth. After all, I broke ten with acres to
spare and they didn’t think I could do that, but how was I going to get to home plate? How was I
going to get to five? There was only one way. Wish me luck.

₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪
I was fearful that it was April again, and waited for weeks, it seemed, for anyone to say what
month it was. I thought of it often when Natalie visited, which was almost every day, and tried to
switch the channel to Weather Today, but the scroll bar was so slow I had to read it letter for
letter and ended up forgetting what I was looking for. After the month, day and year display
scrolled past about 5 times she would change the channel. I was afraid it was April, that was
when Amanda and I fell in love, and I get a sick feeling now every April fool’s day.
There you go…When Ida comes in and offers to wash my dick I’ll know it’s April first. God,
a month of this! All this lost opportunity! I could have raised 3 or 4 children by now with all this
misspent regret. Ahh, young love!

April
We told each other, Amanda and I, that April, that April, the month of love, was a great time
to meet and find each other, but it wasn’t and we knew it. It was too cold to make love in the
park. It was that funny change-in-weather time that affects sensitive skin and Amanda was very
uncomfortable, when all I wanted to do was be inside her for hours on end, if possible.
My lips were permanently chapped and bled as they did with every change of season, every
change of season up until I was 40.
It rained too often. The blanket we kept in the car became moldy and had a raucous, biting,
rancid smell, which made me horny and made her draw flies. Why couldn’t we just be honest? I
love you, you love me—and this sucks.
 No, April was not the best time to fall in love. It made us think of the future, about June, my
birthday month, and July.
Thoughts of summer-fun cast a huge drag on our increasingly sometimes-flightless escapades.
The reports of the weather in July were premature; and threw us into the future with short
stabbbing recoils that made our shoulders sore. Our lack of synchronicity made for long painful
weekends, spoiled her Day Planner, and my complexion—not to mention our backs.
Sex was about to become the only thing we could do, and agree on. We both liked it and no
one felt like a liar. Well, it was my fault. Of course, the future is the last thing you should be
thinking about when you’re newly in love. Being such a rich, fantastically vibrant time, it should
be enjoyed and unwrapped slowly as the gift it is. The one you deserve to wait for. Besides the
whole thing made my dick dry and the dried spermaceti and skin particles I showed up with, and
tried to shake off on the welcome mats, in their respective vestibules, clung like glitter and made
me itch even more.
The tangy residue of love making created huge consternation with the dog, Tevya, who knew
more than anyone else what was ‘afoot.’ He smelled spent bullets and blanks. I think he smelled
one big lie and a thousand small ones. His affections were as unwelcome as eye patches on
marble statuary.
April was also the month of flowers. I picked wild flowers, and hyacinths for her all the time,
she loved them so. The neighbors took umbrage, and snapped a vial.
A nagging thought germinating in her mother’s head came out in excruciatingly subtle ways.
“Guess he doesn’t like to spend money on flowers.” Making both of them see floating ‘cheap’
signs over my head. Talk wasn’t the only thing that was cheap when I fell in love that April—
and wasn’t going to be buying any cows.
My love for wild things including flowers, made her dad suspicious and made me explain
myself to her mom, morning noon and night, which is always deadly, and should be strenuously
avoided. Everyone knew what I was about. But it’s up to the father or father-figure to open that
can of worms.
The willow tree that stood lazy sentry over the so-called ‘backyard nook,’ well renown for its
place in the family’s matrimonial history, gave more than subtle signs of breaking off near its first
fork, about three feet off the ground, and coincidentally about as far as Amanda and I got in that
heavenly direction.
No, April was not the best month to fall in love. It was a spot of cum in an otherwise perfect
Greek salad.

Braving manhood
I hadn’t had fearless sex with a woman since…Come to think of it, I’d never had fearless sex
with a woman. Loiza was close, but I was afraid of her bushiness…I don’t know—it didn’t seem
feminine. Not that a dick, the size of one of Jupiter’s moons, was any more feminine, it was just
that I knew what to expect (IO), and I didn’t know what I wanted. Besides it didn’t freak me out
to get a mouthful of cum, it was sort of the whole idea, but it did freak me out to get a spray of
whatever that is down there right in the eye.
And while we’re on the subject, her asshole was too close to her vagina. I was always afraid
of going in the wrong hole, and then what…pulling out and going in the right one? I know going
gay to avoid ass fucking doesn’t make any sense. I was like the Delta Dawn of avoidance—
unavoidably swampy.
And my fears, I told myself, were rather transparent, but most fears are, aren’t they? Except to
the non-casual observer, of course.
Getting a mouthful of slick, peppery, metallic tasting cum after 20 minutes of hard sucking—
to the tune of, Oh, When The Saints Go Marching In, stuck in your head, heavy on the tuba, is
hardly preferable to a sweet slick-down, that only tells you what you already know: she’s ready
for it, whenever you’re ready to give it to her. Or you can just keep up the easy almost effortless
nose-tongue-chin, chin-tongue-nose maneuver. Since it works both ways, and I shave daily, or
used to, starting when I was 23.
See!…My love for things that are easy, sensual and smooth, brought me to a dead end.
Oh look…I discovered men, right about the same time I discovered women, and now that I
look back on it, it was almost exactly the same time. Having sex with the competition. What is
there to say? Like a walk on Mars…what can you possibly compare it to? Except perhaps being
lost a million miles from home. With the most beautiful view in all the universe.
I’m not comparing gay sex to strait sex, there’s no comparison. It’s like comparing apples to
the spokes in a Maserati’s wheels going 100 miles an hour by a roaring fire in your living room.
One is easy, the other makes everything seem easy.
No pressure, take your time, she said. I was in a race to finish the proverbial book I was
writing, and find out who gets the girl—and delighted to find out at this rate, it wasn’t going to be
me.
The screams of unauthored contentment are about the only similarities between the
sexploits—If you want my opinion, though not analogous. Compare, ‘Oh please!’ to ‘Oh God!’
and what do you get? In Temple-shorthand it would be, ‘Oh my goodness!’ But there’s so much
lost in that translation, it makes no sense whatsoever.
₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪
Anyway, at that time, in that hospital, that was my working title, Makes No Sense II. This was
not the first time I had been incomprehensible. But considering the fact that no one spoke to me
without stretching their syllables out to a freakishly elongated meter, and whatever I said was
inevitably greeted with…Well, how’s the weather out your way? I thought it best to dumb
everything down. This is what it must have been like in the days before dictionaries. Always the
conversation, pitched over one’s head about the person who just left the room, as if we weren’t all
gonna leave someday.
“Heard we were gonna get some more rain…guess it’s that there El Niño or La Niña or…”
“Whatever.”
“La La La.”

Billy begins by telling the truth

Rise early, work late, strike oil. [J.Paul Getty]

I suppose I’ve danced around this long enough; I made an invisible inaudible reflexive
toast…‘I drink tonight to remember and I hope to forget, that I had a feeling years ago like the
feeling I have now with Natalie.’ I managed to lift a glass, which in itself was occasion enough
for a toast.
But in fact, I guess, because the feeling came from my youth and came rolling down the
middle of my awkward ego, like a basketball in a bowling alley, it was impossible to block, or
ignore. I might as well tell the other story of my youth…and then I poured the glass of water into
my hair.
I had always been thin, fast, and epicene. I depended on my wits, my agility and never on my
ability to take pain; I could be knocked over with a feather. I lived in an upside down world of
exceptionality. We were the only family on the block that needed the borough to give us a
variance to add a fourth ring to our circus. But at least I had a place to play.

Okay…alright…promises…I could never keep—ideals…I never lived up to, and explanations

that were meant to mystify. I was full of it. Are you happy now?
 I put everything off, and kept everyone guessing in order to remain the long awaited, un-
inspected package. I was as queer as Christmas eve. I suppose that’s why it was all of a sudden
so easy to be studied; I had put it, my debut, off so long, death wasn’t even interested in me. I
was a grown man who couldn’t care less about those childish strategies. Honesty was my
byword. I was finished going thru the motions. Oddly enough, my strange uni-dimensional
apraxia made warranted movement impossible, and I couldn’t talk right. I was your very average
sappy, open-minded, cheerful bisexual—who liked women also, but preferred to have fun; and
men are more fun—I was gay. I had been out of the closet for many years, and now I was
back in. But this time I was strait. And this closet got no action whatsoever. I couldn’t even
control my own hand.
Life’s too short to spend it flicking fleas, salting the sink, talking dogs down from couches, or
arriving at anything posthumously. As I lay there waiting for my makeover with no existential
plane for my non-existent speech, and with Heart of Darkness as my source for this part of the
journey, begging me to turn around or close my eyes, I realized what she’d done. I almost died!
I couldn’t speak because she couldn’t get off the phone.
The name I called Natalie as I cornered the market on Freudian slips rang true. “Amal-
gamation!” What I said was neither accidental nor intentional. It was that strange thing I had
found all compressed in my chest, a new noun—a subconscious ‘withon.’ She was everything
about women rolled into one. The shock of the thought caused me to hit myself in the eye and
brought my life back to life in a flash. In the guise of a little ceramic tug boat. Never, never…
even thru the days in the tall summer grass, would I know a stronger meaning. This was quite
something…but what?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thinking about sexuality as a child was like having a jihad in my head; and the Muslims won.
I prayed daily to keep the faith and maintain purity; then ran around and cut-up behind everyone’s
back like a jerk. I stole libertine apples and oranges, hid them in my robes; ate them and loved it.
I loved it because I loved it. I hid what I hid to live.
My homosexuality was not a problem in those days, and was taken for granted by everyone I
played with; and was no big deal, especially since it meant that I had secret information, which
was a huge plus. I was regarded as special, not in the retarded way, but really special, as in:
substantial and not to be underestimated.
Being underestimated was an enormous burden for many of the kids I grew up with, not just in
Point Spread, but other places too, all around the country; specifically: Pull Over, Vermont; Briny
Maine, the coldest spot in North America (Clarke says); and also Everneedin, Missouri. The
home of ‘Elbow.’

The US Patent Office

Back in the day, the inventive nature of the American people was on ebb, so much so that the
US patent office in Philadelphia was going to close. close up altogether, merge with treasury, or
just shrink. Everything had been invented, you see—so what was the point? This was august
1881. If you think I’m lying, look it up. In the future, kids will get 1878 and 1987 mixed up; one
was the invention and refinement of the light bulb, the other the relentless revisiting of the
Challenger disaster. Which came first? Maybe they flew the space shuttle in the dark? Kids
don’t get dumber, time beats a hasty retreat. And a hundred years just doesn’t mean very much.
Thinking about mistakes causes electricity to happen. If no where else—in the brain. Electricity
changes everything.
Funny things happen. Time slowed down so I could catch up. If you don’t believe me look it
up. Ask a fact-checker…oh sorry; I forgot…you don’t have fact checkers yet. Civil War
reenactments are commonplace today. Marching bayonets in place. Why? It was like time was
standing still or something.

Back to our story

Billy was lying naked in bed, clouds rose in the bluest sky. He stared longingly out the
window and dreamed that perfect time into existence—the day when he would speak again. The
day when he could be again, and not this time…if he could make this time pass faster he was sure
he would be inches from Heaven—it was at his fingertips as we speak. As he lay, he had one leg
dangling off the bed. It was not provocative it was unavoidable—when you can’t control your
body, something’s always out of place.

“Yo dude, wear a sheet,” Mark said, as he came into my sunny-side of the room.
“Wear a sheet yourself.”
“Dude you just talked!”
“I know, something must have happened.”
“Aren’t you excited?” Mark asked.
“What do you think?” Billy knew he was getting hard, he couldn’t move his head to see, he
just felt it and thought maybe it was obvious.
“Dude it’s amazing!”
“I wish I understood you better,” Billy said, as he squinted in the sun’s reflected glory.
“This is great! Did you take a cold bath or something…I mean did you put your finger in a
socket or something dude?”
“No, I fell naked out of the sky, just like this, an hour ago.” Billy said.
“Dude, I mean what happened?”
“Nothing. I’m back is all.” Billy was not shy at the time, but he tried to turn away, and kicked
Mark instead.
“Well…”
“Well.”
“Well, that’s just great!” He said. I mean it…give me five, dude.”
My penis began to summon up a response in answer to the request, as though showing-off.
Making it look easy—while my blank expression and slack hand stared as I struggled to get my
other hand to move off the bed. I had no idea what was going on. I wished I’d had my tuning
fork.
“Well, anyway,” he continued, “Dude, aren’t you happy?”
“Well if you can’t tell, then, no I’m not.”
“You just need time to absorb the change, dude.”
“You think that’ll do it?”
“Yeah dude, you’re awesome, cheer up or relax or something.”
“I feel better already.” Why do people think that telling someone to behave in a particular
way is a useful adjunct to regular conversation?
“Just don’t ask for the impossible, dude.” he said as he watched my penis move stiffly to a
more comfortable position.
“I’m not asking for anything.”
“I know dude, but you’re implying the impossible.”
“What’s so impossible?”
“It can never happen, dude…never.”
“Weren’t you the guy who asked what the condom was for?”
“No dude, you have me confused with my brother Yusef, I’m useless…to you.” “Yo dude!”
he said, as he reached for a pillow to smother me.
 “And all of a sudden you know so much? High five.” With that, Billy kicks the other leg out.
“Change.” Mark says, and throws a sheet over Billy’s naked body like he were announcing a
magic trick in a disappearing act, and then he waves his hand, and turns his back.
“I tried that already.”
“Ok dude, I understand.”
“Ok.”
“Dude you know…”
“What?” Billy asks.
“I don’t care what anyone says, you’re going to be fine, it takes time.”
“Yeah , I know. Back to normal.”
“Is that involuntary?” Mark asks, referring to some 2.54 centimeters to the inch, 19- almost,
activity below the sheet that wasn’t—really. Billy became truly himself in a lie.
“Yes.”
“100%?” Mark asks.
“Yes.”
“…and your speech, was that a put on?”
“No.”
“100% sure, dude?”
“Yes.”
“Are you being 100% straight with me?” He asked, finally as I was finding it harder and
harder to lay there quietly.
“No dude.”
“You wouldn’t mess with a brother would you?”
“No. I’m not.” Billy says, always the optimist.
“Dude, you’re gonna be okay.”
“I’m okay already.”
“What are you doing exactly?”
“Taking a cat nap.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m getting ready to do something else.”
“Oh.”
Billy got up and got, with help, dressed, and, figuratively, ran to Fa to tell him the great news.
Feeling good was beginning to take hold, it just came. He hoped it would last till he got to his
doctor’s office. It didn’t, he arrived fifteen minutes later, a quarter of the size, and speechless.
Misunderstood for a completely different reason, though. Joy, this time.
Billy smiled to himself, when he was finally able to announce in pure cock-talk, “My mind is
gone!” to Fa’s secretary. Even his dreams were getting fucked with.

Fearful Odds
I made the unheard of faux pa of asking a very earnest x-ray technician to look at my Johnson
once—when he started on about the weather, and caused a mini-storm of protest that would have
led to punitive action if the radiology department had had their way. The consensus from the
nurses was that he had it coming, and what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. And visa
versa. But no King said, ‘Today is ever known as Saint Crispin’s day,’ so I had no reason to live
and no way of knowing who or what was in the pipe line. My words were coming automatically
from somewhere, some thing. My door was open, my store was open, and I lay on the floor.
Believe it or not, no one took nothin’
 To jump ahead, the thing Fa liked about me was that in this garden of inappropriateness, grew
a strange tree and the fruit of the tree was magical. So he thought the tree grew in the center of
the garden but it didn’t. It grew everywhere.

A Fault, in the Garden

Billy spoke in riddles, allegories, aphorisms, stories, parables, fables, myths, legends, and
retold tales that, to put it, well—of which he had no personal knowledge, and couldn’t have. He
said things he had to say. He made comments to stave off depression —asserting truths that just
weren’t, and he told many lies, though few on purpose, if that makes any difference. Billy had
always been a bullshit artist—steady with the flow of truth even when it poured. He was now
human to a fault. A gusher. Whereas before, he had just been, starving artist—mostly asshole.
Now he was practically valveless. Now, when he fooled around, he broke open.
Fa believe that in order for his patient to speak he, Billy, had to access a different language
recoding center. Fa was the same as everyone—He believed things he sort of had to believe. He
understood that expectations were not real, but something he would have to deal with. And he
told people he trusted, that this was fun, hard work but fun—when it was Everything. Neither Fa
nor Billy had ever done this before. Virgins made Billy sweat, even, apparently, if the virgin was
a man. This whole strait thing was a complete mystery. Billy loved virgins and couldn’t help it,
so he sweated a lot.
(Again) Billy was the tree. The place Fa saw ‘produce.’ Billy’s identity changed. Luckily, it
took so little to achieve identity, personality, value, and also lucky too, they were not located in
his head. They were everything now, and they were all over the place.
(Third attempt—A funny thing happened) In the garden of his inappropriateness grew a tree,
which bore truly magical fruit. This tree propositioned every passing bird, bee and squirrel. Fa
went searching for fruit, thinking that the tree grew in the center of the garden, but what he didn’t
know was the tree grew everywhere. If the produce wasn’t in his hand it was in his head. It
always showed up in the wrong place.

David approaches
Jai Guru Deva Om— Across The Universe__ John Lennon, David Bowie (Hello, in Sanskrit)

Two pots of water of equal amounts, equal temperature in equivalent containers: One that has
been boiled before, one that has not: when the heat is applied, which do you think will boil first,
and every time first. Yes. It is that queer thing that water has: disdain for rules, adherence and
conductivity. Did I mention cohesion? But I was not as clear or as repeatable as water
experiments. I was everyone’s nightmare dinner guest: I couldn’t talk, frequently choked, and
couldn’t pass the peas if I wanted to—especially if I wanted to. I was everyone’s greatest fear:
unprofitable labor, with no appreciable return on investment. I was also the worst of the “father
types,” ‘tyrannical and inarticulate.’ Threatening in all directions at once. I was like the
addicted father, who doesn’t care what you think, because you weren’t there when stupid showed-
up. Able to spill, but not clean up; fanciful, demagogic—and slurry—at the exact wrong
moment, embarrassing in dress, demeanor and incessant blather, which so upsets the cabbage,
that it’s another ruined dinner, unrepeatable except thru belching—un-defensible and based on
nothing more than blank willful conjecture about a great big lie—“Oh, you’re gonna be fine.”
Formidable to distant relations and punitive in baseball terms, football terms and bowling
terms: striking out almost constantly. I was that freakish thing that turns up from time to time,
like an optical illusion, or a really bad date: utter inability to tell the truth, but accusatory and
sensitive to everyone else’s lies, as if scrutiny were, even in its most microscopic alliances, still a
one-way street. All one could do was enjoy me while I was there and hope that the rugs, the door
knob, the starter, the loose fan belt, general ill- health, poor maintenance or whatever it was,
wouldn’t prevent my departure. Hallelujah

I coasted to a stop against fearful odds; I hijacked wheel chairs and, scared the staff and
trustees with shear whirling, and Kodak pauses bent on becoming photographic. Stopping
now, is the same as numbering your days, because it would mean an end to profit without a
minute extra to ward off utter lack when it comes. As he approached I saw that the arched brow
indicates the weaker eye.
“Good morning.” Fa says.
“And so.” I said, as I looked out the window at a beautiful day, just so. “Goood Mooring.”

Well you’re talking today, it’s about time

I grabbed his pen and wrote ‘good morning’ in the shape of a sun on my breakfast menu. The
rays went in all directions and one, sent my hand flying back and landed the pen directly in his
pocket.
My outbursts were a little too enthusiastic and ill-considered, they were also totally beyond my
control, “oops yourself.”
“Can you say, no ifs ands or butts?”
“Define can.”
“Very amusing, say no ifs ands or buts, Billy.”
“Just let me finish this last chapter then we’ll get ice cream.” Five syllables, four syllables,
then five syllables, ending in cream. My speech was laborious, countable, orderly, and that other
thing—coming spontaneously.
Fa, Dr. Ferrraj Jarhad, leans over me, and looks intently at the shape of my face. His well-
trimmed beard moving left, then right, right in front of my face, was sort of trance-inducing.
From the first, he had arrayed himself outside the pack—was more visible—and he intended to
discover me.
“Are you doing an imitation of me or of yourself?”
“I am talking to you,” I said, so slowly as to seem impossible if it were true.
“I am talking to you.”
“Tell me a story.”
“Tell me a story.”
“There once was a desk, it sat on the deck, of a boat, on the landguard sea. (pronounced
lang’urd: meaning languid). The sailor reclined, right before he died. He’d signed on, for the
scenery.
“Hmm, Grover Cleveland?”
“Me”
“Who are you?”

A story incurred, acurred, occurred just like that, as Fa was talking. I split into two parts:
thinking about and being about, all while Fa was talking.
Suddenly I was walking down the street, blankly, and I ran into Allan ‘Woody’ Konigsberg,
and he says, “So I hear you’ve been writing.”
“Shhh,” I protested.
“What? …I think I have to go…it’s been a real...pleasure.” And he tries to leave.
“Come here.” and I motion to an alley.
 “Where!? into the alley? Are you crazy?”
“You’re and idiot.” I blurted.
“Now there’s an offer I can’t ignore… especially from someone who almost won an award
once… where are you going?” he says, as I usher him with the touch of a finger into a dark and
dreary tundra.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I pause as he looks around. “how do you get such beautiful
women and talented?”
“What Are you asking how to get beautiful women or how do you get talented Whats your
question I’m already sorry I asked. Look! I punctuated something. Where am I?”
“Women,” I said, and looked behind him, gathering my coat like Zero Mostel. “…keep it
short I have an appointment.”
“You want me to keep what short fella?”
“I’m not trying to sell you anything.” I said in a hurry.
“Oh that’s good the last time I came here it was a pancake house.”
“Don’t trouble yourself but hurry up.” I adjusted my Nehru collar—it was off-center.
“How did I get here?”
“You can’t turn down a straight-line…get to the point.”
“Look,” he weaves and bobs. “It’s simple, so simple even an idiot like you could figure it out”
“Call me Jimmy”
“I can’t help but doubt that’s your name, it sounds made up.”
“It used to be ‘Woody.’”
“Okay, okay….Find pretty girls that like to laugh, then tell them how funny they are.”
“What’s funny about that?”
“It’s sex…it’s not supposed to be funny!”
“Oh,” I said, and looked to my left. Stage right.
“Oh…you are an idiot…now if you don’t mind, I have to jump in the East River, I heard their
fish was good today… Don’t buy anything plastic… Evah…Goodbye.”
A limousine rolls into view with no dents, it’s a close-up, the whole thing’s a close up.
“Why would I buy anything plastic?” I yelled after him.
He keeps walking.
“What’s the shortest distance between here and my apartment?” I shouted, as if I were
throwing fish.
He tried to open the door, before the chauffeur could. There was a scuffle.
“If you’re really so sincere about being my straight-man, what are we doing in your closet?”
he said, with that odd accent on the last really-big consonant.
“I deserve to be slapped.” I said, as he raised his ears.
“I’m not kidding. I have to go. If you want applause that bad, hire a writer.”
“Loser!” I yelled.
“You ask a married man for advice on sex, and I’m the loosah?”
Woody looks at his shoes as if they were attached to his knees, turns, and says, “Have I got the
girl for you…You’re…the dumbest homosexual I’ve evah met.” And he practic-ally jumps in the
car.
“What’s the difference between me and a tenor?” I said to my reflection in the glassy golden
window. The limo sped off, as the window rolled down.
Woody leaned out uncharacteristically. “Ah…a tenor doesn’t have sex before a performance.”
Then he mumbles to the un-appreciating driver, “not before, during and aftah.”
You know what they say…if you have to explain ‘em. Ba dum bump.
Writer-producer-directors are annoying, let alone actors! Go on get out of here... I mean
it! I thought to say as I walked away, ‘take care of yourself, the water’s full of sharks,’ and I
don’t know why. I guess maybe somebody loves somebody.
 You
“You have been the subject of a very lively debate and so far, three proposed articles that I
know of. You may not see much of me for a while; I have to start writing.” Fa said.
“Memoir of a reader?” I said, caustically.
“You’ll see.” He said, just the way they say it in my dreams. “I told the nurses, all visitors
have to be cleared by me, that doesn’t include the dri…Miss Webber.” In another attempt to read
my expression he was quick to point out that, “It is for your protection, you are quite the prize.”
“I’m a diamond.” me
“Well,” In the right setting. Him

And me
Fa brought me gifts. Little mementos of some painful experience in his life, no doubt, which
he hoped might correspond to some similar event in my own life and thereby draw pain out into
the open to spar with. Out into the exercise yard that was all hum and barbed wire. We started
with pain. He meant well.
I guess that’s how they teach a person to speak, start with pain; it’s present in abundance,
shared by all, it’ll never abandon you, and most of all it’s predictable. Fine, “za good a place to
start as any.”

Fa, a proper introduction

It was agony; I would never have learned to speak if I hadn’t fallen in with Fa. He arrived all
puffed up that November morning. What an ass. What a condescending little turd.
Wake me up with a flashlight! Not unless you’re trying to tip-toe out of the room so I can
sleep! Bastard! Pinch! not unless you kissed me goodnight! But afterwards is when I got mad.
Even with my crazy talk, though it freed me to say what I wanted to say, it still inclined me
toward staircase wit, and my rejoinders were often discovered on the figurative stairs as I was
leaving the party, or in my case, in the literal pillow as I pondered my existence. The hospital
was wordlessness—not so easily abandoned, hell.
I wanted so much to please him. I saw behind his beard, and his brown eyes an ocean of
meaning, and he saw too, I suppose an ocean in me. Unknown, dark and still. He held up a
“principled aperture,” an “easel,” a “focus.” Also known as a “hub,” or “palette,” that was what I
called the picture-board he used—the thing I was supposed to be able to talk thru. With the
alphabet on one side and pictures of forks and toilets on the other. I once referred to the alphabet
board as “asshole to zebra”
He said, “Billy, what does that mean?”
“Come in zebra, over,” I said.
He tells that story but it’s not in his book. It’s just like an amateur to bury the lead. I’m sorry
but scientific papers, journals and treatises of all kinds are mind numbing. Of course, I used to
feel the same way about Shakespeare—translate please! But to paraphrase Huckleberry Finn,
everything worth thinking about can be said better in plain English, so cut the crap already.
He would tap my hand and say “straight R’s ace,” when he was offering encouragement to pay
attention or just listen. He called me “Lucky Lindy”, because I had called him that, once, during
our first meeting when he discovered to his great shock and delight, my problem. All the strange
terms that I taught him, he used, to teach me to re-think my “twisty ankled faun.” He tapped into
my love for words and meaning and secrecy, and brought them together in one big giant run-on
“Melville.” I had what’s called Gnostic Apraxia: I understood and knew what I wanted to say but
couldn’t, by virtue of trying, or thru the vortex of trying, begin the task of putting them together
into speech that would impart or even insinuate knowledge. I had a Spanish flag, a French flag,
and a Portuguese flag, but I couldn’t plant it—and say ‘Brazil!’ unless I meant to say something
else.
I was the ‘critic,’ able only to sum up other people’s work with short bromides, bespeaking no
knowledge of the thing at all, unless you understood it already. I could not repeat myself—like
the ‘Doyenne’ who thinks people are watching everything she wears.
My words were for an invisible moment and could not be reused or hammered back into
shape, unfortunately, my hammer was counter intuitive and swung both ways. In other words,
unless you were there you couldn’t comprehend it, But if you left with it, it would fall apart in
your hand. My speech.
These outbursts were inevitably summations. When Fa told me in excruciating detail about
the MRI, which counted down the slices of brain till it got to my speech center where it showed,
“a kind of damage,” all I could say was “M-R-I-O-K”. These summarily constructed quotes
issued from a life-book that was part owner’s manual, and part dictionary of obscure allegorical
references. Oars.
Not dictionary, more like an abstract. My tabloid, the rag in my shopping cart, was proof
positive I didn’t have all my oars in the water and the ones I had were not trolling the water but
skimming the surface. Like the ‘Boy Goes Fishing’ story my father read to me from the
newspaper about a kid my age who skimmed the water with his oar in a failed attempt to propel
the boat fully forward and like a miss-step knocked a fish off his perch. A perch off his perch—
the water. Right into the boat.
“Does it say they had fish for dinner and cooked it over a fire?”
“I don’t know, but they took a picture of it.”
“To save it?”
“Yes that’s right.”
How is it that I could remember my father’s blackened fingers and the story in the daily news
so many years ago but I couldn’t remember Fa’s real name.
All my questions were rhetorical.
"Who’s your doctor?" was greeted by me with a kind of palsy.
I made up a name, “Kevin Carter..” I had no idea. It was, of course, weeks before I would be
able to say Ferraj Bonham Jarhad and get anyone to believe it was not a made up name, or an
anagram.
As Fa explained it to me, and in subsequent scholarly papers, to the world of science: I
couldn’t put words together in a way that would connote knowledge but at the same time I had a
steady coherent stream of symbols, as long as you understood the idiom, they purported to make
sense; at times shockingly so; at other times they were just symbols. If you heard me and didn’t
already know the context surrounding what I meant, you would never know what I was trying to
say, and these mini explosions were, by their nature, often un-repeatable. People walked around
thinking they knew what I meant—nothing had really changed. I never could speak, the accident,
the words, all gone, okay.
I loved a good Ferraj analogy: Look, this is part of your language center…it’s all lit up like a
shopping center, see here. I looked to the computer screen, hmm. And this area here, is where
the cars park, here is where the bus stops, and this is a train depot—all completely dark. You
can’t get here, and he points to the stores as if they were all one and the same, without going thru
here, and he points to the anchor-store. But you do. I looked around for the rest of the story—
they had huge gapping holes in them, the analogies. “Singing in the rain, without the umbrella.” I
meant that as a question.
 “Ah ahem, yes. You never took a single step, but all of a sudden—up on the curb, down from
the curb—one footed, now two—now splashing and spinning and touching every single part of a
set you never walked on.” Fa scratched his head. Billy watched him scratch his head, and
wished he could do that.
I think Fa enjoyed coming in and asking the same exact questions every morning just to hear
my response. Good morning, he’d start out, using my name as it appeared in the balloon over my
head, or not heeding my ‘advice’ and calling me Mr. Hudson. I always expected that this was
code as it sometimes was…code for…there are others in the room. I would wake instantly and
look around. Strangers? Where? Who? I arose to dizzying heights. And forgot how stupid I
was. I hadn’t had sex in weeks. He usually did this, I think, to warn me that strangers were about
and this admonition (code) woke me to delirious heights probably because I hadn’t had sex in
weeks. I lived in an echo chamber and I was the wall.
I fainted frequently and had the cardiologists stumped. One doctor thought it was possible that
the way my brain was damaged affected my heart and my circulatory system. 20 years later he
was proven right. But I digress.
“How are you?”
“incidental.”
“You look well”
“U-2 bono”
I had no code for: I just woke up from a wet dream. But Fa often did a ritualistic blanket
straightening, which fed the rumor monster and blew cobwebs from many abnormal psych
textbooks all over campus. A number of doctoral theses bloomed in our garden.
The problem wasn’t whether I was worthy of time, but was there space for pet projects. The
hospital had to stay full to make a profit. There were no attic apartments where elephant men
could be housed and studied. Nothing was run by doctors. Nothing. About the only souvenirs
the neuro-docs kept were brains—the gray, indeterminate, slicer, dicer, juicer that was everything
once, to someone.
The brains from their favorite ‘patients’ stood in glass jars on their desks and bookshelves.
This was considered de riguire, and my shock and surprise at this could not have been greater had
Fa’s friend Dr. Gary, not not only regaled me with funny stories and anecdotes from his beloved
patient, Crystal. He also had her brain pickled in a jar as though this added credence to his stories
about her stories. And somehow proved their veracity.
As I wheeled by Dr. ‘Mac’ Gary’s office (also known for his love of happy meals), I couldn’t
help but say hello to the jar. Crystal, aren’t you looking fabulous today?
Whenever she would proposition her doctor, which was all the time, apparently, he would tell
her he couldn’t, ‘it would be a health code violation,’ and this made her laugh… “Well wash it
then!” she would say. He did an imitation of her time-consuming, broken apart, MS speech, and
pointed to the lesion that caused it. Her speech was slow and determined—back in the days when
he was tall and thin. His stories became my stories and I added to them. There wasn’t much else
to do. Doctors were fun if you took the time to fill in the blanks.
The white-walled conference room with the dusty floors, that we had our lessons in, was, in
my vernacular, “Pepperidge Farms.” I couldn’t move my hand in front of my face, and if I was
hungry I still had trouble feeding myself. ‘Sure,’ he’d say. ‘I understand,’ and I knew he didn’t,
and it made me feel so sorry for myself. The one thing I wanted to tell him would not, could not
come out. I love you for creating this place.
The accident drove a kind of shearing force thru my brain and there were two halves now,
where there had been one whole. Like the descriptor itself: ‘nomenclature,’ nomen or name, and
cloture, meaning: nothing by itself. I spoke a kind of markup language, fast and terse it was in
fact Hypertext markup language. HTML. I was weak and knew it; I was a mystery to my friends
and I knew it; my life’s aim had spilled into— then out of, my life’s work; to wrest meaning; to
control my destiny, my speech, and stop my stuttering brain; to know everything about what I
was doing; to move my hand; to play a difficult piece of music. I couldn’t get the order of things
right. And when I did, I was pages late.
Ha! I was the Torettes of meaning, I was a freak. And “Depot man” couldn’t keep his hands,
metaphorically speaking, off me.
I was news to the readers of Popular Science, plain old Science, JAMA, Nature and
Psychology Today. The New York Times did a feature about me, 20/20 sent Phyllis George to
ask me stupid questions. 60 Minutes got an eleven minute story out of me, if you count the
supplemental insurance, non-steroidal-anti-inflammatory drug, and car wax commercials. The
History Channel had a field day one rainy Wednesday, and Jay Leno called me the Coke-a-cola
of, Freudian slips. When he asked me what my first memory was, I answered without forming
the thought, I said, “traumatic readiness.” “alacrity in the surrounds.” “angels in the architecture.”
It was funny, but like I say, you had to be there. As Paul Simon said in Graceland, ‘spinning in
infinity.’ When I fell to Earth, it was a very popular song.
Every time he asked me the ‘my first memory’ question, he got a totally different answer—
Not because my memory was growing longer but because I was abbreviated in my ability to
retrieve and hold—like any other new born pup. I was ‘Throw’ in my response.
Many of my first memories go like air-freight back to a song or piece of music. H-A-double
R-I,-G-A-N spells Harrigan. I said once H-A-W, R, I to Fa. I meant to say, Hello. Hello. He
thought I was trying to spell my way out of this obscene jail. And he thought I was asking him to
ask me ‘how are I doing?’ as in: Hello Lucy, I’m home. How are you?
Maybe I was, anyway…language barriers aside, Fa spoke with two lips, a tongue that never
got twisted up, a face as impassive as dynamite...before it explodes, and a neck of burnished
bronze with the most beautiful patina. His eyes spoke also, they characterized his sincerity in
their stark whiteness. His irises so dark and black—I had a hard time looking at them. They
gifted his soul, as if they were matched by music, inner music.
I saw his concern, and yet I saw adrift a backwater of turbulence—a little dam made by an
eddy-like whirlpool. Like, and fed by, solitude and noiseless muttering.
When I did look deeply, I could see so much life, and so little pain. He would laugh at me—
‘what are you looking at SO intently?’
“Isaac Beshevis Singer,” was a typical response. He would jot that down and we’d move on.
I found him interesting and he found me fascinating. So fascinating, I frequently sat in a corner
of my room hiding from his search light—reading when the sun was out. I would sometimes
stuff a pillow under my blanket, as to make it look like I was sleeping. This stopped working
after a while and couldn’t guarantee privacy until I propped up the telephone on the yellow pages,
opened to the lawyer section, and layed an overturned water pitcher by the door. Anything that
connotated mess, made Fa pass by, like motorists around a caravan of school busses still loading
passengers—a wide berth. A potential mess is what he studiously avoided. As do I. That’s how
I know.

I had been with the good doctor so long; engaged with all my heart in his “Higgins’s”
experiments, enthralled at the fun of overhauling me, that I went from wheel chair, to walker, to
cane, to no assistive device at all, and finally to climbing the stairs by myself without even
recognizing these hurdles as hurdles. We were relegated to the third floor back conference room
by the hospital’s governing body, the Interdisciplinary Review Board thing, the IRBT, “the
Sanhedrin.” When they came to snoop and congratulate us on our accomplishment they talked as
if I weren’t even in the room. Once I blurted out “Do-little!” which sent them into a tailspin,
made Higgins laugh till he split his lip. And then they put us up on the roof.
We had only a few short months together, but he taught me to reach forward with all my
might, and pull… maybe he thought I’d catch a fish.
 Fa used to ask me to do a series of…follow a series of commands. Sort of a memory-
organizing-sequencing test—Point to the ceiling after you point to the floor. These things were
hard at first, but spatially, I was catching on fast. Every place was different.
The last time he did that: “Roll the ball out of the room before you point to the ceiling and
after I say ‘go now.’” To which he added “go now,” and I left. He had very little sense of humor
for stuff like that. It wasn’t a game for him, it was ‘Study,’ or as we progressed, it became ‘give
the students something to study about.’ Me.
Fa read to me, once he realized I couldn’t read. It wasn’t that I couldn’t read, I became hyper-
critical when I read. Aside from the fact I couldn’t repeat what I had read, or explain what I read,
I hated what I read. The meanings of the words frequently ran against logic, many authors
seemed to have the most casual disregard for what the words actually meant. They were more
than happy to add their own twist to the same old plot. To pull clarity off, like so much soup-
scum and then peddle their tares as wheat. New words for old.
People often didn’t say what they meant in the book or out of it. The entire process made me
so crazy I was dumbfounded. I used to think the people who wrote these great books knew what
they were talking about—but they didn’t. All I could say to Fa after he gave me Robert Heinlen’s
stranger in a strange land, to read, was, “was an eclipse always a rare event or it would be called
clouds?”

Arts & Leisure

“I was there when you couldn’t talk, and I was there when you began to talk; and you made
perfect or near perfect sense. Like you said, it’s a question of translation. If you’re in a shower-
chair naked, and someone walks in on you, it makes perfect sense to yell, Hot! Hot! Hot! You
didn’t know three nurses would run into the room and turn the cold up full-blast. Do you
remember what you called your speech?”
“Cock-talk?”
“No Billy, more than once you called it Animal Crackers.”
“Oh yeah I remember, mom put animal crackers in my soup when it was time for me to learn
my ABC’s. Before long there were lions and tigers in my soup—now monkeys and rabbits go
loop de loop.”
“See! Brilliant …”
“Honey, that’s an old Shirley Temple song—that’s when I spoke fluent Shirley. It’s funny, I
can’t remember anything I said back then, even at the time I didn’t know what I was saying,” and,
waxing vulture-like, I added “In my opinion most people don’t comprehend what they’re saying
most of the time.” Walking and talking requires co-ordination. Making an entrance into the
present time of ideas and moments requires restructuring and a lot of borrowing. For example,
how long before Thanksgiving gets moved ahead to make more room for Christmas?
“Our lives today are like a 15th century feudal king without a food-taster—not long for this
world.”
“Are you taking your medicine?”
“No it makes me sick.”
“Take it.”
“Okay.”

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Billy flashes back to a time in the hospital.

“Were you talking to me?” Ida asks directly—to the window in Billy’s room. “I will leave as
soon as you take your medicine, believe me, I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to.”
 “1945, Yalta.”
“That makes no sense, Mr. Hudson.” and she laughs, turning up her nose.
“1946,” he says, then turns his head to go to sleep.
“Okay, I get it, you’re so smart and I’m so dumb. You do this every time I’m trying to help
you. Can’t you understand?”

888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888

with my apraxia,
With my apraxia came a wandering in and out of psychosis. Objects seemed larger and closer
than they really were; I fell often while reaching for something to hold onto; I had a strange new
spatial relationship with my environment; it had more to do with me than it otherwise needed to.
Chairs orbited me, not that they moved, they didn’t—that is, not until I did, then they clung
stubbornly to a peculiar equidistance making it nearly impossible to sit in them. When I lay in
bed I was everywhere the bed wasn’t—this by itself was no different than it ever was, except that
I was keenly aware of it’s friendliness —its lack of argument.
The deal was made; I would be me and that was that. When I moved, the room moved in
order to accommodate—being so exquisitely commodious. And when I fell, I never got hurt.
Not being able to complain took a lot of the sting out of landing, it turned out.
Before—I had to come to terms with the idea of the things that floated around me, now—they
met me halfway. I was happily in my buzz. I could do nothing purposeful. Activity was as
abstract and mischievous as concocting a coherent sentence; my main point was as likely to
hide—just as I was about to pounce, as the phone was likely to end up on the floor by its very
attraction to my fingers. Was that the phone? Oops.
Luckily my TV was on all the time and rarely, if ever, in-sync with my roommate’s. I didn’t
realize I was getting twice as much information as everyone else, I thought it was the TVs’
problem.
We rarely had visitors, our viewing habits were organized by the whimsy of the staff. Some
liked arbitrary talk, and some liked ‘the news’ that was pretty much how it sliced, during the day
at least. And by a strange twist of fate my first roommate, that I can remember was hobbled,
brought down, by copper in much the same way I was ennobled, elevated, by steel. They called
him Wilson’s, 928B (Wilson’s disease, room number).
Ed made me seem normal, which is what a friend is for. I watched lots of TV and the TV
watched lots of me. Peter Jennings and I had long conversations long after the last car
commercial was over. Pete in particular, piqued my interest in communicating. He seemed so
thoughtful and he spoke directly to me, not like those therapists hired by the hospital, who came
up from the dungeon twice daily, once to see me, and once to see Ed—danced their eyes around
the room, like Deborah Kerr, then left.
My conversations with Pete, though a trifle one-sided, caused my lips to move—oddly
enough, the one part of my body I had control over had to be quieted, otherwise I would appear
crazy. Who’s crazy? You’re crazy. Ideas flew.
Staying in the hospital is like heterosexuality—its main selling point is that you don’t have to
think about it. You’ll learn to appreciate it, and consider it time well spent, in time—as I did. Of
course, if you want to leave the hospital you have to run a gauntlet of nay-sayers, protesters and
right to lifers, the bete noir of forensic tattle tales; not to mention the scribble-hacks who don’t
give a damn, but have to record everything, as if they were watching a three-legged race, and God
forbid someone should question the outcome a year from now.
 Talking to Natalie again
Include me, I know you, I met you and zip it was my happiness you asked for. I was in no shape to answer anyone,
but you asked anyway. You are different, and invite comparison at the same time. Good morning.

As if remembering a moment just before, I said indifferently, “can I have some water please?”
“Oh you, I water the flowers and you want some too. You are so cute!”
“Rembrandt” I say smiling a toothy grin. “Cute?” I inquired, in my ‘you can’t mess with me
anymore than I can mess with you’ tone.
“Yes,” she said. “Cute as a car-na-tion,” and she kissed me on my dry, pink, fish-for breakfast
lips. I succumbed, being in no shape to defy a power that assumed so much. Like…I could clean
up as well as I did.
At exactly the wrong time Howitzer shows up. The death defying impeachment of the claim
that porcelain is clean and white, being that she was black and scurvy, and yet porcelain in all
other aspects. I never will be able to understand Howe. I thought of you and wondered Howe.
Howe come? Howe could so simple a thing be absent when expectation alone granted almost a
half the requisite suite? Howe? When? Why? And Howe the hell does looking justify finding
my ass and your so-called-self, singled out for participation in the same cubic space? “Get out!
Get out! Get out!”
Ida, come on in we were just about to have sex.
With eyes rolling like brown rabbits, “Missus Webber.”…nod. “Time for your meds.”
I must have said something last night when she helped me out of bed to the bathroom, a job
she hates and always delegates. I was back to being ‘Mr. Hudson Now.’
“She doesn’t need any.”
“It is time for your meds, Mr. Hudson.” Said with all the indifferent, mossy cleverness she
could muster….
Idaknowhowe I’llneverknowhowe Idon’twanttoknowhowe! God I hate her. If it weren’t for
that silent e she could be one of the 5 essential questions of life…who, what, where, when, why,
and how. I don’t count why. And when it comes to Miss. Ida Howe, why, is as completely
unanswerable, as ever.
She’s like the junk-mail that littered my evening arrivals home, when I lived in one—
promising great riches and offering nothing but simple poverty and subtle unsubscribable gain.
She was the reason I took karate when we lived with Aunt Kell in Charmont Louisiana. She was
the try-to-keep-off fly that buzzes you when you’re doing term paper stuff, floating just outside
the 8 and a half by 11 inch perimeter of reasonableness. I even hate her smile, that tag-line of
ebullience that she vanquishes from soft air and compos’ed sunlight to highlight, and then rip my
history with women.
Ergo, my dislike is for her transverse smile, that evenly distributed gash of effortlessly
unruptured fealty. She is too little knowledge in too large an envelope. Opened, her gluey
entrance belies a slap-subtle, cash-me-out, fix-my-wagon prose, which I disdain and disincline.
She makes me sick. She’s the only RN I’ve ever met. And at this rate I consider myself already
free from the allure of whatever could possess anyone to belong to a similar registry, Miss Ida,
Hah!
Maybe she new somethin’, but she don’t say nothin’ she jes’ keeps rollin’ she keeps on rollin’
along. This is right and this just ain’t right. That’s how she talks to me. Me!
It was her interior knowledge of N. Webber’s roadster that was painted all over her face.
Neither smirk nor smile it was ‘a knowing,’ without possibility of parole, that made her so
dangerous. She knew it was inevitable that I would see my initial incident with Natalie as a
bonding experience and that that would be its own undoing. She rolled more eyes than Martha
Rae in Okinawa. House-brown and good for nothing, she offered up her ooze in order to supplant
my glorious re-introduction to life. Doesn’t that just figure, I go strait, and suddenly I start to
hate scary women.

Forestalled (the tide is high)

Maybe I was too hard a brick, maybe too soft. Bring me my, you know, the thing in the sister
hat, the pointer of points…look…you see, I know that…you…look…to (pointing to a clear and
vacuous glass, obviously more than half empty).
I was eaten up by reassurance. I was broken by the spirit of the dependent clause: never ready,
always eager. My soon to be best friend entered my dream-like state almost every day.
Dr. Ferraj Bonham Jarhad, also known as Fa, clever dick that he was, instructed me in the
world of speech, thought, movement, and considered relations. Fa was many years my junior; he
was 27 and I was 36. But I was the kind of 36 that remembers getting carded at one gay disco
seven years ago like it was yesterday, and he was the kind of 27 that wrote all his Med School
references himself, seven years ago, so he could go on his honey moon without having to tell
anyone to hurry up. Everyone loved him, admired him and would be more than happy to sponsor
him, even if they didn’t have ‘the spit to lick a stamp.’ Switching hats as easily as a sweaty
farmer, removes his…always one step from a tractor, and a hoopdy-humpy-loud escape.
I had never considered myself strait, pussy craving, puppet stringed, expectant, or happy as a
clam. But the strings were torn, thanks to Natalie, and Fa’s attention brought me to Attention if
you know what I mean. He told me my diagnosis and he told me who I was now. He told me I
had “fluent aphasia,” which was one step up from “Gnostic Apraxia” and I understood, of course,
it meant he no longer understood me. But anyway, I remember saying, “Force belief as you
would do unto me” and “come, some fit.” I supposed Fa understood me, sometimes, but what I
meant was far from his level of understanding. We were not on the same page. His acceptance
was the key. I didn’t know what I was saying; he didn’t know what I was saying, but his desire to
listen made me, me. For the moment anyway.

Perfect Copy
I was never able to be my self after Sawdust Nevada. I’m not sure now, if there ever really
was such a place, Clarke swears there was, but I think it’s a story he told me late at night when
there were magic crickets, and boys made out of wood, and that maybe he’d put me in a trance
with a wand, and then told me about it.
A town named Sawdust’d have to be near a forest or someplace with a lot of trees, otherwise,
where would the self same sawdust the town was known for come from? It could have been
anywhere, named anything, made from anything, but it wasn’t, it was Sawdust all right.
Turns out Sawdust was actually in California, but for some reason it was so close to Nevada,
that many residents felt that if they wanted it to be in Nevada it would be. That sort of
redistricting was possible, but not for these yokels. They wanted it to be Nevada, for gaming
purposes I suppose, but it was actually California. Where the sun shines all the time and
gambling debts, don’t have to be paid. Just like in Point Spread. It’s a BIG state.
In those days everyone wanted to go to California—but these people. When they finally got
wherever it was they were going—decided it was someplace else, once they got there. They just
wanted everything to be called Nevada. I think in those days people couldn’t help but say
‘California? Here I come’…but these people…just felt…oh hell, I don’t know why they wanted
to live somewhere else, and tell people they lived one state over.
 Anyway we were staying with our Aunt Belle and Uncle Leo, but everyone called him Virge
(for Virgo) in Sawdust Nevada—whatever. One rainy day late in August, I discovered why they
called it Sawdust. Everyone said it never rained in Sawdust, and certainly not in August, but then
again everyone in Rain Tree County or wherever the fuck we really were, lied about everything,
so you never knew whether it rained in August or not; and frankly we were hoping to be
somewhere else come next August and never find out. Time passed slowly. I learned to lasso.
One year from today would be Uncle Virge’s 50th birthday and hang ‘em high if it rains on
that day pilgrim. All I knew for sure was, that when the whole town said it never rains in August,
it was very likely that it did, especially that particular August. The whole town was liars from the
foot-hills to Raganaw, 50 mile away.
Uncle Leo liked Clarke more than me and that was starting to become the trend. Clarke was
so ‘Clarkie’ back in those days, all pink cheeked and handsome with his broken tooth, blue eyes
and an undisciplined mound of straight black hair in his face. Everything he touched made him
Clarkier, which he, and apparently no one else, could get enough of. He was starting to look like
a basket of rope, and they couldn’t get enough of him for distance.
Loving my brother had nothing to do with it. He’s the one who soaked the furniture in my
other Uncle Leo’s living room with that furniture polish which smelled like turpentine, and
probably was the one who lit the matches that ended us up here in Rain Tree County in the first
place, so it only went to figure he’d be the one to prosper. They also said uniformly, that there
weren’t no saw dust in saw dust cuz there weren’t no trees dag nab it.
Clarke says now, there weren’t no town called Sawdust it was called saw tooth, from an old
army cook got stranded there from Custar’s party. Everyone agreed the town was ‘none too
prosperous’ so I knew that there had to be gold somewhere—very nearby. It became my job to
find it. Though if I did, and I’m not sure I ever did, it was when I was unable to be myself ever
again.
Yes, I put my chaps on backward, yes I wore dad’s old ties for belts, yes I curled my forelock
with Mattie’s curling iron that I was told specifically not to touch because it was 1) the only
electrical appliance allowed in the bathroom and 2) because someone who could not have been
Clarke burnt down a house in Eagleton Maine not two year ago. And 3) because boys weren’t
‘posed to curl their hair.’ Plus 4) someone could get hurt one way or t’other, and it probly’d be
me, not to men-shun 5) there ain’t nothin’ wrong with your hair s’ ya need to change it none and
6) makes you look too pretty, besides and 7) you don’t want that.
So Clarke got to be superman finally. This time for real, I guess. I stayed away because 1) I
was looking for the gold, and 2) it would break my heart when he found out he was Clarke Kent.
And 3) when the house went up, I didn’t want to be anywhere near it. Of course Clarke wouldn’t
drop a knot between lassoing one personality while hanging up another. He’d just go with the
flow and I suppose that’s how the town got it’s name. They say once it rained so hard a river ran
right thru town. Now, and I didn’t know this, but sawdust don’t take to water, none to good. So
after the river left, there weren’t nothing left but the sawdust, laying on the ground still dry.
Sometimes I wished I could have been someone else like Clarke was. The conspiratorial
nature of the mountains around Saw tooth, saw to it that that wish came true. People couldn’t
take their eyes off me my whole life except back there, back then.

Reading with her fingers in my rehab

Natalie read hospital menus with her fingers; Veal Medallions in a red wine sauce,
accompanied by grilled Portobello mushrooms and summer vegetables. For the longest time into
our relationship I had one eye that would look east when everything I was interested in was west.
I’m sure it was very disconcerting to her when I gazed into her eyes and one of mine would be
roving. She said it reminded her of Frank, the ex, who always had a roving eye. Mine, however,
was caused by her carelessness, whereas Frank’s was not. It had taken, so far, two surgeries,
three therapists and twelve weeks of looking into her steel gray eyes to straighten mine out, and
she still reads menus to me as if I can’t read them for myself. Natalie never tired of teaching me
things that made no sense.
The only benefit I ever saw from my eye problem was that when I was tired she would always
know how long it would be before I crashed. And then she’d say, “Billy, I think it’s time to go.”
And she’d go.
She could say stupid things, but she got away with it. For example; she’s the only person I
know, under seventy, that could say “oh bother”, like when she saw a dead squirrel laying on the
porch roof, all flat and dried out, or when I would tell her my depression was keeping me ‘out of
town.’ And she’d say “and here we are, out of town but not out of time,” and it always seemed
like the perfect non sequiter response. I loved her. And yet she almost killed me. I didn’t want
to give her up just for some sexual thrill
I could write a book about all the things I misunderstood about Natalie. We were both rope
devotees, it turned out. Hers was shaggy; mine was smooth and new. Hers would practically pull
her up and mine would make it impossible to climb. The thing was, we were both going the same
place. She was just working ten times harder at it.
I heard a voice once, say, ‘you’ll end up with nothing yet.’ A rolling pall fell around me like a
cold chill. ‘All is lost. There is no point’—hopeless. ‘You can never get what you…want—you
can’t even get out of this.’
I believe now, that that was the self, speaking to the self—bleak.

Flash Backs
Billy’s speech is still poor. With Nat he has full conversations because she nods and says
yes…she understands little and ends up suffering for this, because Billy believes she is stupid,
uninterested or deceptive, and holds her responsible for all the information, none of which, she
ever got.
I’m having “flashbacks” Natalie, sometimes all day.
“What are they of?”
“Well,” the thing we…“things” we talk about, like just now, I flashed back to Ida in the
hospital. We “enter” a “small” airless room. And she says, “Take your medicine.” I can see her
“plain as day, hair all up,” butt out, all huffy. She puts it on for me now…I mean now I see her
so much more plainly and clearly and I think “I see myself” too. I thought she was a bitch, now
it’s incredibly clear…
“I think you’re getting flash forwards too.” She said.
Do you. why?
“Every once in a while you say something I’m thinking, and you talk about things that are
going to happen in the future…” she said.
But they don’t come true, “do they…”
“You’re ahead of your time, she says laughing…don’t worry honey, I’m with you.”
Yes, today is a time of feeling open and closed at the same time. I don’t think that’s going to
be true “in 20 years.” I think people will look back to this time with sort of dread. We will either
be open, like in groups or will, we will be closed to “outsiders.” Our lives “will be much more
intelligent.” Does that make sense?
“Yes it’s frightening.” She said and looked at my struggle to speak as if it were hers.
No, I think it’s warm and …“fuzzy. knowing who’s who what’s what.” If you want art, you
can have it, but you have to take the things that come with it…
Natalie raises an eyebrow.
 He says after a long pause, “you define yourself.” I think it feels “more” free. I’m “afraid” all
the time now. I smile “but” I’m not happy. This world “doesn’t” hold water, look at all the
“run-off.”
Billy was struck dumb.
Natalie drew the curtains.
Without you I have no courage at all …“line.”
My, life has been simply unbearable, I sometimes scare myself—look at the circles under my
eyes. I haven’t slept in weeks.
“Everything’s going to be fine.” she insisted as she pulled on the stuck curtain.
So, anyway, Billy thought: what’s the difference, I might as well be talking cock-talk for all
the good it’s doing me.
At least someone might say to their husband someday, “You know, Gordon, I think that young
man is speaking ancient Aramaic! That’s the Lord’s tongue.”
To which Gordon was as likely as not to respond, “Jeeze, isn’t that something.”

The Missing Part

“Sooner I’d be doing anything than making these harps,” the Irish workman claims in his
indomitable brogue.
Formidable as it may be, a mountain is accent and inflection and studied verse, just like any
language you might learn; and shadowing my own intention was a mountain pass I had been thru
before, and knowing now the lay of the land I also knew many people had been there before me
and many lost, or scared and nearly lost, had followed me; so lost, in fact, they would understand
my words whether sharp or dull, or spoken plainly or not spoken at all—understand, in a way that
no one else would…Natalie was one of those… who had been scared. Being and becoming are
gifts. I planned to give her a great gift; fortune smiles, fate laughs, luck takes a back seat and the
muses spill out their wonders. She was gay for me and I headed straight for her.
Natalie, I’m trying to talk to you. I am talking thru the wings. I don’ think you can hear me
thru the flood of wavering sensibility.
God can hear me; he speaks to me thru my only working center to my destroyed self. He talks
in the opposite direction that words usually come in—directly thru my learned prejudices, my
likes and dislikes, my mood, my memories, the things I’ve added, and my mind, to me. To the
thing that wasn’t much to begin with, but now struggles to grow.
“Save me!” “Help!” was all that came out of that.
She said, “Let’s pray.”
I said, “No! I want you, not—not more words…leaking out.”
I tried to say what I meant to say—I can’t have a relationship with God thru you, nor can I
have a relationship with you thru God. I will not sacrifice my self to my soul. I love them both.
She stared at me, and smiled. “What honey?”
I felt like a nervous breakdown was coming on. Talking publicly, living publicly, desiring
publicly, made me overly concerned, self-conscious of everything, and made for a stutter. It also
ma-made me hor`ney.
“Oh, nuh-nothing.” I said and smiled—happy as a breakthru. I kind of gi-giggled. I think sa-
sex is just sex. I have other things to wo-worry about.
You can be s`trait, because you like to em`brace the opposite sa-sex, or you can embrace the
ah-opposite sex because you like to be ‘straight.’ E-Either way it’s what you la-like. I tried so
hard to be understood I became understandable. It became like a need to belong. And then I
started making decisions based on my new need. My understanding. I thought I was strait! I
almost forgot I’m human to a fault and mostly water, and therefore not understandable. The
primary selling point to sexuality is that you don’t have to think about it. It just is. Like salt—
additive. And that belonging to the largest club in the world had to mean something. The
purpose of sex is to ma-multiply, but you’re completely missing the point if you don’t have fa-
fun. Ah-All of you.

Raison d'être, the hologram

Consider Adding: The Photic Drive

The un-conscious gives us little tiny chunks that represent huge amounts of understanding.
In English, the expression ‘everyone,’ translates into Spanish as ‘todo el mundo.’ Translate
that back into English—it makes no sense. It means all the world. Yet ‘everyone’ means an
infinite amount, more than every number-one that you can find or identify, but all the number-
ones that there are. It also means-tests individuals that may or may not be any one at all. This
ambiguity does not translate. The world, for example, cannot roll down my street, as though they
were one can. Invited. Already known.
These packets of information are encoded into a center of the brain that understands them and
understands that they have limited meaning. It is, to this part of the brain, what you take away
from these stories that’s important. Not literally take away but more, what you are able to take
with you, regarding the story, that is significant. To say it again a third time: we all take away
from a story the same thing, and that is whatever we take away with us…that is how the un-
conscious works. It is designed to work perfectly and completely for everyone in an imperfect
world. To enable and frustrate our understanding of the world, by a process of
eliminating…systematically eliminating, the complication of not knowing everything that is
going on around us and being able to know only a very small piece. And obviously having to
operate in the dark, as it were.
It is believed, by some, in science, today, that our brains create the whole world in a
representational form within our brains almost like a hologram that we can ‘see’ and refer to. The
question is not ‘who created it,’ because we did. The question would be more aptly phrased:
‘what trouble is this supposed to keep me out of, if I’m living in it?’
I think it had a whole different function back in the day. I think it was a sort of after thought, a
useless thing. Look at it this way: you have in your brain a generated image of you body in
space. It is there to allow you, just that—to see your whole body in three dimensions in space. It
works very well, it is how you can close your eyes and reach for a glass of water and not spill a
drop. It allows you to yu[r/ (type).
However, this me in space, came eventually, to define my self, at about 30,000 BCE which was
fine, accurate and all, but there was a problem. If you use it to define self, then all the area
around it, also defines self. The area around it is indispensable in defining self because a large
measure of what a thing is, is defined by things around it that are not it. My cell phone in its
cradle is defined by the cradle which is not cell phone and by the Calvin Klein underwear that
outlines its general shape and keeps me from seeing it light up when I have a call. So in this
image, the ‘hologram,’ of the self, there is an outline, the outer edge if you will, that describes not
self. This ‘not self area’ became God, that is…everything else. The Universe. And to this day,
when we check our self-image in the arrowed-margins of the right parietal lobe of the brain we
also check the world—The Universe. This marginal area grew because the curious scavengers
that love to bait the tiger and pull the inedible, from its branches so others can feast, fed it. It
created the world. Then there was light. The area representing ‘Everything’ is non-brain.

I loved God.
 I was not, however, so sure that he loved me. One eye still went east, my knee could forecast
the weather, but only bad weather, my face was like a Monet; looks good from a distance, but the
closer you get the more hap hazard it becomes. I was, in my own opinion a double bagger, if you
asked the magic eight ball how many bags it would take for someone to sleep with me the answer
would invariably come back with the prudent, “two will do.” And I was not so sure the heavens
would welcome me after the episode with the-you-know-what. The count down.
Mention my name in Heaven; someone might say, “Oh yes, he gave Mei a chance to shine,”
and someone else might say, “Yeah, it’s a good thing he quit when he did.”
But the goddamn hospital taught me that it’s not my time yet. Of course, they don’t think it’s
ever anybody’s time yet. But, notwithstanding, I learned a lot from their simple do-me-first
philosophy.
.
Mom Said
That was the summer two years after mom took up sewing, and we never saw her again.
Clarke and I, and Morris’s Aunt, went to Springfield, where mom lived and we spent a week with
her while Aunt ‘Morris’ danced, plunged drains, and made everything nice for my mother. She
would have drawn a smiley face on her if she could. Clarke and I tried to talk, but Clarke was in
full calamity mode and couldn’t smile. He looked like a kid waiting by himself for a bus that was
never gonna come; it was too tragic to endure.
In Springfield, there was no such thing as a sprinkle. We were unaware of the passing parade
and we were woefully unaware that our lemonade was turning back into you-know-what. The
lemonade Morris’ Aunt had fixed, so long ago.
Mom said, “This would look good on you,” and held up her hands with nothing in them, and
she’d stare at us in the little imaginary frame that her ideas insinuated. We looked at her all-
framed, much of the time too. She let us model our new clothes. She must have known they
weren’t real, because she never made us take them off before giving us another set to try on.
Mom said, “Oh, I can fix that,” but she only thought she could. We needed help that was way
beyond her, and Aunt Morris was looking better and better. If I came in the house with a cut, or
blood from the neighbor’s or a rip in my jeans from an un-warranted, under-considered, or un-
coordinated slide into first base, she’d say, “I can fix that,” and then she’d go back to her sewing.
I got a button once—a little too big and sort of more mother of pearl than plain white, like the
other buttons it was supposed to match, and she said, “Oh Billy, don’t be like that, it’s a perfectly
good button. It’s exactly the same as the others, it matches up perfectly, ask your father.” But dad
died and she knew it. I guess.
Mom started getting better, we all thought, until there was this terrible row, because we went
to school without our raincoats and soon we were on a bus to Missouri, the ‘I’ll show you
state’—“That very day.”

More Hyjinx
Doris had been sexually abused I had no doubt. Natalie was a reckless driver who was a
danger to every pedestrian walking, wheel-chaired or crutch-ed; even my own cradled sister was
swaddled from the beginning by a kind of hopeless ‘not-on-your-life-missy,’ veiled-threat.
Perhaps all women are mesmerized, maybe from the beginning. Hope, but with conditions. I
love you…see. But, the, ‘you love me,’ is all implied—implied by the same structure, which sent
me off on this chase in the first place. Next to religion, the biggest hoax in the history of
Mankind.
 No wonder really, men love their little miracles—Erect penis…some big deal. But, my sister
had a home, and my brother and I went from home to home with none.
I have no idea what I’m talking about. This is the same thing, the thing, the callow thing, that
keeps knocking at my door…it’s something about availability, speed, and interconnectedness.
This is why I miss Mei, at least with him I felt better—than him.

There is no way around this, and having painted myself into a corner I guess I have to come
clean, or as my forth grade teacher at Branches Will Break Elementary, Mrs. Schwartzlander,
used to say, ‘I have to fess up.’
I love everyone. I believe that we love everyone and everything all the time. I believe that
this is Heaven. And we are resistant beings. From our experience with, well, language. Words
learned and relearned.
Not to put too strong a polish on it, this was one of those things I learned when I didn’t have
anything else to do but babble and drool and I didn’t know anything but when the nurse was
going to come and feed me lunch. The essential problem with the truth is not that it can’t be
grasped but that it is not graspable. It’s a fractal. The closer you look the bigger it gets. You
can’t get around it, to see it. And therefore you must speculate. And that requires personal input
and so you have too many versions and too many clogged filters. Telling the truth to someone
becomes almost impossible—not that you shouldn’t try, but it’s more like a dance than a drive.
You only get there when the music stops and even then…
I was not always so feckless and morose. In a world so hunkered-down that airplanes are an
anachronism. It’s I love you time. This time has a clear feel of being opened and closed at the
same time.

Billy descends on Fa to find him plotting

Fa was on cloud nine one minute, then absent, distracted and depressed the next. He talked
too fast, then he barely talked at all. He told Billy everything he needed to know in about 20
seconds, then marched around the room as if the subject had changed. He stumbled over
furniture for no reason.
Nothing was working out like he’d assumed it would. He thought he had dibs on a new
language center, something like the subconscious. Long posited from an accumulation of
impirical evidence—something was happening behind the scenes; never seen; rarely heard;
seldom credited. Fa was on the trail. He was all over it.
He had hoped to study it as a second language, but found that he understands Billy’s fucked-
up talk as well as he understands English, and in some miraculous way, when he and Billy talk he
speaks fucked-up too. It’s absolutely clear. It sounds like English, but has a greater shared-
vocabulary, with rarely any dis-harmony in word choice, in fact he has been able to express to
Billy, things that really are not possible in regular speech. The whole thing was turned on its
head.
This is not going to be easy to explain. Billy can only speak to me, or so Fa thought.
Many times Fa laughed openly at people’s expressions when Billy asked them a question or
answered one of theirs. He tried, several times, to translate, for Billy, but three or four words of
Billy’s stood for about 200 words in English. It made Fa look…well, crazy.
He was not permitted to scan Billy anymore so he scanned himself as he talked to Billy.
Eyebrows were raised hospital wide, so they did it at night, and eventually only Sunday nights.
Some understood Fa’s enchantment, others didn’t.
Obligated to try every ethical trick in the book, Fa conceived a plan. He knew perfectly well
that many of his colleagues would not stand for the discovery of the dual pathway. It was
completely un-scientific; it was never going to fly. At the same time he knew perfectly well this
was a breakthru, a discovery of extreme value to science generally, and mankind as a whole. It
would add immeasurably to the science of knowing. If it’s good to know something—useful and
all that, then it could be and is also very good to know that you know something. And afraid to
even think it…it is very great to know that you know that you know something. Fa was moving
toward a kind of end.
It’s just that thing in itself, that he could and would never be able to get across. Some idiot
would add a fourth, and a fifth knowing, just to be cute and cutting. When you know that much
about anything you are viewing it thru time. The time when it came to you first and whole: same
taste smell feel, same background frequency. A recording. The creative power that could be
unleashed would be astronomical, austrailiopithicene!
Billy told Fa to get out of the stock market and get some air. “This cow’s not for sale,” he
said. “But if it were, you’d find 50,000 there that’re cheaper.” Fa believed him.
It could change the essence of man! It might change language!

Fa was expecting Billy that morning, but he was so mentally foggy from consideration of…
of…‘The Scheme,’ and its complexity, and its willful disregard for the future, the possibility of
failure, and the shear fun of simple explanations, shutting doors, prevailing —even winning while
talking with certain people, that he didn’t see Billy run into his office, and close the door. A few
millennia later, exhausted, Fa recovered his senses in time to answer the knocking at his door.
We are inside Fa’s mind:
Dickenson is conspiratorial by nature; Stevenson wants order and can’t abide any chaos or
untidiness; Moldigliani sees herself as the object of derision and affection, and can’t put down
roots anywhere. How can I get these three to support me or, do I need support? It might be better
to court ire. What is it Billy says, court the schism? Agreement is going to be a problem. I want
it and need it, but not right away. There must be friction to get this off the ground. After all I
want to be seen as the one putting forth this idea; it must be really new; hard to understand, but it
must be simple, simple, simple—for me. Hence success! What I need is an accident; all
discoveries proceed from the inspiration of accidents. The plan was about to hatch.
Fa didn’t realize two things, at least: 1), nobody cares unless the thing offered is either edible
or fun. And 2), that Billy was not fun. He was headed for the deep-end and Fa was not
sufficiently afraid of the deep end.
Fa was going to drown.
“Excuse me my name is Winterbourne, Herbert Winterbourne of the Journal without a name.
I would like to speak to you, if I could, about Mr. Hudson.”
Who?
“Are you Dr. Ferraj Bonham Jarhad?”
“Of course.” Fa instinctively looked at his watch, “I don’t have time right now, if you would
please make an appointment with my secretary, I would be glad to talk to you, but right now my
schedule is booked, packed. I’m sure you can imagine.”
“Yes I can, what are your plans with regard to revealing the details of Mr. Hudson’s
condition?”
“His condition. Is…what is your understanding of his condition, Mr. Ahh (toying with a man
he didn’t know)?”
“We at The Journal wish to make you an offer regarding any disclosures.”
“There are no disclosures at this time.”
“My editors wish to know if it is true that you won’t allow Mr. Hudson to be seen.”
“Yes he’s intervisible.”
“Interviewable?”
“He has nothing to say, and doesn’t know anything.” Smiling to himself, like a possum,
closing the door.
“We have questions.”
 “No one has any answers (I can’t answer them right now).”
The door closes.
“I can.” Billy says, quietly from behind a book shelf.
Fa flinches, as though someone touched his shoulder.
“How did you get in here?”
“I took advantage of your open-door policy.”
“I see…you snuck in.”
“No. I ran in, and shut the door while you were asleep.”
“I was not asleep,” Fa says reflexively.
“Well, okay you were not asleep.”
“It’s sort of creepy the way you move around without leaving any traces.”
“What exactly is creepy about it?” Billy says, smiling.
“Not creepy…the opposite of creepy.”
“Fast and inspired?”
“Yes, Fa says, with some hesitancy.”
“I like a little genius with my morning coffee.”
“Billy, I don’t always understand you.”
“Good. How long?”
“How long what?”
“How long have I got doc?’
“Oh, forever I guess.”
“That’s about what I thought.” Billy adjusts the chair, it was the kind of chair that you can just
sit in.
“Well. How long have I got?” Fa asked, hopefully.
“Hmm,” Billy looks around, eyeballing the room, “The tide’s coming in…and the water level
is about to here,” he says, with outstretched hand, indicating approximately waist high—roughly
measuring the height of the books and papers along the very expensive meant-to-look-like hastily
arranged irregular cinder blocks that were neither inexpensive, accidentally, or hastily arranged
or even the same shade of grey as ‘real’ cinder block. Fa opens his top desk drawer as Billy
calculates, opens a brown bottle of pills by pushing down while turning the cap, “thug-uh” and
takes his mood stabilizer.
“Last week the level was here,” and Billy scratches a line on the already described wall, then
another line. Then he says to Fa, “Stand here.” and marks the level on the wall corresponding to
Fa’s nose on tiptoes. As Fa continues to make his pupil, patient, teacher, mentor, friend, savior,
right arm, conspirator, stand in, cow, ticket to ride, and the Lennon to his McCartney hide or be
more secretive—Billy adds it up, and jumps into the cloud of ideas, “125 weeks.”
Fa winces, and rolls his eyes.
“Ever read about Archimedes?” Billy asks.
“No, the mathematician?”
“No, Archimedes the mortician’s assistant.”
“No.”
“Well back about almost 2500 years ago now, Archimedes was trying to solve a problem for
the king of Greece. The king hired wise men to figure out problems, answer questions and all
that. Well, he was a savant…you know, very bright and knowledgeable about one thing. He saw
mathematics the way you and I see pictures, and mosquitoes see temperature. The problem was
this: the king had commissioned a golden crown to be made. When it was delivered it was
accompanied by rumors that it was not all gold, that the artist had replaced some of the gold for
silver. He gave this problem to Archie.
The first thing he had to figure out was how to calculate the volume of a crown. From there,
he could compare the difference between the same volumes of metals with different weights,
silver being lighter than gold, and deduce whether there was fraud afoot or not.
 The story goes, that he struggled for an answer for days, that in fact he didn’t sleep, he was so
obsessed with the problem believing that it was solvable and all that. His servants were
concerned for him, and at some point decided that he must at least bathe. So they lifted the
thinking machine up, and carried him to the baths where they placed him in a tub. Archimedes
saw how the water spilled out of the tub when he entered it, and to the degree that he entered it,
and a light went off in his head, and he shouted “Eureka!” (I found it), jumped up and ran naked
through the streets of ancient Syracuse yelling, Eureka! In Greek.
Archimedes was known for being eccentric, absent-minded and self absorbed.
But that’s not the end of the story. For reasons that need a lot of explaining and a good long
heartfelt apology; all his work was lost during The Dark Ages, lost and hidden, lost and protected,
and lost and forgotten. Just an ironic aside: the Arab world was at one time the hub of scientific
culture, the repository of education as a force in the world, very advanced, very much forward-
thinking. They preserved much of the work of the great Greek scholars during the rise of
Catholicism. This was long before they believed in enforced ignorance. Change sucks. Anyway,
by accident or carelessness, one copy of his masterpiece, The Method, survived.” Long dramatic
pause.
“How?”
“I thought you’d never. A monk was copying a book one year. It took months to make one
copy of one book. He ran out of paper and instead of going off to get some, he hunted around in
the attic of the friary and found, yes, you guessed it, the last remaining copy of The Method. It
was in Greek and it was hundreds of years old so he washed the ink off the pages, and set out to
copy the book of common prayer, as he had planned. He gathered the entire document which was
written on long sheets of paper, pulled them from their binding, turned the sheets sideways folded
them in half and he was ready to go, all he had to do was copy. Once he had finished the book of
verse, he bound the book essentially sideways—from the Archimedean perspective. And that
was that.
It was discovered in 1906 and then became a rumor. It was discovered again in 1991 and was
sold at auction for two million dollars American.
It was not only a book about mathematical discovery from one of the truly great thinkers of the
so-called ancient world, but in the tradition of the time, it was also filled, not with proofs, the way
mathematics is today, but with plotted-out explanations of what Archie was thinking as the work
unfolded. Sort of like a glimpse into how his mind works. This book, called The Palimpsest, is
still being deciphered to this day, and has the potential to yield great undiscovered treasure. It’s a
kind of an early explorer’s map. You see, he thought he was going somewhere.”
“Luckily the monk was not very thorough in washing the ink off,” Fa said.
“You’ve heard this story.”
“No.”
“Well, you’re right. He had done an interesting thing though, don’t you think? He covered up
great knowledge with trite sayings. Think about it.”
“I am.”
“Well, I mean, don’t you think that’s odd?”
“In what way?”
“That’s the same thing we did.” Billy says, and looks at Fa.
“Cover up knowledge?”
“Yes, cover it up with trite sayings.”
“Billy?’
“Yes.”
“Who’s we?”
“I wish I had a cigarette.”
“You don’t smoke.”
 “I can’t get a cigarette. I’m your Everything; I’m very nearly famous; and I can’t get one
lousy cigarette?!”

The Calderon (the ironic proof that you have ‘arrived.’)

The sign of a life well lived is that you can forget whole worlds that others can only imagine—Balzac

The beautiful car, the one that took me everywhere, the one that saved my life by not breaking
at my request—but gunning its engine, hydroplaning thru many an intersection, just because—
dated me, and made me wonder what else I might be forgetting.
Oh, yeah that’s right, I was celibate for seven years when I lived in Tibet. Didn’t I mention I
was a monk who lived on rice and knew only three words of Chinese: ‘please,’ ‘explain,’ and
‘beautiful.’ I guess I just forgot about the orange robe—I think I was a hit.
In 1947, the company founded by Emile Delahaye, the award-winning French automobile
designer, made a perfect car. I refer to it as The Delahaye, when I speak of it. But ‘The
Calderon’ is, times two, the best thing I ever owned.
I’m so lonely without it; I was so foolish not to drive it more. I member afternoons in the sun,
singing to the radio, planning to take over the world in my smoky baby––my expensive toy. Oh
God, what a good time I had…we had, because there was something to that car. It ran me ragged,
and I love it to this very day.
Truth is, you couldn’t go anywhere in that thing without people stopping you to ask all kinds
of questions about him: ‘Where’d ja get that car?’ ‘Is it new?’ ‘How fast can it go?’ ‘Does it
have room for one more?’ ‘Are the door handles standard or are they specially made.’ Yes. The
Calderon was a he, and a very enterprising one: brilliant, genius, and happy just to shine. If I
farted into the abridged gold and tan leather seats it just meant we were going to have a big laugh,
and end up going twice as fast with all the windows rolled down screaming like the siren on an
ambulance.
We would begin our mission: Have fun.
I would wax The Calderon and then Saturday morning we were off. By noon, I had a carload
of the most strange and extraordinary people you could imagine, in the back seat or rifling thru
the glove compartment looking for Quaaludes or Percocet; supposing, I suppose, that my
comportment would indicate that there must be happy pills nearby. Fools.
One day a dog, a skunk, a young girl and her dad are in the car, and we were going to
the…Well, we ended up at several places. I explained that I wanted to pick up an artist and some
brushes so we could all have our portraits done; and after asking around we were directed to The
Campanile, a small bar-bistro with a large outdoor eating area. And there was Paolo, a starving
artist, if ever I saw one. He came with us immediately upon seeing The Calderon’s reflection in
the sunglasses I placed on the table.
It was so dark after coming in from the bright sun.
Paolo drew us together and drew me separately, after I dropped the others off. He stopped at
one point to tell me he was not an artist, and if it weren’t for The Calderon I would have laughed
out loud, but he taught me manners and not to interfere—just let the seats warm up.
God, I spent all that time preparing and, I don’t know, buying wax, when all I had to do was
open the door. I remember…and this you won’t believe: one day I was inside the Delahaye at a
stoplight and a young man knocked on my window and asked if I’d give his girlfriend a ride. He
said it just like that, because everyone became totally truthful in the mere presence of the
Delahaye—all red, all stainless steel, all machine.
The answer was ‘Yes,’ always yes; that was rule one. I think that’s how I became NSN, never
say never. How do you think I got a skunk in the car, by rolling down the window?
And we took off.
 That was typical of The Calderon, looking out for trouble wherever it could be found. It never
occurred to me, or if it did, I dismissed it as silly superstitious nonsense; but I thought he would
be around forever, if only in my head.
So often people said, ‘Today is my birthday,’ that I took to handing out balloons. I smile. The
Calderon's mirrors were lead lined you know, framed, and rarely moved, no matter the vibration,
or the tork in the road.
The Calderon would pass from me one day. Chance of me outliving it, was slim, but it would
pass, one way or the other, and God, that would be a sad day.
You know, think of it this way: beautiful taillights—red. The same color as the wind swept
chassis. A glint of chrome arching above each light, that spoke eloquently about daily goodbyes
and vividly, about nighttime escapades. Whew.

ς
Billy was having a wonderful time trying to figure out what to say, and then not saying it,
unless he was angry, or in some other way emotionally struck—If he felt like it. He had felt, that
is, been feeling, for the longest time that someone was helping him write this novel. One day
Billy figured it out—he was no longer Billy, that wasn’t even his name. God was in his head
about to blow his cover. He said Hello. Billy said hello back. God said, Aren’t you going to put
a comma there. Billy’s world came to a screeching halt. He stopped being fictional. That lasted
ten minutes, then he went back to his work. God laughed. Billy said, Can’t you see I’m
working? God laughed again. Billy started talking differently—but only in real life. In real life,
Billy had to be found by 3 wisemen. This Billy, would have settled for two bright men, and a
PhD candidate.

The sound was empty noise

Billy’s senses were reversed in acuity following the accident, but he never noticed, until he
heard that strange noise. All his life his senses were arranged: taste touch smell see and hear—
different than most people, the same as some. When he heard an odd sound he would disregard
it. It came in handy in the car business. It was automatic.
Billy’s sense of taste enabled him to eat very small portions and get satisfaction. His sense of
touch was enhanced by his asymmetry—his left hand felt differently about the world than his
right hand did, for example. Like the eight year old girl who dances everywhere she goes, Billy
just liked to touch everything, it made life more interesting. And, oddly enough, everything
touched him back. So much was like shopping: touch it and it can become yours.
His sense of smell was acute, even though he couldn’t always identify what he smelled. He
frequently smelled odors others could not, or so they claimed.
His vision was made essentially two dimensional by a dominant, resentful, suspicious right
eye, working in tandem with a lazy, good for nothing, and slightly blue-tinted left. Basically you
take in, what you take in—but when Billy read, one page was pink the other blue.
Billy went deaf not long after the Thunderbolt incident. He learned to read lips. He wasn’t
deaf long enough, or profoundly enough to become proficient at it—he read smiles.
Consequently, his view of the world was inept—it meant nothing, and added up to zero. He
suffered in silent poverty, not knowing whether anything meant anything to anyone.
He found solace in music, when his swollen adenoids finally receded. He loved the sound of
music, especially knowing it could be taken away at any moment. Once, he smelled smoke, and
was so convinced he saw smoke, that he ran out the house.
 Well into his recovery
Well into his recovery, around the time the noise began, he noticed his left eye began
occasionally flashing little white lights in its extreme left edge, the only reliable part of its
unreliable field—instinctively he would sniff the air—Nothing. He couldn’t remember when
he’d eaten last. The hospital food was lousy, the portions tasteless and too small.
He sat with his hands at his side, unable to command them to rise expediently, and wondered to
himself what kind of a place was this, where no one would help you feed yourself. When he tried
to feed himself, the fork would get caught. When someone came to help him, the fork would fly.
The sign above his bed was inaccurate, he didn’t aim—he had to relearn. Things happen.

The flashes came at odd times. If, for example, someone said what Billy was thinking—white
flash, like a drop of whitewash—one or two drops at a time.
It was just one of those things.
Billy had, for a long time, hidden his deafness behind a façade of agreeableness. He became
so agreeable, no one could say how long his deafness lasted, not even him.

Billy saw types. People in terms of types, by watching the corners of their mouths. He
enjoyed listening when he could, and spoke less than others. Speaking directly to people’s lips
was frowned upon in most circles. He never knew where to look. Which eye to follow. Which
one told the truth—which one was wholly untrustworthy?

After the accident, which incidentally, Natalie didn’t believe in—after he flipped, he heard
people long before they spoke, and saw them for the first time, as if for all time.
Billy had had serious depression for years before the accident, the only thing that helped,
besides a four-year search for the perfect SSRI, was a smile tape he made. Just a recording of a
man smiling at the camera, he got it from one of those public-access call-in shows. Watching the
corners of the man’s mouth, with no distractions, reminded him of something long forgotten. He
could call up the image without wondering what the man was talking about, it didn’t really
matter—it took his anxiety away.

Chris David And Billy

Fact of the matter is we live in ancient times; the fact that we don’t know this is rudimentary;
knowing it is deadeningly un-informative. Billy’s search for content was coming to an end.
Tell me a story daddy:
“Once, a long time ago, there was a King and he had three sons…”
“Chris, David and Billy,” his son interjects.
“Who’s telling this story…?”
The boy giggles, and sits closer to his father. “..three sons More, Still and Ideal were their
names. More was tall , handsome and used to race horses across the countryside.”
“What’s the countryside?”
“…it means he raced them all over the place, you know…across fields and meadows, chasing
deer or foxes and such, like at camp….”
“Oh, in the country.”
“He fell in love when he was your age and was faithful…it means he never loved anyone else
the same as long as he lived…”
“I know what that means.”
 “You do now.” His father mumbles.
The boy yawns and leans against his Father.
“…the girl he fell in love with was beautiful and lived in a tiny house made of wood with dirt
floors and a big hole in the roof……a crazy mother, and a horse that would run out of gas every
other day, and she’d call for a woodsman to help her pull it home, but the woodsman did most of
the work…”
“Daddy.”
“…. She met More when the horse he was riding took him off the beaten track, and as More
slept, dreaming of Castles, the horse followed the grass, and went where it was the greenest.”
“Like David Frost.”
“Robert. Yes.” He looks at his son’s left ear, and flicks it with his finger.
“Ow.”
“They do work after all, huh.”
“Daddy.”
“They arrived together at Matilda’s house…”
“Mary Ellen is her real name…” the boy said with a great deal of satisfaction.
“Matilda,” The Father repeated, and laid his hand on his son’s head—
“Loved him and was faithful till the day she died.”
“She was not permitted to live in the castle, but More saw her often…”
“and,” the boy said, “they were married…”
“They were never married, it was forbidden…”
“What’s forbidden?”
“Forbidden is going across the highway by yourself to catch frogs…”
“Oh,” he looks at the aquarium to reassure himself that his frog is still there and not any part
of ‘forbidden’…
“They were together the way mommies and daddies are, and they lived separate lives…”
“No kids?…”
“Wait…”
“Still, the second prince, was fast on his feet and angry all the time. He would run into a room
and turn everyone out, make them leave…”
“Because he wanted to be alone…”
“Because,” the father said, “he wanted to be alone, and also because he felt bad inside, he
couldn’t stop, and he didn’t know why. Still didn’t like to hurt people, he wanted someone to say
‘I know you can’t stop this. I will let you go for as long as it takes for you to stop. I trust you
will stop hating when you get to me. And I will wait.’ But there was no one who could be
pleased that way—who would wait, no one who thought he didn’t want to be that way, that all he
wanted was to be stopped and not to fight...”
“and he killed…”
The father continues, realizing he has woken his sleepy son, “and he killed many people…”
“He cut their heads off and all because…”
The father curls his son’s hair with his finger…
“all because no one let him be More…Yes, in a way—if he could have been More for one day
or if someone sacrificed their heart to him and prayed for him to be Still it would have made all
the difference in the world.”
“Still was hopeless…”
Still curling his son’s hair, The Father says, “shhh. Still thought he was hopeless and ruined
his life and the lives of many people to prove it…”
“What did he really prove daddy?…”
“That he was what he was born to be, and what he made of himself.” The Father turns the
page, to the two-page picture of bloody carnage, and quickly turns to the next page.
 “Still, bought a castle of his own with an army of his own and ships of his own. When he
grew old enough he started a war with the people in the neighboring country. He became king,
just like his father, long before his brothers, for they had to wait their turn being king …”
“When their father died…”
“Retired.” Said the father.
The boy yawned, and made the sound his father made with his mouth open, and his vocal
cords relaxed. The Father tilted his son’s head back and kissed him on the forehead.
This was going to be the short-version of the Big Book Story they had read, together, many
times, over the past six years.
“Ideal, was the youngest of the brothers. He was the baby of the family, and he was also a
Prince. He was not—as a grown man—what he was as a young boy. As a young boy he was a
slob; he never cleaned anything; he liked it that way. Ideal didn’t like soap and he didn’t like
clothes, especially all the clothes they wore back then in those days… Under clothes and over
clothes, scarves and buttons, collars, hats, chains, ropes, fillers, puffer-uppers, tighteners, clasps,
cover-ups and drag-behinds, all that stuff everyone wore in such abundance. He liked to be naked
or wearing only his favorite pants. He called them…”
“Lucky pants.” his son said, and soon yawned.
“…Yes,” The Father said, stroking his son’s hair as he held the book and turned the pages one-
handed—using his knee to hold the book so he could crease pages down the center making them
stay open and not close-up right away. “His lucky pants...”
“See.”
“Ideal understood the world, and he knew it was better this way: to move around and be
looked at for who you were, instead of who you were supposed to be, or who you weren’t—just
waiting to be stopped.”
The boy touched his father’s ear.
“Ideal…could change nothing, and so he didn’t stop (or want to) and he didn’t run away (or
need to). He stayed where he was and he learned to love it. He had no lucky pants…not really—
he had what he liked and wore what he wore, and when, or if, people questioned, or were troubled
by him, he would make-up a story, and in the story would be the thing the listener would want to
hear.”
The boy was asleep.
“Back in those days, luck was very important; so when it came right down to it, he told lies—
he said that everything worth having he already had, and everything he had, brought him luck.
But he knew this world and there was no luck, there were only pleasing lies and ironic secrets…”
“What are `ronic secrets...?”
“Things that are the total opposite of what you think they should have been…now it’s time to
go to bed…”
“Did More and Mary Ellen have any kids?” The son asks as the father carries him from the
chair to the bed…
“Yes they did, they had three sons…”
“Chris, David and Billy…”
“Yes, Chris, David and Billy…”
“I thought so…Goodnight,” the boy says, and he turns over and goes to sleep.
“…Goodnight Billy,” The Father says, and closes the door after turning off the light…
His son turns abruptly in the bed like a question mark, “That’s ironic.”
“…What is?…
“You were supposed to say: I’ll see you in the morning, Deal. But you called me Billy…”
“Oh…I did, didn’t I…Big Deal, goodnight.”

Isaac
 Isaac walks in, the last day of Billy’s hospital stay, right into the middle of an argument
between a black nurse and Billy.
“Ida, you are the embodiment of the corollary, it takes one, to know one.”
“You’re incoherent!”
“You’ve been reading the dictionary.”
She sticks her nose up and walks out with a haughty laugh.
Billy climbs out of his wheelchair, which he uses for effect, and because the crutches rub his
skin under his arms raw. He regains his strength and realizes that if Ida finds him incoherent, he
must be getting better.
“Lazy, Ha!”
Isaac remains standing, studying his old friend and neighbor. He holds two cups of coffee
with sugar packets, and stirrers, from Dunking Donuts—just like they used to share in huge gulps
on the porch in the summers not so long ago, on the way to somewhere—seems – so long ago.
“Well.” Isaac says.
“I had a shirt like that once.” They embrace, and the shirt pulls out even further.
“I haven’t seen you, you look great, really.”
“What part?” Billy says, as he stares into his friend’s open eyes, the same color as his own.
Billy’s speech begins to coalesce with his thoughts; he was an enigma to himself.
“You look well.”
“I want you to wear this.” Billy says, as he looks at his friend’s lips, in their familiar curve.
Isaac looks around, to see what he could be referring to. Nothing. “I missed you.” and then he
puts his hand to Billy’s lips.
Billy had waited weeks for someone to do that, to stop him. Everyone else encouraged him
for their own amusement, and they loved to see him struggle and try and hated it when he gave
up. They wanted Billy to be a hero as though it were a hero’s name.
“Let me do the talking.” Isaac said.
When Billy opened his mouth Isaac said, “ah ah.”
Isaac was the repository of thousands of bytes of code, maybe millions…billions.
Billy said one last thing before friendly silence and miss manners took over, “You were in my
dream, you sang something stupid.”
Isaac sang, “Then you go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like I-love-you.” and he
held my mouth shut. Billy held his hands up Sinatra-style and kicked the door closed.
His lips made ‘that smirk,’ by holding a smile in perpetual abeyance and tearing my fear apart,
shaking my head for me noiselessly, he added, “I was here and you sang songs, then you threw a
radio at me and hit me here,” indicating the left temple.
“It’s all about you,” I said, as he tried to keep my mouth shut. He made me fearless.
He let go of my head, “This place is a pig sty.” He said.
“I won’t let them clean it.” I explained.
“Don’t talk.”
“Don’t talk?”
“Don’t talk.”
“Don’t.”
“Yes,” Isaac says. And I obeyed.
Later, after our coffees and our one-sided discussion of the good times, he says, “Billy, you
never let go of anything—maybe that’s how you’ll get back on your feet.”
I thought of the game I gave him for Christmas 12 years ago, as he talked about how much
people missed me. The $10,000 Pyramid:
“I am absolutely flabbergasted.”
“You could have blown me away, really.”
 “I do respect your opinion.”
“I can’t believe you’re here, tell me everything, was it seamless.”
“How about another bump.”
“Come on, yes you.”
“…..I know, things you want God to say when you arrive at the pearly gates.”

Isaac looks at me as if to ask a question, but he doesn’t, we’re still playing:

“Well don’t tell me you couldn’t think of anything to say?”
“That stuff about listening is bullshit!”
“Come on, you are so funny!”
“You could be great just loosen up.”
“Don’t stand in the back. Let’s…let’s dance.”
“…..I know, things the devil might say.”

A train
A train rolls thru town. No one sees it, but you know it’s there. It moves slowly inexorably,
long, packed.
No one mentions it. They talk about their selves. The town, its people, their lives, the story,
they don’t move, the train does; but everything is about the train and its non-circuitous track.
Believe it or not, Billy’s train moves the same, whether he’s on it or not.
Billy describes everything as either voices or mannerisms—comb and tissue paper, like an
earthquake in a brick factory. A tinkling.
Not only, was the skeleton he thought was a complete thought, not—the tail didn’t suit the
animal. He had created a folk-paleoetymological snafu. He took to eating walnuts. Practically
gave up radishes altogether, except in salads.
Natalie continually mixed up needing and wanting, so he told her one day, to an army of
regret: “Needing and wanting are the same. However, if you are, and to the extent you are aware
of a difference, there is one. It’s like sexuality. You can’t need anything you don’t want and you
can’t want anything you don’t need, except of course, you will find at times, you can…and that
will herald…the beginning of, the beginning of, yeah, the begin..in…in…of…”
“Hard times?” she anticipated.
“A real …”
“Hard…” still guessing.
“Life.” I said.
She still missed it.
In a world hungry for meaning, Billy was loved roughly. The callus you’re lookin’ at.
Natalie’s color is high all the time now, blushes easily, freckles—is a mystery to Billy—the
color of her breasts, her legs, her hair.
She couldn’t be pregnant! He knew he hadn’t gotten out what he intended to say about
needing and wanting, she had, however, somehow gotten it.
He couldn’t have a baby; he couldn’t talk!
He became excitable and grew pale.
He tried very hard to speak, it was like he had taken a quick-study course in English for the
accident prone—it was all swear words…‘but at least,’ Natalie thought, ‘he was trying.’ She
joked, one day that the baby might speak before he did. That never happened. The baby never
happened. The part about Natalie understanding the difference between needing and wanting
never happened. None of it ever happened. Except swearing when he was frightened, that
happened.
 I stared at the big cup of coffee on the table by the window in the sun. Gray vapor came off it
in waves, upward like fire or music, a soft muted rainbow made prismatic by tiny yet visible
layers of water drops held momentarily in the low wintry sun.
I caught myself watching my coffee and wondered with feigned humor how long it would be
before I started talking and what would I have to say? ‘Good morning coffee.’
I reviewed my snapshots of the night before, the little glimpses of the unconscious. We may
take them constantly, but we don’t know them. We only know what we show, we only show
what we save, and we only save what makes sense now. It’s like a slow subtraction problem
where all the numbers stay the same but the tally changes. There’s only one problem. Who’s
we?

Natalie was in the midst of an unburdening process.

Not guilty, because she’s burdened.
The burden is keeping it going. It’s keeping guilt at bay.
Keeping the conversation flowing, with a man who can talk, and means to tell the truth, but
can’t converse.
Just the same, he fed her, even as she fed him, and kept her internal conversation in limbo.
She was waiting to live. And that’s as close to guilt as she ever got.
Natalie even learned to do dressing changes on my ankle. Right where she’d swept me off my
feet. The nurse recognized her revulsion to this, and started out by saying: “There’s nothing to it:
you take the old packing out, and put the new packing in, that’s it. I’ve just told you everything
you need to know about changing the dressing, the rest is common sense, and a little science.
What this is, really, you’ll find, is a bonding experience.”
That got her attention.
Getting my speech back to normal could be our ‘bonding experience.’
I wanted her to do what Fa had done: Read to me, but she tired of that after about the fourth or
fifth story in Mamie McCambridge’s self-help book, If You Can’t Beat ‘em, Join ‘em. I tired of it
at the title.
Fa read Emily Dickenson, then showed me the video tape of Julie Harris in The Bell of
Amhearst. He read selected chapters from Moby Dick, The Persian Boy, Typee, and Treasure
Island all in the same day. He read Emerson’s letters to Thoreau, and Ann Frank’s letter to the
world.
Natalie read from a book that had ‘last chance saloon,’ written all over it. I would have
preferred a double. That was a day before we left the hospital—and I already needed a drink.
Natalie had planned a surprise party.

The day I left the hospital

The day I left the hospital was sunny and bright. It felt great to be back home.
I was aghast that she had phoned up my friends and invited them to my welcome home party.
I had no idea. And she had no idea my friends didn’t know each other—
So no one asked her who she was. They all assumed the same thing; she was an old friend.
Hadn’t he mentioned someone named Natalie or Nancy once, a long time ago?
Billy’s real best friends knew they were his best friends, but many others thought they were
because there was no one else that could be. He kept everyone separate and everyone guessing.
Billy had ‘learned’ an approach to life: tell everyone everything, or tell no one nothing—
everyone thought they knew him—It was annoying. No one knew that Natalie was the driver in
the MVA that took such a big chunk of Billy’s life.
In his dreams he was impenetrable; in real life he was queer. Everyone expected a small party,
intimate. No one expected a catastrophe.
 Natalie should have guessed, when no one asked her who was coming and everyone asked to
bring someone not on her list. The list of phone numbers she got from the wallet the nurse
thought she was giving to his sister, was only three years old. But many of the people had moved
away and many numbers were not in use—cells phones she supposed.
I had no idea she hadn’t told them who she was. She had told only one person the truth and
that was me. Everyone else thought something different. She had no idea they hadn’t been told
thru the hospital grape vine as one might expect—except there was no grape vine just little
strands of hyperconductive jism arranged as haphazardly as if on black velvet, that connected
nothing to no one. She was the only grape vine there had ever been. Natalie was evasive, for the
same reason Billy was offensive—because they both cared what people thought, and without help
they couldn’t be understood.
Natalie missed all the signs: Claire, Billy’s sister, got chummy, and asked her for information;
the rooms had seating arrangements for three people only, and one arrangement per room; no
room looked lived in except a library on the third floor; and it smelled sour; none of the other
rooms had any smell at all; the people she talked to on the phone were very friendly, exceedingly
so; but the neighbors said nothing, waved and then didn’t give her a second look; it was a queer
arrangement.
Right in the middle of the festivities, when everyone began to grow tired of not knowing who
was who, it dawned on most them, and Consuelo especially, how disabled I really was. A kind of
ground swell began in small cadres here and there. The call went-up to sue the crap out of the
bastard that did this. Someone said they’d heard ‘she’ was on the cell phone when it happened.
Someone else said that they should check police records to see if they had done any blood alcohol
tests. Someone else said the phone records could be had—a witness could be found. The general
consensus was that anyone who talks on a cell phone while driving is an ass.
I looked at Natalie, busy at work in the kitchen, a glass of wine at her side, and said nothing; I
just sweated.
I tried to tell them to be quiet but my deranged protest only fueled their desire to get even, or
to get me back a piece of what I was missing, at least. They were united in one thing, justice.
I began to fail slowly, steadily, turning from face to face, at my own party unable to ask for
help even among my best friends. The world was not yet right side up. I said ‘stop,’ but it came
out “when.” I said to Alex’s friend Tipper, that I needed to go outside to see the dog, but it came
out backwards, sideways, and all mixed up, “God, stop it, stop it. Dis tuog, eddies tog…dog,
fuck! The dog!”
I tried to make it thru the screen door as quickly and inconspicuously as possible, for a smoke,
I pulled Tipper behind me and we flew out the front door. I knew he smoked and I tried to ask
him for one.
“52-pick-up, catch me.”
But his expression never changed from that unforgettable look of shock and revulsion.
I made the universal sign for cigarette about twenty times, before he pulled out his cigarettes
and felt himself up for a lighter. I was about to do that myself, but it can be so easily confused
with the universal sign for, ‘I’m having a heart attack—where’s my nitro?!’ My unusual
language gave me unusual insights.
The two people there, that I knew knew Natalie, had turned away. Even Isaac, Mr. Sociable,
born and bred on cheese and crackers. The only person I knew, who could talk over a room full
of people in his regular sounding voice, who never met a guy he didn’t like or a girl he couldn’t.
Even he played deaf.
When I left the house, the consensus was that this was a crime that ought to be paid for in
blood, and by the time I returned, the consensus was it could be paid for in a thousand other ways
each one as painful as that.
“Well, let’s drink.” I said, too loud and too gaily. I had rehearsed, with poor, stunned, big-
eyed Tipper to say — ‘Well, now you know, I smoke.’ However, that’s not what came out.
What came out was just a glimmer of what my re-entry strategy was going to be. Some great
welcome home.
Natalie made the first toast. “Here’s to…” and then she burst into tears.
“A speedy recovery! Here! Here!”
Thank you Isaac.

Consuelo
Consuelo moved in and helped with my recovery—from the horrible party. She and Isaac put me
to bed and then when I crawled out to the car they went after me and put me back to bed again. I
didn’t want to drive it—“I just wanted to sit in it…” I declared over and over, adding, “I’m too
drunk to drive; I’m to drunk to drive; I’m too drunk to drive myself to the store; I’m too drunk too
drive myself to a picnic; I’m too drunk to drive anyone anywhere, why? Because I’m too drunk.”
My etymobile, was hitting on all its cylinders this time. Apparently, when I was drunk I could
repeat a blue streak, no-problem. Note to self: get drunk and call Fa.
“I have to call my doctor.”
“You have to go to bed.”
“I have to calmly, call Dr… Dr. Ferraj Bonham Jarhad—there, say it…”
“You’re speaking much better, Billy…”
“I know…that’s why I want to call my doctor…I’m cured…”
“You need to come with us…”
“Okay, I’ll come with you, because I love you both and because I only have one condition.”
“…What’s that?” Isaac said.
“God, you’re sexy…”
“No, the condition…”
“The condition is that…that…okay…the condition is that I sleep with the phone…”
“That’s not what I thought he was going to say…” Consuelo said.
“…me neither…”
“You mean the telephone?”
“No, the microphone. Of course the tele-phone ha ha ha…”
“Are you going to call your doctor at 4 in the morning?”
“…of course not…I always sleep with the phone…”
“Huh?” Isaac said …“What was that for?”
“…what?”
“Nothing.” said Isaac.
“...ike…ike..”
“Yes Billy.”
“...I love you.”
“…and I love you…go to bed.”
“...all right.” Then I collapsed in a heap…“ike…I think the look on Natalie’s face cured me.”
“You know,” Connie said. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to let Faja know about this. He might
find this extremely interesting.”
“…Connie…Connie…I love you…”
“I love you too. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”

In the morning, my speech is completely fucked-up. Almost inaccessibly fucked-up.

Isaac calls early, and Consuelo is nowhere to be found. I reach over and grab the phone.
“I have candy in my pocket, all soft and sticky.”
 I answer the phone, ‘I have candy in my pocket,’ I mean to say ‘Hello.’
“Hello?” Isaac says, with a funny lilt in his voice.
“I have.” I repeat, and it sounds like a confession.
“Billy?”
“Ah…ah.” I try to say ‘uh huh.’
“Can you hear me?”
“I have.”
“If something is wrong, tap the phone three times on the table.”
‘Smart-ass,’ I think, but “I have,” comes out.
“If everything is back to normal. If you’re okay, tap the phone twice.
Tap tap, goes the phone.
“Good.” Isaac takes a breath. “...I never talk…I mean…I have never talked to you on the
phone, it’s kind of alarming. I almost called…someone…I mean I was thinking about who I
should call.”
“I have.”
“Connie’s on the couch Billy, can I talk to her?”
“I have?”
I go to the living room and wake Consuelo up. Tap tap.
“I have ike.” and I handed her the phone.
She assured Isaac I was fine, and things went down-hill from there. When she left me an hour
later, to buy ‘real coffee,’ I ended up in The Calderon with the doors locked.
Consuelo was frantic when she got back, and thought I was dead. She called me on the car
phone and woke me from a sound sleep—my first unworried sleep since Natalie cleaned and
packed my ankle wound two days ago.
“Hello.”
“What?”
“Is this Billy?”
“What.”
“Billy, where are you? I’ve been going crazy trying to find you.”
She was quite hysterical and crying—never at her best in a crisis.
“What.”
“I called all the emergency numbers on the refrigerator and this is the last one.”
“What.”
“The last number.”
“What.”
“I called your sister, your brother in Washington, and I talked to your neighbor
John…whatever.” Paper rustles in the background…“whatever.”
“ The Browns?”
“Yes, those neighbors.” and now she begins to cry again. “I don’t know where you are. I was
about to call the…”
“Browns.”
“Yes, but then I was going to call the police.”
“Browns.”
“All of them.”
Fuck! now its ‘Browns,’ I thought to myself.
“I’m calling somebody right now.”
“No Browns!”
“This is not the time for this Billy, there is something seriously wrong with you.”
Billy puts down the phone, and walks into the house. The screen door slammed behind him,
and Consuelo jumped about three feet off the ground. She fell on the floor onto her ass—little
brown legs flailing, I almost saw her browns, Christ!
 “Oh, Billy you’re here! I was so worried.” and she gave me a real Consuelo hug. “I had no
idea what happened, I left for a second,” then she breaks down again.
“I know.”
“Now I have to call everyone back, and tell them your okay.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry for being such a baby. I was so scared, I thought something happened to you.”
“I know.”
“You have candy in your pocket.”
“I know.” and I handed her a root-beer barrel I’d just unwrapped.
She takes a long slow breath and a deep gulp from her still-warm coffee, “Where were you?”
“I know.”
“But I don’t!”
“I know.” My speech was getting worse, I seemed to know everything.
“Sometimes I could strangle you.”
“I know.”
“I have to think.”
“Oh, I know.”
“No! You don’t, I have to do all the thinking.”
“I know.”
“Well… good…What’s wrong?”
“My head.”
“Your head?”
“My head.”
“I know, that’s what I mean…I’m going to call your doctor.
“My head-doctor.”
“Of course. What’s his name?”
“My head-doctor.”
“Yes. Fa harrad or some such Arab name, he’s so calm, and cool and SENSIBLE,” and she
begins to cry in earnest.
“My head doctor.”
“Oh God. The phone number’s not on the paper. What is his name?” she said this with such
slow deliberate force as though she wanted to strangle me. I instantly thought of a cigarette.
I took the paper with all the phone numbers and, coughing wildly, wrote on the back: ‘‘Connie
I’m fine I’m repeating everything over and over because I’m hung over.’’
“Oh my God, you can write, but you can’t talk!”
“My head doctor.”
“I know. Yes, Doctor Harrad…”
I took the paper back, and wrote: ‘‘Connie I’m repeating. It’s Ok I don’t want my Doctor to
come over please don’t call him no matter how many times I ask you to, over.’’
She lit a cigarette, as I scribbled.
‘‘My problems are not over like I thought they were last night when you and Isaac were
over.’’ and I handed the paper over to her.
She gave me a look, took a long drag, and since there were no ash trays around—handed the
cigarette over to me while she read.
“Ok. Good, I won’t.”
“Thank you.”
She begins to cry and I can’t talk to her when she’s like that, even when I can talk.
“Billy there something wrong I should be doing something but I don’t know what to do you
tell me.”
I wanted to say ‘punctuate,’ but I held back or was held back I don’t know. I felt dizzy and
decided to sit down. If I collapsed I’d be back at the hospital before you could say numismatic. I
took the paper from her tightening grip and wrote: ‘‘ Thank you I’m FINE! Connie I was in The
Calderon———thinking. I have a headache and I feel better there, Thank you.’’
“Well, I just feel as if I should call someone.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m going to call Harrad Farnum, Barnum and Baily—whatever the hell his name is.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you want me to or not?”
I took the paper and wrote: ‘‘No Thank you call my brother and sister.’’
“Ok. Yes, that’s a good idea. What if they want to speak to you?”
“…Thank you.” The irony that I might finally say Thank you to my brother and sister when I
couldn’t say anything else—wasn’t lost on me. As they say: where there’s irony..
I took the paper and wrote: ‘‘didn’t your mother ever tell you there’d be days like these?’’
“No.”
And I just looked at her.
“…Thank you. she said hesitantly.”

The next day when I woke up I had a very stiff neck, and that’s all I could think about.
Connie stayed with me but I was afraid to talk to her because of what happen the previous
morning. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop talking about my neck, but it really hurt.
I ran into the living room when I heard her coming down the stairs.
“I know my little sweetheart is here…there he is? Oriver is such a hansom man, yes he is.”
“My neck hurts.” I had waited long enough to tell her my news.
“Good morning my very hansom man.”
“Good morning, ouch.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Good.” And that was the end of it. I drank my coffee in The Calderon while I imagined that
children were selling crack, on the street corner behind the garage. I knew they weren’t, but I
kind of played a game of what if, and before long I had a whole lurid tale. One of the moms
came out and pulled a scooter up on the porch, and water ran from a hole in its ass. The kids
laughed. I thought it was seriously strange. My perception of things changed little by little all
day, and I could feel each change. I became horrified that I would hurt Connie. My head hurt, I
felt exhausted, overexposed, occasionally euphoric, then irrationally dysphoric. My shrink told
me, years ago, I was anhedonic. I remember spending hours that day, looking-up what Greeks
thought could be wrong with a person. It was a long list. But of course they had names for
absolutely everything. They loved to name things, they even had a science of naming things, but
I forget what it’s called, some ology. My head felt hot and heavy, and I decided that if I could
hold my head up, it would swell less. Then I felt someone touch my shoulder, and I said “What?”
A fly had landed on my shoulder and he wouldn’t get off. I pushed him with a pen, after I blew
on him. I couldn’t look at him because it hurt my neck, so I went to the mirror, and there he was.
I put on my glasses, and he got bigger. I stood by the mirror with the glasses, watching him, then
with a magnifying glass. He combed his hair incessantly and rubbed his legs with something that
was kind of sticky. He looked around a lot, another fly landed next to him, and I had a horrible
idea they might mate and I was petrified. I was stuck in one spot from pain and something else—
something nightmarish. I realized that if I didn’t’ move I would be eaten by flies. The sun fell in
slats on the walls and I felt the weight of the cushions become more wall than the wall, and the
wall was bigger, louder, more light than the light, everything stepped in...real close in...to see how
I felt. Some great universe—curious, and much larger than I had ever expected. And there was a
definite hum. Everything had its own hum sound, and if you stood away from it you could hear
the universe hum. It was the Bbuzz of the space-time continuum.
 I became obsessed with the flow of air and odors in the house. The heat from the living room
and the kitchen odors competed, and rose alternately to the cooler third floor. They mingled,
separated and floated down the back stairs where they were pushed into the front hall by the
warm cooking-odor butting up against the air warmed by the sun. I felt every whiff, and awaited
the new smells as they ran upstairs, investigated my house, and ran down unchanged. And
unsympathetic.

THE DAY I RETURNED TO THE HOSPITAL

By the time I got to the hospital, I had a temperature of 106, and Connie was the only thing
buzzing, she felt and smelled like Froot Loops and Mocha Cappuccino.
They dropped me in a tub of cold water and my eyes crossed so bad I could hardly see. I
didn’t recognize anyone but they didn’t recognize me either so that was okay. I had three IV
needles in my arm and one was too close to a nerve so I pulled it out, but I think I pulled the
wrong one out—blood was everywhere. Yes it was a nightmare. My cold blood-bath gave me
chills that almost broke my teeth and made my jaw ache for three days.
I was diagnosed with meningitis. Fa said I could have died, but of course, he waited till
Connie was in the room to tell me. The major concern was that I was already on antibiotics, so it
was either a rapid and relatively benign viral infection or more likely, it was a rare and deadly
bacterial infection not covered by the antibiotics. Plus, I had just been discharged, so this hospital
admission was also probably uncovered—by insurance.
Fa rescued me. In all the time I knew him I never heard him yell, but he yelled at the medical
doctors, and I was put on his service immediately. The only thing I remember with any reliable
clarity was the sound of his voice when he said to them, “Do you have any idea who this is?!” It
still makes me laugh—you could have heard a pin drop. The silence was so deep and loud it
stopped the ringing in my ears, for a very long time.
We hadn’t talked for a week but he was still quite conversant in meningo cock-talk, which was
for all intents and purposes the same as regular cock-talk, except all prepositions were either on
or in.
We talked on the tape recorder most uneventfully-occasioning the four-day visit. Emergencies
happened in other people, I was soon in rediscovering. No sweat.
There was an enormous sliding sound and I looked on and I saw sunlight, very bright, but I
could see! I didn’t ‘hear’ it. Then I just climbed on. The manhole cover leapt back in place on
the slightest tap on its edge just like a stopper in a tub. Things happen in people and I never knew
how I knew that.
That, and the pin dropping were the only things I remember clearly.

The ending bits

Billy’s disappointment begins in the form of an argument with God.
When his life opens to cables and cables of possibility, his house climbs its own stairs. Words
ring true. People do imitations of him in small groups out of love; with him as the audience, it’s
funny and frightening at the same time. They know him. They all know him. They open doors
for him for no reason, no limp, no blindness, no hesitancy, they just open doors. Billy once
wrecked his muffler, running over a mile marker, rather than a deer, and just turned up the
radio—since he couldn’t hear the clamor, to him it was fixed—the muffler. They would cup their
ears, ‘can’t hear ya Billy, the radio’s too loud.’ ‘I can’t hear what you said, the radio’s too loud.’
That sort of thing—there, fixed.
 When he got meningitis, he did an imitation of himself collapsing grandly on the stairs landing
palms up, like a baby Siberian Tiger.
This is the ubiquitous red brick of radio fame, of the monotone shrink, he could never love.
Funny, a man he characterizes as, “One he could never love.” The possibility of meeting God is
becoming inevitable, in evidence, in evident.
Life opens and then he gets the good news from a student doctor, “It’s Bacterial Meningitis.”
‘Oh good,’ Billy says inside, ‘my fearful, scary, extravagantly rich world is treatable.’ The
factory that makes this sludge is about to go out of business, just when I’d saved up enough
money.
Well. It begins, of course, as a question—the argument:
“Why when I feel so alive I have a brain infection—the cure is touted by amateurs, and there
are no strings to warp my violet conclusions? But when I had depression, another brain disease,
it was not treatable, professions fell victim, and if nothing else, it was red with permanent
wonder. Is this your idea of a joke?”

Like everything else it came out of order

Fa added to Billy’s understanding of the word. Fa read to him—to double Billy’s vocabulary,
to see how the new information was processed. Billy was encoding it all in the center for
ultimate, timeless meaning. Where All was meant to be saved for the moment of his death—
Billy’s immediate center was down. Nothing was being recorded, everything was being encoded
into Billy’s Center. The Center, for him, without a name. For example, if someone said, “Didja
ever see Casablanca?” The entire movie: Rick, Ilsa, Sam at the upright…the Marseilles, all went
thru his head in an instant, as time goes. All was encoded, available, like a done deal—as if
everything was in the can—complete.
Fa filled Billy up on a Monday, and Tuesday Billy was transformed. All his drives were
full—he had only one, but it was now full. Billy did a thing, which had never been done, because
it had never had to be done. He switched to a mode of comprehension formerly unknown. He
simply bundled everything. The everything he knew; the everything he heard; the everything he
saw; the everything that was his, already done and everything.
It was Tuesday; he couldn’t have stopped listening if he wanted to. Everything was re-drawn,
just like that, just that way. That day it all changed—for him. And suddenly when his mind was
full to capacity, it suddenly tripled.
Things of great meaning were all that he was interested in. All he knew was all he knew. And
no, nothing had changed, except he had a life left. There was more. Space. Time. Lots more...
Billy didn’t switch gears, he didn’t ramp-up, or try harder. It happened within him. The big
chunks of information that represent thousands of concepts fell down, like a wall. Like bricks,
and he played ‘marbles’ with the bricks—moving them, pushing them, arranging them. He had a
great fondness for marbles. There was a time in his life when he could make a world out of
marbles. He had done it before, and he could do it again.
What had Fa said about the sands of time…Uncountable? Billy counted.

Always here always now

Consider: move this piece about 50 pages ahead

Fa was a friend. He was also a coach, and a professional who listened. He couldn’t repeat
anything that was said, it was too private. No one would understand how he was able to create
great meaning for himself from an expression like, “ardent forecast of the dominant good, before
it’s arrival,” as Billy had described a passage from Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson. He
was also a scientist, and that meant he had a reputation. That was the other reason he couldn’t
betray Billy’s trust, and the conversations became increasingly personal and intimate. He was
hooked. He thought Billy was his…work.
Fa noticed everything, and when Billy began to tell him what he thought generally, rather than
react to what was being read, said or expected—Fa insisted on a scan.
He asked Billy where he got his information. “An unimpeachable source.”

1-27-05
“I have heard…” Billy said to no one.
“Where are you?” Fa asked, as he lifted his head.
“I like hearing it aloud.” B
“What?” F
“That sound, that presses like a hum.”
Fa smiled and felt something, while he read to Billy, something crazy. He read the last
chapter as Billy began to move. It oppressed Fa suddenly; he was unable to make a single
conclusion about his patient. Maybe it was the antibiotics talking?
He was very bright, but no one seemed to agree. He was developing something. The part of
his brain that was injured wasn’t coming back. But he didn’t miss it. Billy was as comfortable as
buttered toast. He may have not even noticed its absence. That was what was so funny about the
human brain. It could rewire itself. It could rewire itself so as to pursue purpose. It could feel
loss, as if it were a real thing, like a throbbing finger or a bee sting. It could pronounce areas off-
limits to concurrent thought activity; it could disallow a particular tube to be used, except in case
of emergency. It controlled everything. Fa’s heart leapt—he recovered almost immediately, and
looked up.
“I’m coming back.” Billy said, and smiled at his teacher, who didn’t know what he was doing
by feeding Billy, but fed him; didn’t understand what he was saying, but thought he might
someday; didn’t want to be so curious, but things were moving so fast. Fa thought he might
actually see it—see him, his language, emerge suddenly all at once; and there could be valuable
information about ways we create value out of bits and pieces of information.
“Rained today.” Billy said.
Fa looked at Billy who was once again characteristically slumped in the bed, leaning to one
side, more under the light, his face shone very brightly. Fa opened his mouth to say whether it
rained today. And they both said, “Right now, it rained today.”
When it rains there’s nothing to say. It’s raining.
When it starts or stops, or moves too slow, it becomes what it was, just a morning rain.
When it becomes what it was entirely, it’s done. And then it stops raining.
When you say that truth, you see an incredible, curious thing.
Fa wondered how Billy could not move one finger, but could hold his left hand up—and it
began to move, oddly. Fa saw Billy’s hand and then he didn’t see it. He moved to help Billy
slide up in bed. When he touched Billy he forgot what he was doing. And he nudged Billy.
Then he let go, and remembered how to lift Billy from the side, and moved the light out of the
way first. Then he put his hand under Billy’s shoulder, and he forgot again. And he forgot two
more times that afternoon for no reason. He felt odd and a little confused... Watched this quirky
odd and incredibly curious guy move his left hand around as though it belonged to someone else.
I guess that’s how it starts…with one part…when you find yourself curiously in-sync with
another.
“We should do this tomorrow. I think we’re making real progress.” Fa said, as he straightened
up his office and went ‘diving’ for that journal article.
 “I think we should do this tomorrow. I really do.” F
Billy looked at Fa, and smiled. Fa knew Billy’s assent was almost always silent.
What a good patient he had. He didn’t seem to mind the near-constant scrutiny.
“Let’s do this tomorrow, how’s 5?” Fa said.
His good doctor forgot they had this understanding, just as he realized, of course, they did.
For some reason people kept forgetting and then remembering things all the time.
Billy arrived, just then just like that. He found the way around the self. And then he forgot—
why he would ever want that—to refuse any harmonius attachments. But he remembered the
way. It was in the word Yes. Billy’s brain lit-up like a stalk of celery. But there was no one to
see it. So Billy just smiled.
*

Something had changed radically. He needed a vocabulary STAT. And he got dozens. He
was asked to chose one, he said ‘that’s easy…this one.’ The testing was nearly done. A few
more MRIs and ‘we’d’ have our answer. It was a mystery wrapped in a paradox woven thru
stalks of celery covered by a surprising gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It was
just like fiction. Except Billy was not about to run to the window and throw money, Scrooge-
like, out the window. Billy was a cool returnant. He was scripted. He decided to be cautious, he
lifted painlessly from the bed for the first time in a very long time. He didn’t remember moving
his feet, but there he stood, taking his first breath. Then he slid to the floor like a feather, and felt
like smoking a cigarette.

There Came a Time

He asked if Billy thought he were Christ. Like from the grave? “No.”
“When you say he has come, who has come?”
Billy rarely said, but said this time, “I do..not..know.” It took a minute to say. It was clear.
He knew something, but he didn’t know that.
Fa believed he was the only unimpeachable source in Billy’s life. He kept reading.
Billy frequently expressed some element of his understanding at the end of the chapter, or
when there was a natural break between works.
“Just like that it flew away,” Billy said, during a break in a long passage from Dostoyevsky.
He continued talking, Fa stopped flipping thru the text and began to look up, slowly. “The coffee
isle in the grocery store smells like my room at home, but papery. It’s only there on sunny days.
Summer or winter. It doesn’t drift.” Billy moves side to side as he speaks. “It smells like the
house is going to burn up. People don’t smell it, or so they say. It only stays as long as it’s
sunny. It reminds me of friends. The writer is God. Here.” Billy scratched his forehead
absently.
Fa was afraid to cough, though he had the urge to. It passed, though it abstractedly moved his
mind from Billy’s description of some odor, to his general affinity to Billy as a real, and easily
interruptible person. And just like that it flew away.

In
Somewhere within his search for meaning, Billy found God. What was so strange was that
God found Billy as well. They met, on a plane—not of this world, and they weren’t cruising at
20,000 feet.
God said, You are a man of great energy.
 Billy said, Not hardly.
G: What do you mean.
B: I’m lazy and impatient.
G: Impatient for what.
B: To move on, to heal, to get better, to make things better, to open eyes. Just the thought of
sex makes me happy. I want a second chance, and I want to create a second chance.
G: Come with me.
B: Okay.
G: Okay.
B:
G: Sit down, put your arms out to your sides.
B:
G: How does it feel.
B: Hurts my shoulder, this time the left one, and I feel like bending forward, and I have
to…work to hold my head up—you know…think about it more.
G: Can you stand it.
B: Yes.
G: It is like life. You’ll do fine. Plus you listen and you tell the truth. You are singular.
B: What do you mean?
G: Your father is dead. You are my begotten...
B: I’m impatient and lazy.
G: Yes, I know. Try listening.
B: After a pause that could not be counted—being an uncountable number: Do you want to tell
me something?
G: No, I’m standing here for my health.

More blind than you know less blind than you imagine
*
Believing is like looking in a mirror and loving what you see.
It’s a beautiful transcendent state.
It’s still only a mirror and your beauty won’t last.
*

This joke. Can’t be a joke. It is something else altogether.

Billy wishes his words-world was back, and that he was the listener who got to make sense—
who was forced by Billy’s own spirit to delve into another place, perhaps an ancient place, who
got the opportunity to make sense from nothing.
What was that like? The great ones like Ferraj, like Julie, Natalie, like Mark, Isaac, even they
got it. The Calderon even gets it. Everyone who got it was great. They got it, in the most perfect
and simple way—by just being there.
Billy laughs…my car got it? “I must be crazy.”
The Calderon wanted to be taken out for a spin as much as he did.
That was…Was that part of the joke?
We make things that reflect our wants and desires. Things that lack what we lack, designed to
be unable to finish without us? “Am I getting warm?
Am I getting close to the joke?”
 After burn
Fa had called a man who studied FMRI data, his name was Burn’ent. He experimented on the
truth. He had found a way to tell to within a very very high probability if a person was telling the
truth.
He presented Burn with the information he and Billy exchanged on Tuesday…Billy’s
responses to direct questions…Billy evaded and avoided direct responses.

Burn took the information, which he digitalized, and reviewed it. He found something he
could not explain; there was no ‘p300’ at all, anywhere. There were no peaks of activity which
demonstrated any recognition of anything at all. Not a word, not a locale as descriptor, a single
identifying remark, comment, noun, action, nothing said or expressed by Fa, that made any
impression on Billy, jogged a memory, or loosened a stuck verb—just a plateau-like trundle of
similar numbers, no spikes.
He asked Fa, was this a joke and if it was, it wasn’t funny. It looked like a tracing from a
sleeping man who had managed to dream about meditation. He accused Fa of taking the head-set
off of Billy, or disconnecting the electrodes.
Fa was not amused, left the office, and returned moments later, to a slightly magnetized, rather
dark room, that was so large, and so empty.

“Say what you said again.” Fa said, slowly.

“I said, if he was hooked up like I hook ‘em up, he didn’t hear anything you said.”
Fa sat down because his feet were tired, the floors were cement, and standing for long periods
was hard.
“How?” Fa ventured, “how would I know for sure if he heard what I said?”
“It would register as a blip when you said something that meant something to him.” B
“Meant what?” F
“Had a recognizable quality. B
“What does that mean?” F
“Like if you said, ‘I read a book, your name was on the cover.’” B
“What are you talking about?” F
“If you had said anything that made any impression on him, he would have had a reaction.” B
“He reacted to everything I said. F
“So it would seem.” B
“Well?” F
“Well. B
“Well, speak English!” F
“He reacted to nothing at all. It’s as if he slept. No.” Burn’ent continues, “…as if the
recognition part of his brain was asleep, and some other part of his brain…well…”
Silence pervaded, and rode upon the innumerable stacks of black celluloid frames, like a
thumb, frisking the pile. Like Billy and Clarke had done as children—the same non-sound, the
same brrrrrr when they used clothespins to clip playing cards between the spokes on their bikes.
It was a brrrrr sound; it prevailed in the room while the men spoke; it was the white sound; it was
the buzz of the machine, and the buzz of the space-time continuum, so-called.
“As if he was reacting to something he never heard. The only spikes of recognition anywhere
from him, on all the tapes I reviewed, was when he was talking about things he was interested in,
and the spike is dull. It rises slowly, it peaks for no apparent reason, and then stays up…look
here…he says, ‘Born in Dan, a small town too, just like you were.’ The spike comes here, when
he says the word ‘just.’ See?… It’s the tiny saw-tooth on this hump here.” B
 “How would I…? How would I know if he ever heard me, because you’re saying he never
has?” F
“I don’t know that I’m saying that anymore. I think I’m saying he never recorded anything
you said, which may not mean he never heard it, but then it may mean just that…I don’t know.”B

Silence from far off, crosses the hallway like shoes. A woman leans into the room,
“Doctor Burn’ent, do you have a minute to review Icelan?”
“What did she say?” F
Burn stared ahead. “It’s a code we have for…nothing better to do…”
“Why Iceland?” F
The footsteps trail off, stop, and trail off again as if they were listening.
“Fa?” Dr. Bur’ent says, “Has Billy…that’s his name right?”
“Yes?” F
“Has Billy ever called you by name?” B

Fa got up and walked out the door moments later, holding his tie with one hand and touching
his finger to his thumb with the other. And as he crossed back thru the hall he said to himself,
“No.” The sound of his footsteps echoed slightly. One of his laces was loose and made the
sounds unequal and made his step unequal too. Tho he didn’t take notice. He also didn’t notice
that the floor was sloped, his feet slowed down just because.

Fa smiled at the memory of the stupid expression on the shiny face in the darkened room.
When he was asked by Burn’ent, “Is he deaf?”
Deaf!!
Fa ran to his office, the one he just left, and then raced to the EMG suite in the next building.
He almost pushed Mrs. Emerson out of the way as he logged onto the computer. “Password!
Password!” he said, and glared at Emerson.
“doctorssucktechsrule.” She said, straight faced.
“I don’t have time for this!” Bonham-Jarhad said. She pulled up Billy’s auditory evoked
responses. Thank God, and modern technology, they were done and hadn’t been lost or as the
hospital liked to put it: ‘‘SU, status-unavailable,’’ His hearing was fine. Fa laughed at himself.
Of course he could hear! We had talked! A triangle of sweat pointed out a fact and then
disappeared. Fa touched his brow.
“Doing alright Ferraj?” Miss Campbell, with the heavy eye make-up, said over her shoulder.
His real name sounded funny, everyone called him Fa, everyone who knew his name and
knew him well, that is. Fa got up and ran out.
“Guess not.” She batted as much with her eyes as with the smirk of ‘er quizzical smile.
Empty room.
“What?” said Emerson.
“Guess he’s got something on his mind.” Campbell said again, to practically no one.

The next day

The next day Fa went to work and hit two cars on the way. One in his home parking lot, that
attended his morning coffee, and another in the parking garage at work where he had funny
feelings someone was watching him. Both were inconsequential and caused no damage, both left
tiny scratches, one on the door and one on the tail light. He was in a trance of remembering,
reviewing and driving Billy’s voice incessantly to speak someone’s name. He couldn’t remember
Billy ever calling anyone by name. He never heard it and then as he opend the door to the library,
which was a short-cut to his office in the Old Carpenter Building, he remembered one time when
he heard Billy call someone by name. He called that one nurse by name. In fact he made her
name into a joke.
“That!” he said once, pointing at the back of her dress, “is a coaster you’d never sit a cup on.”
“Who do you mean?” Fa had asked.
“Ida no how.”
Fa thought Billy could be pretty funny, and he often made jokes at Ida’s expense: ‘I don’t
know how,’ ‘I don’t ever want to know how,’ ‘I would say if I could, but I can’t, because Ida no
how,’ he would go on and on, sometimes he’d just yell Ida! He did it on purpose just to watch
her walk by and listen to her click her tongue or swivel her big head on her taffy apple neck.
Billy provoked her right when she showed up, it was very funny.

Had he read her name? Why had he never called anyone else by name? Was her name
different? or was a person’s name a joke to him? Why did he hate her so?

In Billy’s diagnostic process, it was found in every instance of information sharing, Billy
never heard the words—he got the information somewhere, somehow—else. The words went
directly past the right-reading center and were available in an array of code which came to life as
if on its own—when given the slightest consideration. Like magic.
It was as though he had a complete mental-block to sense, common knowledge, simple day to
day things. Every uh, ah, ugh, um. Every ‘uh huh,’ meant, Yes of course, I’m in complete
agreement. Every ‘uh uh,’ No never, not while I’m around. Every ‘have a nice day,’ every
‘come again,’ ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you,’ every ‘make yourself at home—I want
you to have this,’ was encoded as if it held the most valuable—hallowed meaning. The treasures
we live for. The ‘Hey Jim,’ of awareness. The symbols. The very themes of your own life, re-
played over and over. The ‘Money’.
If someone said, “Billy, it’s three O’clock, aren’t you going to eat your lunch?” None of this
information got thru, none of it was straightened out, compared, or associated with a personal
need. It was all recorded as if it was for all time. An eternal question. The language center he
was using had no way of viewing time as a personal right, or lunch as an occasion that could be
taken advantage of. Billy’s response either made the question disappear or made him invisible.
“Look.”

That day was Thursday—pure research and one class at 4. It was Fa’s favorite day.
The phone rang: Bishop was ill, Could he do rounds on the floor?
“Ugh (pronounced like an escape of air). Sure.”
Fa couldn’t believe that the first person he saw on the floor that morning was Ida, that’s too
much of a coincidence. He looked at her, and she stared thru him and said spritely, “Good
morning.”
“Oh, good morning Ida” he said, as though she had surprised him out of his concentrated
effort.
She stuck out her chest and her butt at the same time. Fa smiled. She sat down.
He was annoyed that she was so interested in having everyone see her talk to him and not the
slightest bit interested in listening to a word of the rounds, when it was her patients they were
discussing. Rounds ended; Fa stared at her.
She had a procession of snappy rings, glue-on fuzzy pens, dime-size medals, and kit and
kaboo all across her left breast like an army general gone gay in the most obscene way. Battle
medallions where no one died. He, Fa, was getting a headache justrying to imagine why, of all
the people who were bothersome, Billy singled her out.
 Finally, he had only one more chart to dabble in, and Ida sat beside him. He looked at her
face, and her Doonesbury profile, then at her left breast, and eye-balled, but couldn’t make out the
significance of a single do-dad that was parked there. He gave up on them, and then he saw
something odd. Her name tag had a black smudge under it, which represented her face as the
brown smudge on his, his own, but…hers said Ida Hlowe RN, he always thought it said Ida Howe
RN. He knew, the way she rambled—he might regret it, but he had to ask. “Ida?…what’s the ‘L’
for?”
“What doctor?” and “who doctor?” and “why doctor!” and “what are you looking at my breast
for doctor?” all came tumbling out of her puppet mouth, like vermouth at a pencil-biting art
exhibit.
Fa was appaulled by her lack of comprehension. “The ‘L’ in your name.”
“It’s ha-why-in.”
“Ha- wy-en?” Fa repeated.
“Yes, the L is silent.”
“What L?” Fa said, “there ‘s no ‘L’ in Hawaiian”
“My name.” and she threw her head back in a real duffer of a laugh, “my last name is
pronounced HOW.”
“Oh,” he said, “I know.”
“You knew that!” she implied once to often for his apprehensive edification.
“It looks like—H—u—l—l—o—” he said slowly, with absolutely no inflection.

“I’m married doctor, my maiden name was Monsoon.” She showed him a picture.
“You met a man named Hello, who told you he was Hawaiian?”
“I fall in love with him jus’ like that.”
How is that possible? Fa thought to himself.
“How...” he said, slightly mystified by her story. Not questioning it, or any part of it.
“How the hell should I know?” she said, and laughed till she choked.
He made a mental note to look up Hawaiian words that sounded like howl or holowie or
hliuow, on the search engine with no name, but never did. Billy, he thought—was right, she was
a complete idiot.
He started to ask her something, like…does she know how it sounds, but all he said to her was,
“does he know how…?”
And Ida laughed, “He don’t know how, he ain’t never known how.”
Something about her story struck him funny. Was it something about men generally, or
women’s perception of what makes a man a good catch…it got funnier and funnier until they
were both laughing at the same thing, a man who does little more than say his name to a woman
who wants to believe everything, falls for him hook line and sinker, and gets nothing but a n
unpronounceable name and the brunt of every stupid joke.
“How did you come to marry him?” Fa bursts out.
“Standing up,” Ida screams, “but just barely… I loved him so…”
She was so sweet, and well-meaning, he liked Ida immensely. He coughed into his
handkerchief so fervently he was afraid of coughing up something he couldn’t explain among the
exquisitely observant nurses, who could tell a real cough from an excuse, from a bid for attention,
from a long held-back release.
He laughed unəbraidingly, he wasn’t even supposed to be there, he was doing a guest
appearance. All the schedules had Bishop doing rounds that day. He was a good guy, to himself.
“He make this for me. I always keep it,” She said, and held up a thin wallet-like thing with a
depiction of Pele, The Goddess of Volcanic Eruptions, or something.
“Very nice.”
 “It’s Hawaiian too.” And then they started laughing again. Fa practically limped off.

“Billy what’s my name?”

“Give me a second, to wake-up this for brains.”
“Are you awake?”
“I’m in recovery from various horrible deeds done in my name by microbes of no particular
stripe.”
“No code, Billy”
“It’s all code, doctor.”
“What’s my name?”
“Now, why all this sudden morbid interest in…George?”
“That’s a line from an old movie!”
“Don’t be rude Horace!”
He looked at Billy the way the optometrist had, but with a much weaker light.
“What’s my name you little porn king!”
Billy glanced at the blurry magazine lying on the dresser with the lewd backcover, that he had
flipped-over last night, to hide the lewd front cover.
“Your name is Bone.”
“I’m not falling for that anymore!”
“I’m on a high wire. If I look down I’m a dead man.”
“Who are you?” Fa said suddenly?
“I’m in no condition to be slandered or sung to, my tapeworm’s hungry and must be..”
“You’re going to tell me one thing or the other!” And with that, Fa breaks the silence by
drawing the curtain around Billy’s bed, and then dissatisfied, got up and closed the door to the
usually busy hall.

God had told Billy, you can have conversations—real complete conversations with people
without meeting them. That you can, with God, in God, have a conversation with the entire
world, without meeting a single vibrant native. Being in God is limitless in a high-wire sort of
way. You’re set up to succeed, but it’s meant to look otherwise. It’s an optical illusion combined
with a very distracting lowering of the center of gravity, making the walk harmless, but for the
net in your head.

Ida says good bye to Billy everyday, in hopes, everyday, that he won’t be there when she gets
back, or she will die from expedient unforeseen blunt force trauma, or perhaps she will win the
lottery and never return, essentially making Billy dead to her. There are a thousand ways to
murder someone, to cut them out, to cut them loose, to throw them back, to silence them, to
make them afraid to be themselves—to pronounce it, with all sincerity, a special day, a special
week, or a special month, but none of them are yours. Not one. None.
Ida sucks at her job. She’s the kind of nurse you get when you don’t deserve a nurse.
She couldn’t bag an order of groceries, without inculcating some shabby assessment of the
customer’s worth—placing in amongst the frozen foods a cheap Mother’s Day card for the sheer
pleasure of making a mistake, and implying something derogatory to the recipient.
There are only three things, and some might say four, that Ida is good at: falling in love, loving
brainlessly, and telling love stories backward.
Fa looked at her name tag and his eyes went over each letter of her last name, his lips moved
slightly, and no one saw, or could hear, except Ida herself. Hhah-—-Luh-ow. Ida threw her head
back, the chair jumped, and the book she was reading fell shut. Hello, she said. [How are you?]
 Fa left, she picked the book up and continued reading. It was her lunch break, none of the
nurses cared if she ate at the desk, the patients didn’t miss her, and no one asked her for help.

“Stop it and I’ll tell you,” Billy said.

“What’s my name?”
“Ff-Aah-ah.”
The good doctor never heard it said that way, and he was struck dumb.
“Rhymes with La la la la la, la la, la la.”
The doctor’s eyes darted this way, and then came around once again to those eyes, they looked
different this time, darker, like dark dark red empty. Empty room empty.
“Who are you? Billy…” he said implausibly.
“God…” Billy said, with perceived exasperation.
Fa stared and Billy stared back.
Fa blinked, and scratched his eyebrow, to tame it.
“Let’s go for an FMRI.”
“Okay,” Billy said. “What’s the ‘F’ for?”
“Ferraj.”
“Oh.”
“Functional.” Fa corrected, absently.
“Oh.” Billy smiled. He knew that talking to God in person can make one forget one’s own
name, what one’s doing, or any reference to either. For a few seconds, five or so.
On the way to the scanner Billy was sitting up looking all around as Fa pushed him in a
wheelchair that had left leanings, and no foot-rests, for no particular reason, except it was too far
to walk, as his doctor pointed out, he was still recovering, obviously, from the assault of a very
nasty bug.
“Are you wondering how my brain fu-fuh-fucks?”
“Yes.” Fa said.
“Something’s wrong.” Billy said deliberately.
Fa stopped the wheel chair cold, “What?”
Billy flies forward when Fa stops the chair, lands on his feet, and slowly stands up like he was
rising for the first time—from a swamp. It appears, to a few innocent/uninformed bystanders,
like a miracle. It was a miracle Billy didn’t land on his ass.
“What’s wrong?” Billy asked.
“Oh,” Fa said. “You hear nothing….and everything.”
“Don’t fix it.” Billy blurts out.
“It’s a miracle, you’re aware!”
“Thank God.” Billy says quickly. As they take-off, he drums on the blue vinyl arm-rest with
his fingers and his thumb, to the tune of a car commercial. It’s a brand new day in your Chev-ro-
lay. Billy liked to hum, and whistle, but he whistled in, not out. Where there’s a will there’s a
way. Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today.

Thank you, Fa says.

Thank God for you. No fear, no worry, no pain, Billy said.
Fa believed he was taking God to the scanner, and when God was inside, he said behind the
heavy glass door, “Are you in there?”
“I am,” Billy replied, on cue.
“What is your name? One minute…” the microphone got muffled, and sounds of conflict
resolution could be heard coming from the ante room.
“Okay,” Fa said a minute later, “What is your name?”
“I am…” Billy said, and said no more.
 The scan lit up his whole brain, all at once, all yellow and green. Fa walked into the scanner
room, and as his credit cards were erased by the world’s largest magnet, he knelt down and kissed
Billy’s feet. Socks. Fa was the first to recognize Billy. He did not pray every day—fifteen times
a day, if you count the going to, and the coming from, but at least he knew who he was praying
to. Allah. And what he was praying about. Sura CIX.
Billy learned to speak to God thru several devices. He would say, “Good morning, I love you,
Thank-you,” in the morning. He would say, “Thank you, I love you, good night,” at night. He
seldom forgot, when he did, God would say it thru him, to him.

Purple prose
Billy felt that if he had to say, “with help” every time he discussed an idea he had, that came
from God thru him, it would be almost impossible to carry on any kind of conversation at all. H e
would be essentially silenced. Some ideas were his, some were part his, and part God’s, and
some were all God’s. And many he ad no idea.
Billy felt that if he had to say, “man or woman,” every time he said man. Or if he had to say,
“Thank God,” every time an unexpected, or fortuitous opportunity presented itself. Or if he had to
say whether every mentioned friend or relationship was actual, factual, biological, spiritual,
imaginary or historical, before he introduced one. Or if he had to say, “That’s the truth as I see it,
or as God sees it, or as I think about it, or when I started thinking about it, or the last time I
looked, or for you today, or for you tomorrow, or for everyone all the time under every
conceivable circumstance,” before he said one word about truth—he would be essentially
silenced. Billy wouldn’t be silenced. He saw symbols all around him, dusted-off a few, and if he
felt like it—he’d have fun with some.
The Truth is neither man nor friend. Requires much less attention to its comings and goings,
and does not need you to fix it all the time. Several truths are fixed for all time. Billy just doesn’t
know any of them. That’s someone else’s job. Yours, I guess.
If you quibble over every uncapitalized h, every statement of fact as if you understood that this
was all fiction, over every odd symbol, as though your world was all seen all understood all
knowable all the time, I might as well pack it up right now. If, further, you think playing dumb
will prevent you from hearing me, it won’t. I absolutely refuse to say that love and sex are not
the same. Deal with it. I’m not going to stand in front of the black-board looking and sounding
like a fool so you can feel accomplished. You’re not getting off that easily. If you think I’m
doing 27 hours of research before I say one single thing or make one personal comment, forget it.
This teacher, is just that suddenly—your teacher. If I were afraid of poorly nuanced phrases, or
your misstatements about my misapprehensions, ev’ry, single, step of the way, I’d be
paralyzed…and look! I can move my arm…straight out, palm up …ta dah. I offer that. I hope
for only one thing: that the people I want a offend are deeply offended, and the ones I love and
care about would know it, and could tell. Quibblers quibble because that’s their job—few’re
volunteers. If I said they work for money, they’d turn their pockets out. If I said they work for
power, it’d be, “Who…Me?” Same with credit, clout, respectability, and rave reviews—it’s their
currency.
Life is funny. You worry so much about offending God, you keep your thoughts to yourself.
What God are you talking about? The God of eavesdropping? God knows what you’re thinking.
What do you think you’ve been arguing with your self about?
Some people need to be offended. God is not ‘people.’ And if you think I’m gonna put ironic
little half-quotes around every word of dubious launch, or convertible meaning, ‘Forget about it.’
This upsidedown world, can be turned around with a word. Continue.
 Billy realized something extraordinary was happening—that’s why he was here. Here. If it
turned out, if it came down to a man just going off his head—so be it. It had to be, if it really was
happening, it had to be captured, recorded. Billy wouldn’t allow himself to miss a word—and he
didn’t. It, This, was monumental. Heralded. Unprecedented—Magnificent. Ascendant, Divine.
Billy was whatever he touched.
These things—this thing came fast. All at once. It was good he had a poor memory; he wrote
down every word (and almost none of the shapes), Billy was seen as divine before he became
divine. He was on a kind of a delay. He was in a word, harmonious—to the world Bang bang
bang. The MRI sang. Billy was one step behind, as usual. But he was perceived as God. To one
man he was everything. He ate a pint of blue berries before he went to bed. Everything got real
quiet, so quiet you could’ve heard wires cross.

Dead Tillie
Billy heard a strange sound, hopped on his wheelchair, made a tight counterclockwise circle,
pulled his left hand out from under him, and took off in the said same sound’s direction. As it
got louder he could understand it perfectly; it tinkled like ivory: Words are flowing out like
endless rain in to a paper cup, they slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe.
He tipped his head into the room where the music played and saw a frail old woman with a tired
hand on a CD player, and a finger on the play button. She mouthed the words: jai guru dave…ah
Om. Nothin’s gonna change my world, and it repeated. She never opened her eyes. It was the
privatest of moments, and I stood only long enough to see that, and then I left and thought maybe
I’d go make some trouble for Ida. She was on my mind.
I wheeled over to the nurses’ station where the daily assignment hung in dry erase, and there
she was: rooms 920 thru 923. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something dark and shadowy
dart into a room at the periphery of my…
Ida! He didn’t give a shit what she thought, if she got angry or if she thought anything at all, if
it didn’t help the words that were on the tip of his tongue, to come out—it would not be from lack
of trying.
Vision. She had taken the assignment as far as possible from my room, the one I shared with
the snorer who stopped breathing at least a hundred times a night—probably her idea too. I was
going to throw myself on the floor at her feet so she’d have to write-up an incident report, but
then I remembered the last time I did that. She sent me down for an x-ray, knowing perfectly
well that I was very close to the hospital’s allowable limit of gamma radiation for the month. She
could sterilize me and fuck up Fa’s study all at the same time. The chance of me having children
was starting to become as remote as the possibility of me ever having sex again, ironic. Then I
thought, I could rip my clothes and get someone to find us together, implying that she would
attack an aphasic who couldn’t use a picture board with any reliability and for who(m) puppets
were out of the question. Then I saw how busy she was—complaining about how busy she was.
But I gave the bitch the benefit of the doubt and rolled on. Later, when I had a free minute I went
to the assignment board and wrote ‘N.’ in front of her last name, to the right of the list of rooms.
I tried to write ‘No’ or ‘No way no’ but, ‘N. Howe’ was just as good—no how no way no sense
no pain. What I really wanted was a fight.
He felt dizzy and nauseated—paranoid and stiff from the neck down, like he was high on one
of his drugs—but which one? He knew Ida was not around. So he knew there were no dark
shapes hiding from him. He knew, but didn’t believe, how alone he felt watching the old woman
die. He came to tell Ida, but thought better of it. He was getting a lot worse. I was getting lost.
He didn’t come to tell anyone anything; he was losing his mind. He wanted that familiar face, the
one that you could pick out of a crowd of ten thousand. Natalie showed up in his story about Ida,
he had to stop thinking. He had to tell someone the old lady was dead—she might be the old lady
that had the children visiting her last night. What if they show-up and see her dead? What if her
teeth fall-out right when they look at her? What if the next song on the CD was, Woman is the
nigger of the world? What if he saw her spirit rise up and didn’t even recognize it? What if he
couldn’t make sense of his world? What if all meaning was lost and he went seamlessly from
black out to black out—no memory—no idea what was the next thing he wanted to do. This was
something he could do. Stop. Make sense!
He looked down the hall, not for the imaginary shadow of an instinctual pre-sense, but to the
room number of the dead woman, 910 and the name on the board Beechom, T. Tillie is dead.
No, Mrs. Beechom is dying. No, who’s the nurse? Jean, I know Jean, funny pudgy Jean. Go
find her. It was hopeless, he forgot again—she was already dead. What would he call Jean for?
It was a better story. Leave it like a story. Let her be. Stay out of it. Let Miss or Mrs. Beechom
tell the story. You’re the man who knows nothing. I’m confused, wow! I think that’s a
flashback. Stop telling stories and go get better. Ida doesn’t care about you, she wants you better
so you’ll leave, or she cares but I don’t know. I think I’m having palpitations. I don’t feel well, I
think I’ll go lie down. If I can’t speak, what would I say about the old lady? Go to bed and don’t
bother people; wait till they find out you’re real; you’ve always been strange; you’re wiring has
always been off. You’ve got switches and circuits where no one else does. They can’t learn
anything from you. They haven’t invented the science of extrapolation yet; go to bed.
In the end, I went back to my room. They had already closed the door to the old woman’s
room and that was that. Everything has meaning. Everything, but not for you, maybe for
everyone else. Stick to what you know.

As he recovers, he doesn’t recover; he embraces it

This is what you’re doing; this is what I want you to do—Attributed to Miss Tomlin/ 3rd grade teacher (meant to be sung)

Fa looks dizzy most of the time. He’s talking about going off somewhere: To research and
write.
“You won’t be seeing too much of me in the future…”
That funny song interrupts Billy as he listens to Fa’s premature dissertation. I’ll b e seeing
you in all the old fa mil i a r places…
There was a great deal of similarity and synchronicity in the history of memory and language
studies. Well on his way to spending six million in NIH Research money, Fa believed he had the
answer to the 64 million dollar question and was planning to bring it in just under budget.
The question that arises from studies on memory and how it can be divided up: bits for
absolute judgment and chunks for immediate memory, impacts on extrapolated-language theory
and how it can be divided up. Input comes in, output goes out, but what happens when input
doesn’t flow naturally to the correct right-reading, immediately-useful input area, but instead goes
to the absolute recoded for living in my world—where-this-is-now-and-you-are-all-here area. It
has—not a whole different meaning, but rather, a much larger range of do-able, one-time, I was
here, efficacious, meaningful, and at least partially useful responses.
Fa had been the kind of student who wrote all his college references himself and crammed for
parties the way his roommates crammed for Micro 101. World without end, Gatsbyesque.
These responses were single-use-only because, perhaps, without the stimulation from the
right-reading center there is little or no purpose in repeating, pleasing or refusing to change. If
you own the world you can change your address anytime you want. This is a process of slow
subtraction, if it’s art, it’s one page thick, and one page wide. It’s more like falling down stairs—
really really wide and very very long stairs.
 There is, to make a long story short, and I didn’t say make a skirt short…the ‘Get Along,
Protect the Self’ Center and the, ‘This Is Our World-Our-Way—I Thought You Knew That, and
Furthermore, Everyone Worth Knowing Lives Here’ Community Center.
Value, worth and meaning don’t come from The Get Along Center. That would be too easy.
Language domains that address issues of personal safety and communal integrity are not at odds
for Billy; he is the community. His self protective language center was obliterated, made
inaccessible. And recreated instantly—in the wrong place—one gyrus too far. (pronounced with
a soft ‘G’ : jai` rus )

The Journal of the American Medical Association did their first serious article on The New
Language Accession (starting/adding) Theories in February of 2007. The conundrum of the
origins of language. Fa woke up from his self-imposed sleep, long enough to be interviewed.
The heavy referencing of his work seemed to lift something off his shoulders, and did wonders
for his recovery. Billy noticed that thru-out the article they never mentioned that conundrum was
a made-up word. He thought that was odd, the remainder of the article didn’t interest him in the
slightest.

By the early Spring of four, Fa had made it his business to learn all he could about Billy, who
he was and who he had become. Billy was profane, far beyond what Fa was capable of
understanding. Billy had always been waiting to be found. His sexuality was obscene, beyond
decadent. Incomprehensible, and very very real. Billy was a subset of a subset of a subset.

His birth was accompanied by shifts in understanding.

His physical birth was accompanied by a flood. As the story goes: his mother claims each of her
children’s births were heralded by some natural disaster, heat wave, flood, lightening strikes, or
so Clarke says.
Billy went back to his room and all hell broke loose.
Fa’s understanding of Billy grew slowly from that day, by itself, like the mountain that Burn’ent
had pointed to. A spike in recognition that came, not from one word or one source but just grew
and had only a tiny ridge at its middle for no reason, and didn’t subside.
Fa was unable to follow; he just believed.
He knew the ridge was yet to come—he had only a glimmer of the truth.
Billy was the mountain not a peak.
The Savior was hard wired. His doctor was undone. The things that happened could not have
ever happened. Fa took notice of one thing as he moved in Billy’s canon. Everything he said
came instantly true, as though it was not his effect but rather a place that flowed electrically from
him.
*
Fa talked to a few people who knew Billy; there were few. They, none of them, knew each
other. They hated Billy and loved to tell stories about him that couldn’t have been true. They
said they loved him and betrayed his trust to tell others what he had said or done that was
devilish, and out of character. They uniformly loved him, a few cried. They uniformly felt bad
he was dead. Fa told them he wasn’t dead, he was ill. Many thought he died of AIDS, Fa said he
didn’t have HIV, and wasn’t dead. Many implied he deserved what he got, and some said as
much. And no one ever asked where he lay, or what he might need. Not one. It was like Billy
said, when men learned to speak it was in order to talk about people who just left the room. They
were all waiting for Billy to leave so they could learn a new language. Fa stopped listening to
them; he knew they only understood what they wanted to understand.
He gasped as he had upon their first meeting. His chest caved-in, he choked. Billy spoke
from somewhere else directly to him. And he, Billy, would do anything no matter how much
radiation he absorbed to be with people, and to help them understand. Fa was poised to abandon
his children and thought of destroying them rather than leaving them to find their own way in
such a cruel world. He lost his mind. He fell asleep to all of this and woke, one day and Billy
was gone. He never asked where Billy lived. He never once even thought to visit, or to sneak a
cigarette with him, as they had done once, back before, when he tried to heal Billy, when he was
a doctor, when he was his doctor.

Billy dreamt
Billy dreamt of an elevator and a nearby escalator, and a narrow corridor where no one had to
walk, that was cordoned off. On the floor he saw small objects of different colors and these were
made of a thousand frogs, each thing was pieced together, so it had no function. Each thing
waited to be touched. He did not know what these things did, but they frightened him like
nothing he had ever seen. There were a hundred of them, of various sizes. All he knew was, that
if you touched them they could splinter, scare you to death, and they had to be left alone. They
had no frog parts they were rounded, more like fleshy, flat eggplants. They were blind and nearly
motionless, nor were they hungry nor could they love shade.

Fa thought
Fa saw Billy as gnomic, sententious, full of short bursts of great meaning. Others found him to be snooty and self-important.

Fa thought about the first meeting with Billy and he wondered how he never thought of it before.
As he went to leave, Billy looked at him and said, ‘Johnny B, all I wanted was a steak
knife…imagine, if I’d wanted to stay in the dark.’ That was when Fa fell against the light switch
and turned on the light. One of the residents had said, ‘let there be light’ and another had said to
Billy, ‘now make it dark.’ Billy had a far off look when he stared at the second man. That was
the man who killed himself, that was Dubois, who said that. Dubois, so unlucky in love; the same
Dubois, whose parents both died alone of cancer in New York, NY, while he played with gold
diggers in Philadelphia. He’d heard all the stories. No wonder Dubois craved the dark. That’s
when he, Fa, looked at Billy’s plate and saw in front of him, a plastic knife and a gnarled-up milk
carton.

Fa fell in love with Billy over and over in his mind, not in the normal way a man loves another
man—wanting to be around him, and do things with him, to talk, or compare, or sleep beside in a
chair, or at a desk, or on the floor, or rub-up against in some mutual way, at an agreed-upon
distance. He loved him insanely—he wanted to understand him, to be God to him, or be himself
to God that was inside of Billy. Billy never said anything that didn’t register a chord. He was
Beethoven’s lost symphony his father told him about.
He saw many men fall away. Billy told him the story of a federal narcotics officer who was a
roommate of his, who said, ‘The problem with drugs in this country is availability.’ Billy agreed,
as everyone always had, then added, ‘and there’s not enough of the right dosages either.’ The
man had fallen for Billy, like everyone did, and then came up short, “doses!” ‘Yes,’ Billy said, in
his inexpressive way, ‘I bet you could go from here to Tijuana and not find a single coca leaf for
sale, anywhere.’ The implication that cocaine came in a proper and an improper dose, boggled
the man and made him reel it in, with nothing to show for his efforts in that pond, but a wet
worm. Billy became persona non grata. Billy made himself un-wanted, by being himself, not
because he didn’t care, even though he didn’t. Billy was frequently misunderstood, very.
 Fa wanted someone who had a knowledge of God, to corroborate what he saw in Billy. He
took Billy to Father Francis, the day before he discharged him. Fa was not Catholic, or so he
said. Father Fran lived in a huge empty church with locks on the doors and introduced himself to
Billy as Father Frank. Fa was afraid to ask, because he had known him for so many years, but
stiffened himself to say what had to be said, and had faith it would not make him look a fool. He
asked his friend if his name was Frank all this time. He said, “I’ve always referred to you as
Father Francis, isn’t that your name?”
“Some people call me that, but my name is Father Frank.”
“Tell Father Frank the story,” Fa said, with a growing sense of doom.
“How we fell in love?” B
“How you have God with you, and how, ahem…you talk to God.” F
“Oh, he’s always with me.” B
“Always?” FF
Billy was proud of his improved speech. His anger at being searched, and certified by a man,
who changed so much about himself to be suitable, to pass, made it simple, easy.
“In what way, always?” F
“Like, he never leaves.” B
“Like a cross you wear?” FF
“No, more like a left foot,” and Billy holds up his left foot for the priest to see. Billy was
showing-off a talent only recently acquired, re-acquired.
Fa became nervous and directed Billy to say what God had said to him last week.
“What? Too many people, not enough wine?” Billy inquired as Fa’s hands grew numb and
weak.
Fa sat up suddenly, “No!”
“How my son, is God like your left foot?” Father Brother Franny Frank asked.
“He won’t go away.” B
“Why would you want him to?” FF
“I don’t, but he wouldn’t, even if I told him to.” B
“How do you know that’s not the devil?” FF
“Well, if I say get lost. Look, still there. If I say get out, get off, go somewhere and bother
someone else, look!” Holds up foot. “God knows when you’re being sincere.” B
Fa grew pale, the priest grew gray, and Billy’s shoe caught the light from the pulpit.
“Like this,” Billy said, to what he misunderstood to be looks of query. He makes a pistol out
of his right hand and points it at his left foot. “Dance! See, nothing.” His right foot taps a beat.
He aims the gun again at the left foot. “Dance!” It doesn’t move. Billy was about to say, be
gone knave, when the priest jumped to his feet.
“That’s it! That is all I can stand! No one has ever pointed a gun at God and told him to
dance. You have to leave and take this with you.” indicating Billy’s shoe. “Sir.”
The priest turned his back, and Billy kicked his left foot on the ground hard. It echoed in the
empty church.
“See, he won’t leave no,” bang, “matter,” bang, “what.” Bang on the oaken floor.
The priest, formerly known as Francis, was jarred by the last bang, and knelt down, convinced
he was in the presence of the devil himself, and prayed. Fa was beyond mortification and sat with
his mouth open. Billy smiled and was glad to see preachers still did that sort of thing—prayed to
get people off of their backs, and to help them the only way they knew how.

“What were you doing in there?” he asked, when they got out past the iron gates. F
“He asked.” Billy said.
“He asked? You just insulted my friend and me too. You blasphemed on Holy ground and
you act like you don’t care. You pointed a gun at God’s head!” F
 Billy almost said ‘act?’ Apparently he didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation, since
people at that very minute all over the city were pointing real guns at each other. How could an
imaginary gun do any more damage, or possibly be more offensive?
The former Father Frank changed his name to Father ‘stick me in a sanitarium,’ for three
months, and then came out feeling ready to quit for sure. But he didn’t, he’d made a commitment
to his parents at the age of ten and to himself, and Oh, yes, to God.
The priest learned to dance, let the boys call him Franny, stopped trying to disguise the way he
said sibilant ‘S’sounds by adding an ‘H’, and even though his left foot never knew what his right
foot was doing, He, God, never abandoned him or made him fall.
They painted Billy’s room when he was gone—white, Yoko Ono Lennon white.

Purposeful misdirection is saying what you’re about to do, to a very

skeptical audience; you could steal them blind. Take hate, for example.
Now you have what’s known as an arresting development.

Fa catches-on to Billy’s desire to be left alone, and surprises Marie Carl, one day, as she puts
the seraglio in the closet. “This empty.” she says, and then walks out.
“What are you doing in here by yourself, Billy?”
Billy smiles, ‘same thing you’re doing with me.’ “port out, starboard home.”
“You can read.” Fa says, declaratively.
“Yes.” Billy says, surprising both of them. He attempted to put the book down on its face,
marking his spot, but Billy couldn’t put anything down. He sat with the open book.
“Yes,” he repeats in Billy’s tone, soft, easy, light—“you’re still afflicted aren’t you?”
Billy gestures in a forward manner, arm up and out, ending palm-up, and then repeats “I’m
burning I’m burning”—meaning: ‘you tell me, you’re the one splashing the water.’
“Fault farce ille perficere,” (ille perficere: he finishes) Billy says, apropos of nothing.
“English only.” Fa corrects.
“Whites only.” Billy rejoins, with a bitterness that upsets them both, and makes Fa restless and
fearful that Billy is not understanding him any longer. He is also healer, modeler, teacher, fixer-
helper. Therapist.
“Scientist.” Billy says, quietly to himself, as if self-reminding.
“You read in here, don’t you, my friend?”
Billy had never heard those words from him. And it brought a tear to his eyes and he looked
down and said, “Fa Bonham.”
“I know.” Fa said, and shifted in his seat by the bed. “Can you…”
Billy starts to turn away.
Fa stands as if to go.
Billy looks up, and says with his eyes, ‘go ahead, ask me,’ but he inadvertently looks at the
clock.
Fa sits, he was not ready to leave…he has nowhere better, to go.
“I’m the Ouija Board, Planchet.”
“Hey listen, I’m sorry. I know this is hard and I’m making it harder…look Billy, you and I
can do great things really, and he reluctantly grabs Billy’s hand, the one he’s been gesturing—go
ahead—I don’t know, and—I’m a fool, with.
“I came to see, I mean try something. But now I want to talk. F
Billy can’t gesture any more hopeless helplessness with his marooned hand, so he looks up at
Ferraj’s face, and waits for him to blink.
“Maybe now is not the time.”
 Billy starts to laugh thru his nose, and smiles, his head bobs an assertion: there is never a good
time, when you’re looking for one.
On the table, Fa had placed a book—part of a test no doubt, because he never saw Fa with any
book of his own before. And he looks over at it. In big embossed letters he reads, KING, and the
title below. Billy takes his fist, reaches forward, and lifts the book from the table with his left
hand and throws it at the window, misses, and hits the corner of a picture he’s looked at a
thousand times, a print of a woman carrying a jug of water on her shoulder, and cracks the lower
corner of the frame-glass. The book hit the ground as Billy yells, “Answer this!”
Fa picks up the book resignedly, and tries again to assure Billy of his true concern and
understanding. As he talks, Billy tries not to talk, and the picture on the wall falls apart, slowly.
First the corner opens, then the bottom slat falls, then the glass slips, and another metal slat falls,
and then the glass pulls the picture from the frame, and with it, the cardboard, then the whole
thing falls in pieces to the floor, unintentioned consequences and all. It made lots of sounds, as it
practically disintegrated. Many different sounds, but none unexpected, none worth mentioning,
none they could do, or would do anything about. Which isn’t to say it was unstoppable, just a
very simple process—gravitational, ludicrously deconstructionistic in intent, and absurdly erotic.

Am I getting close to the joke? It’s about being isn’t it, just being…no not just. It’s about
being with a capital B. It’s about finding something that is unable to finish itself; to complete an
assigned task; unable to finish without us.

The Argument
The argument started when Billy had a relapse. He fell, somehow, and was injured. It doesn’t
matter—he was already in the hospital. He was the most pampered of the most pampered. They
did surgery right away. Experts were called in. And they came, and consulted! With anyone
else they would have just pulled the rod out. Billy woke up with a Dilaudid drip, a cuddle pillow,
and a deaf roommate named Marlin…Billy took this as a sort of apology from God, for stabbing
him in the first place. All was right with the world. And they let him keep the rod as a souvenir.

But that wasn’t enough: God wasn’t done: Marlin was the captain of the Lancets, the High
School Football team from Tecumseh. No not yet: His visitors are rock star, super athletes from
the nearby dairy farms, who wake up at sunrise, milk cows till their cheeks turn red, and say
‘golly’ all the time. Not only that: Billy is so charming, funny and playful—on pain medicine—
the entire team falls in love with him, answers his call light before he puts it on, pull-back the
curtain every chance they get, are interesting, witty, and do everything jocularly. No ther’s
more: They sit on Billy’s side of the room, teach him American Sign Language and some of the
‘new signs’ they’ve made up as a team. They turn him on his side if he coughs, make him laugh
till he bleeds, they engage him, and visit Marlin so they can see him. Billy still couldn’t get it:
They whistled easily, respected Natalie, thought she was hot, envied him, and told dirty jokes in 3
languages, one auditory, one visual, and one practically tactile.

That’s not funny! It’s just not funny! Billy said out loud, one day after they left.
It’s not supposed to be funny it’s supposed to be fun—‘it’s sex!’ God said.
I’ve been having sex with myself this whole time!
The joke is: God speaks thru some form of advanced sex. Your job is to be there; he can’t finish
without you.
I make good decisions, then you…it’s not funny. Billy says as he tries to gather his thoughts.
God, this isn’t funny. There’s no punch line…Whatever this is, it has no punch line. Do you
mean to tell me I have to wait till the end of time itself for the punch line? That’s the way my
mother told jokes! You...You…
Billy gets hotter and hotter. This isn’t going to be a one-way conversation if he has any say in it!
You won’t make me…allow me to make a single decision. Important decision.
I decided strait was the way to go. I told you! I should have kept it to myself.
Fa turns into Cullen Hammer or Hanson or whatever. He falls in love and he wants to stop
tripping me. A doctor! My doctor, the one who protected me, him!
Then the football team falls in love with me. They fight for me; they fight to see who’ll medicate
me! Dill squeezed my bag of Dilaudid for 35 minutes just to give me a tiny bit more than what
the machine is set to deliver! And then!…then! Marlin, who just had abdominal surgery, offers
me his pain medicine, pulls himself out of bed like a Trojan, steps on his hose, falls into my bed
literally, and heavily. Breathing sweetly in my face, confesses with tears in his eyes that he wants
to have very consensual sex with me, and do I mind that he’s a virgin—overcoming my two main
objections to gay sex, besides its incommodiousness: 1) you never know where they’ve been and
2) they think they know everything. I tell him I’m strait, and will he please wear a shirt or at least
pair of boxers.
Then! No, you weren’t done, Billy says still yelling at God. No not by a long shot you weren’t:
The virgin gets the whole turn-taking thing, by osmosis, which has your stamp all over it— I
might add…and wants to come right away. First! For me! To please me!
Then before I know what’s happening he screams with pain—your idea I presume...His dressing
comes off in his hand, and shit and blood pour out all over me from his new one-day-old
colonoscopy incision! No drainage bag or nothing! I know whose behind this and…and…I
know who put Ida up to it! Well I’m onto you!
Never, never in all the years with men trying a hundred different ways to achieve orgasm have I
spilled a drop of blood or gotten a speck of shit on me! But now, now! I get propositioned by a
strait 18-year-old nudist athlete virgin, who suffered great pain to be close enough to beg me for
love and sex. Conquered his fear of exposure— in front of every one—opened holes to me he
forgot he had and…and all this right at the time I finished making my final decision to be
heterosexual…YOU BITCH!

I almost fell in love today! YOU BASTARD! Billy kicks the trashcan and it flies across the
room, making a sound like thunder. Billy doesn’t know who he almost fell in love with, it was
either Natalie, Fa, Mark, Isaac, Ida, Marlin, or some amazing kid named Bucky.

No paragraphs, it’s one idea

This is not funny. This is my life! Billy says. God smiles.
That’s it! Billy puts a robe over his gown, pulls the IV bags from their poles, clamps them, puts
them in his pocket, grabs the first two nurses he can find, and says, “Come with me!” in perfect
English.
They head-on down the hall. Pills fall all over the place, stethoscopes fly off necks like hoola
hoops. Pens dance in mid air.
Outside, Billy throws his head back, and screams so God can hear him. Why do you torture me?!
This isn’t funny. This has got to stop. Now! Soup Nazi! No more for you!
He breathes. It’s so dark, the nurses can’t see how red he is. No one moves, it’s raining and they
aren’t aware of it.
This is not funny! His voice climbs and sprints toward falsetto, but clears the bar.
This is sick! He stamps his feet. Mud up to my ankles I’m not moving!
He begins to cough…this isn’t fun for me anymore.
With the help of the narrator, he raises his fist. “One day I will give the speech you will want to
give.”
There’s a crack of thunder.
“What did he say?” Shawri says to Kier.
Kier laughs. “Get the wax out of your ears… I don’t know, I think he said he’s going to make
a speech with a finger up your ass.”
“What the…” and they both laugh…“the hell does that mean?”
Kier is red faced from laughter.
“I have no idea, this is so weird…what does he think he’s doing?” Shawri (pronounced: shur
`ee and sometimes sha` rry) said.
“What are you doing out here?” Kier (pronounced: key`-ur, but often keer-ee ) says to her.
“Same thing you’re doing bitch.”
“God, I can’t even ask a simple question.”
“Your simple questions have…”
“Shh! I can’t hear.” Kier says.
“Who said you could listen in.”
“Shh! I can’t even hear, and he’s screaming.”
“My ears hurt from eaves-dropping,” Shawri says, mockingly.
They both laugh. Both tell each other to shut-up, and both ask the other, ‘what did he just
say?’
Shawri says, “if you could just tone it down.”
Finally Kier says, “something interesting happens, and look who I’m with?”

Now! Billy says, stretching his height to its maximum 182 centimeters (5’12”). “I’m telling
you!” Nobody’s eyes are wider than Billy’s.
I want the punch line right now! Don’t even think you’re leaving! I’m serious!
He’s about to cry, but he’s too angry.
I don’t want to wait till I’m 75, with teeth that fall-out when I laugh.
The rain worsens.
A heart that can’t take excitement, climax, or hilarity. Don’t wait till my bones…
The water is falling from his face, as he speaks thru tears and rain. Till my bones are like corn
flakes, to make me fall off my chair. Don’t wait till I’m in a strait-jacket, to make me roll on the
floor. I demand it now!
The rain gets worse.
I’m not going anywhere till I get an answer.
“What did he just say?” Shawri asks.
“Get the water out of your ears.”
“You don’t know.”
“He said he’s gonna stay out here till you learn how to shut up.”
Nothing happens except it’s raining. Kier says, “get an umbrella.”
“You get one.”
“God!”
“Ok.” Shawri says.
“Get the lead out.”
“Fi-doo,” Shawri says, “I’ll crack you cross the jaw with it.”
They both laugh the same unexpressibly hearty laugh, Kier with eyes that roll, and Shawri
with eyes at half-mast. As Shawri moves toward the fire-door, two nurses run out to meet her
with plastic bags and flashlights.
“What’s going on?” one of them asks Shawri.
She pretends to whisper, but never learned how, “this guy is crazy.”
 Kier says, “He’s not crazy.” she says this in imitation of her cohort. “he’s got something to
say.”
“Who’s he talking to?” the nurse asks Shawri.
“Who’s he talking to, big mouth?” Shawri says to Kier (rarely pronounced: `keer).
“God!”
“He looking for a conversation with God. We be here all night”
“Uggh!” Kier says.
“Oh, shut up.”

Don’t wait till my Alzheimer’s’ makes it impossible to get. What’s the joke?
He’s ranting. The answer comes back as clouds move toward them inexhorably from the west.
I was waiting for you to ripen. God said. Yellow jackets on your lounge chair…they know how
ripe you…they’re waiting for you to turn.
Not good enough!
When I try to help you, God said…you’d think I was playing dodge ball.
Nope, not funny.
I sent you 28 women of all possible sizes and descriptions, all in love with you. You said they
were too heavy to carry around, so I sent one that was practically hollow, and you changed over
to men. God said.
Not gonna get it. Not funny.
It’s true. God said.
There’s a lightening strike.
“Oh, Jesus.” Kier says.
“Go inside.” Shawri says.
“You go inside. Mother Francis.”
Shawri laughs, “Who’s Mother Francis?”
“I don’t know,” and they both laugh.

You never supported my choice in men.

Who sent the chauffeur who adored you. What was wrong with him. God asked.
I don’t remember.
I do, you thought he was lying. And when he showed you his license, his business card, and a
picture of his limousine, you thought he was too pushy.
Too pushy, Billy says in chorus with God’s heard-before comment.
If he was any more sincere and hopeful he would have been a dog, God said.
I didn’t know…Nope…nope, that’s not gonna do it.
You make me laugh and cry at the same time. God said.
You make me laugh and cry alternately.
I can’t get enough. God said.
I asked you what I should do with my life. You said, find a problem and solve it. Then when I
do, you say leave. Was I the problem…because nothing was solved by leaving?
I’m up to here with this nonsense!
A clap of thunder.
NNN//http: nonsense! I said!
And you get my Ostrich, God says.
I know, that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen…I hate your tyrannical sense of humor—you
laugh…everyone has to laugh. Well I’m not laughing.
You take yourself way too seriously. God says.
This one, God thought, Takes himself so seriously. I won’t move anything for him, who does he
think he is. I mean, I won’t be moved. I won’t. He is nothing. Well, I’ll just stay here. He’s
ridiculous! I won’t be moved. He can turn in any direction he likes.
There’s a long pause. Billy wipes tears and water from his face, looks around at the rain. For the
first time, feels like he felt when he was on the swing in Point Spread, once when he played ‘GO’
while it rained.
Shawri looks at Kier. Kier stares back, “Go solve a problem.”
“You get out of here. I was here first.” Shawri replies.

I love you, God said.

That’s not funny!~. Billy says quietly.
It’s not supposed to be funny. God says.
It’s sex? Billy ventures.
No it’s better than sex, God said. It’ll keep you around.
I want a ring. Billy says.
Okay.
There’s a loud crack of thunder and the clouds pass directly overhead.
Billy is lighter than air and walks back to the girls who are dripping wet under their steamy clear
plastic ponchos.
“What happened?” Kier says, as Billy approaches, smiling.
“I got what I wanted.”
“Damn boy, you’re soaked.” Shawri says.
Kier elbows her, as if to say, ‘not now.’
“Who were you talking to?” Kier asks.
“God.” Billy says.
Shawri laughs. Kier tries to grab her, and they both start laughing.
“Go.” Shawri says, with an uncharacteristically stern tone to Kier, and points her toward the
door. “mister.”
“You’re an ass.” Kier says, and all five of them file in and up the stairs.
Billy is soaked, and can’t believe he did what he did. He is so electric he’s afraid of sparking.
The first-floor nurses are the older ones, they wipe him up and down, change his gown, put him
in the old shower room, turn the overhead heat lamp on and in 2 minutes he’s as good as new:
“Nice. A fine how do you do.”
Flop! goes the wet gown.
“You can let go, I got it.” and she takes the bag from his front pocket.
Flop! goes the second gown.
“Hold this up Frannie.” and in two seconds he’s dressed. They put two more gowns on him,
and Grace, the assistant, runs to get the warm blankets they save for post-op patients. Billy is still
pulsating as he walks up stairs. Ionized particles are dancing.
Kier and Shawri are still laughing when he gets back to their floor, but their laughter is so
spontaneous it invigorates him even more, because it invigorates everyone.
He walks to his room. In the hallway sits a man in a black, opera-length coat, reading a thick
volume of Dickens, and he’s scribbling something in the margins.
“Ahem,” Billy says. “Some night!” His eyelashes are wet, his face glistens, his eyes are very
dark red.
The man is sitting by an open window. The cool air feels good. “Yes,” he says.
“Sorry,” Billy said. “didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You okay?” The man asks.
“Never felt better in my entire life.”
“Oh,” the man says, and combs his hair into his face with his hand.
Billy walks into his own room, excruciatingly aware of the brush-off symbolism, but then he
stops dead. The room is silent—no Marlin, no teammates, no blood, no self-effacing laughter, no
fire. He turns, and instead, takes a step backward, almost losing his balance. He walks the four
or five steps to the door, stands solemnly at the door, and catches the man’s eye.
 “You don’t have a ring, do you?”
The man stares at him, opens his palms as the book closes on his pen. “No,” he says, matter of
factly. “No ring, d’ja lose one?”
“Yes, I sort of did. I was just wondering…you haven’t seen one…have you?” Billy’s speech
amazed him, it seemed real clear—but then, he almost always thought that.
“What does it look like?”
“Oh, I don’t know it’s it…very…solid I think. A real nice ring.” Billy begins to feel
nauseated and his head starts to spin.
“I haven’t seen any rings, Mr. Ah…really,” He says this nervously.
Billy hears only, ‘Mr.’ His left leg buckles, and he falls forward. The man stands up as Billy
falls, arms at his side, into him. The book falls, Billy lands on top of the man in the chair who
holds the floor with one hand, to keep them from falling together onto it.
“Oh my God!” he says, and stands Billy up as best he can. Billy’s head hits the door with a
knock. “Jeezoo.”
Billy says, “I’m okay, I’m okay.”
“Alright, come on,” and they walk-slide together into the room toward the bed. “Nurse!
Man down! Nurse! Hey!” They walk the rest of the way to the first, closest bed. There’s no
blood on the bed. It’s Marlin’s bed, and he’s down in ‘G I,’ getting sewn-up and re-dilated:
Marlin’s strong abdominal muscles are in spasm, and he practically breaks the plastic dilator ring.
It pops out and leaps in the air. Hands reach for rings, rings fall off fingers, the entire hospital
reverberates.
The nurses pile into Billy’s room. His feet go up, equipment rolls in as if from no where. The
man stands back in awe and shock. He’s escorted out. Billy looks very pale, and there’s concern
in the steady voices of the nurses. The man trips over a cart in the hallway and hears a machine
start to chirp. He kicks his book out of the way, and is directed to the family lounge. There is
commotion and confusion about who and what and is he bleeding again and why would he be
bleeding. He’s naked on the bed in a minute. Ida has to explain this is the man from the other
bed, in this bed, not his bed.
A few minutes later, the man sees that everyone who’s coming is in the room. It’s quieter. He
hears the chirping. He can’t really hear what’s been going on, but he can tell by the speed of the
staff that the man is probably not dead. One of the nurses asks him who he is, and what
happened. He doesn’t know what happened, and they get his vital statistics: name, reason for
being here, relationship, what he saw, what he heard.
David is visiting his mother, who is sleeping across the hall, at the moment. He doesn’t know
the patient—he was watching the rain turn to snow.
Billy is fine. He was in shock. They gave him a gallon of fluid intravenously, and watched
him get better. Watched him closely. Shawri and Kier said he had been highly excited and began
to rant. They followed him outside and then he began to calm down and seemed fine, ‘like he
had had a fit or a seizure or something and then it was gone.’ Then they came back. The story
was corroborated by all. Shawri said he thought he was talking to God.
“He’s having a psych-emergency, if you ask me.”
No one said anything. They don’t call Psych, for medical emergencies.
“A lot you know about a psych emergency.” Kier says, under her breath, as Shawri leaves the
room.
“Ha, you probably know all about them.”
They laugh, and as usual, they don’t know what they’re laughing about. The room is cleared
in twenty minutes, and the equipment is gone except for the beeper.
 Try Again
The nurse says, “Good morning Marlin…Good morning ‘God’s favorite.’ How are we this
morning?” “God’s favorite,” Billy says, “that’s a laugh.” “You made him stop the deluge last
night…Shawri, told us. They witnessed it, you asked them to, don’t you remember?” “Oh,”
Billy said. “They looked so bored, and I felt so man..i…c… so good, that I…” Realizing he can
talk and share, in forward or reverse. “That’s not true…a lie…I only made a sugges…tion.” This
was the first time Billy, had made plain clear sense since he came onto to this unlucky cloverleaf.
This highway to hell. Billy says as he trails off. The sudden ability to speak without some
emotional catalyst lasted a total of 30 seconds. “ Look,” Betty, the nurse said. “Everyone knows
the story: you’re queer, you get smashed up by ‘shaken not stirred,’ He (pointing to the acoustic
ceiling), saves you, then He takes away all meaning and gives you understanding in its place—
then you go strait—right?” she says this as she bats her eye and does a hair-flip. “…Yes,” I said
tentatively. “Well, except that He took understanding and gave me meaning, Billy says. “Either
way when you have the one, you always think you have the other one…what’s the difference?”
Betty asked, and then added, “Can you have one without the other?” ‘Why are you asking me?’
Billy gestures. “Well you oughta know is all. Though frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
“Really, you don’t care?” Billy questions, as if it were four sentences. “Sure I care, not that that
makes any difference—you still bore me, I’ve already seen your membership, plus I’m married. I
just always wanted to exit to that line.” “My dear, everyone wants to exit to that line.”

===================================================================-=-
-==================================================══════════======
Never listen
Pardon my French, but the fucking angels of this world left me cold, endangered my blankets,
flattened my pillows, broke my sunbeam blender, lost my mercury dimes, stole back a topaz as
big as your thumb, wrecked a perfectly good refrigerator magnet, subsumed my innocence, and
played with my desire: the only thing I had that was mine. At the same time they let me know I
was one of them. I suppose it was a kind of joke. A kind of initiation ritual, but I was so young
and so stupid I couldn’t, or didn’t understand.
Where do you go when you have nowhere to go? Where do your dogs lead you when you
can’t find them? The cats have flown, the birds are starved. The friends I spent a life-time
gathering, and trading-in, are gone. Like a young, French baseball-card collector—one Yogi
Beara, one Lou Gehrig, and now—well, time is trouble. And nothing ever goes right. A steady
state of decline prevails, murder is the theme. Death to all. But I suppose death is the willing
cohort of all our dreams, when we’re blurred, injured or diseased…I don’t know. Ask the
English who suffered the unspeakable Black Death in 1352 when one third of the population died,
ask them, don’t ask me. I suffer in silence. I cannot speak.
Never listen, and danger will overlook you. Never listen, and fortune will smile. Never listen,
winds and smiles will pick you up. Never listen to me, never listen. But never speak, and you’re
truly screwed. I see in you a time where I was once. I see in you a place, somewhere I lived, but
it’s long gone, and it should be. It beckons me to turn, look, listen, and see. But I say now, never
listen. Never listen, because if you hear the throaty quality of birds they will destroy your present
kindred feeling. They will destroy your moment. They are for you a weather forecast, a down-
load, a leaky faucet, a burning candle—only a measure of time, and a place you tried so hard to
hold. If you listen, the applause you heard might just be the rancid trash, and the empty plastic
bag trying to retain its former shape. Don’t give it up to the mynahs, the whipped-up sparrows, or
puny moths. These creatures have no feeling for you, they mean so little, they want too much,
leave them, leave everything. If you ever have the chance to go back, don’t listen, never listen.
All wrappings seek their former form, even potato-chip bags.
Something happened. I was sitting around minding my own business, and Ida came in
unannounced. She knew how to infuriate me—just show up. My speech was in that funny stage,
talk-not-talk, fluent-not-fluent, ready, not ready by half. It made me angry. Yes, everything
made me angry. I told you already, describing a conversation is impossible, but I said something
nasty about her shoes or something once, and she said, ‘God doesn’t like ugly,’ and something
clicked, there was a zip, something went zing, and I looked at her and thought, ‘Oh yes He does.’
She got out of the room before I could explain. My stitches hurt and if I tried to chase her it
would not…be…work out right. Ida being Ida.

Nick of time World in balance

The hum was getting on Billy nerves.
The buzz contained everything, it was everything: ideas, stories, dreams, wishes, beliefs, ritual,
superstition, informative greetings, tricks—also known as exercises in educational furtherance—
people asking to be made right, and begging to be made wrong.
He ignored it and refused to clean up. A messy desk is a fortune; an empty desk is shear poverty
from which there is no cure but more money.

It buzzed.
One day it buzzed in a higher frequency. It rang. It could have been a ‘C,’ for all Billy knew it
was ‘D#.’ It was a very pleasant whatever it was. It kept ringing. He ignored it.
Then it attacked, and he got a near constant ringing. He ignored it.
He noticed when he talked, it dissipated, unless he talked about it, and then it went away
completely—so he whined. That helped for a while, but it would take more than the dinging of a
bell to get him to talk incessantly about nothing to people who were only looking for one thing—
status.
Inspiration came to him, just like the TV reception in Valdoster, Maine, in 1972. Their
perception of status-interruptus, had the same effect on it that a vacuum cleaner had. It made
reception fuzzy and irretrievable. He ignored them and their perceptual discrepancy. He knew
they couldn’t be looking for him.
If they thought he was of higher status, his profane, perverse and preposterous nature would
disabuse them of that in short order. He felt as though he had somehow misled them, and grew
apprehensive and very quiet, waiting.

He made a mistake. He began to listen. He no longer had to take any notes, because he was a
fiction writer, and he only told the truth. That was his second mistake. The first was, working
only when inspired.
He didn’t ignore the mistakes. He didn’t notice them, and kept going.
The ringing stopped, Thank God. He still kept going.
Billy didn’t pretend to ignore things. And Billy did something else you can’t do—he didn’t
pretend not to notice. He really didn’t. He just kept going.

The endless search for status kept him never ready.

The sound the world gave-off was not conversational, yet...it had conversational qualities.
Someone spoke, years ago and was, as if, waiting for a response.
Billy decided to let them wait.
The endless search for top tire was enervating to hear, debilitating to watch as it went round and
round, and morbid in its righteous skew.
More lines occurred to him, and oddly enough they fit, so he kept them. He decided he’d claim
full veto power. That was his third and fatal mistake. Three months later he woke up fictional,
one morning. He had never in all that time used the veto, not once. Didn’t matter…dead is dead,
or so they said.
Choices were still offered in two’s.
He decided to be ‘in the moment,’ since he was an artist. Except he wasn’t an artist, but the
moments came, one after another, just the same, enseriatum. Let’s see you use that in a sentence.
That. Let’s just say, Billy was not slavishly devoted to the form.
He had never been on a real football, baseball, basketball, hockey track, or swim team. He didn’t
know anything about the army, navy, airforce, marine core reserves, therefore he didn’t ask for
permission. That would have been his fourth or fifth mistake but he never made it. He never
asked anybody for anything. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, he didn’t notice that it made any
difference. They never picked him, and he never wanted to be picked.

He thought that was interesting. The white sound that was so far off, wanted entrance.
He looked up. A book hopped from the shelf, when he read its name.
‘That figures,’ Billy thought, and he entered it. He hadn’t joined the Corp, and he hadn’t had sex
in over two months, he would have entered anything.

Billy found the buzz slowed down. The ringing in his ears was gone, but he didn’t want to
mention it, for fear that it would hop back. So he referred to it obliquely as ‘Bing and Bob go to
Bali.’ People would ask him about ‘the road pictures,’ and he’d say he hadn’t heard a thing. It
was a long way for a light load, as Billy’s father used to say, but it made him happy that people
couldn’t wrestle his fears to the ground without his permission— Jinx him. Hi. Or talk about
him as if they knew him.
The important thing was they were gone. Thank God.

God asked Billy how he liked things so far, and Billy said fine, but the reception’s poor, did God
leave the vacuum on?
What vacuum. He looked up absently, and did what Billy did, ignored certain questions. To some
people all questions are questions, to others some people aren’t even people.

People of all stripes, passed right thru the white sound, completely oblivious. Billy decided to do
that too.
That’s when he decided to be more coherent. He couldn’t, so he just kept going, and stuck to
spelling and punctuation. Clicked where and when he was told to, and resented it. He was not a
typist. He couldn’t take dictation. He wasn’t ‘channeling.’ He would never be anyone’s opening
act, and that was that. If you want to know so bad, what Billy did, it was practically nothing, he
made coffee, tea, and served his specialty: noodle surprise, which everyone roundly criticizes,
especially people who’ve never had it. He was also not a diet doctor, but you would know that if
you hadn’t ripped out the writing by the dotted line.

Billy was fictional, so when he held out his hand, another hand was reaching out toward his,
otherwise he wouldn’t have mentioned hands in the first place. That’s one of the first rules. The
fact that Billy was not on a quest for God, didn’t make any difference. A lot of times we drop
things, but we never hear them hit the ground, this was one of those things. Like (to) everyone
else, things just happen. Prepositions get re-routed and you just go on. It’s not your work
anyway, not really. Or so he was informed.

Billy had made so many mistakes by then, now, whenever…he just couldn’t stop. Interpreting
the white sound led to mistakes, so he decided to declare himself right, and that was his biggest
mistake. It saved him a lot of time, it saved him a lifetime, but it meant he had to die. Again. It
was like a bad romance novel—they had sex way too early, and way too often.

Billy watched the weather channel for ideas. It made him laugh, and asked so little in return. The
better they were at prediction, the more they missed, and the sadder the announcers became.
They rarely used their names except to say goodbye, yet on satellite public access, their name
rank and serial number was written across their chests the entire time. Billy thought that was
interesting. But just.

The white sound affected different people differently. It became for Billy, not so much buzz, but
vibration. And he could hardly sit still. He was aware of his coin. One minute sensible, the next,
conscious of something invisible, intangible, yet pressing. One side then the other. No money
changed hands. He kind of liked that, though it seemed very odd. It also seemed right.
He tried to watch Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but he had seen it so many times he just walked
in and out of the room like Richardson himself—always in a fret.

He felt inspired, and decided to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That lasted ten
minutes. He went to bed exhausted, the sex lasted eleven minutes, and put him soundly out.

Billy thought a lie was nearly as good as the truth if you could get someone to believe it. Besides
he knew the devil was in the plausibility of the details. If there were any. He felt political, that
lasted four seconds, he farted and went back to sleep. It was just gas.

He made things up. That solved the problem—No details.

Billy was so perverse, after he made things up, he examined them for truth, and found them not-
wanting. This fictional character thought he had a mind. So he began thinking. He became
conscious. A greater consciousness reached out: so who’s real now. Ha ha.

Billy felt inspired. He was. Billy was like the dog catcher who catches his first dog—
mystified—What do I do with this? Billy was ready to take it home, except he was home.
The weather channel implied the Earth was moving, by showing static maps, and moving clouds.
Billy thought the channel had an interesting perspective on truths. The numbers never added up,
and the clouds were two dimensional.

Billy was glad he stopped drinking nine months previous, and that his friends didn’t call often.
When they called, he’d smoke and drink and declare a holiday, not necessarily in that order. If
they called more than every two weeks, he’d run out of holidays. This was perfect, five
birthdays: Feb., March, June, June and Sept. One long weekend every three months, toasts to
winter, spring, summer, summer, and~fall. A celebration of brotherly love, to warm the winter
chill, Philadelphia New Year’s style. He would have stopped time for them, and then start it all
over again. He did. Busman’s holidays, every one.

All of a sudden, one day God drove him to the store, Big K. And left him in front of the soap
display. He said he would, but then he did. Billy stood there looking at fourteen thousand
kilograms of soap, in the soap aisle, and wondered how hard it would be to mount a box above
the tub. God came back, five minutes later, Billy hadn’t moved, he was still staring, and God
said, ‘I bet you don’t know what you’re doing here.’ He liked God, he thought he was wack. He
was like a bud, a friend. And He liked what we, the collective we, liked.

Billy couldn’t type, take dictation, drive, be humble, talk, walk long-distances without
complaining every 40 meters about something, or spend any more time wondering how the hell
he got here. He talked to himself as he looked for status, and tried to be right. Didn’t like to read
much, unless it was sunny, hot, and he was in his backyard. Exercised like a pirate, with visions
of buried treasure, and a patch to acquaint his lazy-eye with the bounding main. Gold coins, and
such. Waiting for things to be so thrown.

The white sound

Dum dum dum dum dumm, dumby doobie dum dum dum dum dumm, dumby doobie dum dum dum dum dum—Woh-woh-woh,
Whoa-oh—Come go with me, Clarence Quick, the Del Vikings 1956

The white sound was not as irritating as Billy thought it would be, though like burning leaves,
it hurt his nose sometimes, and other times it smelled like Heaven.
Then one day he thought about how people kept saying things like: you must be deaf, are you
deaf, are you crazy, are you listening to me, are you awake yet, were you sleeping. The white
sound had an element he couldn’t explain. So he decided it wasn’t there. It was human and anti-
conversational. It went like this: (whistling in) hey…hey.
He thought perhaps these unquotable remarks, that people were making, were a part of his
processing. After all, Fa and his team-approach, were taking careful aim at his word-choice,
which was at times poor, and at other times right on the money, depending on who was in front of
him. Fa understood everything, and asked hundreds of questions, which Billy understood.
Others ignored him. This was a theme of his, and he navigated it like Magellan. Stupid people
thought he was stupid, smart people thought he was smart, untrusting people thought he was
underhanded, and untrustworthy etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. He put people off on purpose, he
always had. This theme was called ‘old reliable.’ Billy discovered this fact when he realized,
that, now that he was an adult, no one thought he knew what he was doing.

The white sound was like a quote. Two paths diverged in a wood…and that made all the
difference. He had thousands of these on-file. It was not stored as a quote per se, it was stored,
that is encoded as a feeling and when…not as words or syllables…and when someone said
something that gave him that feeling, he would say the sound. It was a no brainer—Paying
constant attention is resource-intensive and can quickly exhaust advantage. He realized this at the
same time his doctor realized that Billy was encoding everything into a deep-meaning center, that
in fact nothing was going into or thru his right-reading center, at all. His ‘get it right, watch your
back, keep it simple stupid, hey, this works this way’ Center, was down, and had never been that
good to begin with. In fact, one little accident, a few molecules of fat, and some bone-marrow
from a broken pelvis—a precipitous drop in pressure, and a one-way trip thru the heart from the
other side, and his self-preservation, ‘me-only’ center, was gone, history, S.U.

Everything was being encoded as though it had great meaning, which was impossible.

Ida borrowed his wheelchair one day, the one with the big sign that read, ‘DO NOT TAKE,
UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH—THIS MEANS YOU.’ But the ‘nose for news,’ that read
from top left, to bottom right, couldn’t read that. Anyway, Billy ventured out, and he heard it
again. The thing in the white sound that couldn’t be there.
He went to get a hoagie and a coke, and a pretzel, and a hotdog down at the food truck by the
hospital entrance, and maybe smoke a cigarette. Two people were yelling, one said: I’m talking
to “Billy” now. Billy stared at them. They said it again, to him. There were just the two of them,
and he didn’t notice a cell phone, or anyone else around. He was glad when the tall guy produced
one, and dialed some guy named Billy. It was creepy though, and he felt like the man was talking
to him. He walked to the old Convention Center, where he’d heard they were filming indoor
scenes for the movies. Someone said, “Hi Hudson,” and he knew he hadn’t heard that. So he
went back to the hospital. Just as he got up on the curb an old car hit a puddle, and the water
missed him by centimeters. He turned to see a shiny faded orange-colored 1950 Hudson, lumber
off toward Franklin Field. God laughed.

There was something in the white sound peculiarly interested in talking to him.
As it turned out, Billy came to believe it was just one of those things. He was exhausted from
watching his wheelchair and Ida.

Mark was the best nurse he had ever seen. And called every guy under 80, “Dude.” He was
deeply respectful to women, and batted his eyes at them incessantly. Billy had become a very
good observer. Supposing to himself, that seeing the same behaviors over and over among
different people, made this happen. He was left wondering, because he had never really never
been all that observant before. In fact, quite the opposite, he was one of the most inattentive
people in the world, or so they thought, him included. Billy came to believe that a man who had
the guts to accept the title: “Nurse,” would’ve long ago transcended its slinky absent quality, in
favor of its potential to release one from the..
The white sound, of people saying things they just have to say, ‘the accompaniment,’ the things
they must say, the things that even they expect to hear themselves say, began to ebb so slightly at
night while he stared at the ceiling that it became almost audible. It was the sound the Earth
makes. A din.
Billy had a dream that was not a dream. It moved independent of him. It showed him nothing. It
was no where. It neither warned, nor desired, nor worried, nor cared, nor sang a word. It
began…Hello.

He heard it again one day in the white sound. The biz, the buzz, the fizz, the fuss, the white
sound. And this time he was not mistaken or wrong, nor did he deny what he heard, though it
definitely didn’t belong.
In among all the nonsense, repeated phrases, things about asking people how they felt, and people
saying, “Fine,” he heard it. He couldn’t identify it at first, so he thought about it. What was that?
He almost said it out loud, and he wished someone he knew would come up to him or something
would distract him. But he was left alone. In his aloneness
…There was certainty in the white sound.
He thought that was interesting—he didn’t know what certainty was, so he wasn’t afraid of it.
Billy had been so devalued—he saw the good of it: He wasn’t the least bit afraid of being wrong.
He had walked thru mine fields his whole life—Still Alive! Yes, but also, he knew that people
often lie about where the mines are. On purpose. There was nothing of any real value that could
be taken away from him because he knew where the things of real value were kept. He always
knew but now he had…well……....certainty.

He found that to be the case more and more. This certainty was an answer to whatever question
you had. It answered who, what, where, when, why, and how. It answered in testable ways who
was talking. Was it the real person, or the who they were projecting? It answered who they
thought you were. Who they really were. Who they thought they were. It gave ten times more
information than you asked for. It answered without him asking—what was really going on? All
about what people needed or wanted. It said clearly that people stop in one place, a symbolic
place. Billy realized his ‘me’ language processing center was down—He couldn’t have known
that, but he did. Everything was looking symbolic. Even his own symbolism. When, was
always now, and where people stopped was at a crossroads of desire and something else. People
were fascinated by their own desire, but when found, they would duck, avoid, or move on.
Consider: put Monroe Effect here. When do you stop trying? When do you start accepting what
you’ve got—loving it? Settling for it, if you want to call it that. The purpose of life is to Be.

The Monroe Effect

The Monroe Effect, named for Marilyn, describes a state where a person has a talent that puts
them in a category by themselves; lets say the odds of having this sort of talent is over 1,000 to
one. Then they have a second talent, which has to be, being in the right place at the right time,
and this ‘talent’ also carries a probability of roughly 1,000 to one, well the chances now, that this
person would have a third great talent is enormously small, approaching a billion to one, and yet
they seek this out, to their own destruction.

It has to do, I think, with living in the childhood sphere where things are just working out—
desires are met; heels touch the ground; if you were of a mind to take what you got, where would
you cash in? The greater the talent, the bigger the ‘opening,’ the greater is the desire to keep
going—driven more by innocence than addiction. Want defies sense.
In other words when do you stop trying? When do you start accepting what you’ve got—loving
it? Settling for it, if you want to call it that. Can you ever have what you want?

Years ago I was very happy mopping floors. I loved the simple restorative nature of it. I found it
entrancing, almost hypnotizing, and I could stay in my head, go deeper and deeper into my own
thoughts, and even begin to see some that weren’t exactly mine. I could stay down longer and
longer, and when I came up, the floor looked good. I found also, that humility was useful for that
part of the dialogue, what I would now call the soul. Describing any activity in terms of a
conversation is not only the simplest and most accurate way of describing a series of repeating
then alternately unrelated thoughts and feelings as they float by. But it’s also the only way I
know-of to learn. Sit here, I’ll show you how this works: Imagine you’re having a conversation
with light. The light lands on a tree, then your eyes land on the tree. Then one leaf, this one, for
example. Here, touch it if you want to. Hold it up next to mine. Drop them together and you’ve
recorded a dance. Describe it if you want to, or just watch them settle to the ground with no
opinion. There are no words for the myriad continuous interactions between things. You reflect
these things because your recorder is always on. Always informing you where you are.
They showed up, these things, same place, same time, pretty much just like you. The world is
very beautiful with words or without—maybe more beautiful without. Silent conversation!
There! See, that’s what all this is. Like everything’s vying for attention …and so few words
accurately define our relationships. Now, that I can understand.

I moved on from mopping floors for the sake of money, self-esteem, the probative nature of
embarrassing questions, that stuff, and I don’t regret it, I’m not saying that. But I felt a little like
a Zen master in training. Start, start with the lowliest job, find the true nature of it, unravel the
doingness of it, let it bring being, first emotional, sensual, then calm, inner peace, then challenge,
then knowing in small bite-size pieces. Good enough to walk on.
Cleaning is one of the few things life offers that is truly noble—self-driven then suddenly not—
that can also stop time. Forcing someone to clean against their will, or promoting a circumstance
that gives them no other choice is not what I’m talking about. The builders of the pyramids were
doing just that, creating something so clean so simple and so truthful to their understanding of the
soul, that that is the only thing it was. Symbolic of the soul. The offered, outer purpose had little
if anything to do with the unyielding hypnotic conversation. To make something perfect you
must end it. The work of revealing the soul is done, not just by the symphony conductor, but
also, and more directly by the man or woman who cleans and positions every chair. The scent of
the Mimosa is pouring in my window just like a robe—eternal summer. The idea that you will
stop when you reach happiness is false. If that were true, there would be happy people at the top
of the pyramid, and miserable people at the bottom and that’s a myth.

The Monroe Effect is about dissatisfaction at obtaining your goal; it is as if your desire for
everything has left you here. You feel as tho you’re a failure because you still have desire. The
goal suddenly pales in comparison to what it represents.
If you let IT—lack of fulfillment—take away fun—you have let desire rule your life. As
uninteresting as they are, goals matter. When Marilyn sat and watched them erect a 50-meter
poster of her ‘Desire’ in the middle of Times Square. Her goal was, ironically, put in its place, as
all goals eventually are. “That’s what they think of me,” she said derisively. It is a little bit like a
game. Except this one you can’t master. You can only put yourself in a position to claim
mastery. It’s where you stand, and what you stand on.

Back to my point: The ME has its basis in probability. Ask any great artist what allows them
their vision: How did they get this interpretation, out of what they were given? You’re likely you
get a statement about a conversation: “The stone speaks to me,” for example. Getting attention
for this, is a whole nuther gift. That’s two gifts right there. To expect someone with two great
gifts, to also have a third: “I know what I’m doing,” is very improbable. What they mean is they
know what they’re doing when they know what their doing. After all, a mosquito knows what
it’s doing; that’s why I tell everyone, I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s true, but it also makes
all the flaws disappear.
*
He watched people more carefully, after all, he had time to kill, and nothing better to do.
They smoked, people he smoked with smoked, and the first drag was heavenly, but that was it-=-
all the others were taken, with an eye to notice what else was going on. He thought that was
strange.

The hum of the white sound got louder, and he was afraid the bell would start again, marking the
end of class, or the beginning of class, or whatever noteworthy non-event was about to transpire.
This unexpected development was sustainable and incredible. He loved certainty and always had.
He began to test people with it. He made up elaborate ways of tricking people into telling the
truth. Then he realized he didn’t need subterfuge at all, all he needed was a question, and the
answer would immediately come—often in the most mysterious of ways.
‘Well finally!’ someone said in a booming voice. It was 3 in the morning, no one was around,
except the night crew, and they were all at the desk. He listened for the voice that had just said
that. Paula was working next room down. That was a relief, Billy thought. Maybe he was going
symbolically crazy, you know, just plain crazy. He put the pen down, and turned the light off,
and the phone rang. “Do you have my pen?” The voice on the other end said. Billy dropped the
phone. A shiver went thru him. He picked up the phone, and there was no one there. He swept
the pen off the table to get it as far away from him as possible, it slid toward the door. Della, the
night nurse, walked and talked. You could always hear her coming, she said in advance of her
entrance into the room, “I’m sorry, I thought I’d hassle you about my pen. I didn’t mean to wake
you.” I wasn’t asleep. She walked into the room. “Do you have it, klepto’man?”
“It’s right, right, right there,” he said.
“Where?”
“At your feet.”
She looked down. Her pen was one millimeter from her foot. She picked it up.
“Did you throw it at me?”
“No, it flew there.”
“It landed at my feet?
“Yes.”
“Right after you threw it at the door.”
“No, it landed there right before you stopped.” I thought…Oh, well, that’s a start.
“You’re okay, right?”
“Yes, just tired.”
“Well it’s after 2 O’clock, that might explain it. Get some rest, you look like you need
it…Talking better Billy…” She said, as she walked down the hall toward the station.
Billy tried to sleep. He was glad that hadn’t happened. He, like his mother, had no trouble
living in denial—like an idea whose time hadn’t come. He was still thinking about certainty, four
and a half hours later, when breakfast was served. He got his tray and said as he lifted the lid,
“Oh, great, Bacon.” What he meant to say was ‘Oh, great, Waffles.’ That’s what it was, but what
he wanted was bacon. The nurses’ assistant came in, two minutes later, with a plate of bacon, and
Billy ate it, glad that his misstatement led to such a propitious misunderstanding. He spent the
entire morning wondering how you could get what you wanted, by implying you didn’t want it,
and in fact demonstrating disappointment that you had already received it. Well perhaps sarcasm
works that way. Another mystery. The night crew left and they looked tired. One of the men
down the hall had had a heart attack, probably when someone took his bacon—And they spent a
long 2 hours resuscitating him, adjusting his blood pressure, then analyzing and adjusting his
heart rhythm. Billy tested Ida, later that day, and found her motives were without guile—she
wanted more of everything, but work, and she got it. She would just let everything happen
around her. He knew from that, that she was without guile.
The symbols that repeated, seemed to repeat all the time. It was something about desire.
There must be hundreds or hundreds of thousands of things to desire, so how come there was so
much repetition. Another mystery, or perhaps he just wanted things to appear simple, and
similar. ‘Life just crazy’ Ida said. He heard her very clearly from the bathroom and when he
walked out to the hall to chastise her, or pull her chain, she was gone. That’s her answer for
everything, just crazy. Billy had a new love, and he couldn’t be bothered. It was that thing that
didn’t exist. Which he found in the middle of the gross, unrequited universal noise, that had no
name, but was like a rush.

Billy now listened for certainty. He determined, apropos of nothing, that people stop where
desire and pleasure meet. But saw no examples of it. There at the hospital everyone ran around
all the time. He had three visitors that day, more than he had all week, and though they didn’t
overlap, they were there all day. It was fun for him to just sit around and try to talk. Isaac and
Ida were a riot together. One would interpret what he meant to say, and the other would explain
it back to him. One was very intuitive, and the other, dense as dynamite.

God, Thank you, Thank you for everything. Billy said.

Everything. God questioned, or might have just repeated. G
Yes, everything. B
Did I tell you, never accept a nick-name unless you know the real name. G
Yes, ah…you did. B
Did I ever tell you never accept a nick name for a nick name. G
Ah, no. But that’s logical. B
Did I ever tell you nothing repeats. G
In a way. You told me symbolism repeats. B
Yes, the symbols change, but it is imperceptible. It is evolutionarily slow. G
Got it. B

People don’t repeat, He explained—explained so slowly, it took Billy almost two months to hear
what he was saying. Symbols repeat, in a sort of sequence or a pattern, like music. Billy didn’t
know enough about music to understand what God meant, or was trying to tell him. He thought it
may exist as a possibility. Billy was fine with talking about possibility—that came from losing
his hearing once when he was a child. He learned to just go with it, as tho Being could be
unclouded.

The rules of the community

are the rules of forgetting and forgiving. The community has no real memory, it has collective
recall. Something girded, braced, something defined by practice, a formidable re-visiting of past
cautionary tales, outright warnings, and instructive greetings.
The strange and continually stranger look into the workings of a desperate struggle: the
barbarians over the immortals. It’s a winner take all fight, because—hardly the mating ritual—it
means to kill: dangles flowers, candy, meat, whatever, over a hole and the one waits for the other.
Billy spent most of his life climbing out of such holes. And now he was free. Freed, f-e-e—
freed without all the painful R&D, or silly elongated sounds meant to keep us talking, or push the
end a little further from the beginning.

Now that his search for content was over, he had no reason to revisit anything. He was totally
free. Except there was nowhere to go, that looking for, could disclose.
He rode from epiphany to epiphany, from apogee to apogee, careless to what prompted it,
unaware of any downside. He had an asymptotic relationship with every function as defined by
the x and y axes. He was Cartesian, orthog-onal, he rode infinity like a wetback rides the Rio
Grande—He just walked across it.
He was non Bayesian, in his predictability, he did not flutter his wings, no matter how likely it
was that he would fall beneath the motion of any other thing.
With no input registering on his black board he felt as tho school were out for the summer,
‘permanent grass stains,’ became a triple misnomer.
He went from window to window in that 1-story classroom, certain that fear of the outside,
and reason itself no longer existed. All he needed was a door, and he’d be gone.
The rules of the community are the rules of the ameba: flow as far as you can, as fast as you
can—devour, change, whip something up, create a reason if you have to.
For this reason: that the thing is coming that will stop you, when it does, you’re done. If it
never comes, it will be just like this—all go.
The rules of the community, sent a shiver down his spine. It was a masterpiece of
understatement—become overnight a drum-roll, un-connected to any previously encountered
marching order. This thing was that second language he always wanted to speak. It was the
translating job he was born to do. Revealing the landscape to farmers, deciding the barn,
resolving the flow of water. Helping the hibernating-bear hunters to realize how much time they
wasted on stealth. Economizing the operations of rendering and smoking, would better serve
them, for the long winter, ahead.
With a road cut from the forest…there, they could efficiently transport the wood to boil the
pots and build the abattoir, there.
Billy could make short work of this entanglement. “The water flows down into rivulets…
here, here, here, and there.” His voice is clear; his thoughts raise the temperature one degree.
“Build your house on that rock.”
And… “Did I ever tell you the story of the Johnstown flood?”

Swimming
The Otter would say, that in the day to day operation of a probabilistic world you need a
pivoting point, otherwise, you are likely to be blind-sided frequently, and isn’t that what Melville
meant by his portrayal of Captain Ahab’s peculiarly riveted stance on the foredeck of the
Pequod?
The probability of failure in pursuit of the white whale must be calculated. Don’t take
anyone’s word for it unless they are with you—and even then. Mathematical variability is greater
during periods of uninterrupted observation. First rules: It’s in the water stupid. Unless I miss
my guess, your kidneys are filtering every mistake you ever made, over and over.
If horrible things happened, be careful while you nictate (briefly shut the eyes) your own fate,
that a second storm doesn’t creep up on you from the other side; that’s number one; or two, and
know that solutions abound, numberless and mathematically relevant. Pick one. However, you
might consider The Gospel Singers’ Remedy:
In order to sing songs of meaning a singer can’t cry; singing and crying don’t mix, but the
songs must tear at the heart or they’re no good. If you cry you can’t sing—so solution one, is to
keep singing until you overcome the desire to cry. Practice, and when you feel like crying sing
louder, move around a lot, skip a breath once in a while—a sharp rise in carbon dioxide levels can
give you a glimpse at your own mortality, and snap you out of it real quick; engage with the
audience, wear special clothing so everyone (including yourself) knows you mean business, and
don’t forget the footwear, it should be soft inside, hard outside, and no socks.
You are not just some hack who can’t get thru the first chorus of Amazing Grace. Also, If you
have to cry, cry with just your eyes, or get off the stage. It’s too hard to follow real emotion.
The Otter was having a field day, unapologetically cluttering up my cave with wishbones, half
eaten carcasses known as gifs, (graphic image files) the spiny parts of spiny urchins, and lots of
pistachio shells. He had always been rude; but this heaping-up-aggravation-in-my-way thing,
was just some talk-down-to-the-landlord bullshit—the complete opposite of instructive. I had
just enough veto power to take my ball and go home. Except I was home, and it was moving.
I checked the mountain of bones and rotting nuts for a pile of shit, because if he takes one
dump in this airless space I’ll kill him. Otters don’t laugh but that doesn’t mean they have no
sense of humor; everything has a sense of humor, even caterpillars. Ever see one dressed like a
milk shake—those are the poisonous ones. Or the black widow spider who has the universal
‘Keep Out’ sign permanently emblazoned on her belly ‘X,’ and uses it, like you or I, would use a
radiation warning sign: padronistically, nailed to our front door to keep everyone, but the agents,
away (padronistic: the system of obtaining labor thru employment agents).
‘This is a paginated world.’ He would say. ‘The hold-up is the remedial nature of socks.’ If
you read ahead, it turns out the same: he just doesn’t like socks. And that’s all there is to it; the
rest is argument, division, re-naming; the rule of fives, and more urchin rinds. Thank you just the
same ;.)
 Understanding is trying
Where did I come from? B
Everyone was an idea, before they were born. G
When we first met, you didn’t know me. B
I cannot tell you everything all at once. I walk in understanding, as I move forward in time. I
don’t have the luxury of blaming Darwin for change. Nor can I endorse a line with missing links.
The line is unbroken, and you will not live long enough to see it so. You do not need to
understand. You, Billy, are hungrier than most. I am the Everything, that is all encompassing. I
am not evolving…you are. I am sum ( ∑ ) . I don’t figure these things out. I have no need to
know. I want to know. I want to know where you came from. It is important to me—more than
idle curiosity. Billy, you were a symbol, long before you were a man. A thief on a cross, long
before your birth. I had not seen you so clearly. I too have movable focus. I too can look away.
I am sorry. You were there all the while. G

God speaks to himself, shaking his head, if he had one:

A spirit of hunger in need of understanding. Deserving yet serving himself, and then I stepped in.
I was always there. My Son was born, then became who he is. If you have to know our
relationship—speaking now to the world and not himself: it’s simple; he amuses me, as you all
do. But I amuse him—I fell very hard. He gets me. Sense must make sense, and add up, as tho
there were a sum. There must be, always—a perfect fit.
Awareness is an ongoing sum, already known and unmoving. All. Man is not created equal.
Even Billy’s not created equal. His left side is much slower than his right. It is the whole man,
which is equal; as it is all mankind, which is equal. Not one from another. Together. Thru you.
Left to right, fast to slow. As tho your streak across the sky spelled out a string of words. You
will not last, because you cannot. You have shattered the system that would hold you together.
You have only one chance. And this is it. Many lines will remain forever broken. For, as you
will see, things change very fast when they have to. They have to.

Thoughts flew as if between rackets

Airplanes passed overhead as Billy worked. They went by so fast, Billy couldn’t tell whether
they were fully occupied or not. One was groaning under the weight and was clearly full. He
wondered if those people had parachutes, you know, just in case, and then he realized the planes
were going too fast to make escape a viable option. Wouldn’t it be nice if they were speed
variable?
That reminded Billy of a game he played in high school, it was a variation on tennis. It was
called ‘protection’ and it was played with a racket, and a cup. It required great aim. The rules
were simple. There is no escape, period. You have to protect yourself, it’s a very dangerous
world. Most people played with a big ‘racket,’ Billy knew better.
He played with a friend, who wore a cup.
His friend Geo. used to love to play it. Geo. was president of the junior class. He had cerebral
palsy, but nothing stopped him. He laughed harder than anyone. He had horrible aim, but he
owned the cup. And Billy had a raucous sense of humor.
He loved him. He never voted for his friend, but they were in different classes, one was a
senior, and one was a president.
I know you know. I love you, now everything seems different. Does it to you?
 You know I’m here; that’s it. Nothing changed. I’ll be here for a while, and I’ll wait for you.
If you own any stock in the crypt real-estate industry I’d sell. Death is symbolic, symbolic of
desire. I’m what you call fictional. The body is combustible. I will be wantonly, grievously,
symbolically murdered. No one will go to jail. When I die, I will be burned, at night, in the dark,
on a plank, like a skunk.
When you find out what oil is good for, you’ll be sorry you burned it. When you read this, I
am in prison. Galileo’s prison. The world looks pretty flat from here—that’s from standing very
still.

Grief and Conceit

Billy found, as he read Moby Dick, just sitting there, that grief in spirals, coils down into the
midst of it—which is conceit that it has a beginning. It is illusory in its spring-like form. Illusory
in its movement. Illusory in its apparent rise or fall. Illusory in so far as thinking about it can de-
trench one from seeing it move when it doesn’t. Grief had always turned, in Billy’s life, to
despair without moving at all. All the time spent trying to turn the spiral the other way, was
wasted effort, and would have served him better, if used to reign-in someone else’s suffering
heart—that he could have done.

I
I am no great respecter of money, pain or propriety, or that proper impossible humanness that
marks pages invisibly, and memorizes blank pages sometimes. Money is only remarkable in its
absence or abundance. Pain only remarkable in its absence, and propriety is a pain in the ass any
way you look at it. If you’re one way, I’m the other. Or as my father often implied and never
stated; ‘You’re just naturally rude.’

I’d love to accept your honorarium, but I’m on a hunger strike, symbolic of food, and you
always have coffee and donuts at those things. Besides, I’m practicing invisibility, for when I get
out of prison. Also, I didn’t really do the work. It woke me at 04:00am and let me go to bed at
21:00pm. I took as many breaks as possible; that was my job, that, and to not-drink. It played me
like a harp. Further, I got the idea all at once like a rose as if I’d never seen a green rose. A bud.
I let it change and grow and that’s what happened; it was complete when I got it. Never mind
what it looked like in the beginning, it became a rose. It was a rose. A few drops of water—ya
got a rose!

4-04-04
I had attained what I can only call extremely-local celebrity status. It was time, past time to
go. I was about to leave the hospital for the last time. I had to say goodbye to Ida. I realized
somewhere in my torpor what she had done. Ida had given up a big part of herself to help me.
Circumstances are rarely of any consequence. It’s here and now.
Ida was a saint. She had talent, things to do, places to go, a life that awaited her, but instead of
going there, she was here with me. It was not a hobby. Helping me was what she did, when she
didn’t do her real job—the thing she was good at—selling cosmo-seuticals, face tightening gels,
makeup that makes the world wonderful, and has the power to change…who knows…or selling
Sonot Gold Jewelry (pronounced: so ñay`).
I sought her out that morning, and I couldn’t finish my sausages in swimming in syrup which I
hate anyway…I went to look for her to Thank her. I found her in a patient’s room combing an
old woman’s frozen white hair, pulling it into a pony tail and I waited outside the room for her to
finish. She came out ten minutes later, I know she saw me, Ida saw everything. She was trying
to beg-off my apology. She went to her assistant who needed her help getting a man up out of
bed. She sighed greatly, looked at me and went into his room.
I was tongue-tied. She was hardly irritating at all that morning. I tried to say, ‘Ida, I’m sorry.’
I meant to say, ‘Ida, I love that you gave up all the gifts you have, to be with me.’ And I said:
‘I...’ She walked behind me, and walked into into the room away from me. She and Annette, got
Mr. Mister out of bed, pulled him by his arms, hoisting his fat middle up to a resemblance of
vertical, pulled the wheelchair beside him, and plopped him in it. There was no one else around
to help, just doctors.
I realized she did her job, the one she was clearly no good at, for him as she had for
me…Ida…Ida. Yes Mr. Hudson? I just want to say Thank you, and I began to lose neck control.
My head bounced and fell to my chest. Oh God, she said, clicking her tongue.
“I just wanted to say Thank you, before I left…And Ida I’m so sorry how I treated you, you…I
want to shake your hand please.” “Okay, here,” she said.
I saw Ida as she was—unqualified, and my heart stretched to meet hers. This woman gave up
Avondale, sales, speaking engagements with high school entrepreneurs, and the Four-H, to be
here. The good nurses avoided working here with me. I got the try to be’s.
I said what I came to say, “Thank you for being with me Ida…I mean it, you were the best
thing that happened to me…you got me on my feet.”
“Okay, good. I’m glad, Billy.”
Just to hear her call me by my name, gave me hope. Maybe someone else would see me too,
as I am. Stupid, thick, plain and weakened. I could no more explain to her how I felt about her
sacrifice, than she could say a clear and simple hello.
“I have to go now.”
“The transporter left fifteen minutes ago, they are only allowed to wait five minutes, then they
have to leave.”
“I know, Winsome waited four minutes and skidded off.” Ida tried to walk past me, but her
big butt grazed the arm of the chair and spun me around. Facing west, I saw Ida slink east. I
called to her and she turned around. And gave me a look of neglectful incompetence.
“Ida I wish you would let me tell you what I want to say.”
“Okay…go ahead.”
I couldn’t say what I wanted. How I knew she was meant for other things, but, and she knew
it too, she was here instead—at 07:00am, 02:00am, 18:00 in the evening sometimes, and noon, as
I sat, or slept, or regaled her about the service, and the sloppy help. Her face brightened when I
took her hand. There was no one else around. My bags were packed, and slung over the handles
of the chair. I had two bowls of flowers leaking in my lap from just being watered, ‘for the trip.’
She said, “Oh, alright, I’ll wheel you down. It’s the least I can do.”
As we rode toward the elevator, I reached around and touched her hand. She couldn’t pull
away or we’d crash at 20 KPH into the fabric wall. She pushed the G button on the elevator. I
didn’t expect this, but I began to cry.
“Billy what are you doing?” She said, “I thought you be happy to leave.”
“I am, but I just realized how much you’ve sacrificed to help others and me.”
“It’s alright, I understand you wish you been better to me, but you couldn’t help it.”
“Yes, I couldn’t…I know.” As we reached the end of the lobby and rode thru the revolving
door I grabbed her hand, and did my best to try to say: ‘I thought you were the most unqualified
person I’d ever met. You were meant for other things. Things you would be good at, things you
have talent for, but instead you chose to be here with me, and help.’ I didn’t know what to say, I
didn’t know how to say it, I wished she’d make me angry and then I could complete this
experience. I felt so unqualified to be in the world. I was frail, slow, I walked with a limp, I
stood with a stoop, and I was luckless.
I remember thinking, I’ll just do what she does. I lifted my chin, jerked my nose, and stuck
out my butt.
“Ida, no one is as giving as you. This is your life, and you throw it away on me. I will never
be able to repay you.” No one was around, tho I wish they had been. And I took her hand and
kissed it. She didn’t pull away. But she covered her big fake diamond with her thumb so I
couldn’t touch it.
I struck-out completely unqualified and just did what I had to do. Someone shoved a
microphone in my face and asked me how I felt after my ordeal.
“These are some of the greatest doctors and nurses in the world. I am very grateful.”
They all thought this was something I had to say, but I would never think in my wildest
dreams that of all the people, the one that worked the hardest was the one most unsuitable, and I
wished her well.
I turned to see Ida wipe a tear from her eye. Life is funny. I planned to say to her: ‘You may
now go and live your real life. I set you free.’ That was what I decided to say, in full view of the
cameras or radio hook-ups, or whatever media outlets were covering this big deal event. What I
meant was: ‘I had to work ten times harder to be understood, because you just won’t listen.’
What I said was: “Goodbye baby, good luck.” The cameras whirred, the microphones buffeted
the crowd, and a still-photographer fell on his ass. Some people need to be made to look like
fools.
When I walked out into the bright sunlight, I looked around and everyone was gone.
The thought I had, flew away. The sun hit me rhythmically. I danced the ‘stand here dance,’
people cocked there heads, I wondered out loud, ‘can you please move, I have to go…’ the sun’s
rhythm made my speech coherent—I was ready to black out. And I did. No one caught me, they
were too busy covering the news. I was free, I was back, and I was about about to fall into the
bushes. Foosh.

The Sons of Heaven Museum

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of the Earth, and things are the sons of Heaven—Samuel Johnson 1775

This is where I turn really Gay, so avert your eyes: I’m about to cast black spirals on the
margins of all your papers. And if I’m lucky, you will never be the same. Designate someone to
drive.
For starters, words are never the thing they stand-in for, therefore I’m not gay, and you’re not
gay. Secondly, if words were the thing they replaced, we would not be able to sing Moon River,
it would be impossible My Huckleberry Friend.
That car selling, man fucking, coffee drinking, nail biting fragment, the never drove drunk,
always driven drunk lover of mine. That fence-ugly separatist, that I was soon becoming, didn’t
care for me enough to give me the dime-size portion. He spent more time avoiding things he
feared, than pursuing things he desired. He was the list of all lists. He was I. And I was He. A
mind-fucking fortunate son. A druid dude, lifting the veil. A high falootin’ landowner, in an
Irish potato farmer’s chain-saw thin plot of borrowed land. He was mine, and I was His,
redundant, heedless, supernumerary lover.
“Labels are gonna kill us.” the beanstalk man said. He was tall, thin and perhaps he was still
growing. I thought highly of his opinion; I was glad I met him. But, what’s a beanstalk? My
ignorance might kill me, so my naïveté, but I like labels about this much. You can’t see my
fingers and, of course, you can’t read my mind or even know what I’m driving at. I mean, they’re
good for some things, except they’re never true, so how good could they really be? I think the
truth exists here, within this: that I try to label everything so that things can’t just float around me
all day slowly disappearing. That could un-stick my own mind, or whatever that is up there, and I
could become one of those floating disappearing things myself. If everything were free and easy,
that might mess everything up. I looked up in to the sky and there wasn’t a single bird. That’s
odd, the air is usually aloft with them. I don’t want anyone to take my place. Look still no birds.
I want to control my environment. They must be off somewhere. I’m not worried about where
all the birds are because I know this is just an effect, a perceptual hollow. I want everything to go
back. Ah, one jumped from the tree. Good. Thank God.

David

I fell in love with David just like that. He was at the end of the runway. The only things that
kept us apart were heedlessness, the fact that he played the cello, and I came from extreme stage
left, the other side, in order just to hear him play.
I knew this cello whooping, rock star was a closet strait. I knew also, what that meant. So
was I, damn it—another label! One day I was sitting in my office and I heard this sound. It was
like a note from a really big cello. It seemed to shake the whole neighborhood. It said something
to me about mortality and death. A transformer blew.
All he wanted to do was fuck, and play his big fiddle, mine being too creaky and tiresome to
play with I suppose. What he really needed was a woman, but he didn’t recognize that, for some
reason, some reason apart from my dick, and appalling and lack of breasts. Turns out, only part
of my dick he liked, was the way it looked, soft. He was a speculator, a theorist, and I was to
derive confidence from his lack of a speedy withdrawal.
I loved that he stayed. I loved his pedal point. I loved the tension, like the heart beat they
don’t have the nerve to play-=- lub dub-lub dub, over love scenes even on the Romance Channel,
a sound mistakenly reserved for the horror film genre.
I like the sex effects. There are two, and I don’t mean that communing with God thing, that’s
sex, these are ethereal effects:
After sex, when it’s connected to a love, even a fleeting one, the mind creates the desire to all
of a sudden tell its deepest darkest secrets, like one quarterback to another, knowing full well
they’ll play on opposing teams one day. Like James Bond would do to Pussy Galore and then
have to kill her…or like Mata Hari, who drove the secrets right out of the Prussian generals in
1915. Unfortunately, she did the same to the English generals—she was dead before the sheets
were dry.
Second, if you practice, and you use some imagination, you can feel the lingering evanescence
of a person’s other life, during foreplay. Like with David, we met, fell in love, and buried our
heads in the sand, at least I did, and while there, I explored the dune. I explored all of his body—
The sergeant told me to clean the stove with a tooth brush, and at first I hated it, then I looked for
ways to enlist other corporal punishments, so I could delve into their maddeningly meditative
kitchen company—Anyway, I used to touch his legs, especially his calves after a pick-up
basketball game, and I could feel the height they’d jumped—the jump shots, and dunks. I could
feel in his ankles, the fake, the lateral hand offs, the quick twists in his feet. I could feel the
pressure from running, the friction from stepping and pivoting, even shooting for the basket. His
knees were hot from seemingly rudderless serpentine stampedes—winding his way thru a maze
of courtiers. His whole body leaned into me just as he had reckoned with the ball, judging its
speed intercepting it in its short forceful ark. I could feel that memory still there in his thighs, as
it held his body, especially if I didn’t wait too long after-game. I think it’s a guy thing tho. I
already saw him move, I know how this goes. This expression sent signals all the way down my
spine. I guess it’s a spinal memory, because I don’t think it’s full of conscious thought. It’s all
afferent, efferent, upper-motor-neuron stuff. Sub-cortical, ha! I’ll say! It’s sub-radar too.
Exploring the body while still hot from activity.
Yes, you can feel the activity. It’s still there in the muscles and tendons just like a word
lingers. A word like “suffuse.” Words like modulation, repetition, mordantly bereft—they leave
marks. P`os—little post mortem effluence, lividity, you know?
You know, a medical examiner can tell which injury was the one that killed a man, no matter
how many injuries he has. Same thing, the body holds its secrets, just waiting for a Mata Hari or
a Pussy Galore or me, to take it away, wherever.
Zaz close to being one as I could get with a cellist. Yes, he was a foregone conclusion, as
Clarke had the good taste never to tell me. But I wanted confidence so bad, I’d take a cut and
paste approach if I had to. And with David I did. Turns out, I wanted confidence in him—in
order to get confidence in me. Ha. Logic wasn’t the only thing I flipped. I pulled the old
Philadelphia Move on him. The Philadelphia Move, until very recently, known as The
Philadelphia Trap, goes something like this: It’s a well-known story, but deserves a re-telling,
right about now:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was, for the first 9 years that the United States was a country, its
inspired capital. Except for the first few years when New York was, which doesn’t really count.
Philadelphia has never forgotten that, and cannot understand to this day, how they lost the honor
to Washington—a preponderance of naturally occurring beggars, hooligans, and thieves
notwithstanding.
Down to the muddy provinces they went, lock, stock and barrel. Mistake number 47 in
Philadelphia’s checkered past. Go to Washington! Raise cane on their muddy streets if you don’t
like it here! But I digress.
Anyway, the country’s sesquicentennial was coming up (150 year anniversary—brick, I
think). Philadelphia loves big parties and screwing things up…not always in that order. That was
back in the day when people loved large gatherings, and they, the gatherings, weren’t so freaky
and mortifying, as they are today. Going to a World’s Fair was like spending a day at a really big
Coffee Shop, but really big, and take away the coffee.
Philadelphia means: City of Brotherly Love, in Greek. Our town takes its name from a city in
Greece with the same admixture of men to women, tho with probably less chagrin for same-sex
couples. Who really knows? Somethings just don’t translate.
In order to find its place on the world’s stage, Philadelphia decided to build a monument to Art
and Culture. It was to be modeled after the Parthenon of ancient Athens, but better.
Much planning anticipated its rise. The tallest pillars in all the ancient world were roughly 60
feet tall. The temple of Zeus at Olympus, I think. These would be 63.
Many renderings preceded the final design. The site was magnificent, and perfectly suited to
any number of interpretive visions, except for that nearly vertical cliff.
The self-cleaning half-empty museum is still in evidence, weights about 1 million kilos, sits on
an enormous rock that the original designers hadn’t reckoned on, occupies at least 25 acres in the
middle of the city, indulges a matrix of 12 or so, heroically cast, militaristically massive,
occasionally gold-plated statues, and no one knows it’s there.
Owing, in part, to its amber interpretation of white marble, few people recognize it as the new
Parthenon. But, it’s as close as we’re ever going to get to the Greek model, because in a real
democracy the people have all the money, and in a capitalistic democracy, some of the money is
elsewhere doing other things. The other reason resides in the appalling lack of gods and
goddesses to serve, protect, and otherwise appease against the threat of a foreshortened lineage.
Anyway, so when it came time to finish-up the project, and add on the statues of Zeus, Apollo
and Aphrodite, each with their own retinue, and each given berth, one on each of the three main
entablatures, also known as tympanums or pediments—the new Philadelphians balked. The plain
fact was, these Philadelphians, unlike their namesakes, didn’t care for the immodest gating about,
that the Greek gods were privy to. There was damn little money for this sort of Tom Foolery,
damn little. There was also too-healthy a distribution of doubt and self-loathing which revealed
that even on a good day, blue brown and yellow are as good as We The People deserve. And
everything has to be cleaned periodically, and that adds up. Anyway, the City Hall, which is,
more or less, a copy of the Palace of Versailles, was unfortunately, not self-cleaning, hosted a
long un-noteworthy succession of avaricious, then parsimonious machine politicians over the
intervening 34 years making it nearly impossible to know whether funds allocated would be funds
distributed. To top the whole thing off was the subtly skeptical, and sometimes outright
suspicious nature of Philadelphians generally. If you’ve got something to show just show it, if
not don’t, and just cut the crap. If you look, for example, at the statue of Philadelphia’s father
and founder, affectionately known as Billy Penn, from 18th and the Parkway, you’ll see what I
mean. You could hang a lantern from that! So… messages go back and forth. My copy’s better
than your copy, etc. You could call Philadelphia the, ‘Is That So?’ city, and you wouldn’t be half
wrong. But the story gets even odder.
Charles Borie et al., the artist who designed the building, was also intimately involved with
designing and installing the statues that would fill in the triangular areas above each of the three
pediments. When he was informed, after reviewing his plans, that there wouldn’t be any extra
money for these sorts of polytheistic shenanigans. And, that, even if everyone was coming to
Philadelphia for hopefully, the biggest party of the last 40 years—if he didn’t go a little lighter
with his brush, and not be such a stickler for detail, he was going to have a hard time squeezing
any more money out of their depressed pocket books. If, and furthermore, if he felt it absolutely
necessary to represent an entire mélange of 15 Gods, some lesser, some greater, he might
consider drawing them frieze-style instead of hoisting them up there as statuary. He had been
given millions of dollars to bring his neoclassical revivalism to their city’s over burdened post
Victorian sensibilities —and he was lucky to get that.
Knowing that $75,000 was only enough to do one of the porticos, Borie, and Price, the lawyer,
got a scathingly brilliant idea, and decided to do the portico on extreme stage left, making the
final product, so horribly lopsided, that the city fathers, and their political machine would have to
ante-up with the remaining $150,000 to complete the work. Borie, Price and now the sculptor,
Jennewein, all knew that even the casual observer’s sense of proportion and symmetry would be
assaulted by his travesty. The politicians, and naysayers all went to the unveiling, 5 years after
the museum was dedicated. The traditional white damask was ceremoniously flung back, and
with a flourish, revealed that only one of the three sides was complete—and not even the main
one, Tah Dah!▬Check.
The Main portico, which faced the city’s center, the very ostentatious City Hall, and looked
down upon a wide Parisian Boulevard built for that purpose, boasted a blank brick wall.
This bore no relationship to the intention of the project, and was an anathema—Greek for
abomination. No one said anything, but wheels turned.
The architects, artists, and boosters, who had fallen in love with their “Philadelphia
Athenaeum,” rejoiced at the effect this would have on the corrupt and petty bourgeois politicians
who only loved their money and power. The Mayor, the City Council, and the public at large,
were horrified at the gamesmanship played out so publicly. Everyone shook their head. It wasn’t
bad enough, that they’d sniped at each other for 34 years in the Papers. It wasn’t bad enough that
the politicians had played ‘keep away,’ with money that wasn’t there’s. Now, the fancy-shmancy
European artists they’d hired were going to hold the city hostage: Pay to fix this mess, or you’ll
look like a bunch of hicks—not ready for prime-time players, provincials, Bucks County corn
farmers!▬Check.
The statues were 4 meters tall, nearly naked, and highly symbolic: The central figure of Zeus
represented the creative force or will of man. He was surrounded by figures from antiquity that
were meant to represent the intertwining themes of sacred and profane love—according to Paul
Jennewein: the central conflict of Human art, Civilization, and within Creation itself.
 The people did their level best to un-admire the workmanship, artistry, and skill that went into
rendering the colossal deities: Aphrodite (Venus) was too provocative; Eros, a pubescent boy: too
anatomically correct, yet too stiff; the kneeling Adonis with shoulder length unmanly curls; and
the goddess of human reason looks just like Clara Bow, the ‘It’ girl of the recently past Silent
Movie Era. These boldly painted statues were unlikely to ever oxidize or fade into their
pediment. The gods championed something—something that that part of the early 20th century
had forgotten—Life’s racy edge: The statuary vamped while people searched their own
definingly human elemental themes. They never passed a bond to complete the job▬
Checkmate.
It was then, and still is today, 72 yrs. later, unfinished. Pushing the bounds, defending
imaginary borders, and nearly out-witting your almost-adversary, are the only symbols on that
façade that are truly ancient.
People will always say: You don’t know how to love, what to love, who to love, when to love.
You don’t even love the right things, the right way. Love is personal—inside.
The Philadelphia Move is a simple one. One that has been seen and done a million times, to a
million people, in thousands of guises, but never so boldly. The move is simple: shoot yourself in
the foot in order to fuck up someone else’s ride. People teach lessons to each other constantly—
almost always about love. Smells like home to me.

Keeping the swamp warm

It is not enough that we succeed, our friends must fail—Gore Vidal

I’ve always called the book, The Work. I know my friends. It’s not that they want to see me fail,
not really. They don’t know what I’m doing, still don’t. I just told them I have to be my creative
self, and do my Work. Perhaps they thought I was writing a who-dun-it; perhaps they thought I
was immersed in my graphics; perhaps they thought they’d fail by comparison. I just didn’t want
to hear: How’s your little book coming along?

Nobel
When Billy was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Nobel Peace Prize, and the
Nobel Prize for best work by an amateur—He said, as only Billy could: Can you put them
together in one medal, and make it coin-sized so I can wear it on a string?…and I will. And also,
could you talk to the Pulitzer people and kind of get together on this? They were shocked at first,
and then asked Billy, Did he want five coins, or just one with a really long inscription that might
be too small to read? And did he want to give his acceptance speech in Sweden or Norway, or
what? Billy’d not come to bring Peace, so Oslo was out. He tried to explain that, even tho
participating in great things was the whole point to life—and that he was still very much alive,
and really would like to show up…He’d find a way to sneak out if they insisted, but, he’d never
allow it to lengthen his sentence, etc. etc…And couldn’t they just drop it off, or mail it? In so far
as when he would deliver his acceptance speech, that would be in his own good time—Thank you
very much. They pondered this for a while, and then decided to just take it to his prison, which
was Galileo’s prison, and hope for the best. He didn’t have the nerve to tell them they could
make it dime-sized for all he cared—He had no plans to read it.
Billy understood that Alfred Nobel was the purveyor of the most destructive force the world
had ever known, prior to the atomic bomb, which is hardly ever used, and that the guilt over this,
caused him, near the end of his life, to want to make amends, and also to elevate humanity so that
others would not do what he had done, and was still doing—profiting on human frailty. When his
brother Ludwig died, a Paper ran Alfred’s obituary, and it began: Merchant of Death! Nobel
would be the first to point out that if he didn’t do it, someone else would—If I’ve heard that story
once, I’ve heard it a thousand times…
Billy was aware that almost everyone who’d accepted these great awards had never done
another useful thing for the rest of their lives—it was a kind of capstone. Billy saw immediately
that this was a truly human gesture: completely fucked-up, unworthy, and enormously pathetic.
Of course! He said, I’d be glad to accept it—with conditions: lots.

God said: consider: keeping the swamp warm somewhere else or shortening it, never agree to
anything that’ll lengthen your sentence, and associate Nobel with one of the ends, and flip it.
Billy had no idea what God meant by that, so he didn’t.

Billy spent long lazy days reading his so-called critical notices, and drinking Mint Juleps. At
around sunset, when he’d read all he could read, his secretary would come in and ask how many 2
pound boxes of chocolate truffles she’d be sending out that day. Billy’d look to the big blurry
pile of paper in the out-box, blot his tear-stained face with his sleeve, hand her a big book of
stamps, and already-printed address labels, and say: Send one to each of them; I love them so.

When I woke up
//
When I woke up as the only living son of the only living God, I felt a strange emptiness in my
fingers, absent joint stiffness, now some other kind of stiffness.
I held-off on the coffee, and felt very sensible. Not being Catholic, or religious at all for that
matter—not organized religion anyway, I felt unhampered by any of that unhealthy baggage
about who the son of God, formerly, and for understandable, superstitious reasons, also known as
the son of man, was supposed to be. I said to myself, ‘I don’t even take vitamins religiously,’ and
then I laughed out loud. I stretched in front of the window and thought, The only thing I know
for sure about this transmogrification, is that it isn’t unhealthy. I was back, that’s all. Hi. And I
had no baggage, Thank God.
I didn’t doubt for a second what I felt and saw. Life was once again a playground for veracity,
and not verisimilitude. The difference between the two, was abundantly clear. My forehead
didn’t cave in, and my head didn’t get any bigger.
I knew what I had to do, and I thought I knew how to do it, good thing was, no one knew the
other Jesus, so no one would know if I were doing it right or not. My opinions became
rounded—not cut-off, like the crust on bread, more like spread way out, less boxy—my own, but
sort of already-shared by something really big, that may be forming them as we speak. I tried to
speak. God said, You’re a computer. My ability to understand him changed that very instant. I
went back. He spoke thru me, to me. He had said: Why don’t you get on your…ah…computer?
He knows me! He speaks thru my sarcasm! Of course, I fell in love with him right away. Then I
decided I would get on my computer.
So far I was batting a thousand, and it was only 9 am. By 10, I had solved the drug problem,
the crisis in the middle east, and had been on talk radio.
It wasn’t perfect, but at least I had new stories. Some, I might want to keep to myself. The
truth was, I had failed at everything I ever tried. There were a lot of lessons in that alone. Oh,
lots. Things were looking up.
Perhaps it was possible the accident smothered something and allowed the transmogrification
center to get some air for a change, that’s how it felt anyway, I could breath. Ahh Huhh.
There’d be a lot of opportunities for I told you so’s. Being gracious was not a strong suite of
mine, but perhaps my stoic silence and permanent smirk could translate graciousness, whatever
that is. Well we’d see—I’ll just be accepting and humble. My collection of uncontrollable and
odd facial expressions might finally come in handy. A hundred people could translate one look at
least a thousand-dredful ways. Of course, I shouldn’t count all my…you know.
A voice inside said, you are what you create, you are also what you allow to escape. I don’t
know who said that, nor do I know if it was a bid for recognition, but this was looking like a
bump in the road. Mistakes happen—they are some of the best things.
I felt like I was in love, but what with?
I lifted my shirt and looked in the mirror, not bad. I had one of those bodies that looks good in
white pajamas. Red was my second best color. This was going to be a ball.
I wanted to stamp out oppression. I was awash with emotions. I felt really good.

As he sat in the restaurant later that day with his friends he couldn’t help but look at the rack
of lamb on the next table and think, ‘The sacrifice that doesn’t even know it’s a sacrifice.’
Photographers from LA’s, Whitney Observatory, to Rio’s Monte Corcovado, got itchy necks
and rashes. There were things I knew, which I just couldn’t possibly know.

The assertiveness of Mei

After healing the world
The wishful good-for-nothing, I left in my uncluttered office, never left my side,
metaphorically speaking. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was getting any work out of himself
and if he were, would it leave a mark. Mei visited me before work and showed up more than
once as an eye opener. Visiting hours at Saint Steve’s started at 09:00am. Mei showed up at 0’
seven hundred. It occurred to me that the nurses often asked him to leave, and come back later,
but they never seemed to be able to stop him from showing up in the first place. As deliberate as
he was, I always noticed that many things just sprang from him: his sense of timing, for example.
Once, when we had an older Chinese couple prowling around the lot, Mei disappeared and
turned-up out front with a kite. He ran around for a minute or so, to get the approximate wind
direction, find the air’s lift potential, and then he ran the string out, meter by meter. The couple
was delighted, and the old man, who was extremely reticent by nature, even suspicious, opened
his eyes and became smiley and chatty. Mei even handed the trowel of string over to him while
he came inside, and took two balloons off the display we had thrown-together for the new PU
Cruiser, lying in state, in the middle of the store. The absurdity of tying balloons onto kite string,
and enlisting the assistance of customers, appealed to the Asian sensibility apparently. They like
absurd things, and the couple found him extremely disarming. I watched in amazement as he
worked them, and finally, they gathered, just the three of them, with one onlooker off at a safe
distance checking his own shoes as though at a funeral, around a coffin-sized car. I stood by the
window watching ‘the funeral,’ which was in some strange and mournful language, full of ‘baio’
sounds, and ‘lao ye’ and ‘chie ann esky.’ As I shook my head, I felt the coffin descend slowly.
This was a sad exhibition bound to bring bad luck, I thought. Out of nowhere, my top salesman
pro-deuced balloons by the arm load, and began tying them to the coffin handles and coffin
antennae. He bowed, smiled, bowed, held his hands together as if he were going to start rolling
pasta for the dead baby, and as I opened the front door, to listen, I heard him say something over
and over, it sounded like ‘e—ahh an-da ka-yu—ah.’ I remember trying to remember what he’d
said, so I could ask him about it later. He sold them the car, and they left very happy. I thought
they looked like they had found a new son—–though it was apparent no one could take the place
of the ‘dead one.’
“Mei, what does, ‘an da ka-yu,’ mean?”
“It means: And this car is you.”
“…And what’s the kite for?”
 “Old Chinese man ah, invent, ah, kite.”
“He thought he was so funny, but his punch lines always made me sleepy.”
My able-assistant understood that communication is really distraction. And of course it goes
both ways, distract others-distract yourself or some combination of the two. Mei had managed to
sell the car by convincing them that, in fact, it was a dead baby’s hearse.

A little too broad minded

How dare he lower the esteem of working people by working out some inner conflict so publicly, and then not naming names. —me

The world’s always been full of interesting characters. The most interesting ones have been
the ones who offer choices. One of these was a man named Eamon DeValero, president of
Ireland from 1959-1973. He was a kind of self-invented rogue. The details of his life are so
implausible and poorly documented that it’s very difficult to fully grasp his contribution—he was
the embodiment of politics: he sought worth, because he had none; talked in circles, just to talk,
made stupid statements that he blamed on others, took almost no responsibility for his actions,
fell apart frequently, and wasn’t even from the country he later became president of. He probably
knew more about distraction than any human being who ever lived. This was the choice he
offered: Ireland for the Irish and that was it. He never mentioned the alternatives—as tho there
were none. They say talking to him was like lining up marbles on a slope with a stick, and
negotiating was impossible.
As I’ve said, we offer each other two choices when there are really three. Freud managed to
offer three choices: We can live in one of three worlds, except you can’t choose the one you
wanted to be in when you want to be in it—so what’s the point? We end up finding out where
we’ve been.
DeV, as he liked to be called, just kept changing the name of the alternative, as if the opposite
of ‘Ireland for the Irish,’ was: everything and nothing else. It was like he offered, 1) Ireland for
the Irish or 2) Hey, just look around. And then everyone would look around. He wasn’t bad or
good. He was like the man with no clothes who passes out scarves. “Here, and a pretty one for
you.” If you were ever asked: Does he wear clothes? You might say, “Well, sort of.”
If communication is essentially distraction, and distraction is a million things, and choices are
always misrepresented, then distraction has only one purpose—movement away from Truth. It’s
not a million things—it’s one thing.
Billy’s world seemed to be changing in a very odd way. Outward. From here.

Roll over Beethoven

Poor Ludwig, his talent out-lived him. He did something that centuries do—he created
something the fullness of which, he would never know. He created his greatest work, stone deaf.
His ninth symphony.
I walked down to Fa’s office after the antibiotics were done, and I found him on the floor.
Beside him was a jumble of papers. When I turned his head he coughed, but didn’t get up. I
called for help, and waited. When they came to get him, he woke up instantly and…This is all
pitched to the listener’s level, and does not always begin slowly…and had this look of shock and
guilt-fear on his face, like I’d caught him with a collection of porn. I stayed to put together the
papers together, and I read:
A study done by Singh et. al.© regarding the syntactical errors of aphasics. At the end was a
scribbled note, and a diagram that was shaky, and seemed to show two views of the same
configuration from two different angles.
 Fa wrote, that his theories turn all current ideas about language, and language acquisition on
their respective heads. They have been seeing the elephant in pieces, supposing it, a very
confusing gray mess. ‘The use of speech analysis for differentiation of treatment, is going to be
as outdated as hoop skirts and hoola hoops.’
Then he starts to scribble, damn lefties, they can’t write. ‘When people are more able to see
the structure holding its function~~~~able to see the various functions(,) there conjunctions
(where they overlap) and their absences.’ more scribble, and a diagram that looks like a wax
bean. Then off to the side. ‘The brain is sexual in all its activity.’ Underlined three times. ‘Not
only is it clear in it’s structure, and ability, perceived function—’ Long scratch, ‘it rotates
randomly in order to acquire purpose.’ ‘once~~~’ something something something ‘it has’
something ‘and then records the gyrations-rotations, so it can get back to where the honey is’ big
slash, big arrow pointing to something, and the words, ‘hard wired.’ Then in another hand, ‘Sex is
Prototype of all human activi’ t y …...crash….
I saw his porn collection! He had more arrows on that page—even the words looked like
arrows. Doesn’t he even masturbate? I wondered how long it had been since he’d had an
orgasm? There is practically no sex in science, unless you count the occasional epiphany, and the
prankish, addictive, ‘where’s Elmo’ of fossil hunting. Fa was always on-about creating
something. Sex is the only invasive study they never do here. There was a rumor his wife took to
wearing a burqua. Why would a 21st century woman wear a hijab-burqua? Total sexual
surrender? Does that ever work?

Yea…But I…
People like to think romantically, like the Romans—that their lives convey meaning, that their
thoughts convey knowledge, and hope they matter in the scheme of things when, of course, we
know now, that they don’t.
The Romans, like the Greeks, enjoyed their thoughts. They liked to share, they weren’t like
me, faltering from my first memory onwards—unable to talk to handsome men or smart beautiful
women. They talked amongst themselves irregardless. It was dog and pony time. Everyone had
Oprah money and James Brown time—they didn’t care about coming back, they weren’t ever
gonna leave. They thought it all had to mean something.
I know from experience that meaning is the stripped down version. Meaning is the summary,
the prose about the prose. The bland and forgotten assumption. Meaning is the critique, not the
show. Personally I like my thoughts chilled, over ice. And so do I.
Everyone wants their life to mean something:
Klaustropenia, meaning: not enough closed in spaces.
Egalatheos, meaning: on equal terms with God.
Homoabsentis, meaning: nobody’s home.
Listen, everyone thinks they have a sense of humor and good taste. Make it up. Get some air.
It’s like what they said about the first woman: her name was woman of all women. But
nobody knew that until the others came along—they thought she was just being wordy. Oye
como va. How’s it going? If I weren’t fictional, I would be dancing.

I love the study of language because both my parents spoke Swahili, I think.

In English there’s a verb form, which reflects a ‘mood of uncertainty,’ a wish, a desire, or an
uncertainty. For example, The man asked that we are there for the opening. It is more proper to
say: The man asked that we be there for the opening. It expresses a desire, on the part of the man.
What is interesting about this, is that yes, it does sound more natural to the ear. It also, is
probably why so many people have a problem with conjugating the verb, to be. They live in
uncertainty, wishfullness, and desirousness—all the time.

Likewise, many have a difficulty conjugating the verb, to have, for much the same reason. For
example:
The shooter would have left town sooner if he would have known the police were onto him—is
incorrect. It should, or would be better and more expressive of ‘the mood of uncertainty,’
wishfulness, and desire if one wrote: The shooter would have left town sooner if he had known
the police were onto him.

I believe that so many people now, live in a world of uncertainty, wishfulness and desire, that this
mood, which is built into the language, is carried with them, in all their communications—even
tho they don’t recognize it.

David Lotis
Often times, right in the middle of an argument David would say, “Line…” This is a term of
art. Literally, a term used by actors during the rehearsal of a play. When an actor is rehearsing a
scene from a play, there’s someone designated to ‘hold script’—to assist the actor who has
forgotten his or her next line, and also to keep them true to the author’s words. Let’s say you’re
doing Hamlet, and you haven’t got all your lines memorized yet, you might ‘go up’ in the middle
of a speech. ‘To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms ……’…say, “Line,” and the person
following along would say, ‘against a sea of…-— in order to spur your memory. Many actors, by
way of vanity, or artistic license would often take very long pauses—for effect, or because they
were lost. No one wants to look stupid, yet if you don’t force someone to admit their lost, you
might get a truly unwarranted gaffe. People in the Theatre are trained, not to give the actor the
next line until they ask for it. The must say, “Line.” Many a great dramatic moment has been
lost from idle back stage whispering—just as many dramatic pauses were actually little synaptic
arrests. So much like life.
So when we would argue. I would say something like, ‘What are you doing?’ He’d pause for
an incredibly long time, and then say, “Line.” To which I might say musically…‘the rest of your
life, summer, winter, spring, and fall of your life’….etc. Anyway, it broke the tension, and made
him the hardest person to argue with. I almost never got the last word. I was such a finicky little
bee, many times he’d say to me, ‘Here, eat something. I cooked this for you. Why won’t you at
least try it?’ There would be a long pause and he’d say, “Line….” And then it was my
turn…‘Oye, I cook till I could drop dead and…’ I only gave him enough to jog his memory.
Then he would finish the soliloquy, ‘what do I get from this, pract`cally nothin’…One minute
you want sex the next you can’t be bothered I should go make soup.….’ If I paused, he’d pause,
and some of the pauses were so long I had to laugh. He’d chime in, or sometimes not, depending
on how tight my grip was on my intension to make him responsible for how I felt. He might
finish the speech he went up on, but usually he’d just pause for a long long time and then say
“Line” again. I’m still waiting for him to say Line. The last thing he said to me was, “I’m so
tired, I’m jumpy.” If he came back and said Line, what would I do? I don’t know the play.
Actually that was his favorite bit, ‘the what are you doing bit’ and it was mine too. It could be
played any number of ways, but he liked it best when I sang the line, that you spend it all……and
he’d sing, with me. I had a pretty descent voice back then, or at least I thought so.
I loved the show biz stuff David did. He was slightly overweight, and very sensitive about it.
He said he had the body of a great lighting director. It was hell for him to go on stage, he’d gain
20 lbs just thinking about it, then he’d become all the more self-conscious. The thing was, he felt
more free being heavier. As the Germans say, Lebensraum—free, but at a very high price.
One day I came home, and David was on the phone, as usual. He was thinking something
devious and sublime. I could tell. I felt like I was interrupting. He could a left the room. Would
a been nothing to me. I just realized, toward the end, I never said the word ‘have,’ I don’t know
why. I’d like tuv spent my life with him. He meant so much to me. We’d a great time together.
It was like that. I guess I ended it. I just couldn’t really have him. It kept me addicted for the
longest time—not really having.
But you know, I took my addiction for David and I was able to move that desire, that
compulsion to another part of my life. So he left me/I left him, but I still have a part of him, right
here right now. I guarantee……Line. You won’t find no-body else like me.
I was the jealous-type. He’d stage-whisper into the phone: I can’t talk, my husband’s home.
Just send me the Carpentry magazine…I forget the name of it. I think it’s Brad! Brad! Brad!
Then he’d hang up. You’re very smart, I’d say. I don’t even have to try, it is the nature of the
Lotus. He’d bow his head and put his hands together. I said: I heard that they held their a hands
like that to hide gold from conquering tribes.
“Well I can’t speak for ‘them,’ but I don’t hide anything from conquering tribes.”
“How egalitarian of you.”
“I’ll say.”
David’s last name was Lotis. He was like the flower the ancient people of the Orient
described as being sacred, and able to cast a spell upon devouring. A profound forgetfulness of
self, and country of origin, along with a strong desire never to return.
In conversation, David was un-assured, soft, and fragmentary. He flew from conversation
right into the arms of monologue. He was an excellent monologist and masturbator. I had to
trick him into conversation. This could only be done by agreement. If he said I was looking old,
I’d agree. If he said he always took vitamins in the morning be…fore coffee, I’d agree to change,
based upon the overwhelming evidence, and his powers of persuasion. If he told me he was
going out, I’d tell him he should. This wore him down, and led to devotion, as it was meant to,
and this leant to sex, as it was want to, and this led to smoking in bed, metaphorically speaking.
David was Trying but he could be very funny. He wasn’t the funniest person I ever met, that
would have to be Steven Michael. Steven could actually knock people down with a word, a
properly placed jibe, or a retort. Almost like a weapon.
I remember once he knocked the Overnite Letter Carrier guy on his ass in five words. The guy
came in during a lunch break, and seeing Steven chatting away, not working, asked him what he
was doing—implying ‘nothing.’ This was a meaningless interruption, but Steven turned toward
him and from across the room knocked him down literally. “Giving each other blow jobs.” And
he banged his knee on the underside of his desk three times, and then dramatically blew a puff of
smoke. That was back in the day when many offices were just one big room, composed almost
exclusively of discreet women, and people smoked. No one in the office lifted there head or
made any hint of a disagreement with Steven’s characterization. They were quite aware that their
silence conferred total accord. It was a perfect joining of his elemental nature and the complexity
of the environment. The Letter Carrier guy didn’t get hurt. He suffered only a minor injury to his
elbow, knees, and pride.

Wandering
Cut to David in profile. Monologous, after watching Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca:
“Their lives are so circumscribed—full. Where love is a foregone conclusion. We are all
dissipated light, and the credits roll upward.”
 This is what comes from agreeing with him. All I wanted was sex. I came to Natalie unsure,
but I came to David fully formed, after having been around—the real thing, not the movie.
“It’s a kind of Heaven up there, all haloed you know, soft focus, not like here.” He says with a
wave of his hand in the general direction of the kitchen.
I look sideways and hide my rolling eyes, tho he has radar for all eye movement.
“The women are Venuseses…you know Veni…whatever! The men are sturdy,” he looks at
me pointedly, “Neither permitting, nor shunning scrutiny. Above reproach.”
We are one great big reproach. “Yes,” I said, “But, I…”
“Clear as ah…clear as a glass, in a glass, in a glass glass.”
“David, that’s pure Gertrude Stein.”
He lets that one go, and puts down his glass. “We are not haloed,” he continues, with
gathering gravity. “We are halved, red, orange, yellow.” Then gesturing broadly toward me,
“green, blue, indigo, and sometimes violet. Have you ever met a gay man, who was not half of
that? Either red, yellow and orange, like me, or green, blue, indigo, like you?”
“And sometimes ‘y…’ I mean violet.” Someone had to say it.
Arching an eyebrow, the storm approacheth.
“Laugh!” I said. But no.
“If you want to. We are a half a mélange, half a melon. To you a dribble, not a rainbow.
Paint, is what we are! And a very thin veneer at that.”
“Oh, honey your not,” and I almost said ‘thin.’
When he caught his breath, that was a warning I think.
“Unloved. Scratched?”
I still don’t know which definition of ‘scratched,’ he referred to. He was self-referential at
this point. ‘En vino veritas.’ (drunks are truthful)…I wish.
“We betray, for we are pretenders marked for extinction, in a world that doesn’t hold water,
but allows for run-off. We are the run off.”
“In other words,” I said, taking advantage of the pause. “We are the knock-offs, and they are
the originals. How do you know everyone wasn’t gay, till women came along?”
“Well that makes no sense.”
“Go take your pills, I mean it!” That’s why I said it.
“We are un-haloed, and I think, halo proof!”
This is his big finish. He stands, stares at me with tears in his eyes. There is a long and
awkward pause, an almost suspension of time, or belief, and then I said, “….. line.”
“You can’t be serious about anything, can you? And, you turn my own line, words against
me. You just betrayed me.”
“…I can’t betray you to you. David…I’m holding up a mirror. Building my own gravity.
Who can exhalt without betraying? Wouldn’t you rather it be me than anyone else? I love you.
You’re an idiot, Casablanca’s a movie! It’s not real! No one lives like that, and you always
forget the punch line; you ignore the wrap-up, the meaning of the whole damn dream.”
“What dream?”
“It’s not real, David. It is therefore a dream. What’s the last line? The only thing you
remember from most dreams is the last line—it’s the most important part (I think).”
“Last thing...I know, two people’s lives don’t make a hill of beans in this crazy world, but
you’re going to get on that plane and you’re…”
“No, the last line. You don’t remember do you?”
“Yes I do.”
Well what is it?”
“This may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“Well.” I said.
“You think friendship is better than true love?”
“It’s a movie.”
 “It’s a book, it’s a life, it’s a dream, it’s a whatever it is. That’s no answer!” He continues.
“You should know that. Having spent most of last year in a cocoon. Estate of confusion…of
language…linguistic, whatever it was. That thing! That Ferraj always talks about…you know,
made everything seem so real to you, and yet so unreal, strange, and made you feel so…you
know. So queerly gay.”
“Now you think strait is queerly gay?”
“Well it is! For you and me. It’s Lesbianistic.”
“That’s a very interesting concept,” I said, in my full flower of agreement mode. Yet again, I
was horny; the exact opposite of the point I was trying to make about friendship.
“I don’t know…it sounds stupid. You’re either one or the other…it’s a syllogism,
that’s…that’s full of…of…”
“Jism?” I offer. Leaning my head toward the crook of his shoulder, and advancing toward his
muscular hips.
“No, not quite yet.” He continues unabated…for the moment. “I started to say, it’s full of
inequivalencies!”
“…Yes…I know…equally…equivalently,” I kissed the reddest part of his lips…“in full
equal...ity,” I kissed him, and swallowed shamelessly in the middle of a word.
“and…equalesque…equally…equus. Equita…tion…e…egalitarian, as the French say.”
“Now your making me horny. How do you do that?”
“I’m a very gentle lover..always have been. I’m not finished: equality. The state of…of being
equal…equate…equalidad…” I move in close. “Equitable…equalize…”
“I’m feeling unequal, bigger.”
I reach around him. “Equilaterallyequatorial.”
“Can I just say, gulp, one thing…gulp.”
“Yes.” I whisper, “equidistant.” into his ear. Equilib-rium.
“…uh…uh…um. God, just to finish my thought. Not equal.”
Still whispering, “equillibrat.” Then I say “equal,” like he says it. In that way.
“You can’t be straitly strait, and get gay out of that…”
“Straitly strait.” I whisper in his other ear. “Maybe you could, maybe you could, maybe you
could be perfectly strait, and so perfectly strait,” I said softly to David’s neck, “you…you would
be so attuned to your environment, you would be so perfectly straight, that the world would start
to seem more than a little bent…If you know what I mean?” As I say this, I put my hand on
David’s chest, just below the chest muscles, and just above the stomach. “You know what I
mean?”
“Yes,” David whispers, but it catches in his throat. “I do.”
I continue. “it might be too much.”
“too much.” David whispers almost inaudibly.
“You might have to achieve a balance to make things well, equal again, you know? Every
once in a while, you know?” I said, as I touch David’s arm…so ready to reach.
“Yes, yes, I know. Give-in to the harmony of the universe. Is that what you think?” David
petitions.
“Yes.” I kiss David’s arm. “You would naturally harmonize, and bring together the forces that
you’ve built up, and something would have to give.”
David felt a jolt go thru his stomach, and flash to a spot he knew well. A spot that operated
like a switch…a switch I just threw.
I was kissing him open-mouthed at this point.
David drops the wine glass, and it shatters at their feet.
I whispered to David’s adam’s apple. “A glass, in a glass, in a glass.
David appends. His head fell back. I knew he knew I loved him This then
I added to my repertoire of useful slang: Veni. But how to get it in a sentence?
Oh…Veni, Vidi, Vichy.
 Consider Billy’s relationship to David, in the context of sexual ambivalence. He loves them
both. Natalie because she’s ruined. Racked with guilt, unable to show Billy her great guilt. She
is not in the end, un-burdened of him. She loves him, and knows she can’t have him. He’s
broken already. She wants to make it, their togetherness, solid. Crystallize it somehow, and
enjoy it at the same time, she writhes to his statement, I love you. David cries, and dares him to
make a sacrifice. He finally sees David's aloneness—and sees it as his own—the same. He says,
anything you want to destroy, go ahead—if in the end, I can have you. David hits him, Billy is
shocked. Sometimes I want to kill you.
“For…?”
“For that! For being so smug, for talking down, for laughing at me.” and he hits Billy again,
in the face.
“You are funny.”
“David holds him down, pins him down on the bed. “You’re not adult-enough to have a real
relationship. You’re a coward—you wear a mask you…you...” and he kisses him full on the lips.
“Are you following?”
“Yes…”
“Good! And you’re selfish, and you don’t care about me…no, not really...all you want is
sex.” David soon, or about that time, realizes where he’s sitting. “…you have horrible
timing…you say stupid things…and you don’t know how stupid they are. You are impossible to
hurt…You’re dense!” He realizes again, how dense.
“I can’t stop looking at you…you fuck women!” Women!…like my father, damn I hate you.”
Venturing where no man should go—“Because I fuck women? David, I love women and
men…I really do, but I would give all that up, for you. I would end every relationship if I could
have you. But I won’t destroy everything, or leave everything behind, for more
misunderstanding.” Distrust, anger, insincerity, rivalry, fear, and loathing.
“Well, I’ve gotta be me”...and he quickly puts a hand up to Billy’s mouth. “I know you love
me, but can’t believe…believe…I can’t believe…that you …I can’t believe that you… could.”
He stares down at Billy—his head pressed into the pillow. His statement of fact is greeted with
silence. “…that’s why I have to leave. I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” Billy says, and doesn’t move.
David begins to get dressed.
“Why don’t you just kill me,” Billy says.
“Always thinking of yourself.”
Billy falls in love again. He meant it when he said, why don’t you just kill me, and then
within a second, he’s brought up by ‘dave.’ He starts to smile, he smiles, but David can’t see it—
its happening deep inside the feather pillow, but he knows it, just the same.
David begins to smile, and then to laugh. They’re both laughing. David jumps on him
wearing jeans with the belt undone, pulls the pillow from under Billy’s head, and puts it over his
face, and then leans his own face against it.
“I really do love you.”
Mumbles are heard.
“You’re good for me…you always say the wrong thing…but you have me to fix that….I can
do that, but…you have to listen….I need to sleep in the morning, you know?” David lifts the
pillow up. Billy is sort of dazed, and dry eyed. “You know?”
“Yes, uh huh.”
“And I want to be treated like, well…” He puts the pillow back over Billy’s face…like…A
real person who deserves…well, all of you. You have to stay interested, and buy me things,
breakables. I only want breakables, and pillows. I want your heart and soul, and we’ll split the
money.” Now he’s very serious: “I don’t want to tell you I love you, because I take these things
very seriously.” By now, he’s got his head resting comfortably on the pillow, and he’s waxing
airily about life, and his serious side. He uncovers Billy’s ear, and whispers, “you know that,
don’t you?”
Billy turns his head toward the light.
David pulls back as Billy breathes quietly, and without protest. Slightly hypoxic—dazed. He
says nothing. He’s grateful to be able to breathe finally.
“You do know that about me?”
“Never more than now.”
“See, there, that was an intelligent thing to say. That’s it! I want to have influence over you,
on you. I want to influence your life…for the good. Like the cello, I want to play you. I don’t
think I mean exactly that.”
“Good.”
“I mean, I don’t want to ruin it.”
“Good.”
“I would feel awful if you hated me.”
“Good.” Billy’s eyes are wet, and he blinks a lot.
“I want you to say nothing. Just lay there. Do nothing…I want to feel you breathing.” David
puts his lips over Billy’s opened-mouth, and they breath into each other.
Billy is becoming hypoxic again, and is beginning to wonder if he’ll survive all this
philosophy.
“Ok,” he says. “I’ll do it.” Billy’s hands had been on David’s ass, and now they were pinned
to his side, by David’s knees. “You’re good for me, and I do love you, but that was never the
issue.”
“No.” Billy says.
“No, never. I’ll love you till the day I die, or you die—and you’ll give up women and
men…except me.”
Billy smiles, and he knows, if he opens his mouth, he’s going to laugh.
“Well?”
“Are you sure you don’t want to just kill me.”
“No.” He says, seriously. David leans in, to kiss him. “Are you mine?”
“Yes,” Billy takes a breath, before their lips meet.

*
Billy walks out of his house, gets into the car, adjusts the mirror, and turns on the radio. It’s
cringe-drive-time radio. Howard says one thing, and Billy turns to another station—the pop
station. Your body is a wonderland, by John Mayer, is finishing. We hear the short beats before
the last chorus, where he repeats the line four times, your body is a wonderland, and then Billy
changes the station. Sinatra’s duet with his daughter—something stupid is playing. He backs out
of the drive, a woman with a baby carriage stares him down—he pulled-out too fast. He adjusts
the visor, because the sun is in his eyes, and drives off. Then he stops, backs up, and parks in
front of the house. The woman hot-foots it down the sidewalk as Billy gets out of the Taurus, and
into The Calderon.
The door clicks perfectly. He sighs, holds the wheel fondly, starts it up, turns on the radio, and
it plays the same song as before—Your body is a wonderland. Starting from, swim in a deep sea
of blankets, take all you big plans and break them…this is bound to be a while. Your body is a
wonderland—I’ll use my hands—Something bout the way the hair falls in your face. I love the
shape you take when crawling toward the pillowcase. You tell me where to go, and, though I
might leave to find it, I’ll never let your head hit the bed without my hand behind it. You want
love we’ll make it.
He takes off to see Natalie, and tell her it’s over.
She welcomes him in.
 She’s a wreck, her hair’s in her face, and she doesn’t seem to care. She has given up or
something.
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh nothing Billy, I’ve just ruined everything.”
“Everything?’
“Yes. Coffee?”
“No, yes, no.”
“Good. Yes no to you to.”
“I’d like some water.”
“Oh, this is serious.”
“Is it?”
“Well you came over for something right?”
“I came over to see you.”
“Here.” She hands him water, and turns to reach into the freezer for ice.
“I came because we need to talk.”
“She picks up the ice cubes, and puts them into his extended glass.”
“Thanks.”
She sits at the table’s yellow table cloth, and picks up her coffee. There is an interlude of
silence, and you can hear the children play outside her window, on the street below.
“I want to talk.”
“Me to…Natalie.”
“Yes.”
“I’m in love with someone else.”
“I know.”
“And I love you too,” he adds, too quickly.
She nods, her hair swings equivocally around her face, pale and glum. She smiles. It’s
suddenly apparent she’s been crying, the hair was meant to hide it. The phone rings, she takes
the call, tosses her hair out of the way. Billy drinks water and wonders why he didn’t just call.
The person on the other end, has made her tear up. She walks out of the room, and says, “I know,
it’s all I can think about.”
He takes deep breaths and gulps, if she got bad news he ought to leave. He looks around the
room, her cat walks up—jumps on the window sill, and is soon pushing her face into his hand.
Billy scratches her behind the ears. The cat shakes her head and starts purring almost
immediately. He absent mindedly strokes the cat, in a sort of a union.
Natalie comes back cheery. “Well, that was very interesting.”
“What was?”
“Oh, my pal Barnaby called, he has this theory. Did I tell you he’s a genius?”
“Barney, that I met?”
“Of sorts. Well, he says strength is a woman’s strong suite, and that a woman can do anything
she sets her mind to. Anything. What do you think?”
“Does it matter?”
“Funny. It does, yes, very much…because we were talking about you.”
“About me?” Good, it’ll make this much easier. At least she didn’t just find out Barnaby was
run over by an oil truck, or pinned beneath his car on I-95 at the bottom of a pile up…with hot oil
dripping on his face… or…
“Billy, I was thinking…can we talk in the other room…it’s just quieter, and Bats won’t bother
us. I want the moment or two before you go to be nice. You know it won’t be easy for me after
you leave—--—just throw me over, and toss me out.” She makes broad gestures as we move our
appliance shop to the living room.
I have to tell her, her VCR is broke, and not worth fixing. I rehearsed it in my head, as I had
learned to do, and probably should have been doing all along. “Natalie, your VCR is gay.”
 She looks at me. “You mean too much to me, you know?”
“Yes. Nattie…”
“Billy, no one calls me Nattie, Sit here, or even Natalie, except you. Call me Ebbie, that’s
what everyone calls me. That’s what all my friends call me, ‘sfar back as grade school.”
Natalie still has friends from grade school—that boded well. On the sofa, Natalie sits on his
lap. “I know I can be bad.”
“Natalie this won’t work.”
“Billy, I know you have to go.”
“I’m gay.”
“You’re as gay as Bats.”
“The cat?”
“You’re as gay as a cat Billy…You’re not gay.”
“I know, I’m a cat. I go all over…”
“No Billy, you do. You cat-around. You are…” grabbing her thoughts back, “you are all
over the place, you love all kinds of people, in all kinds of ways. Don’t you think I know that?”
“Well…”
“I love how you can fight, and love, and laugh, and love..and make love standing up.”
“I never really…”
“Well you could, it’s in you…all t h i s s…s…s-t-u-f-f is in you. Let it out. Let more of it out.
Stay open…You amaze me. Of course, I didn’t know you before I ran over you…”
“No.” Billy says whistfully.
“Were you always like...”
“Always, except I appreciate things more now, and I think before I talk.” Billy didn’t mean it
that way, and it was too late to take back, so he expanded on it.
Natalie is shocked into silence.
“Because I have to, to be understood,” he says.
“I did that.”
“You ran a red light. You were talking on your cell phone, and you’d been drinking…”
“I didn’t run a red light.”
“You turned la-left onto the la-lot.”
“I turned into the lot, before the light, to avoid the light.”
“That is our light, it’s for the road an-and the lot.” I was starting to stutter. Lot to say.
“Well. Billy, I’m so sorry, I can’t tell you how sorry I am, but Billy I…can’t un-do it, I can’t.
I’ve tried, I can’t, and I can’t cry any more. I love you. Whatever became, of the person you
were. Him, you. I think they’re, still here inside you, part of you…it’s the part of the you I want
to know.”
“I’m gay.”
“Stop saying that.”
“I’m gay.”
“Billy.” Her hair swoops from her eyes. “If that cat, fucked another boy cat, male cat, would
that make him gay?”
“I thought Bats was a girl.”
“See.”
“No.”
“Right, no, that wouldn’t make Bats gay. Bats’s gay children wouldn’t make him gay either.
Bats probably has gay grandchildren does that make him gay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well ….I do. Gay grandchildren are totally out, they’re twice removed. I mean, if you can’t
see how stupid that sounds. You sleep with women!”
“Occasionally.”
“Well, obviously, but…”
 “And I don’t have any grandchildren.”
“Good. I’m saying. You, in here.” She touches Billy’s chest with her finger. “Are all of you
gay?”
“Yes.”
“And everything else?”
“Everything else? Yes.”
“I slept with a woman,” she said, “…that doesn’t make me gay.”
“But you slept.”
“I slept with you.”
“And that makes you a lesbian.”
“So I’m a lesbian for sleeping with a man who slept with a man?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how that sounds?”
Billy didn’t know, so he didn’t say anything.
“Twice removed. I love Bats, does that make me queer for cats? I love. I sleep. I moan. I
eat. Give me the silent treatment, but don’t make me crazy with all this layering on of labels.
I’m a lesbian who’s in love with a queer man, who thinks he’s in love with another man—who
has more shoes than I do. So that makes me a closet drag-queen, twice removed. And what do
you care about all this historical layering anyway? You’re more of the moment, than anyone I
know! That’s your problem and…what I love about you. You go with this guy, you’ll…you
might lose that.”
“What?”
“The moment when…the moment that catches your breath.”
“I doubt it.”
She looks at him fixedly, and kisses him. He might be the end to all your ‘moments.’
“I still say.”
She kisses him.
“Nat…Ebbie.”
She kisses him.
“That sounds funny.”
She kisses him.
“I’m gay.”
She kisses him. “…I know.”
“And you don’t care?”
She kisses him. “...I’m gayer. I’m queer for you.”
He kisses her, and they begin to touch. He lays her down on the sofa cushion, and kisses her
lips, and begins to move his hands to her breasts. She’s red faced. Suddenly her lips tingle, and
her hair gracefully falls in her face. Billy kisses her neck, and then her chest, where the muscles
knit together, he gulps audibly.
“Don’t stop, Billy.”
He falls to the floor on his back.
She sits up. “What happened?”
“I jumped.”
“Oh.”
“Natalie, I came to tell you I love you, and now I’m leaving.”
“Fuck you for being so thoughtful.”
“It won’t work.”
“I hate your smugness.”
Oh, he thinks: that’s twice in one day.
“You kissed me,” she says. “I felt it. It meant something.”
 “Everything means something…” He collects himself, and picks up his shoes that fell off. “I
should have jumped a long time a go.”
“If you had, I wouldn’t have you.”
“But you don’t have me.”
“I feel like I do. Why is that?”
“I can’t make love to you.”
“All right I’ll bite…why?”
“Because…I’m in love with somebody else.”
“A drag queen from Memphis.”
“Athens, Georgia.”
“Memphis, Athens, Philadelphia, Whatever! It…it’ll never work, and I won’t be here to pick
up the pieces…like I did last time.”
Billy stares at her. “Like you did!” He says in disbelief.
“I stayed until it was all put back together.”
“I’ll bite,” he says.
“What?”
“Why?” He asks, unmoved by her nonchalance.
“Because…” Her whole aspect suddenly changes. “I….I killed something…you know, inside
of you. And you lay there, and bled on the floor, the black top, the gravel surface…and I knew
you were dead.” She breaks down into long sobs. “And I watched you sleep, and I prayed that
you wouldn’t die. And I prayed that I would. And you came sob…sob…to, and you were so
beautiful, and you were so broken…my…heart just broke and…sob…sob. I just…sob, gulp, fell
in love with you, and I...don’t want to say goodbye. I love you. I couldn’t tell you for a long
time—you couldn’t talk anyway, and it tore me up inside. And now you can talk, and…she
moves a magnet from the refrigerator by trying to slide it, and ends up peeling it off…and moving
it…you tell me goodbye…I’m sorry. Oh, God, I’m sorry I ever helped you to talk…and she
breaks down. Please go, I’m sorry for everything.”
They embrace. Billy knows he has to leave, right away. But he stays until she’s back
together. The radio plays. And no, they never got married, and yes, he was always faithful. Big
deal.
“It was so good to see you Billy,” she gives him a big hug. There’s almost no light in her
eyes. She thinks about telling him a story from a long time ago, but he wants to go…
“For the good times.” He says. She closes the door on her foray into speechlessness, and real
men that stand in the hall. One time, she came out of the bathroom, and two people were talking
about the fascinating man they’d just spoken to. Natalie knew right away who. She also knew
that in two seconds they knew fully half of what she knew.

Just David Slang

Billy felt such a strong connection to David, he was bordering on obsession, and not the
Calvin kind. He, Billy, had been in love so many times he could hardly count them all. Genie,
Pat, Nancie briefly, Lindah, Alice, Tom, Danny, Brine, Stevin, and Jim. Five women, five men.
He, counted them all. There would be more than twelve, a lot more.
Holding them was part of it, thinking about them was part of it, singing, dancing, wanting to
be with them or just to hear their voice was part of it. Buying stuff. For Billy, what made him
narrow his list to a golden rule (5), was that each of them had driven him to the point where he
called their name out at night—not involuntarily, as in a dream, or a nightmare, but fully awake,
with his hand to his mouth, or his head in his pillow, so as not to wake the neighbors, his parents,
his sleeping lover, his dog, his fear, or anyone else, to the object of his desire...it being such a
fucking secret all the time.
 David liked the exploration, and that made everything very exciting. With the lights so dim
we couldn’t really use our eyes, I took the sheets down and exposed David to my hands, and my
deepest thoughts. I touched him in ways that didn’t allow speech. And this joined in me a desire,
after a while, to speak directly to him.
David, I said. You know, you’re haloed. I just noticed a shiny efflorescence encircles you just
here. He arched his back in such a way, I knew he knew what I meant. You are truly beautiful. I
love every line, every crease, and every seam. Funny isn’t it? The seam only shows here, and I
touch him there, where the seam is. I guess it’s part of the manufacturing process. The last part,
out of the mold—maybe it’s also the entry way.
Do you think it could be, David? Perhaps it’s filled last, or filed-off last. What do you think
about how you were made? God, yes, he says. I had framed my intention, with my hands, and
my thumbs were plying a straight course.
“You were strait when I met you, right Billy? Were you Bill, William, Will, or what?”
“I was what.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning, I was full of meaning—a thousand ideas, but no understanding, and little useful
thought. I came out, from a kind of prison, not the kind you think, and there you were, right here.
I wonder if that’s coincidence? Maybe your presence outed me, what do you think.”
I wish you could fall in love a hundred times, just to find out they were all me. It’s a hell of a
feeling. It’s like snow.

The Keys Again

Did Venus blow your mind? Was it everything you wanted to find, and did you miss me while you were looking for your self out there? –Drops of Jupiter—-
Train 2001

The time came, years later, when David forgot everything I’d taught him, because I guess it
was more like life, and less like lessons, or visa versa. He went to go look for the keys. Not
where he lost them, but under the light. I felt so bad, I wanted to die. No luck, no use, no hope,
no sense, no love. I guess this was the theme of my life. A trip to the attic: a junk box with no
junk in it. Many engines are not ever ready. Most engines end-up ready after all. I don’t know
what it means, but it came to me when I closed the lid for the last time, and went down stairs to
the warm yellow light, and the hum.
Later, I asked God what it meant, and he said it was a nonsense sentence. He said it was
Byzantine. Life is like a hat. When you’ve got it on your head, you can forget you’re wearing it,
and you might even go looking for it. Then when you take it off, it feels like it’s still there. Feels
about the same on as off.
Why don’t you just talk in code? I asked.
Because we yet now gather berries.
Thanks a lot, might take forever to figure that one out.

The Spring feeder

In the morning, with lap top on board, he sits by the window. Cup of coffee in sippy cup, so
as not to end up in lap top, and also because the swirling vapor is not so distracting. It can’t spell
out words, and will listen to reason.
He has a marvelous view of a mimosa tree, which is overly sensitive, and a hundred other
plants, trees, and teenagers. The teenagers are walking a death march to school, in various shades
of blue and red as tho everyone’s name were Tommy, and everyone wanted to err…run way.
 Cars pass, grass, moss, just waiting to be watered—the works. Well, he got this idea. He’s
queer for mimosa trees and idyll scenes.
Billy lives in the world of ideas. In his world there’s no such thing as a bad idea, don’t laugh,
in your world there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

Raise your hand when you get it. And yes there are stupid questions. If there weren’t you’d
be much smarter.
Billy wanted to see birds when he looked out the window into his front lawn, which is where
all this took place. There was a family of cardinals that lived on his property and he was queer
for cardinals—thought he’d feed them—they’d have baby cardinals, and he’d be inspired to, who
knows, screw Risk Management?
He had an old, overly elaborate, birdfeeder, in the backyard, that Clarke gave him when he
moved the last time, to get closer to the state line. The airport. Or was it the time he wanted to be
at the triangulation of the Yeshiva, The home for unwed mothers, and the dilapidated used-
clothing outlet and camera shop. Or was it the time before? Well, no matter, it’s in the backyard,
full of bees, and like it or not, they would have to move.
Billy thought this thru for days and days and days, redundantly.
He had hurt his shoulder, repeatedly reaching for the coffee he placed behind him on the
window sill, counter, table-thing, he had arranged next to his chair by the window. Now he had
to sit with his arm at his side in the only position that didn’t cause pain, and couldn’t lift it any
higher than this. Ow.
Even with pillows bolstering it, it never got better, but he would think to himself, how can you
fly through the air with the greatest of ease, land painlessly and not pay for it somehow? Even
fireworks have fallout.
That’s when he got the idea to dig a hole. He had calculated the perfect spot for observing and
planting the birdhouse. So he did—much attended his every move.
He filled the birdhouse, and even the tiny little birdhouse rain-gutters, with birdseed he’d
found in a bag in the garage, that coincidentally had a picture of a cardinal on it.
The squirrels scared the cardinals away, and ate the birdseed as tho Billy’s attention to their
competition meant nothing.
Billy changed birdseed. Same thing. He put fly paper on the ground to discourage the
squirrels, but he created a horror that to this day is unspeakable—a kind of hunchback caped
Quasi-Moto-of a squirrel, who scrunches up tighter and tighter every day, as he cringes and
creeps single-mindedly all over his territory, which fairly outlines Billy’s property, reaching with
his one good arm as he goes from branch to branch looking for sanctuary, and sex. Nuts. It was
an especially horrible sight the last time Billy saw it—with the yellow cape covered in flies. But
it was fly paper after all. You wouldn’t think using something for the purpose it was intended
could look so dreadful.
Billy vowed never to do that again, and thought it best to get a b-b gun and shoot the poor
thing, but that seemed like a bad idea in its infancy—this squirrel was doomed.
Billy was afraid it could get worse. But then when he saw the hunchback he created, dangling
from a tree, grabbing at acorns he thought, no, it really couldn’t.
Look, everybody can’t be happy all the time. The fly paper was bound to fall off someday.
With the help of the ASPCA, the poor thing was extricated, and happiness held sway, but not for
long.
Therefore, the problem became, for Billy, how to discourage the squirrels without raising the
specter of Victor Hugo, and The French Inquisition, and still be able to watch the beautiful birds,
and make them happy.
The cardinals were not afraid that ideas generated by the inventor of the hobbled squirrel could
become their undoing. They lived in a land where there are no questions period. It was all go, all
the time. That’s why Billy loved to watch them. They really didn’t care.
 God said: You know…one thing leads to another. Why don’t you get off this subject, and talk
about living as it is for humans, and stop making everything a metaphor for the way you live, day
to day…The choosing that you think you do. Billy said: Thanks a lot, I love you. When I need
help, I’ll let you know…If it’s all right with you I’ll just do this my way. Can I hold the
apologies for later, when no one’s listening? God said: You’re a pain in the ass, and there’re no
two ways about it. Why don’t you just listen to me, and save yourself a lot of trouble. Billy said:
I’m busy writing, if you haven’t noticed.

Eventually, having exhausted all the possible squirrel-proof bird-feeder designs, he came up
with one of his own. He took a thin flexible metal pole, and with careful counter balancing, and
special weights that would slide along the ersatz ‘rain gutter,’ he invented a squirrel-removing
machine—making it possible to toss the squirrels harmlessly onto the reliquary of Notre Dame
right next door. Then he made and filled a special compartment with water, for a sort of now
your-off baptism.
If they managed to shimmy up the thin, ungrippable pole to eat the seeds that were not their’s,
the bird feeder would begin to tip from their weight. The longer they stayed the further it would
tip. When the birdfeeder was practically touching the ground, it slowly turned into a catapult. It
would give plenty of warning tho. It would bounce, and twist, and shift like a long metal spring,
which is essentially what it was. If they didn’t take the hint, and before all the seed was dumped,
it would become so unstable that when they tried to jump or even reach for the ground, it would
fling them 10 meters into the air, in any one of several directions—most often, directly into a pine
tree, practically built for an operation like this. Billy never filled the water container, it was filled
by the rain.
The squirrels had one chance and that was it–fa-lip. This worked on a number of levels, and
made Billy almost miss the squirrels. Its unpredictability and continual warning of big air,
reminded him of something, but he couldn’t think what.
The birds came back in droves, and sang to their heart’s content. No one knew what they were
singing, but it was very pretty. They were so red and God, so bright and, quick! They’d look
around attentive to everything. Billy thought about getting a bird bath.

He came to realize, after a while, that making the choice between birds and squirrels was
fucking with nature, basically. All his ideas just encouraged the birds and squirrels to think it was
‘go time.’
He didn’t care…he got what he wanted, a view of beautiful birds, some very cranky, some
who ate while they talked, some flying here and there. It was so beautiful it made him cry. Then
he’d become speechless, and drip into his laptop.
The squirrels were becoming thin, and one day a squirrel spread out his arms and legs, and
with the extra skin he had under his arms, jumped from a tree and flew onto the feeder—and was
catapulted into the street, accompanied by a spray of water, where he sat dazed, until he was run
over by a Chemical-Lawn professional.
Billy had fucked everything up with this queer notion of choosing birds over squirrels. He
was ordering the deaths of countless generations. And don’t think the neighbors didn’t notice.
He had invented a bird-feeding, squirrel-killing machine of horrendous destructive power,
dreadful purpose, and severely unknowable consequence—that sprayed penalties, and justice, in
all directions like fistfuls of nuts.
Billy thought about what he’d done, as his mother had brought him up to do, whenever he
created killing machines of horrible moment.
Billy thought he was trying to do three things simultaneously. Feeding what he loved, having
fun, and saving everything. The squirrels could be happy with the left overs or they could learn
to behave, and avoid pit falls and catapults. It could be a learning curve for them. Sure, some
might suffer needlessly, but in the end they’d be all the wiser, and we’d all be better off.
 Or why don’t they just take a hint and fucking leave? The Moyers, next door, have open trash
cans, and big trees. Mr. Moyers shot a raccoon there once, by accident, or so he claims. The
squirrels could go there. Except for the bananas, he and Mrs. Moyers’ diet was mostly nuts,
anyway.
Billy realized, you cannot chose between two mutually exclusive options, that’s the same as
choosing between good squirrels, and bad squirrels; you never know till you’ve fed them, or
gotten them pregnant, which is which.
He was clearly being too human in his thinking, and he should be more God-like. Let it be ‘go
time,’ all the time. The love you save may be your own. But, you can’t have all of it, all at
once…that’s what happened to Bobby Moyers. You can’t have fun all the time. I think that’s
what Mrs. Moyers had written on Bobby’s tombstone. Anyway, I saw it somewhere.
Mix it all up. Mix it all up, love, have, feed, fun, save, everything. You always end up with
the same thing. Nothing.
Billy realized, that birds and squirrels were only interested in three things: things that were
either edible, fun, or could save your life this instant. Billy thought the squirrelly,
unceremoniously delivered, face-full of stagnant water would save some, but they hung-on, then
flew-off just the same.
Billy stopped sweating, when he realized people don’t sweat when they’re 1), either speaking
the truth, or 2), they don’t recognize the lie. Conversely, they sweat when they lie or don’t
recognize the truth. Either way, what’s the point? No one knows nothing.
You cannot chose between two mutually exclusive things ever. Only three things, and two of
them are probably the same.

A fighting spirit you have, now, then Will

A fine fetter I see you’re in this marning. Tis a shame what happened to your asphalt last
night, hear it has a crack right down the center, plain as the nose on your face, almost.
The nurses knew all about you, your temperamental side, your strange friends, how much you
were alone, your odd take on perfectly normal every day things.
You were a funny…are a funny one you are, but don’t be getting a look. I’ll brook none of
that. I’m not after ya and I’m not running from ya…I’m just a telling ya how it was for them last
night. Coy! They thought you were scared mostly, but they weren’t at- tall scared, not even
Bessy, the later-comer not ever her—fraid of the likes of you. What would that tell ya then? Not
a one…scared…not at tall scared. Amazed—they didn’t think you had it in yuh Mr. Hudson
now. ‘You’…So quiet and all…never say boo…never told anyone about the mouse even!
Billy me boy, a mouse…not even? They also tell me, you dont have the corner on what
anything meant ta ya. For it never occurred to beat the bushes. Ta raise a hand to ask even once
for help! They were surprised for sure when ya took um out last night to witness that un-holy
argument. Prior to that, they thought ye had no heart, no brains, and no courage. Personality.
That’s what I mean. But ye proved um wrong boy-o, you did indeed. Did due that, and grateful
to God that you did—finally now we can free your bed. Make no bones about it we’d be glad to
get rid of ya. You’ve a worll of trouble in store, but ‘tis clear now you can manage, so good bye,
God speed ya, and good luck, we’ll see you on the flip side don’t cha no.
…yeah, but I …
Don’t cha see, boy-o, ya can make room for the next one. Make no mistake, you might be
done but the girls...and the mister aren’t. And I’m a long way from done, too I’ll have ya ta-
know. Now get your butt out of the goddam bed, and shake off that willy won’t ya. There’s girls
a foot and you got no call to be starting...ar so they tell me.
That’s yours and this is mine, and if I were you I’d learn to let go, and there’s no time like the
present.
 …yeah but I…
Don’t start your whily shenanigans on me now. It’s only because I like you I’m tahking to ya
a tall. And because I think you’re of a mind now to understand.

The Buzz of the White Sound

I think it is strange and ironic that history can be so telling. I heard a noted historian say that
the verdict of history is that WWI and WWII seem now, to have actually been one war with a 20-
year break.
Much of what initiated the second part, was a relentless desire to undo the legacy of the first.
It occurs to me, and this may be fanciful, but about 20 years after WWII ended, we had a serious
standoff between the, then, only two nuclear powers in the world. The most serious clash the
world has, as yet, seen. Is it possible that history’s lesson regarding that episode could possibly
encompass the President’s drug use, and out of bounds love for an Icon? Could desires have
somehow played a part? And where desire lurks, can jealousy be far behind?
Hear me, is it possible that, not just a love for life, but a totally, unnaturally-enhanced feeling
of love, that was completely outside the bounds of reason, morality, politics, dignity, even
possibility, could have made, or in some way solidified the President in his resolve—that life was
worth any price to maintain and secure. Far too precious to plunder or recede from. That it must
be preserved as long as possible?
Look at it this way, if the bombs were allowed to stay in Cuba, back in ‘62, they might very
well have been used within a few years, giving us enough time to double and re-double our
threats toward The Russian Union. Setting up and sealing our fate—and not to be overly
dramatic, but the end of all life worth living on this planet? Causing, what could have been, not
only a completion of the war, but also a completion of the world.
I wonder, because I advocate immoderate love, and reaching for life in the areas formerly
considered out of the realm of possibility.
Will history say that the third and final world war was averted by the fact that The 35th
president, and the movie star had an affair that made him hold onto the world of the living with an
iron resolve? That love, beyond the bounds of propriety saved us all. That the meaning of love,
stumped the Premiere, and he backed down. Can love save us again?
Some may ask, how could sex, drugs, ego-centricity, and ‘the love that makes no sense’ ignite
such a steadfast determination—a faith, in the inherent goodness of life and humankind, and
cause a man to risk everything he ever knew, to save everything that ever was, at any cost?
Hmm. If you ask me, they were all jealous. He, JFK, was alive and they were dead. Look at
the pictures—LO, showing off his gun on a beautiful sunny summer day, one so filled with life;
The Premiere, dazzled by a certain Hollywood starlet, looking like he’s just got ‘let out.’; SG
coming across, more than a little corpse-like, the flesh clinging to his face, just barely; or even
Fidelity itself, a puzzler, think that one over...This pathetic life—from the barrel of a gun, this
here, or that there?

The Dogs O and I

There are two dogs in my house. One is my dog, he runs the house, he protects me, and taught
me to say the word ‘treat’ when I was trying to teach him the meaning of the word ‘if.’ He loves
me and has all the keys. His name is O. His real name is Sherpa‫ס‬. He is divine.
There is a second dog; he is even more fascinating and someday they will write books about
him. I don’t know his name. I call him Ire, because he was the dog of The Iron Chancellor of the
Republic of Germany, I don’t know when he lived, but I know he changed the course of the
world.
Prince Otto Von Bismark united the area we know as Germany today. He was Prussian, scary,
rigid, authoritarian, and he put it together like a nuclear weapon.
He had a dog and he did a very strange thing. He brought his dog to work. Not generally a
good idea to bring your dog to work.
Germany had a king. The king did nothing. The Chancellor ruled the country, and the king
took the credit, but the Chancellor could do as he liked. Dignitaries from all over Europe came to
see the German leader to curry favors and check him out.
The problem was this:
They walked into his office and they met two Bismarks, the polite and cordial all- business
one, who shook their hand and offered guidance and counsel, and the other Bismark who was not
so prudent, sniffed their crotches, kept his eye on them every second, growled from the side of the
desk,and intimidated all the great leaders of Europe and their emissaries. The dog was huge. I
have a portrait of him, but I don’t know his breed. A Gainsayer I think (a contradiction).
This dog sent shivers down their spines. Many men left the office shuddering, not realizing
they had met two men—thinking they had met a man and his dog. The dog could have easily
killed them, and had to be ‘called-down’ on more than one occasion.
As the story goes, this intimidation gave Germany an air of invincibility. This fed into the
zeitgeist (the spirit of the age) of the German people who, united, were at critical mass. The First
World War was a direct result of the not so subtle influence of the dog. Needless to say the
effect—tho felt, was attributed elsewhere.
This is a fact. The dog was the first cause of the imbalance of power, which led to the First
World War. The First World War led directly to the second. The dog was long dead by then and
so was his owner.
How do I come by this information? The same way I come by the portrait of the dog that
hangs in my hall—I can see it from here.
My Grandfather’s Grandfather was an artist. I come from a long line of artists. Very long.
He was the kind of artist you call when, as the leader of a great people, you can have anyone draw
a portrait of your dog. He was not a dog-artist; it is, however, his best work.
The sad part is, the Chancellor took one look at the portrait of Ire and threw it in my Great-
Great Grandfather’s face, and then unceremoniously threw him out of the country. Typical, the
same themes keep repeating. He was aghast and mortified that the dog was drawn to look like
him. He does.
This was not the dark ages, but people didn’t realize that pets take on characteristics of their
human owners as a function of an agreement based on unconditional love.
A feedback loop was created. The dog was interpreting subtle signals of odor emanating from
Otto. Ire acted instinctively toward the cause of this fear-reaction as a function of a dog’s job to
protect and love his master. With the visitor stunned, Otto became calm, and then Ire became
relaxed—and wary. The visitors were completely unable to comprehend the dynamics. There
was nothing to say about it in their reports to their bosses and counterparts—because there were
no words for this strange alliance.
It left an odd taste in their ‘mouths,’ and when they spoke of German unity, they gulped—all of
them. And they didn’t know why. But I do. Word spread—Not about the dog—a feeling. The
impression of intangible power, is much stronger than a sensible discourse about real observable
power. A belief was formed in the air. A belief that another German chancellor was later to
capitalize on.
I didn’t know how I knew this. I believe I knew this because the story is in the artist’s
rendering, any remainders of the story are in my head, and in my inheritance. I researched the
story. It became more true. Then I found something so strange I didn’t know what to make of it.
I knew the story of the dog from childhood, it was family lore. But something was left out. Then
I found a picture of Otto on the Internet. I had to study it for a minute. Look at that! Is that
possible? That would explain it—the link—the unbreakable oneness. Telling the truth runs in
the family! I knew it! I ran to the picture.
Now I have the picture. It keeps me balanced. If you saw the picture, you’d know why. The
artist got paid nothing; there is no other likeness of the dog in existence; he almost destroyed the
world with his ability to growl on command; and he has an interesting glint in his eyes. Also,
they were both cross-eyed!
A fact’s a fact. If it is a fact, you should be able to prove it. I can.
Resources are not yet so low you have to kill each other for food. You kill to prove you are
deserving of love. I know that. You are. You all are. All of you are deserving.
An aside: My Great Great Grandfather did what great artists do—he left something
incomplete. For him it was hands. Not my choice, but you have to leave something out.

The White Chapter

It is almost always a good idea to get out of your own head from time to time. A case in point:
my car’s tires are made by Ford, that is, the tires that the car came with, and the tires that it’s
supposed to have. The car drives fine without them, and everyone knows it; but the dealer always
tries to sell a certain brand—they act one-way about this. I have no particular opinion, and it’s
only my natural cynical nature, and my adjacent feelings of anticurrent, that makes me feel
otherwise. I prefer not to go with the flow on matters of principle, but not knowing principle,
often times, from illusion or mean-spirited petulance, I feel that being a kill-joy is as good a
reaction as any other, unless the prevailing winds should change, etc.
Men in general, tho I love them, and I make no bones about it, can do, be so stupid as to be
docile and angry at the same time. That is regarded as an accomplishment, and is accompanied
by great back slapping and sonorous sounds made famous by many wildlife documentaries, and
docudramas beginning with Howard Hawks’ Hatari 1962, and culminating three years later with
Born Free. The ability that affords a look outside their own worlds, is a practical impossibility,
there are so few windows or opportunities.
We are polarized by a current at a young age, and that is the thing we are addictedly drawn to.
The art of the thing, is its huge potential benefit to ours and ourselves—it is the thing that keeps
on giving—by agreement. We are powerless to make excuses. It is not home, it is helplessness,
which is the Achilles’ foot magnet.
When men do look beyond themselves they see anger mostly. The main reason is that
someone has made it some big deal, fin deseicle (the fashion), to look outside oneself, and that
implication—that there is more—is itself offensive to a very high degree. This may be needless
to say: our first look is a scowl, hence the war between the sexes, something that I am ineligible
from booting-up for—one, because I don’t ‘get it,’ and two, because I’m not so polar as to worry
about the schism (pronounced: skiz`-um).
When 911 happened and no, or almost none of the Islamic brotherhood stood up to say how
outrageous an act this was, it soon became wholly clear what a perceptual veil the schism creates.
‘We are one and we cannot be divided.’ This is our strength, yours and mine, when we see a
crack we jump to the side with all our friends. If no one is on the other side of the crack that
piece falls off and everything goes back to normal again; a pretty stupid thing to do is straddle the
crack, it won’t hold together no matter how many people stand on it.
I court the schism. I believe in finding the broken off piece and floating away. I am not alone.
Many just don’t understand the benefits of going your way. There are no benefits to going your
way. It’s not a ‘my way for my benefit world.’ To pretend that it is, is foolish, foolish for anyone
and ultimately disappointing. Sometimes it’s a ‘get-out-of-here world,’ and like a cockroach that
hops a piece of floating cardboard it may go where she can breathe again or it may be her
undoing, sooner than later, but no matter. To read the history of lucky cockroaches is at best, half
the story.
When it was considered cool to flash a fuck-you symbol to the camera in group pictures; I said
nothing.
I wasn’t doing it. I had no opinion. ‘The guys’ thought it was cool, unfortunately, 99% of the
guys thought it was un-cool, but most went along with it. Many of the finger flashers actually
didn’t like it, but they didn’t want to be left out, so they instigated. It was, I think, the ones that
didn’t like it who instigated most. Oddly enough, there was a dweeb/geek schism that I jumped
over. I jumped to the tough cool—I don’t care— dweeb side, and that has made none of the
difference. I was the member under suspicion, who had to prove himself or get off, so I got off,
that made more sense. And still no difference.
I don’t advocate anarchy. I want what I want, which is my world, and if I can’t have it, or
even if I can, but have to fight for it, I’ll be mad. So I’m another angry man, just angry about
different things.
Wanting what you want is perfect. Courting the schism is crazy, unless it gets you
somewhere. A half-history lesson: Getting somewhere is unlikely if you are frequently jumping
from piece to piece. Being that we’re all in this together, you can either be in the first wave to
jump, in the last wave to jump, or never jump, you’re dead in any case. Existentialism will out.
Human motivation is about growth and pain. Court it. You don’t have to marry it.
I think that a finely made work of art requires very little vision, very little heart, a great deal of
passion, and tremendous patience. But only toward getting it to feel right. Patience for sunlight
is bound to bring on the night—faster than a clock, and more surely than the Earth’s rotation. If
you can’t make it right, you may have to feel differently about it.

Antiphony
The sound, alive on the air, petted and ridden thru like planes-aloft—clawed thru like sale
merchandise, stood for something. Something. Something real. Something that had a frame.
Something like a door. And it made Billy angry. He had to find it—feeling that he was so close.
His speech, tho ruined, meant only that he couldn’t tell others. And so…there it was. I lifted
up my eyes and I felt, by the wind against my eyes—the direction it blew. And I followed it to its
source.
The symbols that repeat, the ones that come on the beat, like music—that’s God speaking to
you. The music, those repeating symbols that made it ‘musical,’ was not God’s voice. They
were arms that held me. I slept. As I lay on the sofa, The Becoming raced backward. Smashing
a stronghold of anchors. Lethal to a self under fire. We were in reverse, like a cricket’s song:
Like a song out of the blue, all your life will see you thru. Anything, your heart’s desire will
come to you.

The end is meant to make ‘better,’ all that came before. I saw it from, as tho from very far
away. It made perfect sense. It wanted something, and it didn’t know why or what exactly—but
it would have it anyway. It was thru that door I passed.

A lot of people had a lot to say, luckily there was no air in Billy’s universe, so sound
transmission was minimal.
Music of the spheres—shrill, blinding, escaping air. The anvil chorus: this is what I mean it is
n’t a n y o t h e r. You live in a tent, the woods is full of serpents.
 There was stuff in the white sound. Something familiar, like the names of childhood friends.
But not just that, familiar and free, more like running, as a child runs around a neighborhood he
knows so well, or how running seems now—free.
It was not exactly fluent like that either, was it?
It made Billy slow down when he first saw it.

The encoded coral structures of information, grown one huge piece on top of another, began to
overwhelm. Then they changed. As tho Billy just took a step back. Now a reef, more beautiful
than before, less confusing, more integrated, bigger. Visible yet unpronounceable.
The reef expanded further. Billy stood upon it. There were lines of bubbles. A hundred
thousand bubbles, each important in their place. One wave, so many bubbles: some stayed
separate, and others combined with others of similar size, but many didn’t change at all, just
moved along. There were millions upon millions, then Billy took another step back, the waves
crashed upon a shore. Then to the pebble beach, still unspeakable in its beauty. A thousand
million pebbles—one beach. He kept going.
Then to the grassland above. Reef. Shore. Beach. Meadow. All gigantic pieces of clustered
information. Billy was a little bigger, in the field, than a single blade of grass. Each with its own
grain. Each blade dictating a direction. Outward.
As he began to walk thru them, he noticed they kept him from falling. They held him up. He
could see the huge thing that he couldn’t take his eyes off of, rising before him, and he moved
along nicely, one step at a time. In shock.
He, like a grasshopper, decided to walk as slow as a blade of grass. Now this one. Now that
one. As slow as possible, around it, in order to see that it was there. One blade at a time.
He saw, rise before him, from what appeared to be the center of an expansive meadow, a
singular tree, enormous as a Willow, Locust or Baobab. The biggest thing he had ever seen.
It reminded him of when he was a kid and his family took long Sunday drives in the country,
the clouds seemed to follow him. As he continued observing all that was around him, silently,
and to himself, as slow as he could, he felt as tho he were moving thru the white sound, and this
thing was moving with him…out.

No Consequence
You thought you were the one of consequence and I was ‘a type.’ I never was what you
thought I was. I’m not what you think I am. I’m sure Fa didn’t realize he was leaving my self
un-protected, I couldn’t even say No. I’m sure he meant well. I am sure he found me, found me
worth studying. I’m sure he didn’t use me.

The thing in the resounding surf was stuff I could not have known. How could I know the
Cold War came from unrequited love? How could I know Mankind had met four reincarnations
of himself in the millennia of time, and never fought, one against the other for digging rights,
even once. We didn’t learn to fight each other until we learned to fight ourselves. The Neo never
fought the Cro. We never fought a single battle for the rights of natural selection. How could I
know Man has a walking brain? That the information age is more like an information dump.
How could I know religion is not fun…can’t be made edible, and can’t possibly save itself. How
could I know that all art, all religious feeling, all sexual activity exists in a perfect moment, when
you can do no wrong—like an actor who’s in the character on the stage. When he’s in the
moment he can do no wrong. Same with all of them—except the writer. He must wrestle with
the always imperfect form, make friends with it and keep wrestling. How could I know that
being purposely Impenetrable was also sex-driven, and why.
 When I was 18, I ran away. A flea-bag hotel, a foreign language, a toilet paper spool, money
wrapped with a rubber band. I stole 400 dollars from a drunken boxer who couldn’t hit me. He
threw 20 punches that stopped—each one, millimeters from my face. I never learned to fight, I
couldn’t understand his game. But now I can, that’s how he interrogated me. He believed his
jabs and punches brought out the truth in a man. I looked so innocent in those days—his jabs
couldn’t penetrate that. He literally couldn’t touch me. He had every reason to question my story
(none), yet he swung, in baffling uncertainty. Not ever having learned to fight, I saw no harm, no
reason to protect myself…no danger…I thought it was a game. He must have known I stole his
money, he had every reason to, yet nothing landed on me, not once. I never stole again. Just
souvenirs, nothing anyone really needed. And another funny thing, I went from being a terrible
liar to being a terrible liar. It took about five years. I’m so bad at lying now, I don’t even bother.
It’s a complete waste of time.
How could I know 25 years later, that the tough guys of my childhood were dropping like
flies? How could I know that Jesus could neither read nor write? How could I know that
Beingness was everything? How could I know these things for sure, when stories abound,
interpretations vary, and opinions spread like cancer? The thing in the White Sound followed me
out, it was Certainty. And it had a name.

~~4-5-04 thirty minute myth

Bang, zip. Dreams themes memories became part of one story. One story, is more than the
meaning of the content of the story compared to your feeling about what the content means to
you.
Men are afraid of sexual freedom much more than women. Their desire to be stronger, relied
upon, and self sufficient, shifts their boundaries all over the place. It is as tho they hate each
other. Their hate may be deep. But I believe it’s more like icicles—sharp as a knife, but breaks
easily, and can’t be put back together, even in a freezer.

Sexual freedom is the freedom to express yourself and your body. Has nothing to do with
orgies—that’s your content. It’s about good manners, rules, and asking permission.
No still means No. Love is in hello and not necessarily in goodbye. But who doesn’t know that?

There was a spontaneously generated myth that occurred on April 15, 1912. The great steamship
Titanic was damaged by an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic and it was sinking fast. The
structure of society was written into the structure of the ship. As it sank, the wealthy, women and
children were escorted into lifeboats with a sailor-or-two apiece. Decorum and panic prevailed in
a bizarre exercise, not unlike a feeding frenzy.
The ship sank in minutes. The people who knew nothing of what they were speaking, determined
that when a ship of such incredible size sinks, a great sucking will ensue, and everything around
the ship will be pulled under—like a vacuum. Or a table cloth. This myth formed in an instant,
found adherents ‘like that,’ and gave everyone suddenly something to do, and nothing to think
about. The few lifeboats that there were, rowed as far from the ship, as fast as they could. The
ship went down just like that. It erased drama as it created drama. Glub, glub, glub. There was
no sucking sound, no one was pulled under unless they got a bangle caught on a rail. They just
drowned. The life boats were too far away to afford much of a view. The horror stupefied them.
The feeling was: The few swimmers left, could pull the boats over, in their panic. No one was
rescued.
People will panic. Lives will be lost. No one will be erased, or gobbled up. There will be no
great sucking sound. All of a sudden everyone will become an expert.

I feel a little like the man dying of throat cancer. As a last ditch effort, he gets a tracheotomy, a
hole in his neck—a new way to breathe. He’s still dying and he’s still addicted to cigarettes. He
decides to smoke thru the hole in his neck. It’s ugly but satisfying. And truthfully, if there was
ever a time to quit—that wasn’t it. Quit before it’s too late. He lights up…fuck ‘em. They don’t
understand. Life can’t be about survival, suffering, pleasure, or pain. It’s about something else.
All of it. Everybody dies, we suffer together, that’s half the fun, the other half—when the pain is
undone.
Every moment is not an opportunity to begin. Decisions are personal, often ugly. It’s my life at
my pace. People want me to hurry…whenever you’re ready—I’ll just wait forever.

The expressions in the rustle of the leaves are too numerous to mention. One, however, is notable
for its attendant symbolism. So what?
Is it a question? Is it an earnest statement of insolvency, or freedom? Say it over and over: so-
what–so-what-so-what–so-what, now say it faster. Tell me, do you hear the helicopters? Are
they come to see you fail or fall, walk away or wave you on? Do they care? Are they going to
stay? Do they find you as fascinating as you find them? So much gets said and passed around
ear to ear. Are these autogyros just doing their job?
There is no ladder, but if I were you, I’d consider this a ladder, and just take hold.

If I listen for coincidence, in Italian, co-inchi’denza—they become puppets, like Maestro Fellini’s
Attore (non-English actors). And it all sounds great, for a while, but…non sa cosa dice (he
doesn’t know what he’s saying). He doesn’t know how right he is. Let me give you two words,
puppet show. A Runaway Audience is not the product come, from a runaway hit.
Billy decided not to listen for coincidence, and immediately changed his mind, and decided to
think what you’re thinking: ‘What’s everyone else thinking?’

A Song
He realized you couldn’t love another until you love yourself; you can’t be truly rich until you
give yourself away, wholly, to friends and others; you can’t kill, unless you kill inside first—
waste a part of yourself. You can’t rob another of their freedom and keep your own. Therefore,
he reasoned, you can’t hear what’s going on in another’s head, until you first let them in yours,
and that was out. Billy was private property— God’s property, and if he wanted to dance naked
in the kitchen with the blue flames and the sunlight pouring onto the black and red floor, that was
no one’s business. Besides, as everyone also knew, it was a well known established fact, that
God was a jealous guy.
The only thing that kept the plumber, the chimney guys, the pollster, and Billy’s car from
dying was the black suit, boutonniere, CPR mask, and somber expression of grief, Billy kept
handy by the front door.
To prevent something from happening, get completely, intensely prepared.
His fear dominated everything. It made the world go round—∞—Loved him for it, always
will, does today. I didn’t marry my fear, make strange friends with it, nor have I out-lived it. It’s
one of the most important things in the world, and it comes and goes. I don’t leave the door open,
I close the door behind me. And it never made a bit of difference.

Diary entry 4-6-06 year month day

Asked the All Seeing One to walk the dog with me. He had fun. We had fun. We are
connected; we are not the same person. We don’t act in unison. I didn’t do it to be kind, or to get
him out of the house. Walking the dog has nothing to do with the meaning of life, except that
doing what you need to do is a critical function. It keeps you from going away—depersonalizing.
Someone help me, help me please…was the answer from above. How can I… how can I tell
them… this is not a puppy love? –Paul Anka, 1960

Guide dog
A woman taught her son the problem with me…was the problem with men. Needing of
forgiveness and blind worship. Please don’t go to the instant experts, they don’t know.
Don’t go to them for answers, their noise is deafening—they will imply I want money. I prize
them for their wealth of wisdom—however, newly acquired. It is valuable beyond
comprehension. And you, you will believe to the extent it furthers your internal conversation.
Leave it! If you can’t go alone, there is no one who should, by purchase of rights, follow you.

Life is growth and pain, go grow. It is in your every utterance. Have pain; it is for you, and
not nearly as bad as you suppose. Joy comes in the morning. Unearned.
Everyone has God beating at their door, waiting at their pleasure, supporting, loving and
patient. Not everyone is so preposterous as to claim they were born this way, however. I am and
I was.

Easy for him he doesn’t have to live with you. He lives in you.
Keep me in your fiction, and I’ll keep my fingers out of your drama.
There’s nowhere to go because you’re already there.
Let me show you.

Your number
Luckily, I have your superstitions to speak through. I survived the discussion already. I was
kept asleep this morning well past 4-06-06 0600. I woke at 0820, more than three-hours past my
usual wake up time. Four is the year. The only thing I can really give is myself, Thank God.

There is only one sensible way to view time in numbers, the way it goes—not circular—
directional, much like an old fashioned ambulance siren. Out to in. This way: Eon-Age-Century-
Year-Month-Day-Hour-Minute-second—expansively. You live second by second—tho you do,
you can’t, nor can you live hour by hour, or eon by eon. You must trans-temporally proceed. 2-
1-1-4-6-6-11:15:30. Of course if you’re looking for agreement you could do what they do on the
‘News,’ take whichever side is popular, and sort of stick with that.
Don’t take everyone’s side, and do this behind closed doors, with the kids asleep. Then leap:
What’s yours is yours:
Your life
Your happiness
Your loves
Your business
Your desire
Your losses

Ideas are like things, but they take no time, occupy no space, and are not annoying, as long as
they’re your ideas.
Everyone understands perspective—their own. Some people understand visual perspective,
and how it changes based on light. It’s a short list, after all—what is light?
 That’s why I stopped dyeing my hair, I was meant for better things. That is also why I don’t
edit God, without leaving a space. I have better things to do, and no better things to do, you
decide. (consider: all numbered dates become year month day from here on out)

In his dreams, Billy has The Weren’t Dream

In the dreams Billy has, are sounds of nothing—except when Connie lived with him, he heard
snoring. Thoughts of nothing, except when David kicks him with his knee.
Ideas for new inventions of nothing. Tastes of nothing but the inside of his mouth, which is
disquietingly tangy but never masks the scent of those little wheels that whir inside his electrical
devices. The ones that never stop, and never need grease.
In a world that rings, where everything makes a noise, has a smell, looks like something else,
or falls apart at a constant speed—for him, as he dreamed, nothing happened, and he rarely
remembered them; of course, there were the constants. The ones that were falling apart, building
up and falling apart—there were those. This is one:
He had long since given up hope for the unraveling. Those disintegrated lives presupposing,
that as far as he was concerned, they could just keep talking since they were going to anyway:
Have a nice day.
Stewardess?
Yes.
How many miles to…
Sir…Sir this is…
But I just want to know.
Sir.
If I’m being difficult, I’m sorry.
Thank you sir, you must see how…
Busy? Yes, I certainly do…on the go-round, can I have some pretzels? These chips get stuck in
my teeth.
Yes sir, of course.
Can I ask you something?
Sir?
How many miles to Toledo?
Sir, I’m very sorry, but I don’t know.
Who does?
Sir, I’m not sure.
Great!
The disquieted passenger irritated everyone. He had been on this plane before. He knew just the
right questions to ask, to make the cabin steamy.

The cute, not so young stewardess, handed him a pack of pretzels that was imaginary in its
weight. Billy’s dream had given no weight to anything. Here, things either were or weren’t,
everyone had nothing, got nothing, and bills went unpaid forever. This was his ‘Weren’t’ dream.
In this one he wasn’t going to get any action. He wasn’t going to get any service, he wasn’t going
to get any respect, ice water lemonade alcohol, encouragement, deference, softer seats, better
movies, and especially he wasn’t going to get any answers.

Honey?
Yes? I mean no. Sir, my name, and she practically flashes me her tit. My name’s Cloris.
Hi Cloris. She begins walking away. What’s that short for…? I yell, as she runs away. Did she
say something? I ask the new woman who’s sitting beside me.
I heard her snore as her head jerked then bobbed toward her shoulder.
How come people are so good at hiding and recognizing, that they can do them simultaneously?
That old lady was about as asleep as a furry of meerkats.
Good fake. I said, but you’re not fooling me.
Sir. Please wake up…Hi…there…You were sleeping and several of the passengers were
complaining.
Who?
Sir.
No, this time I mean it…you don’t know where we are, how high we are, wind currents, you
don’t know from flight plans…nothing; temperature, velocity, drag coefficients are Greek. A
simple question like how many miles, just doesn’t compute, but suddenly someone somewhere
thinks I’m in the no-sleeping seats, and I’m asking who?!
Sir. Please keep your voice down.
Or…?
Sir. I do not intend to have a long drawn out discussion, Thank you.
But you don’t mind arguing! I called to her as she ran up the aisle.
I’m trapped! I said to the kid who grinned menacingly at me from the seat in front.
Mommy, that man says…
Shhh.
What’s your name?
Jason.
shhh Jason, his mother says. Turn around, Mommy has a game to show you, it’s cal…
Jason?
Yes.
Tell your mommy my name is Captain Smithers.
Mommy, that man is Captain Sugmant.
Jason? Billy asks.
Jason…?
Jason…Lieutenant Sugmant, please…Fall in!
Mommy can I…
Yes. You have to be back in your seat in five minutes.
Okay.
She turns around and gives me such a look…I’m not afraid of her.
Jason and I play the card game, War, Jason is winning.
I’m winning.
Random chance, and the stewardess want to get me off in the worst way.
Jason hates me for losing and not giving him a medal of honor, which I never promised.
Everyone is upset and I am responsible for everything, including the fact that we’re losing
altitude.
Sir.
Call this number, and I hand her the phone. 999-999-9999
Sir.
Just do it. It’s the heart attack help line.
Sir. I’m not authorized to…
Don’t explain anything to him…some woman says from across the aisle.
Smart Alec, I could be dying.
Is your seat belt on sir?
Yes, I hiss.
Good.
And there I am all alone in a plane with no answers and nothing absolutely nothing. All I wanted
was an answer to a simple question.
Sir.
Yes.
The flight’s over. The deplaning procedure requires all passengers…
I know…you’re wonderful. How old are you anyway?
Sir.
Nevermind.
It might have been a dream, but it felt real to me, and I got nothing out of it.

NEW JESUS—Really Wants a Limo

Be wary of all enterprises that require new clothes—Henry David Thoreau

Being God on Earth was tons of fun; the phone never stopped ringing: time shares, wireless
telephone deals, credit cards till you were sick of them, the electric company wondering where
the check was…riotous…not Lucy’s first day at the chocolate factory but a riot nonetheless. Of
course, there was the down side, it was hard to get out for some real fun. The camera operators
scared everyone away, and it was starting to look like I may never have sex again. Everyone I
knew in Hollywood was dead.
Terminus says to me, You’re so smart now, think of something. That’s when I came up with
the out-house idea. I had a trench dug from my front yard to my neighbor’s, two houses over.
That was easy enough. Then I bought an old-fashioned outhouse, and put in a false bottom and
placed it at my end of the 30 meter long trench. Then, when I wanted to go out I would just slink
into the outhouse, with a roll of toilet paper, and while they had their cameras trained on the door
with the weathered wood, I’d sneak out the bottom, and in a blink, I was in a taxi at the
neighbor’s house. Unfortunately, I didn’t count on the boldness, and sheer brazen resolve of
those camera holders. When I didn’t come out in thirty minutes, they walked right into the
outhouse and before long, put one and one together, and figured how I got out. I had no idea they
were so bright!!
Then Hazrat came up with the latex and limo operation. I had been moaning about the
prostitutes who never returned my calls, and the scandalous self promoters who wouldn’t give me
a moments peace. Me!
I remember saying to my friend Sienna, If only I could find a prostitute who was also a
hopeless fevered self promoter.
Do you know any actors?
Actors! Why didn’t I think of that? I had been an actor back in the day. Three plays in three
months (then a dry spell, known to me affectionately, as The Sahara). There’s always a starving
actor who just needs that little boost. I could actually be doing the world a favor, you know, I
mean if he were, turned out to be any good. Yes that’s it, I’ll go out with an actor, that’ll solve all
my problems!
Sienna said, “Breathe.” What if, instead of joining the circus, you call up your latex man and
have him make a couple fake Billy-heads, you know snap-ons, then we call up an actor who
wants to be an overnight sensation—he shows up gets out of the Limo, click click the camera
operators get their pictures of the beef cake. And it’s still all about you.
Yes, go on.
He or she shows up at the door
Yes…
The two of you are inside just long enough to switch clothes and exchange heads.
Yes…that’s sounds…good. Of course, sometimes I’m not in the mood.
…(long pause deep sigh)…Then the two of you come out.
Uh…Okay…
Well, click click click.
 …Then you say goodbye…and get into the limo…..see…as him.
I have to imitate him or her while he or she imitates me?
No, you walk like your head’s in the clouds same as always…the crowd thinks your fabulous
visitor has had some sort of epiphany…bingo!
Before the head, or after?
With the head….he’s you! Click click click he or she walks into the house smiling like a
plastic doll.
And…..
And you drive off. No one will follow a ham actor when they can follow your ass into the
house.
Good point…..But I just got out of the limo, didn’t I?

You drive off.

……
And come over here.
That’s perfect! I get total freedom, and ten or fifteen minutes with a great looking guy, or girl.
Everyone’ll be so jealous. Imagine the stories of abandonment, betrayal and self sacrifice. ‘He
healed their broken hearts and showed them the light, all in ten minutes.’ I’ve always wanted a
date that lasted ten minutes. And now I might get hundreds! It’s a field day! I said. Everyone
gets what they want! Tom, or whoever we call, gets the publicity, the camera operators get to
operate, and their bastard children don’t starve. They get great pictures of me—almost
professional quality. The people that make up all those stories, have to tighten up their fiction,
cause they only have ten minutes. And if they lie and say we were in the house for two hours…I
could become the world’s greatest lover! My reputation’s already shot, it’s completely
believable! Done cut print…..except when do I get my head back?
He walks into the house with it, as you…..he’s wearing it to look like you…..and takes it off.
Great! So then I wear it back out side…with it when he leaves, after. And put it back in the
limo for the next time.
No, you are you. You don’t have to look like you—or wear a mask. And when the
excitement quiets down, the ham walks away dressed as his favorite actor or actress, or character,
more cameras, click click click, can’t you feel the intrigue. ‘Where are all these beauties coming
from?’ etc. etc.
…Where are they coming from?
Your latex man…
Oh, I thought my dates brought their own masks.
I’m sure some will, but your latex man should be able to work-up a movie star face in a few
minutes, besides who’s gonna be looking at them?
Right…So let me see if I understand, I’ve got a date with the Prince of Denmark, the Queen of
Chicago, Tyrone Power, whoever. A limo rolls up, Ty gets out. We exchange latex, or whatever
inside, then he escorts me from the house to the waiting limo, I get in with…as him, then “I” walk
back in the house—Billy uses his fingers to describe his new persona. I walk back into the house,
but except that’s not really me, and then Tyrone dresses up as The Prince…..and awaits my
return.
And leaves…not as a star, but as someone else all-together.
So…..people will assume…..he flew into a jealous rage, and stomped out.
No. They will assume you have given each of them a part of you, changed their lives, by
using their gifts, and shown them the way.
All in one night?
Or they’ll make up some other story. Billy, a series of still photos can’t tell a coherent story—
and even if the moronic camera holders figure it out, that’s their bread & butter.
 Great! Who should we call? I’ll make a list: Tom; Brad; Tobey; Justin; George; Brendan;
Leo; Ethan; Elijah; the elusive, and ruddy P.R.; the hard to graduate MD; the very deep JD; the
you made me come up too fast, Bens; the changeable Bonos; the I can’t fly, TWAirline; the Law
man; the other JC, also born on my birthday. The swashbucklin’ RC, no relation; the Foxx; the
glacial JG. And KW, just because he wants it so bad. I give because I love...I love because I
think you love me. That’s caused a few problems. The JT’s, Timber, and Barbarino. The
brother of the River, the said Phoenix, who worked within a mile of my home. How does he
know what he knows? Colin; Cameron; Toni; Christian, Oh, what’s ther name…..ends in
‘on…in’…..you know…wan, palely drawn, ashly. I’ll think of it later. The empire of the
Christian sun. Billy falterd, almost fell, stood back up. He was making himself dizzy. The
things he moves toward are tender, lovable. Renee; Drew—Those guys on the animal network;
that DIY guy; the senator with the funny name; that guy from The Parkers (trey sheek); that guy
on the news—the devil may care Seann-William…This list is endless! Heath Cliff…
Of course, Billy says, exhausted and exhilarated from listing. “When he leaves, and I’m over
here, with you, who’ll watch the house….my latex man?”
No. Nobody.
What if Seann has a party and messes everything up?
You watch too many teen movies.
Billy would occasionally touch his arm. And find happiness in his own expression.

Well everyone was happy. It worked like a charm. If they figured it out, they didn’t care.
Everyone got the picture they wanted, the date they wanted, the personal associations they
wanted, the money, the fame; everyone who wanted to be me, got to, provided it would seem
plausible; all the while I was having fun with my friends.

I never left the public eye for a second. There was an endless stream of very hansom shots of
me posing on the porch, in the rhododendron, lifting my shirt as I lifted children into the air,
signing women’s breasts—My latex man made heads for an assortment of moods: ‘Biding my
time,’ ‘Ready to lock horns,’ ‘Rake,’ ‘Pensive and thoughtful,’ ‘Humble and patient,’ ‘Butch to a
fault,’ ‘Hell fire and damnation,’ ‘Bold and decisive,’ ‘Sad and lonely,’ ‘Resolute,’ and my
favorite: ‘Love and Peace Everlasting’—with the curl of hair in the front. And of course, my
‘Going to the gallows face,’—he made ten of them. People kept taking them home as keepsakes.
I was all over the freaking place.
Everyone was happy, except, of course, the purists, and the quibblers. Luckily, they never
figured it out. “How many men and women is he hiding in there??” It never occurred to them I
wasn’t hiding anyone or anything, but that’s purists for you. They get one idea, and that’s that.
Damn!
Sienna asked, What if the photographers don’t take warning—they can make life hell.
Yes, I know: Too fast too slow to too rough too soft too brown not brown enough. I might
have to spell it out for some. It’s like telling a child not to stare at an eclipse—I’m trying to
protect them from their own, galella-like, ignorance, and other’s also. I finally put an old dress
dummy on the porch for the pitcher takers—it gave me time for errands.

4-4-25 year-month-day (ymd) Fiction

Fiction is not an invention. It is what you can’t tell a story without. If it is an invention, it is an invention to discover God—WS

While the world learned Billy’s language, and looked up at the sky for no reason, just as many
people waited for him to die. Presumably so they could talk about him. Nothing has changed in
all this time. The house drew attention. They web-cammed it.
 Suddenly there were experts on every conceivable subject. Billy didn’t have to worry about
money. Billy didn’t have to worry about anything, least of all money. But now that he didn’t
have to, money became the problem. In all his life he always had bigger, more serious problems
than that. Now it meant something critical. In his present form, money was exceedingly
dangerous. Green gold—all tarnish all corrupt. Yet he had to eat. But to take food, or money, or
favors, was not permissible. If someone had done him favors before, made him their famous
meatloaf, visited people in prison, or routinely helped people in trouble, then they could do the
same for him—But no special favors. Any way you slice it, it’s trading on the word of God.
Others can get away with that, but not Billy. Not now, not in this state. Billy was not a swami,
shaman, sufi, seer, sorcerer, spellbinder or mabus, whatever the fuck you think that is. Billy was
not in the maybe-business: maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, maybe he could be, maybe he
couldn’t—that’s endless. Billy was in the I’m Here Right Now Business—not long for this
world.
Billy was not channeling Nostrodamus—He was open to the wintry winds that close doors and
kill damp. For the thing he was about to do, he had to be spotless— incorruptible, immaculate.
This is, after all, what he had come to deliver a final blow to. The only way to fly without a
shadow is to be fictional, even at night. Nevertheless, Billy had things to do that could not be
seen.
He had little money of his own. What he had, he had come by honestly. And that couldn’t
change. The rules apply to everyone…especially him. If he were a parish priest or a carnival
barker dressed in fancy pants, it would be one thing, but he wasn’t. This had to be done as
cleanly as possible.
Just so you know, Billy would never work exclusively for the Americans, never take their
money, never sell their wares. Billy loves them very much, but he won’t dance to their tune.
He’s not for sale. They’re very generous, but their ‘country’ is getting smaller, and so are they.
They’re problem-solvers, from the Dutch. It’s to their credit that tho they know you all wish you
were American they never say it, even in private, never. I’ve never heard it, ever, however, they
will address you one day, this way: My problem is you! They’ll say it, but it’s not true.

It is very well known, documented in fact and fiction, that money corrupts. A rich man cannot
get into Heaven. And Billy made several trips a day. He had no intention of stopping, if
anything, he would be making more trips. Just when he really needed money…he had it, and
couldn’t touch it.
For the suddenly deaf, Billy whispered softly to himself, under his breath, Wealthy men and
women cannot get to Heaven. It’s invisible to them. Always was. It is an open-handed consign.
To them money is everything, yet it’s not real—a poor substitute for God, who is everything, and
real.
Heaven is a place of symbolism, that you ‘live’ in, when your dead. It is nothing like this
place. It’s real—it feels more real than this place. But that’s Billy—maybe your prison feels
extremely real, I don’t know. I know you can’t go unless you’re clean. Symbolically, spiritually
clean.
*
Start by telling little truths to people you trust. Don’t start by telling people, you have often
thought of killing them, and you had no idea how easy it would be. Anyone can do it! I would
suggest instead, start with something like, “When you turn to go, I get butterflies, I want to come
with you. I love you even when you drive me crazy.” Well, anyway, you make it up, I happen to
like butterflies, that’s me.
Heaven is like the ocean. It’s very easy to get it confused with where you were the last time
you saw it, as some have noted. It is not a couple kilometers long, a couple kilometers wide, with
a seating capacity of 144 million—that’s Aruba.
 There are rules. Some people can’t go. They are clean outside and dirty inside. I am dirty
outside and clean inside, I recommend that. It’s really about the inner truths we tell. If the truth
is hell. Well, you’ve got no where to go. If you accept the truth without acting on every impulse
to kill the neighbors, for example. You’ll be able to see it when you get there. The truth is
different for everyone, obviously. It exists as a point of reference. To see with. Sight is
symbolic. Murder is, in all its many forms, also.
Getting what you want, for example, is symbolic of your ability to change. Not how much
you change…your ableness. Changing. Changing back and forth continually, is nonsense.
That’s what you do now.
Not changing anything, is symbolic of desire. It can be so profound, it feels like the other side
of desire.
The present time is like the perforations surrounding Broke ten, and The Ticket.
Horrible and useless. A clear indication that someone knows how perverse you can be.
It would be so easy to slip if you had the moment to dwell in, but you won’t. You won’t
suddenly become something you’re not. With the perforations you are pretty much guaranteed
not to rip it out and trash it. You’re afraid.
That’s how perverse you are. That it might be sacred.
Which it is. The thing you are so afraid of is the moment. You’re afraid, perhaps, that you will
screw it up. You’re afraid zip it’ll be gone, irretrievable, made untouchable. Perhaps, that at any
moment you can be swallowed up, dragged-under by your fantasies, your very nature, and
become your self and horribly lost. Afraid that you will suddenly stop, be come hard, and not be
able to finish your work or do the thing you were born to do. The problem with your life—so
many ‘moments’ are lost to this fear. It is the fear they’re selling. The thought police sell fear. I
sell fear you can rip apart. You will not become an animal—you will not drift from place to place
without thought of where you were, even yesterday—like a Wildebeast. Even fish know the reef
that spawned them. They can hear it. What you know today, keep.
The answer to a man and a woman’s question—How can I walk around with this? Is not your
affair. It’s theirs. One man’s sacred script is another man’s trash. But you probably knew that
already.

Fiction is either in your head or in your hand, and visa versa. You have every right to live in
your own head. When the present moment doesn’t matter anymore, all the fixing in the world
will get you nowhere, and means nothing. You are more symbolic than you know.
What is brutal hell to you, is candy to me. Life has a rubbery taste sometimes, but so do cold
french fries. Be careful what you put in your mouth you may be called upon to talk about it one
day. Fantasies that don’t impart depravity to the object of your desire—suck. They need work—
they’re no good, probably not truthfully your fantasy…Oh…you know what I mean.
How many times do you suppose you will be given to say you’re sorry?
The time you take.
That’s Latin and it doesn’t translate. I apologize. Life is growth and pain. Speak. Hardly
anyone has sex at work. That’s your fiction. No one has sex in this work. That’s my fiction. It’s
important for me to show you how I can undo things that cannot be undone. After all, how could
you turn the pages if some were stuck together?

Dear doctor. You cannot force people to see you, make them take your advise and then charge
them. When you rescue someone’s dying child, and you hand the parents, the world, and the
child, him or herself, a raft of guilt, fear, and mind-numbing sorrow, you are protected. I want
you to know that. I want the parents to know that too. When you rescue a wizened old man or
woman from dying, and hand their child, their spouse, their friends, their family, a world of grief
and regret, you are not protected. And you must pay. Say what you will, death is normal. Un-
proctored. Not your ballywick.
Doctors are not the only ones given gifts. There are no such boundaries. Everyone has a gift, few
know what the gift is—so few have names. Doctors who take gifts and make them pay and pay
and pay have thrown their gift away. They’ve named their own border.
Now, that was hard to translate.

Giving you good news is easy.

That is not why he has, I have…He has come.
You have put forces in motion, you will not be able to stop.
There is a reason I sent my child to take away death, worry, and pain.
It has to be this way.
There is only one chance.
Do as he says. He is ready, you are late.
The world will last forever. With you or without you.
Sweet dreams amen.

No offense, but you have a better chance of putting beetles back together than of coming to a
sensible conclusion.

God was difficult to understand @ first, but not difficult. What was difficult was believing it was
possible God would speak directly to me. So I decided he didn’t. And then he didn’t—he spoke
thru me, to me. I want to say, ‘He listened to reason.’ I would say now, he understood how I saw
the world—its position: above, upon, around, near to, along with, to, on, in, thru, from, by, for,
across, besides my world was prepositionally specific (Dad was an English teacher). I asked him
why I had to run around hiding. He laughed. Who said you had to run around hiding. You’re
naturally…God looked at Billy. You aren’t trying are you.
Billy tilted his head to the right, and said, Trying what?
God said, you’re naturally this way, aren’t you.
Billy tilted his head to the left. What. What way? (That was a question, right?…good.)
God said, How is it you do nothing, make no attempt, don’t try, don’t know what I’m talking
about, and seemingly don’t even care.
Billy thought to himself, Did he just say seemingly? But didn’t dare say anything.
God laughed. You’re the Mecca of Meccas. You’re like one big parade. And He laughed some
more.
Billy decided God was crazy, and from that point on, they got along fine. It became, it was, like
it always was. me—Him.

Move This
He has my permission to take away your suffering and let you die.
If you try to teach him what love is, I might die laughing.
He’s told me that’s what you’ll do. Your problem is not too much love. That’s his.
If you decide to stop killing cows I will weep. Saving cows won’t work. Save the Earth.
I guarantee he will not stop being preposterous for you. He is the One that could never be. Yet
he is. He is the one you will say never existed, yet there he stands. He is the fantasy you say you
never had, never heard of, and wouldn’t be the least bit interested in, but you did, you do, and you
are. And he did also of you. In dreams awake.
In this world if you try to keep your outside clean and your inside dirty, it’ll switch on you.
Keep your outside dirty and you inside clean. The more you try, the more you’ll get it. A
fictional character knows more about mind, and soul, and Being than you ever will.

The End
((((consider: put at bottom of page. See Author’s note))))

Apocrypha (see also links to Spine, Barnes Foundation, The Johnstown flood, and Anticurrent)
In the future there will be plenty of time to read, but precious little time to be still, quiet and
reflective. There will be, behind people, a great push to acquire and wrest from others, that which
they don’t really want, but don’t want others to have. This does not reflect a change, it is the
general shape of things to come. Reading a book fast is better than reading a book slow, for
example. It will be considered more ‘genuine’ a ‘show’ of interest when in fact, of course, it
isn’t.
Knowledge itself will be changed and offered up as ‘means.’
My knowledge, for example, is better than yours etc. How can it be? Everything you know is
everything you know. You aren’t really adding to it all that much when you fill the empty spaces.
Put me down as pro-knowledge and pro-education. But like candy—I always preferred the ones
with the soft chewy centers, not all hard and so densely packed.
With all the fence building, of course, there will be no time for fence mending, and things
generally will fall into disrepair, at their normal rate, tho it might not seem so.
The more things you have, the more and the faster the disorder. You will be tearing things
down as fast as you build them up somewhere else.
People will be planting corpses in the ground while others exhume bodies for proper
disposal—in the same cemeteries, at the same time. It’s not disarrayed, it has to be that way.
The future is a huge mess—get used to it. As the Chinese say: lots of luck.
Many people will think that now is the time for killing people who don’t understand, and that
all those other times were mostly just land disputes. If that were true they’d kill themselves. Just
get out of the way.

The following is apocrypha and other stuff, which is unnecessary to the work, its
effectiveness, or your understanding, one way or the other. It was not pulled out of the trashcan;
it was always meant to be part of the work; it just has no ‘bearing’ on your results. It reminds me
of Mark Twain’s comments about the straightening, widening, and deepening of the Mississippi:
They didn’t start serious work on the river, until it became obsolete, and by the time they ‘fixed’
the river, there was hardly any commercial traffic left, and certainly none that would benefit from
the ‘improvements.’ Well that’s the way things go, it’s as if, without struggle there is no real
point, and happiness couldn’t be found there anyway. Life without struggle is, well…..fat, and
loathsome. But that’s more Apocrypha itself. Personally I’m for private struggles, but that’s me.

Spine
Just so there’s no confusion, this is fiction. My Grandmother never spoke a word with her
spine, she had it so wrapped up in doing nothing but arranging her world the way she liked it, she
could hardly stand up straight. And if you think that’s saying something, well you’re wrong. I
was thinking of my Aunt Jean when I wrote those lines, she spoke volumes and volumes of
courageous, stalwart, gritty, important, stuff with her up-rightness, and that’s who I was talking
about, but this cannot be autobiographical nor is it.
The people here are not even people; my Grandmother is not in this at all. These people are
here to be devices to move the story forward, and to serve the plot, and theme, which at this very
juncture is somewhere between ‘nothing works out the way you plan,’ and ‘taking chances is
critical to your humanity,’ with a sprinkling of ‘I’ll be okay, as soon as the blood dries.’
Curious thing, the problem with using real people in your story is that these ‘devices’ become
real after a while. They have emotions, and feelings, and thoughts, and then they start refusing to
do what you tell them. They get upset, and they work on you till you give in. If I put my
Grandmother in this—in short order I’d find out just how real she was, all over again. She passed
away in 1983. None of the things that I say happened to her, ever did, except that she wished my
father dead and never got her wish. The whole thing’s made up. I just sit here making things up.
All of it. Of course, the first names of the kids I played with as a child are real. There would be
no point in listing them, saying out-right that this has no value, and continuing unless it’s just to
harass, stupefy, insult, bore or hint to the reader that something else is going on. A kind of
creeping digest of loosened facts is asserting itself. Control is lost, and the shipwreck is about to
be followed by a tsunami of cognizance, a bolt, a spin, and a clap, or something equally horrible.
Being in fiction would intrigue her, but she would soon start her old shit, and there would
doubtless be lists and demands—all made, over a tuna sandwich and a bowl of chicken noodle
soup set down in her cozy little elfin kitchen with the secret laundry shoot and the pantry just off
a ways, that smelled like Ike Godsey’s and was big enough to be The General Store. The kitchen
could be a character, with it’s harmless gas stove, peerless crockery, and aerodynamic post WWII
appliances that fascinated Clarke who’s real name shall remain nameless since my brother is the
commander, and chief pilot for Air Force One. He also sells beetles that he catches in his
raincoat to children in the neighborhood who pay him in gummy bears, and other things pocketed
for long periods of time. And is very sorry that the kid who sold him his sister’s panty’s moved
to Wichita, because he’s worn them out already. Ha.
Grandmother Fellows would, no I’m not done with her yet, would buy me off, just like she did
back in the day, and I’d have to stand up to her, and it would screw-up the whole book, and
change the theme to ‘elder abuse and its pitfalls.’ Yes, with her in this, all of a sudden she’d
oops, mention William Shakespeare, and this expression he made part of the language, or that
nuanced phrase, or Hemmingway, and what a sad story that was, blah, blah, blah—anything to
trip you up. She wasn’t fast but she could catch a ten year old up in her net sooner than you could
dry fish on a boat.
If she were here, everything would be out of character for a bright, whip of a thing who liked
everyone to be awed by her majesty, and was driven by her insecurities about scanty family
pedigree into a person who was distant and snobby.
I’m sorry I asked that question, but I was three, she knows what I mean: ‘Why don’t you
leave and not come back?’ It made her forever wary. She had never had the wind snuff out her
candles so quickly or with so little trace of malice or envy.
If I tried to get her to go to a baseball field and start coaching from the sidelines, she wouldn’t
do it. She’d rather go shopping at Wanamaker’s, and crack wise with some down trodden
saleswomen who have to take her crap—falsetto and all, than help me out in the middle of the
ninth, and then after she went shopping she’d want to go to a party or a bridge-club function with
Mrs. VanMeer, or the Andrew Carnegies. There’d be no stopping her. We’d get in a big fight,
and she’d spend the next twenty years reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov by candlelight,
and loving every word. If she didn’t quit it she’d have a religious conversion—become Catholic,
and have a picturesque South Philly accent, and she’d sweep the front porch stoop-to-street with a
short broom till she understood the power of poetic license. And if she didn’t like that I’d give
her a hankering to read Pasternak in the original Russian, and develop a great fondness for his
translations of Shakespeare. We’d take Chekhov away, and make her secretly in love with Yuri
Zhivago so she could stand in line forever…anyway I digress, but that’s why you never put real
people in your story—they are inveterate fuck-ups. The point is: this is fiction. There is no one
here…Well, I’m here. And I’m working day and night on a theme, but not tonight because it’s
Halloween, and I’m having a huge party. All my friends and most of the neighbors are coming,
except the Brown’s, who no one likes because they’re thoughtlessly lowering property values,
and remain unrepentant. It’s going to be a blast; Chris and I have a bet; the first one who spots a
headless horseman gets oral sex, and all the candy they want. Later.
My Grandmother stood at the door, said Thank-you for being here to watch the house and
added, “Now, no parties.” and then she winked. She and Granddad walked off, arm in arm down
the curved path he built, and stepped up into a Hanson Cab, and went to the Carnegies’ for dinner
and a show, wearing a huge corsage, a lucky hat, and sweet loving smiles.

Barnes Foundation ▄

William Barnes was an interesting character. He bore no resemblance to anyone living or

dead except, of course, himself, being dead and all. Sorry, let me start again. Oh, funny story: I
was sitting in my favorite chair about to read a book, watch the history channel program on
Richard Nixon, and try to figure out the unanswerable, unasked, question: What could compel
such an incredibly unsuited, un-politic man to pursue a political career in the first place? The
show had just started and I farted; Oliver, my dog, started barking as if someone were knocking at
the door. Shape up! But I digress.
The interesting thing to me about WB was that he was the archetypal Prima Donna, extremely
good at what he does, so good, that he has absolute knowledge of, unfortunately, only, one
thing…‘how good he is at the particular one thing.’ That is as far as I’m going to go in the
definition of a Prima Donna. If you want the history of the term look it up. This is the
information age…don’t let me stop you.
Anyway, curious thing, it doesn’t matter that there is really no niche for what Barnes did and I
want to say does. What he does is, I guess, is called, exhibit art. He goes around all over the
place, Europe mostly, and buys great art. It is his passion. It is his love. He knows the great
works of art, he knows absolutely the great works of art, he also knows what makes them great.
Somehow when the gifts were being handed out in the theoretical pre-womb, space area thing-
time he caught this one—don’t ask me…yet he excelled at this one thing beyond the learning
phase. He was also beyond the teaching phase. He was at the fun phase. This I do for me, this is
local, as of course, all art is. Extremely local, if you don’t believe me, ask Mei chapter who
knows, page 5, line 37 right before the period.
Barnes had achieved in some horrendous way this talent for something unbearable, so
indescribable it has no name. Some people can get a thrill…knitting sweaters and sitting still…I
digress again. The Prima Donna does what all Prima Donnas do, he or she, takes this huge
ability, the one he worked on forever. The one that is like a middle name, always just been
their’s. The one some call a gift, because they don’t know where it came from, except Barnes
tells us…indirectly. I could have chosen Da Vinci, Shakespeare, or that romanticist Blake or
Burke ((((I’ll edit this later anyway)))).
Barnes decides to show 500 pieces of art he collected, that’s it, Collector! Renoir, Degas, Van
Gogh, all of the greats—where? In his home. He turned it into a museum, because real museums
wouldn’t put up with him. The true PD enjoys competition, but can’t tolerate a hack. Mind you,
it’s a nice house, and it looks like a museum. It is located where it’s always been, in a n
expensive neighborhood just outside Philadelphia.
 This is the point. He is a Prima Donna because he knows he’s good, he knows how good he
is, and he knows why. Great—feet, yards, miles above everyone else. He is the Mozart of
collectors. He arranges the paintings on every wall in all 24 galleries; it is some of the greatest art
of the 19th and 20th century. He never loans it out and he never lets anyone re-arrange it. Not
only that, but he does a thing even more surprising, a thing only a great Prima Donna would do—
it is almost un-definable, but I’ll try… If...you have the power to ruin a work of art you have, and
to the extent that you can ruin it, you have the ability to make it great. He was creating a work of
art out of works of art. Dummy this down: the only money that you can say you have is the
money you are able to, are in the act of, and have the intention to, give away. Money in the bank
is in the bank.
So what does Barnes do? I’m getting to that. If I were someone else I’d tell you to go to
Lower Merion, Pa., and see for yourself. Sorry, what he does is hang the framed canvases on the
wall and beside them, in a seemingly random placement, he hangs hinges. What I mean by
hinges is hammered out metal door fasteners that allow for the predictable motion of a door, you
know, a hinge, hinges, some rusty. He has them all over the walls and he will not allow their
removal. Hinges and other things.
The general consensus of the well paid tour guides is: A. That he went a little off; whereas he
was always excentric, he kind of made up his own eccentric mind to do this—and that’s that. B.
We would remove them, but this is what he wanted, and of course, C. the very popular, ‘I don’t
know. Why ask me?’ And likewise, D. ‘do I look like a 19th and 20th century millionaire with
too much money?’
I can tell you why he hung the hinges, but I won’t.
Just kidding. He hung the hinges to fuck with you. It is a local joke. It is that perverse thing
that pleases the creator. And of course paintings are open doors—never forget that. Purpose
exists beyond fucking with you.
Somewhere in here, say that it’s my belief that if someone knows with certainty that they
know what they know, they have a right to, and even an obligation to screw around with this
thing; idea; ability; handicap whatever. It’s God’s will then. An approximation of God’s will;
that’s what makes it art. Ruining art doesn’t make it better, it’s ability to.
Alfred Hitchcock, another Prima Donna. He wanted to appear in each of his films. His name
was above the title, but he knew the grreatness of his greatness so…he had the ability to ruin the
work. When I say ruin, read, make it better. More about that later. And Alfred realized that this
could actually ruin his movies…people would watch for him to walk a pack of Pekinese dogs, or
stand watchfully in front of a funeral home as the camera pans to Cary or Grace holding hands
exchanging fearful glances. He realixed… One of these days I will learn to type—or I’ll know
why not! If my left hand was not such a retard…well anyway. He realized that being
unrestrained is freedom, that if you hold yourself back, you’re not free, but if you don’t, you’ll
destroy your own stuff. Many great works of art have been destroyed in this paradox.
THIS is an important point: Al, was doing something he really wanted to do, because he felt
like it, and because he could, and because it amused him, and because it became his signature,
and because he liked to fuck with people, and because it was a local joke, and because if you have
the power to ruin something, you have the power to make it grrrrrrrrreat. That was a keyboard
problem I swear to God. I am a Prima Donna about one thing—besides the knowing the
greatness of my greatness—I know the Otter very well. Another proble…that was a computer
went on standby problem, and I hit any key to restart it. I hate WORD. You could literally lose
all your work in 2 or 3 key strokes.
Look, if you still don’t know what any of this has to do with sex attics like your self, read
chapter 11, page 545, 4th line, and while your about it, read page 69 upside down, right around the
middle of the page. Getting too manic I think, do you? yes, do you? yes.
 The Johnstown flood
It’s the story about the imagination. Therefore, it’s about a crisis.
There was a common town. Large for the area—a ‘Center,’ they would have you believe, tho
it was to become a center, of sorts, it was a place on the way to somewhere else. As towns go, it
was the abused dog, the spinster—related to all, and left alone to rock in the center of the room
drying out and flaking off.
It was 1889, big things were happening—the ironic lovemaking of white men and black
women, driven by 19th century morality—but not here.
What makes it so hard to describe is that it was an imaginary place. Not that people didn’t
come and go, they did…by the thousands.
It was equally forgotten, like that familiar dream you settle into so comfortably and then in the
morning go on about your business. If it weren’t there, you’d miss it once you realized it was
gone. If I said, ‘no one cared,’ you would be more confused about it. The people there, cared,
and they vomited when they drank too much, but neither caring nor vomiting made this town the
center of anything, least of all the crisis in the long loose-sleeve of imagination.
If I said, ‘it had no pretensions,’ you would know I was lying. It had all the fishy smelling,
dandruff-hiding pretensions that hoop skirts and high collars could muster. It was a wont for
imaginative developments. It was lost, or perhaps it was living well and couldn’t care less.
Descartes, the great and gifted mathematician and rhetoricist, said of the century in which he
lived “He who hid well, lived well.” I say, duh! Only a great big bitter-artist could say that, and
only a gbba could know it’s true of every age.
The perspective the flood had on the truth was that it began in the bedrock that raised up all
over the place and left nothing to the imagination. So, I suspect, the caves and caverns that dotted
the land instructed no one. Perhaps if they spent more time in their sylvania caves they would
have had a better appreciation for the power of water, but once again, by implying that they were
short on intellect would persuade you from my point. They were not too short on cave lore; they
were too far from the caves.
Johnstown had a perspective on truth that could, and did, burst the minds and imagination of
thousands. It was so horrible people forgot it immediately. It was a death knell to the hope that
passed for happiness, of perhaps millions, but that’s why we have so many people—so that
horrible things don’t ruin everyone’s day.
The idea that there are no stupid questions is erroneous. These people were as dull as
dishwater. They died because God likes to watch water flow down hill—like any perpetual child.
Meaningless tragedy doesn’t mean the same to Him. Drama is everywhere.

It was a cool rainy day in May 1889. The rains were particularly fierce that spring. The
community of Johnstown located in the Appalachian mountain range of Western Pennsylvania
was in the very heart of a burgeoning Steel industry. Something horrendous was about to happen.
This was a crisis of the imagination fueled ironically by coke. But I digress.
The canal system provided the easy and cheap transportation of thousands of products and
consumer goods in a westerly direction. The railroads, and the tracks that guided them put a
quick end to the slow waterways plied mostly by flat bottom barges pulled by touchy mules.
The canals that led to Johnstown were abandoned and drained into the lake that sat 14 miles
up-river from Johnstown. The lake was dammed to provide sport fishing and recreation for the
owners and managers of the great plants, and also for the growing middle class in the area. Some
of the wealthy Pittsburgh steel magnates like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick and Andrew Mellon
were members of the now infamous South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, an elitist, and once
secret retreat for some of the wealthiest men in America.
 The towns below the dam knew of the danger but never imagined what 20,000,000 tons of
water would look like. The town, named for Joseph Johns, had been located away from and
between the hills that supplied the steel and the coal. Positioned to allow for growth of the
mining industry and yet central enough that no town could be built closer. Many of the nearby
towns were located on the mountainsides, which made them almost inaccessible by road or rail
and difficult to enlarge. Johnstown was built in a valley, lower, and up-wind from the noise,
choking fumes and toxic dust. The founders of the town decided to build on a treeless area
surrounded by the most beautiful forested area in all of Pa. The land was flat, it looked like an
esplanade—It was a flood plane.
The reservoir, turned lake, grew to meet the expectations of the membership. It was
maintained by engineers and Italian laborers who came to the area for jobs, and the good
life. For some reason the spill-way was not maintained. Instead, over time, the dam was raised
higher to allow for a larger lake, more boats and more peace and quiet.
The dam began to weaken at 11am on June first 1889, after many messages were sent warning
the people down river of the potential for structural failure and flooding. The townspeople had
heard dire warnings before, and they had a cynical slant to them, the people not the warnings, tho
up until that morning you couldn’t tell the difference.
All the messages were sent on horseback; every hoof beat vibrated the trails that led from the
water; every shout and shovel moved disaster that much closer.
It had been raining off and on for more than two weeks. The ground everywhere was
saturated, the rivers were at their maximum, the town’s-folk were concerned and pulled their
curtains back and looked in the direction of the dam for signs of any problem. The men who
were responsible, tried their hardest to shore up the dam by piling stones and whatever was handy
on the earth and rock dam. They even had time to build a spillway off to the side but it became
jammed with debris.
The bucket they were filling was a mile across and the water level was rising an inch every ten
minutes, the spillways were covered in iron screens to keep the fish in, and were not functioning.
At 3:10 pm the dam burst.
20 million tons of water tore open the center of the dam 450 feet above Johnstown sending a
wall of water 60 feet high racing thru the valley of the Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek Rivers
at more than 40 mile an hour.
They say the sound of the water was like unending thunder and made the ground shake. The
people in its way were swept up like dew, and became part of the force that rolled downward
toward the town of 30,000, some still in their houses.
It didn’t happen all at once, it took the crest of the wave about an hour to roll thru
Johnstown—that’s how big it was. Another hour to reverse its course when the wave broke
against the mountain, and came racing back. It destroyed everything in its way. Thousands were
killed, but not right away; many were seen floating on tree limbs or bobbing in the water calling
for help. Some were scrambling to get ahold of the river bank, just to find it dissolving into mud.
People tried to help their friends and families just to have them pulled from their arms and sent
screaming down the current to certain death. Many climbed to higher ground to get away from
the inferno just to be pulled back into it 20 minutes later. Huge portions of the hills gave way,
1600 houses added to the weight of the water smashing flat everything in its way whether it could
float or not. The body of a man was found a week after the worst man-made disaster ever
recorded in the history of the world, in Steubenville Ohio, two rivers, and 200 miles away. He
had been a passenger on the train that was crossing the old stone bridge when the water pulled it
from the tracks. People were killed by the flailing limbs of horses trying to stay afloat, some
were incinerated in a fire that burned steadily upward even as it was whipped along with the un-
burnable downward progression. And believe it or not, there was a wire works among the hillside
factories that bid eagerly for cheap labor. A leading manufacturer of barbed wire added its
storehouse, as well as its twisting and cutting machines to the mix in a hopelessly grim, and
Gothic plenum.
The tragedy of the Johnstown flood was a crisis of imagination: No one considered what went
before them or why things looked the way they did when they arrived. Possibilities were put
aside, in all likelihood. No one considered the way to undo something might be to blow it up and
start over. No one imagined change, fright, weight, gravity, speed or the inability to run fast
enough.
No one imagined the horror of seeing children in the river splashing around holding hands.
No one imagined you could be so scared you couldn’t make a sound. No one believed their worst
fear might come knocking on their door. No one imagined such an abrupt end to a peace and
quiet, that rang for years in a beautiful ‘C’ chord. No one imagined dying upside down, riven
with hollow steel bullets with wooden centers. Or being tied to trees by your neck with your
pockets turned out and your sex indistinguishable and unknowable. No one could imagine being
burned alive and or buried alive, calling out for help the whole time, to people who you knew,
wearing clothes you mended for them. No one imagined that helplessness would have a sound
like that. No one imagined you could die without regret. No one could imagine that you would
have been the 81st person called and the 702nd to die, or that they could be lost in the woods, the
treetops, behind their own house and never be seen again. It happened so quickly no one could
imagine the building you worked in could turn to dust right before your eyes. Or that you would
ever dive off your own roof without a thought as to consequence.
This crisis in imagination happened mostly to John David Lewis, who survived his wife and
six children to find the fortune he had amassed disappear in five minutes while he looked on; and
spent the rest of his life on horseback asking people the same question. He asked it so often, they
say, he stopped waiting for a response, and just rode on, day after day, year after year. No one
imagined they could go crazy, dreaming of their own true love, and perish without them, in a
torn-apart world. No, no one had seen his Emily.

Anticurrent
If you don’t want to read blue words, that’s fine. That was an inadvertent computer glitch I
swear, but it makes a point. Whereas, it’s unethical to write fiction and present it as fact, to add
made-up words about what is clearly very factual information, is just asking for trouble, begging
for, some might say. It should be noted that there is no word for anti-current. I looked; there are
two contractions: up stream, and up river. Essentially up the creek. Since I haven’t seen a stream
or a river lately, I suspect that others have not either, and trends being what they are: I leave it to
your imagination.
In English, there are hundreds of words for assaulting someone, the list is too long and
remonstrable, but there are no words for going against the current. Only, being difficult, and
causing problems. Is that sort of thing interesting to you? It is painful and obvious to me why.
You can go to jail for making up words. You can also go to the nut-house for using made-up
words, but the strange truth is, that if you print them in blue or, in fact, any other color other than
black or white, and you limit their use to words for which there are no substitutes—you can’t. If
you use gray you have to have something for which there is also no word, but it is similar to the
expression used in discussing musical ability, ‘absolute pitch.’

More Apocrypha
 Jesus had been dead for over a hundred years before they started to hide some of his more
eccentric teachings, you may read understandings. Jesus wrote little.
The scramble to hide Billy’s thoughts began in some cases the same day. Archeologists and
anthropologists were amazed how little corroborative evidence existed that he had ever been
anywhere, even when they had unclassified public documents that proved the fact. The picture
confounded experts. The phenomenon was believed to derive from unenhanced memories. In
other words, no one talked about it, so there were no alternate versions, so there was no argument
over who was right and who was wrong. Consequently, the ideas lingered until someone said,
That reminds me of something I heard somewhere. When was it? It was a long time ago, before
The Age of Sense.
That’s apparently when knowledge clusters spontaneously developed. These were known as
arguementarium, or arguementaria, since there were virtually tens of them. That was the name
given to these places where the seeds of his teachings grew. The starting places.
The final judgment of history was that he was crystal clear.

The Greatest Gift

No, it’s not understanding.
Paris represents the greatest gift. He is the chance to see yourself as a young man and hang
out. He is boring because he loves you; he is captivated.
At first, it is clear he is there to hold a place in the hope that when the story is done you will
write him a part. But you never do.
He is forever hopeful, if nothing else. He is the good news. He was there. If he hadn’t been I
would have had to have lost hope. Hope of a happy ending. Paris doesn’t get to really live until
all is said and done. His comments and injunctions will have meaning one day.
It is not done yet.
He is saving a spot so he can go back and live again.
Do it all over again, do it better this time.
He never does because. Just because.
The world is blue, completely linked, and just as suddenly it’s not. The End.
******************************************************************************
******************************************************************************

(Consider:) The Exam

I gave God the handle to my life. He has cleanliness issues, and was shocked at how the
dishes in the sink were all of a sudden His problem, He thought everything was awkward, but
quaint, tho he never said so. I knew His thoughts, the recognizable parts, and yes, we had a
conversation me for Him in me. I thought…yes…I thought there was going to be some great
sucking sound, but there wasn’t and we didn’t argue about it; I thought something horrible would
happen and he thought otherwise.
He did write me a message: ‘all of their parochial concerns cause them great fear. It’s
stultifying.’ Some big help, everyone knows that. He loves jokes. He checked out my dick of
course and pronounced it fine, ‘some of my best work.’ He meant dicks in general; I assured him
I was glad I had it. He smiled often and now he feels welcome and comes and goes just the same
as before. Absolutely no change tho my head feels lighter and I have less to remember.
I tell stories with no chance for debate. One day He asked if he could come over. I said…—
well, what would you have said? I said, Of course. I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but I
forgot about it. I didn’t clean up. I took a bath because I had planned to go to the nutrition
center, and they have a sale the first week of every month. It was April seventh. He showed up
in me. He took over. I watched from inside, at first, and then I watched, and felt, and had privy
to, thoughts of a sort—from various locations around the room, none more than three meters
away. He said something about the dishes in the sink and I gave him the sponge. That’s when he
looked at me. I knew who he was, of course, I just had no sense of gravity. He did the dishes—
thru me, the way I do the dishes, but it wasn’t me. He thought it was awkward. I was long past
the thinking I might have a heart attack phase—I was well past that. We didn’t talk much, the
conversation had been ever after even always and ongoing for some time.

Three conditions to start with: do not lie to my face; one question at a time, and if I am silent
suddenly, you must wait; you will know what that means. He jokingly said to me, ‘don’t lie to
me, don’t talk to me, don’t look at me, and I’ll show up when I’m ready.’ He’s what you’d call
an active listener.
He left. I gave God the keyboard, and he wrote the exam, that, as me, in me. I put in the little
half quote marks. I was shocked when He began, as I always do, ‘consider.’ He also suggested I
turn up the heat. He’s not paying for it tho. He wondered the house hadn’t gone-up when he saw
the stove, but I think he was kidding, it’s solid as lead, in fact, I think it is lead.
I just noticed; he put it in parentheses, (consider) hmm. I also took a bath, ostensibly in order
to go to the mall and buy my protein drink, before he came. I told you, he has cleanliness issues.
And that part about Nazi’s is dubious; I believe they are used as toothpicks. He insisted I talk to
my father and apologize for making him feel guilty, and wondered, as I did, why he didn’t just
commit suicide. Who’s tough? You’re tough. Yeah.
There was never any sucking sound. Isn’t that funny, I thought there’d be an upheaval or
something. The things we think are true, that could never be. If you think I didn’t ask for a
bigger dick, you’re wrong. That’s when he made his pronouncement.
He says, don’t ask him to cure your cold anymore. He’s off in the universe and the answer is
No. When he offered to bring my father to me, I balked.
How crazy do you think I am? He’s been dead for almost 13 years.
I said no, and No still means no. Like I say, nothing changed. He feels this message is a no-
brainer.
The project is unlimited, but he gives it five years, I should have seen that coming. I just
remembered I got a ‘message’ in 02 or 01 that I had 3000 days to live, I don’t remember when
exactly, but it was right around the time Stephanie-Rose died.

The next day Billy woke and felt like the real deal, it was clear and sunny and he decided to
embark on his first interview. He rehearsed his three conditions for an hour.

4-3-20 year-month-day (ymd) TV interview

Billy proceeds with a series of interviews one at a time, like a cousin of a cousin touting his book
on the 35th president of the United States. His almost uncle.
Barbara, I have two conditions, and an ethical point. The conditions are these: don’t lie to my
face. Okay?
Okay.
Oh. Now how can five million pictures be better than one?
They can show different aspects of the person.
The many aspects of me. Which different aspects are you referring to?
As much as the camera can show.
Oh the camera that doesn’t lie?
Yes.
I don’t need that, I have you.
But the people want to see and hear you.
Don’t change the subject…Tell me which aspect you’re going to capture? The smile on my face
as I walk away? You cannot capture me or any aspect of me in five million pictures that you
can’t capture in one.
Butt?…
—That would be as likely as any other aspect.
I can’t just turn the camera off.
Turn the cameras off.
Guys, turn the cameras off.
See, just that simple.
And the audio?
No, that’s okay. You really don’t get it, do you?
No.
Barbara, did you ever have one of those moments when you feel the inside of your shirt? You
know all of a sudden you’re moved somehow; maybe you inhale to a surprise or recognition,
maybe you exhale to loss or realization, maybe something changes? This is the reason I get
dressed in the morning, in the hopes that I will feel something.

She stares at his reference to her blouse, which is too white and too sexy, and doesn’t go with her
hair. She is becoming apprehensive at his ability to speak to her inner demons.

What is…I…hesitate to ask, sir. How should I address you?

House number, street, town, state, zip code, country. He smiles for no reason.
She tilts in the chair they placed to capture her best side—and then moved three times, before
she’d sit in it.
What is your second condition, if I may be so bold.
Well…One question at a time, and I don’t believe in interviews or any such fakery, a pretend
conversation is of no interest to me. How do you feel about it?
That’s fine with me Sir…but back to my question. Do you prefer Sir, or Mr. Hudson, or just
exactly what?
My name’s not Hudson.
Squirming in the chair that’s too tight, she goes blank. She has never had to ask an interview
their name before, at least not since she auditioned for What’s My Line.
Oh, the ethical point.
Sometimes I can’t speak, it happens occasionally, it always passes. You must wait. It is the
response that causes the pause. You’ll see what I mean. And you should wait; interrupting the
pause will not bring an answer or allow the question to come faster, nor will it hasten or obviate
the response. So just wait, silently, please.
My name is Immanuel Divine Savior, but please, call me ‘ im.’
Can we turn off the lights or turn on a fan or something? She asked the crew.
Alternately Barb, you could call me God in Man, Gim (soft ‘G’ sound), for short.
Okay honey, where were we?
I smile because God smiles.

Passing thru crazy all across country

Judy Garland couldn’t go on. So used to seeing the audience from behind a curtain, the producer said: Look! The first
three rows are occupied by the handicapped. She looked out, and said, “You wheeled ‘em in, you can wheel ‘em out.”
I stayed home. The convention hall came to me. This may sound strange but that’s what
happened. You see, I can’t go there, and I don’t know why.
The microphone was before me. “Hello,” the audience squirmed, it was dead silent and hopeful.
No one said good luck. If I thought about it, which I didn’t, I would have realized it was a
superstition—don’t say what you mean.
I had already broken a leg so I figured I was okay. It is in my opinion, by these things that I am
known.
I have three conditions, I began, One, do not lie to my face, one question at a time, and three, if I
cannot talk, if I stop abruptly, you must wait, you will know what I mean.
I say this because there will be time to ask questions; this is an informal talk. No one will
survive. If I raise two fingers to my lips, that doesn’t mean Shut Up—I just can’t speak.
In the front were a bunch of gypsy transvestites—big hair, huge tits, bangles, beads, some were
flavored, it was a mess. They had names like Patio Furniture, and first names like Igotta.
I will never be your opening act, I said to the big red one, with the dress that took off on its own
from her shoulder, and looked for all the world like fireworks. She looked at me genuinely
unaware that I had spoken to her. I will never be your opening act, I repeated. Please go to the
back and stand there. She looked around and her eyes baubled. This is the front of the stage, I
intoned to her mystification. Please.
People were uncomfortable—that’s why I stayed home. You sit because you are right to sit, and
you my dear, will stand because I told you to. Please go to the back. The day you listen to me,
and do what I say, will be a happy day for you, do you understand me?
Happiness had eluded her so long she’d forgotten how long. I hadn’t. It was written on her face
as it was etched in so many others. It was unmistakable and could not be disguised or covered up
in any way. There was a slow shuffling movement. Someone took their wig off. I had this fear
that the audience was going to disrobe, and I’d have bedlam. My dream about appearing in front
of an audience naked was turning around on me. I just knew it, they were going to disrobe, and I
was going to be the only one dressed. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always do,
nothing. The flash bulbs, the real ones, went to the back of the room, and I started again, but I
added something, it was a whisper, and it was completely unexpected.
I’ll never be your beast of burden. I’ve walked for miles and my feet are hurtin.’ I’ll never never
never never never be.
I am delusional as well. These are my people. I am not here to make you happy. I’m here to
see that you are. I am not certifiable, and that may be because I’m single or not. I just throw that
in for the shear hell of it. I forgot everything I had come to say and I remembered a line that is
unknown—That you can forget great things, is a sign you have learned the value of completion.
The lesson. That was said on the death bed of several great and well known men and women, it
was also said by many unknown people. I attribute it to Balzac, because that’s where I heard it.
I started over. You know my conditions. I have two ethical concerns: I do not lie, however,
I’m not too good with the numbers, I have to have help with them. Unfortunately, my helper took
the books and went to Brazil some time ago, leaving behind urchin rinds and a map to Tobago. I
celebrated my 45th birthday two of three times, so I can’t be trusted with numbers, secondly. I am
inspired. The audience cringed, and began to lean. I felt like I was back at the store watching
Mei block my view. And I have full veto power. A wide range of disappointment and approval
popped up like little bubbles all over the crowd, but no one noticed. I was glad they were such
accomplished liars. They forsook the thing that they were good at, which is finding fault—for
me, which they were utterly unqualified for. Note to self: don’t say forsook. That would be like
saying the name of The Work, and I’m superstitious. I touched my knuckle to the wood of the
podium; it looked so empty, there was nothing there. I had nothing to give. This was a fine time
to realize it. Luckily I had remembered not to come. See, that’s the advantage to getting the
convention hall to come to you, and it’s not too much trouble, fact it’s simple. Yes, and
complicated. I had a feeling like I was getting the meningitis back again, but this time I could
only use one preposition. Christ, just when everything seems to be going in your way!
Oh, I said, as if I had drifted off my second ethical point—full veto power is everything. Try
not to use it.

And then the world changed. I went back to Claremont Louisiana. It was dumped in my lap
like a half ton of raw jumbalaya: part quid, part squish, and mostly invisible. Not invisible,
imaginary invisible—we never looked invisible.
In Claremont the townspeople couldn’t take their eyes off me, none of them, or I should say all
of them had the same problem—they stared at me. I figured at first they had never seen such a
beautiful boy, after two weeks of that, I began checking for broken zippers and loose teeth.
Loose and missing teeth were endemic. Four months later I decided there was definitely
something wrong with these people, and decided to dance for them, just to fuck with them. They
loved it…absolutely loved it. I was a star, I couldn’t shake them. If anyone objected to my hip
action when I walked, they were instantly silenced—I never understood that town. I loved it, and
I loved them in a way, but they were kind of creepy, and never included me. I had to go down to
the stream and play among the creatures that lived there, as they ebbed and flowed to my delight,
like the rings of Saturn. Clarke noticed that they couldn’t take their eyes off me also, and that’s
where he developed his amazingly cutting wit. He superceded me in all things, and agreed that
their cooking was like their joke telling: an explanation was usually required.
Clarke burnt a hole in Aunt Tillie’s lace doily, the one that covered the 5,000 kilo, antique
buffet table in her inclement dining room, the one that read, ‘don’t go in there!’
Don’t you know what don’t go in there means? She said to Clarke one day as I walked by, and
then hit him. He had the same gift I had, protection instantaneous protection, and we were out of
there before you could skin a coon. You see, it’s the fat that enables the skin to peel away so
effortlessly. These people are pretty slick, he’d say with a glint of his own mischief. What’s the
difference between slimy and slick? Me neither.
Clarke would say, For fishermen, they make pretty good seamstresses; a reference I always
thought, to their nets, and their petty reparations.

When I looked up at the audience, they were enrapt, and I realized how totally visible I was.
“This is what I believe,” I continued, as tho nothing had happened, but some saw the glow
begin (I wanted a bag over my head).
I believe what the fundamental evangelical orthodoxy believe: all eggs are dead; there is no
difference between wonton grievous murder and picking flowers; the only life I know that matters
is mine. Dead silence prevailed.
Man is the center of all things, around which everything else revolves.
The audience looked clueless, I felt great about that.
God created man for his own amusement; he is the gift that keeps giving.

No one knew, and I had a delightful private moment. Clarke and I moved to Forest Grove
Nevada, also known as Saw Dust. Town names mean nothing to me; it is not an ethical question,
and it’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t see any difference. It only helps you to get back
home when you’re lost, and if the people you ask, know where they are in relation to where
you’re going back to.
Clarke and I just kept traveling. We both took our protection to the limit, I think that was the
best thing we taught each other. He tried to kill me, and I just stayed sweet and innocent.
Together, we replaced our parents without realizing it. We. He couldn’t outrun my protection,
and I couldn’t defeat his desire to kill me. All I could do was ruin it for him—you know, take all
the pleasure out of it. Anyway, Saw Gulch was a gun town. Everything was guns, I swear,
sometimes they’d go off by themselves. I felt safe, but just the same, I was glad that these yahoos
were not riveted to my beauty as they had been in Louisiana. I had grown some, and, gotten
‘lanky,’ or as Clarke used to say, How much do you weigh today? You gain a pound per inch—
keep this up and you’ll be the first 84 pound seven foot tall 12 year old, in history.

The convention hall was packed.

The question then becomes, what are we going to do about all the stupid people?
Nothing. A collective sigh of relief went out. What did they think I was going to say?

The one thing about gun towns at least in the West is they always have soda machines, lots of
them, so whenever we needed to take a break, me and Clarke, and some hang dog would go down
ta the store and Clarke and I’d imitate the constabulary. He always started it. What you wonts to
do? Hell I doe know, I a thunk I a go down have me a sodr pop. A sodie you full shiiiiiit. Thar
aint no reel sodie zih only some zat got ice zenny way I cant understaaaan a single wur –urd yo
saying. Straighten up Jackson, here cum the cops.
Our protection lasted thru the evening, and we often got to watch the sunsets, which were by
far the best thing in the town. I was having a lousy time because I was not the center of attention
here. He told me it was a gun town and he told me how they had duels for no reason. I thought it
sounded great. What did I know? I was a kid.

He took a bullet for me. I didn’t realize the center of Saw Dust was shot up. I could have just
looked around to see it, but, well that’s protection for you. If you’re taking something, you’re
taking it away from someone else. I had the protection. If you think we went from there to
Paradox you’re right, Secaucus NJ. Some big deal.

Who are you? Someone shouted from the audience, wakening me ever so slightly.
I am. And if you thought I was going to say something else you’re wrong. I am. What you
think about it, say about it, complain about it, get all misty about it, changes nothing. You will
believe what you want to believe. You will see what you want to see. If I say I’m not The Christ,
you’ll hear that I am. If I say I am, you’ll accuse me of being late, and coming empty handed. I
held the microphone tight to sound, and very loose.
A hush, permeated with a hefty dose of ‘crazy,’ filled the cramped, airless room. I wished I
had a Xanax, or that time would speed-up a bit, and the Xanax I took earlier would kick in. See,
that’s the trouble with drugs: delayed reactions, and side effects. The thing you want passes by
unnoticed. Cramp. I thought I saw something move, but the world didn’t slide, the rug hadn’t
been pulled out from under everything, so I thought what I always thought—keep something for
yourself. Don’t give them everything all at once.
I was born gay, I continued. I know how petty and hateful you can be. I know that you will
try to ruin everything I ever had, ever made, ever said, ever thought, ever loved, ever needed; I
know you will stop at nothing…you see, I know you. Billy looked to his right, and said
something to the people there, about martyrdom being overrated and how he wasn’t ‘up for it.’
There was a pause, and a few yawns. Billy turned to the far right, what his father used to call,
unfortunately, the lunatic fringe, and he said something so rude, they were stunned. Quite a few
got up and left. What he said was rude, but very clear, extremely clear. He wasn’t about to let it
happen twice. He took steps to see that he would never be a martyr again. The ones who left,
didn’t know that Billy wanted them to leave, or why. Many of the ones who remained, never
heard another word. Billy wasn’t, couldn’t be, was nothing like, and bore no resemblance to,
anything they would even think twice about. Believe it or not, Billy was a one-time thing. A
butterfly with wings. They didn’t understand, but then, they didn’t need to. He was protecting
them—They were fragile. Their faith, the strange beliefs of the far out there, was so flimsy it
could fly, a light wind could pick it up, carry it off, and you’d never see it again. It would
essentially sink, like an ark that just couldn’t hold that last 383,000 metric tons. That’s why they
have to censor everything—not for the kids. They hold their own ears, because they know it’s
true. Their faith is not strong, not strong at all. But faith is fragile.
They pretend to be in love with its imperfections. Like an ancient vase—Beautiful. Great.
Amazing in a thousand ways. Fun to talk about restoring, but you can’t move it to a restorer
without breaking it, and no restorer would even touch it—until you back-off …about a mile or
two or three. Billy said, and did, all he could, to keep the stupid, F-ing, so-called far right, out of
his Work. They saw God as small-minded and hateful. They also believed that God was made in
their image, and no matter what you say, they’ll never get it. This juxtaposition is beyond their
comprehension. If you’re not encouraged to think, in short-order, you won’t be able to. It’s best
to leave them where they are. They’ll get there eventually. It’s not that they’re so unnecessary,
it’s that they gave up integrity many years ago. They saw no profit in truth that changes. They
don’t know God’s mind, any more than they know God’s medium. They won’t know, because
they’ll refuse to know. They will look away. Those who speak of change, never mean
themselves. Plus, they could screw-up a Norwegian drive-by shooting!
I’ve failed a thousand times: I’d fail a thousand times more, for you, and I hate failing.
Clarity, hello, is a bit of a false doctrine. Many people believe you can’t have clarity until all
is said and done. Many people also believed that that is what Billy’s appearance signified. Billy
is not poised to reflect clarity (duh), it inevitably leads to overstatement. Billy is aimed directly at
certainty, and he never overshoots…..So much for clarity.
“Where was I? Oh, yes, I know you. I bet you didn’t expect that. I would like to show you a
trick, but I have to have an intelligent audience.” Three people got up and left, and five people
moved in to take their seats.
Show me a story of the Holocaust, and I will show you something you never saw.
A shake and a shiver go thru the crowd, six people run out, five come in to take their place.
The room is hot. No one carries a story of the holocaust with them, but when we looked, there
were several.
A man hands me the first story, it was typed. He points to paragraph three. I read the first
sentence. It’s a lie. And I threw it down.
A gasp went up, and the eeriness of that moment took my breath away. I just kept breathing.
Someone had a magazine, it had a thread-bare quality, and I wondered where it had been, but I
would never ask. I was clearly on my own, so I looked for the index, always page seven unless
the magazine is a fashion magazine, and then it’s about page 27. Holocaust survivors
remembered, page 67. I turned to page 67. There was a shout from the audience, and another, as
I read the Bright Water ad on the facing page reflexively. For some reason people can’t stand
silence. But I wasn’t reading the ad, I just scanned it—clear clean water. I looked down to read
what was becoming a blur. I wished I had a mirror to see if I’d ‘still got it,’ and I thought:
someone’s gonna fuck up my trick, but of course, they couldn’t.
I said, Remember my three conditions, just like Mrs. Ketler had said, as if she were looking
over her glasses, whether she had them on or not. That shut them up. They had no idea what I
was talking about, and they weren’t sure if they liked my tone. “Another lie.” I handed the
magazine back to a man who looked as tho he despised it. I read another article, this one was on
a palm-sized device, it was very blue. “The Holocaust began with the rise of the Nazi party in
Germany in 1933, continued through the course of the second world war. The Nazis murdered 6
million Jews in a bid to take over the world.”
“Lie! Omission! Obfuscation!”
Can no one show me. Psalms 118:22, Luke 20:17, Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10, John 8:28.
What you do even to the least of these, you do unto me (Matthew 25:40). Am I so far beneath
you? The apostles stayed, because Christ was funny. Christ was all about potential, and the
potential for humor in this, is unmistakable—like Kilamanjaro, you’d have to be in a whole
nuther country not to see it. I know because I’ve been there. And no, they didn’t record that, it
wasn’t the message. Wasn’t then, isn’t now. Funny people aren’t always funny. But I know you
know that. They tend to waver. With humor, the contrast’s already built in, plus, who could walk
continuously in circles repeating?
Did you think Christ would come back, came back, is coming back, to say hello? Or just to
have a fit!
I smelled a strange odor, and I thought, This is it—the grand mal seizure of all grand mal
seizures, but it was that smell of paper, ink, crayons, or burning ammonia that reeked and yet was
so subtle, people claimed not to smell it. I thought the house was on fire the first time I smelled
it, that was in Jettison Missouri, it had a burning smell, and the more I smelled it the worse it got.
It was like today, sunny and bright, not that I remembered, I don’t, it’s just that it’s always sunny
when I smell that smell. I think, if you want my opinion, it’s the scent of sunlight. I have come
to believe, it could be a thousand things, but what it is, is spirits who visit. They don’t talk, but
I’m sure that’s next.
I have smelled similar smells in sewage, and catholic incense, component pieces perhaps—but
when I ask people to smell it, they can’t. I’m sure it’s got a scientific origin, but science picks
funny times to visit. Of course, it could be my family, I have a lot of fair weather friends in my
family, of which I number one. I have no nose for odors, from all those years of cigarettes. I
think I must have killed a lot of olfactory sensory receptors.
I woke to hear myself shout “Nowhere do I see the word homosexual, I see six million Jews
stop, sometimes I see six million Jews, gypsies, mentally disabled stop, or 6 million Jews and
others stop. I am neither others, nor am I mentally disabled, nor am I, technically speaking, a
gypsy, tho my homeless brother and I did travel across the country in a kind of caravan—it was
not a retarded gypsy caravan stop. No more telegrams please stop. A small lie, but what else are
you not telling the truth about? Your veracity is suspect. For this reason as well: Nowhere, as I
look for the words homosexual, or sexually deviant miscreant, do I see the word ‘dregs.’ We
were the dregs of society, unfit for the pleasure of their good company, undeserving. Is it one of
your superstitions not to call the name of the devil? If not, where are the words: useless unclean
inhuman disgusting disgraceful deceitful conniving foul putrid, underhanded, untrustworthy,
cunning, pathetic, ugly, wanton, repulsive, untermensch—subhuman, unholy, unfit, unclean, evil,
kike, or faggot. Isn’t that what they called us, you and me? Are you saving those words for
something? Not in front of the children? They’ll get over it! Did it upset your vanity to be seen
with us, is that the problem? Were you keeping your distance in the grave? No, I think not—
were you outraged by the way we died; did our leakage offend you; was it too foul? The story is
not told here to my satisfaction.” and Billy throws the pager aside.
Who do you ask, how was it to die bit by bit, you ask the one that never did it! It is always the
one who survives that gets to say how the grenade attack went. Well, it didn’t go very well. I
don’t have much use for your history, try using your imagination. If you know, you should be
able to tell the story a thousand ways, if you’re looking for credibility you can only tell it one
way.
A gay man named Hiram scratched a message on the wall of one of the crematoria, for there
were many. In German, ‘Never forget.’ He wrote that on the wall before he left, not years later,
that day, that very day in 1945 January 27th—because he knew how they tell stories. They leave
the most important parts out. They killed you because you were, in their eyes, unworthy scum.
Tell us why you left us out of the story before the story is repeated. Tell us why no gays died in
your version, and this time tell the truth. Call the devil by his name. You know what you know
about your own life, but you’re afraid to say. You don’t know what you don’t know about his or
hers, but you can stop accusing.
I am the dregs come home. I’m back! No, not to say hello, not to converse, not to check your
work, I’ve seen it, it’s been checked, and it is found dismally wanting.
I’m not back for a visit, or to tell you the same things I told you before, ad nauseum. I am here
to lead you all the way out of this sespool. The most I can say, is, you have this childlike notion
that to save something, you must change it, that in fact you must change it, in order to save it.
That’s why I brought a friend; to help me explain this thing.

You broke fingers teaching the virtues of right-handedness, when you should have been
teaching the virtues of water. What were you thinking? All your denials aside, no one can think
for the life of them, now, why you were so stupid then. Well, I’ll tell you:
In the days before adequate water supplies, when people in larger communities, had to build
far from the river—when people went to the defecate, they wiped themselves with their non-
dominant hand. It was part of the hierarchy of rules, it was also part of the acthnocracy of
contracts. Ambidextrous people were, once again, off the hook.
The left was never referred to as the shitty-smelling-hand, called by any number of other
names, my favorite being ‘gammy,’ but I digress. Being a sort of writer, I like a good word now
and again. Even if I can’t use it in a sentence. The teachers taught the rules by rote
memorization, and religious mnemonic paradigmism.
Use your right hand to accept the pen, the Eucharist, the extended open hand. I don’t want
your shit. “It has even lower status than you.” Status, being the basic plea in most of our
communications. Not this one. I did not come to plead my case, or His.
Clean hand, virtuous hand, no good can come of your smelly left hand. Well of course with
13% of the population left out of this equation, everyone was touching shit all the time and lying
about it. The insistence on right-handedness lasted hundreds of years longer than necessity would
dictate. Our confusion about it’s original purpose, notwithstanding.
Instead of insisting on a hand check they went for an obedience check, and that’s always a
disaster. The attendant virtue of my right hand is not its equivarient relationship to my ass, but its
alacrity and efficacy. A rule is a rule, especially a rule about virtue. If you heard me say beware
then beware. Once again, water, and the properties of water such as: cohesion, distribution,
solvency, and heat capacity, make it a model structure.
Therefore, it was more about the availability of water, and the disagreeable nature of hiding
shit. I’m not asking for miracles just tell the truth for once. You’re a pack of liars who lie about
lying. You’re assholes who lie about touching your ass. If I could stop you, without killing you,
I would.
Do you think it possible, The Christ would come back if he had something to say? Do you
think it’s his job to apologize for The Dark Ages? Do you think he should tell the lessons of
Auschwitz? Or do you think he might come back, be coming back, have come back, to up the
ante. On the other hand, do you think there’s a plan B? To paraphrase Descartes:
I
think,
therefore
I
am
in charge here.

The only thing worse than a long, drawn out explanation is a short one. This is neither. This is a
story. It’s about why I came here, and what ‘up the ante’ means.

This is what Billy said to the f i: I o c r t b n u n , b u r y o a a (the squares represent a

space, because, for example, there is no fifth letter in ‘let.’ The comma between ‘yard’ and
‘before’ isn’t necessary, but 4 empty boxes are plenty) Note: 20th century obscenity law
prevented anything, but ‘word games,’ pattern recognition etc.
 The Information Age
In many parts of the world the natural flora and fauna are elegant and surreal. In these places the people strive to meet it and fail.

The information age—give me a break. The trip-you-up age, you mean. What would
superstitious peasants need with photons? When I tell you I sleep with men, half of you get
jealous, fully half of that group is sure they’re not jealous, and half of them again would love to,
if they could be sure what sleep meant, at any given time.
That reminds me of the fast Shakespeare story: William Shakespeare, great as he is, is
unreadable; it’s not English anymore. They live, his characters live in the moment, unfortunately,
the moment was over 400 years ago. The question is not how great he is or whether you can
learn anything from him, the question is, do you change him, his work, to save him? Or do you
let him go?
This looked like a really good time for a heart attack but nothing happened. It started to look
like my seventh coming-out party was going to be in a booby hatch, no noise makers, and no
party hats, just lots of feathers, all of them stolen. You don’t like it. You want me to be different.
Taller, shorter, older, younger, more this, less this, more that, less that. What for God’s sake did
you have in mind, razor wire? Dynamite with a laser beam…guaranteed to blow your mind? I
live here; I visit there.
I know you want to change me to save me, that’s what you always say.
Shakespeare ran away from home to join a troupe of actors. When he was 26 he abandoned
his wife and kids—how come nobody gets that he was an actor? Those are the two things that
made him a great writer. He wasn’t so worried about picking the right words, to him they were
practically all the same, and he had a big secret, he wasn’t going home if he failed. Greatness is
great, it’s also lousy sometimes.
The audience in the borrowed hall has long since clouded over. Tell the fast Shakespeare
story slow, and tell the slow Shakespeare story fast. I was sorry I brought the convention center
here. Look at them, they’ll be lit up like lampshades soon—do they know that this is the
information age?
Information you can’t use, is useless. That’s the first problem, solution, problem. The second
problem is you can’t unlearn what you’ve just learned.
The house doesn’t smell like burnt toast today and it was sunny, wonder why? Passover. You
can scrape burnt toast all day and have nothing to show for it. They won’t eat it and if they do,
they won’t like it and they’ll just get pissed off and resentful, and the place will still stink and
you’ve got nothing to show for it, but crust.
Clarke kept me up late when we were kids by telling stories that were so compelling. How
could a guy sleep—all about the Marines and Iwo Jima and the shores of Tripoli he even had
songs to go with the stories. We moved thru the country like cantaloupe, appearing like magic at
the breakfast table. I’m sure Clarke had no idea how much I loved his stories I only told him a
thousand times, but he’d say, Do you want me to tell you a story…..of course I do, stupid, what
do you think I come here for….you got the upper bunk and all I get is stories, keep ‘em coming,
let’s go! Don’t ask me any more, do I want to hear it…just tell me. He thinks he’s so great, half
the time! That’s kid voice.

But seriously, why do you think he’d come back? To tell you how horrible you are and how
unrepentant you are by nature, or would he take a more soothing balanced approach? I like things
that scare the kids. I think Christ would come back, has come back, is coming back for you. Like
pain—for you. Perhaps he’d come back to make you queer for each other—less ashamed to love.
Not so embarrassed to put the raincoat on at the height of the wet season, if you know what I
mean. Less frightened that they’ll run under a taller tree. Not so quick to make a sale, or hoist
one. Afraid of commitment possibly? Like a ball you know you can’t catch. That’s what they
say about gays…but when were they ever right about anything?
Life is funny, people are funny. People expect maybe I’m a cross between Marlon Brando,
Yuri Gagarin, and Amelia Erhhardt: The most beautiful and talented man on the planet, who is
also smart, brave, and lucky enough to be the first to get his ass launched into space. And you
want to stop looking, but you can’t. You’re wrong. I’m me. Pleasant, provocative, piqued me.
Unafraid to love, and hardly afraid of sex at all.
Your selfishness prevents you from seeing Heaven, it also prevents you from knowing which
direction it’s in, since you can’t ride or walk or be carried; you have to go naked—fat, hairy,
smelly and naked. Please wear something, they understand, as you do, that you’re fat, hairy, and
smelly under your clothes—that’s what drove property values down in the first place, when we
jumped the abyss. Everyone knows how you hate to clean up, cleaning each other up would be
totally out of the question.
This may be the wrong time, but the Otter told me something interesting last Sunday. That
was while I was hung over. I thought about calculating the relative equivalent value of animals.
It’s typically Otter in scope, and rife with short explanations which can’t be quite right; there’s
always something to sew up; and when you think long and hard about it you realize he was never
here, but he told you everything all at once years ago. Basically, I’m not going to go into it, but I
can show you the math. The Human to animal relative equivalent value, is 1: 2,188. One Human
has the same value as 2,188 of the general animal. The numbers are not the interesting part,
being relative and all; what’s interesting how he arrives at that.
You must begin with suppositions, I know—screwed already.
All Humans have relative equivalent value, i.e. we’re all the same. All animals have no value,
relative to Humans. Humans have all the value. Arguing is window dressing and cannily
expected.
The Human to Tiger REV can be calculated, however, because there are so many of us, and so
few of them. It goes like this: 7 billion People vs. ten thousand Tigers. This number can be
arrived at from the disposition, the offset to the corollary, that when the Tigers are gone, the
Humans are not far behind, so you have a Tiger REV. However, Tigers are animals, so they have
no value, so to find the mean of two numbers when one is zero you have to calculate zero, which
the Otter says is 0.00312, don’t ask (basically take half of one, five times and don’t cheat. Five,
being the number of divine human suffering, and the dynamics of accumulation being something
numbers don’t allow for).
Now, whereas pigs still have no value, if we were in fear of our continued existence on the
Earth it would be the same as the Tiger’s. Trees have no value what so ever.
The Cockroach REV is difficult to calculate because it’s theoretical. If there were only one
male (or non-pregnant female) cockroach left, it would have scientific value of a measly 1:
218,000. It is of course theoretical, since if there were only one, there couldn’t be 218,000, and if
Cockroaches can’t survive then all Humankind won’t, so the first value would be +/- 1. The REV
is always written as: Human : some other worthless species.
I found the whole thing enlightening, and it helped my hangover to watch him go thru it step
by step. It made me feel as tho my headache were subsiding at a similar rate. I asked about the
Tiger part, he said matter of factly: When the Tigers go, you’re next. He’s been right about
everything else. There is no purpose to the R.E.V. ratio, it all depends how you calculate zero. I
just like to hear him talk.
It is known in mathematical terms as a good deal, and in theological terms as equable: about
time someone said it.

4-4-07 Year-Month-Day (YMD)

 Wouldn’t it be funny if all humanity killed themselves, and all that was left were the Amish
and ten-thousand tigers? I was worried about the Amish, all that in-breeding and all. It’s bound
to make them sick. That’s what my mother said when I would steal away with my candy to eat as
much as I could. She was usually right.
I’d like to donate my sperm, but how can you make an offer like that? I just don’t have the
nerve to walk up to an Amish house and knock on the door, I mean, what would I say? You
know they wouldn’t understand. Besides my donation would be in a test tube. I wouldn’t even
know what to tell them to do with it. I think we should come up with a sperm dispersal system
that you could just give to women who were at the mercy of husbands who knew nothing about
husbandry, to…you know, take the pressure off. I think my kids would be fine with Amish
fathers and mothers. I am concerned about all the amphetamines tho—my son, or daughter
would probably get sick.
Of course, there’re the legal issues: paternity and all that. I can hardly say it was an accident,
or I didn’t know they were going to each carry the test tube around for a day and then pass it
along. I mean it gets more and more complicated the more you consider all the things that could
go wrong with that plan.

Simulation of the threshold scene:

Knock knock knock…hmm. Hmm. Oh hello, and I put my hands together like the Buddhists,
the test tube barely visible. I was wondering. Slam. The planning was fun, but you’re
right…they would slam the door, maybe if I talked fast. Good morning I found this in a basket in
the river I was going to throw it away but I saw a light coming from your house that seemed to
light the entire sky, here, bye.

The God dialogues

You know we’ve never had a conversation, a real one. Tell me a story.
The ostrich is humor.
Billy says: I know what you mean.
An ongoing series of blunders. God shakes his head. A tragic misreading of circumstances.
I’m sure you’re right, but what do you mean? says Billy.
Well, the decision to abandon the air, for starters. Was it too cold, too scary, too empty, too hard
to stay up. Too high. What was the problem. Misunderstanding of the situation, its
consequence, and poor judgment regarding the absence of competition—He can’t fly because
he’s so scared. Yes, pretty much…no brains.
I’m like an ostrich?
No Billy, you’re one of my favorite things.
A complete idiot?
No. God says.
An ill-informed reckless spoiled brat?
No. Sorry about that.
Someone with too much love?
Warmer, but no.
A fool for love.
Yes. Billy, you go where love takes you—un-caring of the consequences—completely unafraid
of what could happen. Actually a lover…of mankind. A teacher, a solution finder. Who knows
nothing but himself, and understands the nature of his own soul. G
Mrs. Ketler asked me if I had a soul.
I remember. And you said: I don’t know. G
You remember. B
Sure, you stopped the class dead in its tracks. G
That was pretty good huh? Billy says.
Yes, you shut her up, she never asked a classs that question again. One person out of all her
classes said they didn’t know, and that simple truth—the touching, brave honesty, turned the
question off. And made people see more clearly what truth is. Everything else became as
nothing. All her soul searching; what did she think she was doing. G
Yes. B
You were 17, you were more truthful than anyone, they looked up to you, they’d mis- judged
you. You were young and perfectly aligned. You were my little boy. God says.
Oh God, I don’t know, I dream about… B
I know what you dream about. But it can never be. G
I know, says Billy.
Billy, you want what you can’t have. Why don’t you want brains, or perception, or immortality,
understanding, or true love, or something more useful than a boyfriend, girlfriend, wife and
family. G
I don’t know. But I want true love. B
Do you Billy?
Sure, who doesn’t? B
Do you want it really bad. G
True love? Billy asks.
Yes, do you want for true love. G
I get lonely. B
Answer my question. G
Yes. Yes God, I want true love. B
I just told you, you don’t want what you have. There’s no need. G
I guess you’re right. I would like to have someone beside me tho. B
You have me, God said.
And 500 rings, but none of them fit. B
Now you sound like an ostrich. G
You’ll have your ring my son. Stop wanting true love. I’m telling you. God says, in a mocking
voice, if voice is the right word. Someday I’ll tell you the secret of the universe, but not today. G
I like what you told your shrink. G
Which one? B
You know. G
Yeah well, you told me to tell him. B
I know, I just liked the way you put it. G
He didn’t get it. B
No, I’m afraid not. He thinks your crazy. G
I think he’s crazy too. B
You must be then. G
Yeah God, I guess. I’m talking to you. Billy says, to a reception of silence. B
You know Will, God continues, after a break. G
Bill, Billy says.
I’m sorry about how you feel your life is like a big joke and all. G
Well. And Billy tears up. I like a good joke as well as the next man, but this is a whole life. B
No Billy, this is not a whole life, there is much more. G
Oh, yeah about that. B
You’ve crossed over. G
I have? But why didn’t you tell me? B
You wouldn’t have believed me. G
The Wizard of Oz, next to last scene. B
Yes. God says.
You are now in the world of ideas, and you can live forever. G
Until this whole planet crumbles, which is about 150 years. B
No Billy, forever. The real Forever. G
A lot of good that’ll do me now. B
You see what I mean. I try to be serious, God says.
Do you ever have sex God? B
No. I don’t have things Billy. I am. G
Oh. B
The divine multiplication of dreams, worth, temper, and stuff, of which souls are made. G
You didn’t like that part about larceny? B
It served its purpose. G
Will it? B
I just said it did. G
Goodnight. B
Yes, good night Billy. G
i
How did I get here? B
It was a natural progression. G
Thoughts don’t stop when you cant talk. BG
Right, nor dreams, nor memory, nor wishes. Thoughts keep going, and thoughts can only change
one thing…ideas. And ideas can only change one thing, everything God. So here you are
zip. G
Where? B
Ideas. G
Ideas? B
Ideas are real things. They are like time, they count in the universe. G
Ideas? B
Where do you think all this came from? G
Well, I have to go to bed now. B
See. G
I can’t see everything, Billy says. No one can. B
That’s a myth. G
A myth? B
You can see all of it. G
A blind man accordingly, can see all of it. Billy supposes.
Yes. God says, all there is to see. G
I’m worried that I might be crazy. B
God laughs (It sounds like a milkshake popping. It sounds like dimes, billions of them in a room
touching, not perceptibly moving, it sounds like a hum within a hum).
I know. You’re still funny, God says. Goodnight. G
When I get the ring, will we be married? B
I can’t marry a five year old. And you can’t marry your father. It would never work out.
I know. If I killed someone would you be mad? B
Of course. G
At who, me or the guy I killed. B
You’re too smart for me, let’s just say I’d be mad, and leave it at that. Go to bed. I’ll be here
when you wake up. G
Billy feels like a five year old, when God says this.
…dreams are wishes! Billy says, as he feels the door about to close. B
I knew you were going to say that, God said. Dreams and wishes are the same. If you are aware
of a difference, and to the extent that you are, they are different. And that, my boy, is a very
strange and extraordinary idea indeed. G
Did you just call me Indy? B
Big deal, goodnight. G

The End ((((Consider: bottom of page))))

Edgar Degas
Billy liked to watch TV. He watched everything. He watched and read. He watched and
thought. He watched and worked. He even watched and talked, listened, examined, and
questioned.

“You wouldn’t think after a lifetime of struggle, success—challenge-success,

misunderstandings, and even greater success, that old-age would hit him so hard, but it did. Said
perfectly, it hit him like a Degas. Like L’Absinthe 1876!”
Yes. God said.
“In his life, he was the creator. He learned to create. The how. He explored it. He invented
it. He pursued it, chased, caught, found, and played with it. He learned to create, and as he got
caught, himself, in infirmity and bad weather, he learned, just towards the end of his life, that
greatness in creative things, also comes from what you allow to escape—it was some of his best
stuff, and he’d say, ‘This is just to get my engine running. The get-me-started. This is not for
sale.’”

What were we talking about. God said. Oh, yeah, all those ruminations, and accusations about
who has an immortal soul, and who has a wanting soul, and all that. You showed her what for,
what honesty is, simple truth, and you trumped her petty soul- counting. It came from the edges
of perception—she was literally blind-sided. Why did you fix her so acutely. Did she upset you.
G
No, she asked. If she wasn’t ready for the answer, she shouldn’t’ve asked. B
What did she ask. God said.
She asked if I knew I had a soul. B
She asked if you had a soul. She saw you check, and come up dry. It astounded her, she’d
never seen anyone check before. G
Did it change her life? B
It changed her delivery. G
Did she suffer? B
No, not hardly. It took her three years to figure out why she stopped counting souls among her
students. Ten more to forget you, and a further ten to remember you. She still thinks you were
an ‘affect.’ I wouldn’t call that suffering, I’d call that soul searching. G
Me too. B
If someone asked you how far to the nearest inhabitable planet, would you tell them. G
Yes. B
Good boy. G
Do you ever think of her. God asked.
 No, not really. B
What is it. G
It’s a…a…It’s a story I can’t remember correctly. Yet, I can’t forget. An inattentive narrator
tells it. The musical score is played on the wrong boat. It happens on a river, so no one sees
nothing. It’s nauseating just to think of food. It’s of absolutely no remark, and the song is about
the death of a child. B
Was it Heavenly. God asks reflexively.
Yes. B
Good. G
Thank you. She was a math teacher wasn’t she? B
No, her husband taught math, she taught the humanities. G
Oh, yeah, I knew that. Are things ever what they seem? B
No, not hardly. G
I told the story to Fa. Billy said.
Which one…God asks trivially.
Well the one with the attentive narrator, the inattentive listener. The one I remembered
clearly. Facts all tied together and, more or less accurate. Except this one happened on the dock,
had a punch line, and included me feeding the seagulls, even tho, back in those days seagulls in
Philly would have made headlines. He never heard of the song, thought my father died of arsenic
poisoning, and professed not to know what a lollipop was. B
So you tweaked it, and gave it a big build up…and… G
Ughhh. B
Tell me about it, God says absently. I love you very much, Goodnight.

Living on Loperamide, the Arrival

He arrived in a car. It was called an Apocalypse, an Appaloosa, an Applecore. Whatever it
was called, it didn’t matter. Maybe he arrived on foot, when his boots touched the ground.
Maybe on horse back; what was the name of the neighbor’s horse? No matter. He showed up
because it was time. He had never left, and yet he was brand new, right off the boat, donkey,
whatever. He was himself, that’s how he knew he never left—he’d been there his whole life.
Now he had a job, a title, and a couple things to say.
It all came back to Him. He realized how he’d gotten there: His long unbroken-string of
failures made him very wary, very worldly, and yes, very idealistic. It wasn’t Natalie’s
Forerunner, it was the proximity of the sun. ‘That map you never drew, but thought about.’
The Sun without thought. The Earth of thought, feeling, emotion, truth and currency.
Meaning was the divide. It was also the only way to get there. Decisions are what it looks like
from here—horizon. Just the surface.
He was back on Earth, and he was compelled to say it. He didn’t mean to say it, nor did he
want to. It was the thing you must say. He had forgotten how it worked here.
God, why have you forsaken me?

He looked around for the elements of torture, because they were not obvious. They did not
line the roads or stand sentry at obvious places. It did not puzzle him, yet when it occurred to him
where they send men who, so-call sinned, he laughed, and felt better about the whole thing, tho
for a time he knew he would understand none of it.
He held his head, no blood, and he felt his hair. Good, still got it.
God implied right away, that men were very much like abused dogs, touched too roughly, too
often, and now if he went to touch them they would not allow it, in fact it would be wrong to try.
He was healed by what God said, Do nothing just stay.
 The litany of injustices that came with the car, made doing nothing, pleasure and pain. So, he
did nothing about that. He felt like turning up the radio, considering himself lucky he had not
been born a hundred years before, or a hundred years from now. God pointed out that that was
the whole point. He must live as tho it were a hundred years from now, a thousand, a million.
My ears didn’t work, my shoulder ached, my stomach was un-arrested, there is no word for
that, tumultuous…okay, and the Loperamide kept wearing off.
‘So.’ God said.
One eye goes left, the other right. Perhaps if you shoved a sharp stick in one of them, Billy said
sarcastically.
Hmm... God said.
Not funny? Billy remarked.
Which one. G
My left eye, the one you broke. B
The one you broke. You’re in the perfect place. G
Shut up and leave me alone. Billy said.
What’s my name? Billy, the Old Jesus, asked.
Shuh `tup. God answered, just like that (accent on the second syllable).
Well, that’s better than Tu pac. God! Billy said. I hate it already, and I want to go home. B
Happy April. I know how you loved April. G
Did. B
Till I ruined it. G
How’d you know I was going to say that? Billy said, unimpressed at his alacrity of mind (him
self). Do I have a dog? B
Do you have a dog. G
Yes or no? B
Yes. G
Rover, here rover. G

Consuelo runs in, “Oliver.” She begins talking in baby-talk. “His name is O-liv-er (accent on
all three syllables). Where’s my hansom man?” She said.
My ears perked up. Could a man be a dog; could a dog be a man? Maybe God was a dog—
anything’s possible. Words change their meanings. Oliver came bounding in. Billy’s
disappointment was palpable. The papered dog with pedigree, and no birthday, came bounding
in, and did his best to knock Billy on his ass.

Repeats
The sixth-month anniversary of the accident was fast approaching, and he walked back into his
house April Fifth.
“I’m home!”
“Is that you?”
Sounded like Consuelo. “Yes,” Billy said, tentatively, “I’m home.” Billy always had the
impression when he was with Connie that there was a crisis on hold.
“Good, I have something for you.” Connie said.
“You do?”
“Do you want it now, or later?”
“Never.” ‘later’ Billy meant to say.
Big hug.
“Au’re’voir!”
Decisions
The thing about decisions: I too have a limited view. A window shows the world to me. What’s
that tell you? I’m happy here. Horizon—Only visible with a peculiarly imposed limit. You have
to look, neither up, nor down, but along the edge. People have different views. I’m like a
shallow pond you can walk upon. A pool. A puddle. When I become the place you cannot go,
then you cannot go, and when you turn around I’ll be gone. I am like a perspective of dire
limitation—A perspective you can’t have a sunrise without.

It
I didn’t know how long it would be. How many spins of the wheel this time. Where to look to,
or what to look for. How much love I had left or how much love I had lost, thru looking away. It
was very quiet, the way I like it. I was alive. It was a happy day. If you can’t see the limits for
the impediments, you could be fooled in many other ways as well.

Repeats
The thing about decisions is, there is crappy frame of reference. Things are not, as they seem.
I decided to say the sun rises to my left. I meant to say the sun shines upon me, on my back, and
on my fingers, it silhouettes me, and what do I say…your horizon is wrong—obscured. n No
one is even looking there, nor could they be, and understand what I mean. I have bypassed you,
deadened you, implied you are easily fooled, and eliminated you. It is the opposite of why I have
come here. And why I stay.
It’s is an operational fault.

I am here now. The Earth is dying. The next planet is a million light-years away. I’m
working on it as fast as I can, but the idea of suspended animation is daunting indeed.

The End
(if you don’t understand, you have to ask a question)

Isaac
When Isaac was seven, he and his family went up to the mountains, as they did every summer,
to get away and have a vacation. One day Isaac’s mother saw him walk up from the lake, and she
thought, how perfect the day was, her son glimmering, the sun everywhere. He took his bathing
suit off, put soap on it, and hung it on the line next to the undulating bed sheet.
“What are you doing?” she called from the porch.
“I’m hanging my suit out to dry.”
“Why?”
“I just washed it, and now I’m hanging it out to dry.”
“Nobody washes bathing suites Isaac.”
That was as much as she knew about the future. She could not imagine a time when people
would wash bathing suites, or a time when a naked boy with clothespins would be impossible to
imagine. But in the 21st century; the water was polluted, sun tan lotion stained, the sun was
practically toxic, and child pornography was any naked child, especially if they were happy being
naked—It was going to be a wooly ride.
Her son, her pride and joy, would never be like this again. No one would. Not because it
lasted but a fleeting second—because he would be illegal to see. Immoral to consider. A drain, a
drag, unspeakably reprehensible. Laughable, but unspeakable. You couldn’t see him this way. It
wouldn’t be possible to recreate this simple scene in the future unless you were the Michelangelo
of the century, to come. If I said there were few Michelangelos, holding up the breeze, you
would surely catch my drift. If you asked me what I meant, you might be even more surprised.

Billy’s speech ~~~

At first, Billy’s speech was as Bbromion (Roar) or in Greek: inarticulate sound. Then became
Torrent: was without control. Then it became Horizon, and was exceedingly limited. Then it
slipped accidentally in a gush of limitations, limited perspective, and limited value into the
Imagination—where it passes gently back and forth between worlds like a hound.
Billy believed he was comprehensible in the extreme, that his thoughts were magic. And they
made nothing happen effortlessly, and they could be understood without trying. He was beyond
happiness, and expected no further developments. He was the Jesus of happiness, and he’d just
got back.

Having arrived
Having arrived after 2000 years, he wanted to go back right away, and panicked at the sight of
the door. How is it possible Jesus would be crazy with grief to be in our midst again? How is it
possible he would be crazy enough to come back? But with a strong constitution, pills, and a
raucous sense of humor, he just took one day at a time, and fairly soon he was able to go back and
forth. Like a transient in a hotel lobby—just follow the revolving door. The first true world
traveler. He was appalled when he read The Bible, at how John had been expurgated, and vowed,
as he had so many times, not to read anything ever again. Peace and calm were his bywords.
Then the meanings detached themselves, and he had to change his bywords.
Openness and clarity became his bywords, but everyone was in his business already, and no
one knew what ‘No’ meant—or anything else, including flexion-drive. What kind of language
was this anyway? No word for, Thank God I’m not home. Exuviate was as close as English
allowed. But, ‘what a dump,’ really said it.

Fiction, the rules of fiction

The rules of fiction are the problem with fiction. There is a writer, one per book. Some
people say two, but that’s fiction. There’s always a way out, built in. Put the book down and
keep reading the signs. You will never know at your leisure how the story ends. What fun would
that be?
It’s an odd thing, I have seen a number of deaths, all kinds. They are unbelievably anti-
climactic. All the good stuff is pure prologue, without that, the truth of the story may be absent.
I hate bad news, and ugliness. I keep my soul clean and my mind dirty. Words can change
their meaning very fast, it always goes the same. I was about to ask, ‘but where do I come in, and
I got a look, so I say a verisimilitude. It is not a lie, it’s just not the question I really wanted to
ask, no one seems to notice.’
 You cannot suddenly become an expert in anything, but acting.
Humor can save you, that, and a song. Sing with people, don’t beat them up because you can,
don’t blame them for your fictional problems. Everybody must die—except in fiction. Nothing
is ever what it seems, not hardly.
I believe God speaks thru your equipment, keep it clean. He has cleanliness issues, And he
thinks he runs everything. But he makes mistakes. Every few thousand years, to hear him tell it.
God’s ironic: The beings with the shortest record, claims he never has. You can’t create without
first setting limits—you just can’t. The whole thing is its limits.
I have superstitions: I cannot really read the work; I cannot easily say its name; I cannot easily
say my own, nor have I ever been able to. I don’t know why. I believe it was divinely inspired.
There are mysteries everywhere, but everything is not a mystery.
I made an amateur’s mistake, I only wrote when I was inspired. I mixed coffee with
inspiration, and found I needed very little coffee, I courted the muse. You don’t win the muse,
you court the muse. If you want to get married pick one, there is no right choice— that’s
mythology. Fiction is not mythology. I was working in fiction, and I felt inspired, I decided to
claim full veto power, and everything changed.
True, current and coherent are my guides in working. Use your own. Put originality up there
somewhere, but not first, you cannot be the originator of anything, even in your own fiction.
Fact and fiction are the same. The only difference is, in fiction, you don’t have to know how it
ends, maybe no one dies. I respect the words and encourage inspiration. Court it, you don’t have
to marry it, and wait, you must claim full veto power. It makes all the difference.

To heighten the drama, look for the boats of contrast, and the icebergs of conflict. People are
not trying to deceive you, they can’t help it.
The rules about declining your life are the conditions and claims you make.
Three conditions, to start. At least five claims.
I believe the claim is more important than the deed, however, you must be sincere—that’s the
hard part. Doing everything for everyone would be easier.
You are never suddenly an expert, however, if you’re writing a book about stupid animal
tricks, you must deal with a lot of shit—there’s no way around it.
In terms of characters, life and fiction are nearly identical—characters abound. They all ask
the same question: When are we going to get there, and then they sit down, and wait for someone
to drive them, or they just go back to complaining about the lousy food and the small portions. If
you ask them what they want, they are as likely to tell you what they think you want to hear.
They love to do favors, and they have pure larceny in their veins. They are essentially fractals,
not just because of their endless nature but because the closer you look, the bigger they become.

In fiction, I am a Jew.
But if you ask me my religion I am not a Jew.
If you ask, to satisfy an inquiry, I am a Jew only if you hate Jews. And I am not, if you are a
Jew.
If you want to play in the street, I am a Jew.
And if you want me to explain the rules, I am not a Jew.

I have never been a Jew. I am myself, and I have never been a part of a religious movement.
Any. They wouldn’t have me. I am beginning to wonder if they couldn’t.
I am as happy as a clam, I am a water filter who can’t decide which way is down.
Ironically, my first father taught me to write about what I know, and my second father, to
write about what I love. What’s ironic, is I learned how much I loved the first one, about the
same time I came to know the second.
 My Attic
I left a valuable painting in my attic, and I don’t know why. I own the painting, but I put it in
harm’s way on purpose for no reason. My attic is freezing in winter and boiling in summer—
everything up there suffers, to some degree, except, metal doesn’t rust and wood doesn’t rot, I
think it’s hell on plastic, and if I had any old 78’s I’d never store them there.
I own things I like, that I mistreat, because I own an attic. I have to put something there; it
was not a problem until I thought about it. It’s simple to solve, too simple, deceptively simple.
How many other things do I own that I turn my back on? Can you own anything without turning
your back on it? I’d like to see you try. Funny I never thought of that before. Is it a problem?
Or is it the shape of the house? There’s a raft of things I don’t know. For example, would my
father call me Rudy if we met in Heaven? He always told me I was rude, and I was, on purpose,
and for whatever reason I chose; I was a mess. I was preposterous from the beginning,
yesterday’s word for yesterday’s dad. God says he has a thousand fathers, is that true, do you
think? Strange world, beautiful and miraculous, Thank you both. Thank you God.
That can be my newest nickname, Rudy. I think I’ll keep collecting them.
My larcenous nature is about to turn on the world and steal.
You see that’s why three conditions: Do not lie to my face.
One question at a time.
If I stop talking you must wait.
Φ You may not record me without my permission.
You’re on timer; I can wait forever.
Stop fighting. Stop name-calling.
Stop hurting each other. Apologize.
Start telling the truth, I’m tired of it…I don’t care,
who started it, and if you think we’re going any-
where, today or any other day you are sadly mis-
taken. It’s over, and clean up your messes.
Before I come out, I expect this will all be done.
Your problem is, you love each other…Show me
some respect, and while you’re at it, show some
respect for yourselves. Φ

I always liked a little tumult, you know, turmoil. It’s good for you. No one has to die.
And I think we can take Christ off the cross now. It’s been 2000 years. Isn’t that long enough?
Thank you God for everything, God bless everyone Amen. I’m here now.

The story, OM
A small key turns the tumblers that work the lock on a door by the elevator, on the 16th floor of
the McQuade building, in New York City. It is the home of Orly Montpelier, a specialist in the
laws of possibility. His opinion is sought by hundreds of heterofoils, and the utterly fearful, who
seek his advice on what images, sounds, smells, colors, ideas, jokes, foods, themes, electronic
devices, clothes, accessories, hair cuts, facial features, voices, or songs, make the grade, in terms
of ‘Blanket Heterosexuality,’ as he calls it. He’s in advertising—a consultant. He’s on the
phone:
 No! No! No! If you show two men talking, you must show more than one woman—right
away. You must also, end your… he looks thru the papers on his desk… deodorant commercial,
with a woman smirking or smiling! And he hangs up the phone. Idiot!
To himself: “They don’t get it. Boy girl-boy-girl-boy-girl! Always, in everything!”
O. Montpelier can’t abide restaurants anymore. The very sight of an odd number of people at
a table eating a meal, makes him nauseous. Inevitably, if two men are with one woman, the
waiter will be a man, and conversely, if two women are with one man, the waitress will doubtless
be a woman. Without balance to OM, life is nothing but people wandering around holding
themselves up. No direction. No possibility of real heterosexual behavior. The phone rings.
“No! No! No! Male groups must be four or more. If it’s three, the three males must fill the
frame, and there must be food within reach of all three of them. Men hanging around without
even the possibility of eating, or, of course drinking, is highly suspicious! What are you selling?
Refrigerators!! Food! Food! Food!” And he hangs up. “Idiot!”
The Advertising Agency of Rack, Ruane and Montpelier, was run by O.M., as he liked to be
called, almost single-handedly. He had etched for himself, with a metaphorical screwdriver, a
slot in the advertising landscape. His own niche—a place to stand. He knew, above all, his work
was highly symbolic. Full of meaning, and ancient incantations, spells, sayings, superstitions and
grim warnings. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, for instance.
Symbols like hands were undeniable, and ‘cloth’ in abundance. The more cloth, the more
womanly. But, it wasn’t his job to teach so he didn’t. The time would come, quick enough, that
he would be supplanted—he didn’t have to quicken it. Also, no money in it.
Later that day: O.M., back on the phone—hardly ever off, says…
“Is this a TV commercial or print? You idiot, of course it makes a difference! Commercials
are action-based visual media. All action has sex as its prototype—incomprehensible,
compelling, and undetermined in outcome—but based on a strong desire for one thing—and in
terms that are final…the constructed decision: I’m going to get something out of this! And
Heterosexuality sells! fucker! He takes a breath. “Queers have no use for your crap! If they
needed lives that required constant bolstering, they’d all be in show business!” He takes a hefty
swig from the bottled water with the flavor of coconut and strawberries. “We are” and he clears
his throat, “marketing to people who will swallow any thing, and follow any one. Without the
fear of looking queer, you have no case Mr…” He couldn’t think of a single famous lawyer
except Atticus Finch, so he said unsatisfyingly, “Mr. Lawyer man.”
His days were short. Not because they were numbered, but because he loved this—and they
flew by. “Boy-girl-boy-girl-boy-girl period! In print, it’s two or three to one…depending! There
are rules you know?” He pushes the ‘end’ button on the phone and immediately wishes for the
old days when you could throw a phone down in its cradle and get a real crack out of it. ‘What’s
a faggot want with…’ he mumbles to himself as he looks thru his papers to remind him of who he
was just talking to… ‘ozone depleting deodorant, and toxic cleaning fluids—They lick armpits,
for Christ’s sake!!’
The phone rings again almost immediately. “Yes, yes Monsignor. No, of course you can’t
change the TV commercials, keep the gay reference in… You are a WELCOMING
CHURCH…You want everyone to feel accepted…welcomed. What you do once they get there is
your business. Yes, you’re welcome. Family, family, family, Your Holiness.” He places the
phone down gently, and picks up his agenda for the day. “You’d think he never heard of bait and
switch…the nitwit!” O.M. spends much of his day muttering to himself as he shakes his head
and frowns.
He felt as tho he was conquering the world one phone call at a time. Every movie, every
book, every TV show, every commercial, every piece of legislation you’re trying to sell, every
logo, outfit, toy, and scribble, every picture, every poster, every pair bond, every religion, every
everything. Heterosexuality is it! It! It! It!…and he laughs…it made his head tingle. It rules
because it sells!!!
 Two Princes
Once upon a time, there were two princes born in the same country. One had to change his
name—no one knew why. The prince did not even know why. The name he changed it to was
indecipherable and unpronounceable. He was very happy, and he would never know why.
The other prince was to become king. He lived in the castle, everyone loved him, and he felt
loved. He had all the best things in the world. His name was Mija, he couldn’t grow up, and he
didn’t know why. He changed his face, and he didn’t know why. He became white, and he
didn’t know why.
The king told his son, ‘When you are king, you must behave as a king.’ The prince did not
understand.
I have not told you everything. He said to his son. When I told you, you were beautiful you
danced. When I told you, you were brilliant you sang. When I told you to stay with me you left.
It has to be that way. You never need to worry again. I have loved you like a father, the king told
him. I have taught you well, and you have taught me well.
When have I taught you? The prince asked.
Remember when you asked me why you were born black. I said because black is the best
color to be, and what did you tell me?
I told you I’m not going to spend my life being a color.
I was so proud of you. I am still proud of you. I love you to this very day.
I am not a disappointment?
No. Said the king.
Even though I have not behaved as a king?
You are not the king yet, my son.
He did not understand.
You will one day. The king said.
When?
When you choose to ask for understanding, you will get it. It will be as a house to you, and it
will be right there. And you will be amazed that it was there the whole time. And when you
walk up the front path, you will walk part-way around part of a big tree, and the door will open as
if by magic.
Who lives there? A magician? The prince asked.
You do not need a magician, you will never need a magician, but you could use a hair cut.
Don’t ever leave, the prince said. I love you too much.
There is no such thing. And I love you.
How much? The prince asked.
More than you’ll ever know. My love is protection. You are my beautiful son, my prince, my
king, my child. It is not for you to understand. It is why you were born.

Every king has a king

What I’m good at, is what everyone’s good at—falling in love, loving, telling bizarre and
implausible love stories, and creating my own world.
I stink at almost everything else. When I drive, God has to do all the work. I can’t drive and I
don’t know why. I look like I’m moving but I’m standing still.
There are great and wonderful places I could show you, there are things to be seen, to see and
seize that you cannot imagine in your wildest dreams, no one has to die, you don’t have to worry.
I know what I’m doing. And we will begin en camera when you start treating me with respect
and treating yourselves with respect. You may not take my picture or record me without my
permission. You will never turn me into a martyr no matter what shit you throw at me.
I’ll never be your beast of burden, I’ve walked for miles and my feet, my feet are hurting; I’ll
never never never never never never never be.
I would like to show you Paris, I would like to show you the Hajj, but if I see one baby born in
one cesspool or anywhere near one, here or anywhere else, ever—everyone will die. And no, I’m
not kidding.

I solved all the world’s problems and found something for them to do so they would feel
employed. Then I went to have lunch. Yes, that was late. It was one. You know, 13:00. I
heated up some burritos or enchiladas, and I left the oven on. The dog had to come remind me.
My house runs itself. My house is where the water parts; my house is where the parade begins;
my house is just behind home plate; next to where the bus stops, My house is the one they pull up
to, to read their maps, to eat their sandwiches, to get some shade, to call. My house is across
from where they set-up their easils. My house is an engine.
When you start showing some respect, wheel begin.
The goal today is more commotion for you, less for me. MORE!

The first man

Wildly popular for the first ten days, Billy felt invisible and very prosperous. Then he
became mordantly visible.
The first man was not a man. She swung a hammer—a very heavy hammer.
Billy learned all about guns in about five minutes. There was a world, unpaginated on the
other side of this world, and it spoke gibberish, and wanted a piece of ‘me.’ Go to the Catholic
Church, I said. They’re giving it away. I probably shouldn’t have said that. I probably should
have regretted it, and I definitely should, by now, know when to stop…but I don’t. How would
you like it, if you were trying to come to terms with your unprofitable phase and down the street
they were giving it away?…oh never mind.
There was a group without a name, and Billy saw before them, an aura. A thing. They were
close, and they were dangerous. Luckily, they were stupid. Billy joined up. He had to swear an
oath, of sorts, that he had never made love to a man as to a woman. Billy signed on. It wasn’t
true, but these oaths carry subtle, and even subtler meanings. I would exclude you too if I could.
I never made love to a man supposing he was a woman, nor made love in pretense myself. I’m
not into ‘dress-up,’ but I’m not against it.
The woman, who I don’t know, was more masculine, and expended less energy being
masculine than almost any of the more biological men and boys there. I signed up to see what the
club-house looked like. That would tell me more about them than if I had been able to tear them
apart and put them back together. They had no imagination, nowhere to get one, and were highly
susceptible to the slants of slurs. They crushed everything they touched—but everything.
After one day of being strait, I was exhausted. It was easier to overdo than I realized. I spent
ten minutes back-pedaling, for every five minutes of forward motion. I slept like a baby that
night.
To over simplify, lets just say she walked in on me at 03:01 that night, following our first and
only meeting. She wailed. I turned in bed to catch a glimpse of what I thought was a man with
red hair and a leather jacket jump toward me, raise a huge steel hammer over her head, and as I
stood up in bed, her trajectory was nullified—by my dream—if you must know. She fell
backward into a full-length mirror, which I placed there, on an angle on purpose.
It happened very fast. He turned, she turned—lost her balance and crash! Thousands of
pieces of broken mirror. She had a split in her forehead and her hands were bloody. The leather
jacket was sliced up the back and around her left arm.
Get out! I yelled. Never bother me when I’m sleeping! She was dazed and kept putting her
hands, knuckles and knees into broken glass as she tried to steady herself. It was truly horrifying.
She seemed so confused and perplexed, it looked like slow motion. She could barely think.
I said, Get out!
She looked up at me.
Oh, it’s you, I said.
She looked down at her predicament, and felt through the glass fragments for the hammer
handle.
Get out!
I am, she said. Jeeze.
I should have you arrested. I said matter of factly, as my heart raced noiselessly, or so I
hoped.
Oh, fuck you. She said.
I …want…you…I said, as I put on my…boots…to…turn…yourself…in. Here! I bundled,
and handed her a pair of white socks, one for each hand. “Squeeze these.”
She did, and screamed.
Never mind about the hammer. Get out of here before the police show up. You are going to
turn yourself in bitch! I just added that for effect. At the time, I was still trying to make out her
indeterminate sexual identity. I should have said bitch. I think what I actually said at the time
was: I mean it! Or some such cattaglott (from catastrophe meaning down, and glottis meaning
throat).
That was the interesting part of the story. Then she walked home dripping. I kept the
hammer. The whole thing’s in litigation, or whatever that’s called. Her story is: she was cleaning
out her garage and, I don’t know…lost control when she saw herself in the mirror.
For many people, being hidden from their mortification by cops, cars, lights and sirens is
much preferable to walking humbled, home alone, in disgrace, in search of their own, fill in the
blank. One neighbor saw blood, the next saw a deep cut, the next, a failed expression; it became
the world to her, ever after. The sun was just coming up.
She was too proud to turn herself in. Proud of what? A real man, or woman wouldn’t attack
someone in their sleep. That’s animalistic, savage.
Identity. Of course, it’s all yours…it’s what you identify with…that’s the point. I relate to
Gospel music, but that doesn’t mean I’m a join up. I relate to gay women, but that doesn’t mean
I’m a have’n operation. I don’t see the point in spending all that time and trouble turning my self
into my self. Truthfully, I’ve never embraced identity, until recently, of course. Look, I’m not
against identity—I’m against hammers, but only sometimes. Doesn’t mean I’m for uniformity—
don’t be ridiculous—it has it’s uses tho—It can lead you to understanding, but it can never
enhance it. Anyway, you can’t turn my bedroom into an argumentarium over sexual identity. I
tried. I just love too much. Woe is me.
She spent hours getting home. Doors were closed to her that would never be opened again.
She couldn’t turn the door-knobs because she couldn’t rip the dried and bloody socks from her
hands. She stood before doors she knew, but couldn’t open. People refused to help her. She was
found hiding in the early afternoon as tho pelted, as tho disrobed, as tho disheveled, rebuked,
harmed, by her own hands and, there-in she spent the rest of her leaden life. And beyond. I
forgave her, but you know…it made no difference to her or to anyone else. Anyone else.
Nobody. Nowhere. She didn’t know how to drop it. Well, that’s socks for you. I don’t make
this stuff up, it just comes to me.
It’s ironic: some people would do anything to join a group, and others would do nothing to join.
She spent all her days walking from closed door to closed door to closed door, and I walk thru
them as tho they’re not there. God said: I love you. Little did I know.
Maybe there’s no such thing as too much love. The further away you walk from self, in order
to express self, the more truthful of self your expression becomes. She destroyed herself all day
every day until she couldn’t stand it any more, and then she destroyed herself. She would have
been better off working in a softer medium. As they say.

The Rotunda, as useless to telll them their problem as it is to solve it for them—it leads to ignorance.
Bill sat at a podium. The place was crowded, but not so crowded he couldn’t have a real
conversation with one person. It was ‘question time,’ and a man stood up, and asked a question.
Billy said yes, after little deliberation, and then asked…
What’s your name?
Never tell him!—a hushed comment made by someone seated.
I don’t know.
You don’t know your own name? Billy looked surprised.
That’s right.
You don’t know your own name, and…
Nothing.
Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. I solved a problem like this once, Billy said.
How?
The person sat down, just sat down, and the problem was solved.
But how? Someone asked.
There was nothing else to do.
Well what was their name? Someone asked.
I never told them, and I never asked them. Billy said
You just sat them down. Someone said.
No, not really.
You had a chair. Someone offered, without making it sound like a question.
Yes, and they sat. Billy said.
As easy as that? That was a question from far off.
Easier than telling this story, and quicker.
This is a difficult story. Someone said.
This is a slow story. Billy replied.
I’m participating, this is question time. Are you afraid I’ll talk about you, or afraid I won’t?

Super chief, the super shrink showed up

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents… Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Are you…?”
“Listen, I can’t participate in a debate, right now. Re-phrase your question.” I said.
Silence, deep and long, then long and deep.
“Make it more like a discussion between equals…you know, real people.” I said.
Silent thinking. Glasses, and I think a pencil were involved.
“Wouldn’t it be funny, if years from now people pump you for information until you’re ready to
scream—opinions, values, private thoughts, feelings, associations, stream of consciousness, what
was it like at the time? How do you feel about it now? What did you really think—about
everything? You can just say: ‘It was discussed. It was shared.’ That’ll keep ‘em guessing.” I
beamed my ‘Boy, I’ll be glad when this is over’ smile.
Silence. Undo attention to the blank page in front of him.

“Okay—” I plunged in. “I have Being, like everyone. Part of my being is the being I am.
There is the being that I am, and the being that I have. The being that I am, is part of the being
that I have.”
“Uhhhh.”
“The part of my being that I am, is dwelling in identity. Just like yours. It has an inherent
changeable quality. That is, for me the part that doesn’t change, has never changed—Identity
does change, but always symbolically.

“For example, I am a ‘Teacher.’ Now I am ‘Retired.’ I am a ‘Museum Curator,’ and part of the
intellectual elite. Now I am a ‘victim’ of a crime, and I cannot participate at the level that is
requisite for my previous identity—I can’t host a collection. My identity doesn’t really change
me. I change it. I change it thru my eagerness to take the biggest, or maybe the smallest piece of
pie, as if it’ll make a permanent difference.”
I was about to say, ‘It’s part of our taking holding keeping nature,’ but he dropped his pencil, or
whatever that was, just about then, so I skipped it. I thought of reminding him that back in the
day, people used to say, ‘You are what you eat,’ as if a cracker, or a carrot could make an
everlasting transformation, but it was already 13:30, and it was looking like I wasn’t getttin’
lunch any time soon. So I left out all food references.
“Metaphorically speaking, I have the ability to change it (identity). That’s what I don’t do. I
have no reason to. The part of the being I have, that’s not all tied up in identity, disappears when
you look at it. It is, of the moment. It is unarguably mine, but, in the here and now. It’s just me.
or consider: it’s me when I forget I’m a Museum Curator. When I’m involved in, and among, all
the other symbols, all around me that’ve distracted me somehow. That is to me a truer way to
look at my being. It is changeable in and among symbols.”
They stare, they all stare.

“What point is there, for me to speak of my identity to your identity, when I’ve just told you the
being part that I believe is identifiable as my being cannot change? It would sort of set you up to
disagree with me—even before I’ve said anything…I would rather speak from the part of my
being that I have, to the part that you have.”

The doctor, who came with a small booklet of credentials, wavers, and authoritative re-naming,
gave a light rinse to the expression that grayed his face. Nothing’s permanent.

“Are you Christ?” He said.

“Tell me who you are? Tell me about you, your life. Tell me in whole or part, the everything
that’s everything to you. I’d rather have a real conversation—you’ll get your answer. I’m tired
of all this fakery.”—And he does. They all do. They tell me everything in about two minutes.
“Yes, he said. I read that. What was the genesis of that idea?”
“You didn’t read it too well, didja?” I was starting to feel comfortable—like a hook in a fishes
mouth. If my life became one long dull reiteration—yes I am, yes I am, yes I am. Christ! What
a fuckin’ waste. You’d have won my silence. See, it has to be this way.
“Well…alright, he said. My name is Sanderson…Doctor Sanderson…some people call me
‘Buzz.’”
“Call me IM, Billy, or call me by my real name . Yes, I am he.”
He looked at me, did one of those internal shrugs, and said, “…When I was growing up, I had the
most extraordinary adventure. …My father’s father owned a sugar plantation in Barbados. He
used to tap tap tap on this fence…to this day…I don’t know how to say it! …You see, back
then………… ”
“Yes doctor, go on.”

Billy was so happy he passed the shrink test, except for part seven, sub-section three: Do you
think you’re Christ? Billy answered truthfully, and blew the whole test on one question, which
isn’t really fair. But once you say your Christ, that’s pretty much it. Honesty doesn’t always
count. The second shrink, Billy was not so cordial with: Look; imagine I decide to go off to be a
filmmaker, and I mortgage the house and buy a 27,000 dollar camera. I want to be a writer-
director-producer if it kills me. So, while the actors are rehearsing I do some of the back-shots. I
begin my story about the evanescence of life, in a cemetery, see, and on my second set-up there’s
this big flash of light, off to the side of the tombstone. So I took the shot, and it looked really
great, but it wasn’t my light. The light I bought was on the other side. The leaves the 2nd AD
dropped—nothing.
How did that make you feel?
I don’t know, I’m a cinematographer; I like light, who knows! Please don’t interrupt. So I
ignore it, and I go back to the stone, because I want to capture the depth in the letters and the
somber mood, and all that, see, and then there’s another flash of light, same light. So, of course,
eventually I turn the camera on the light. I turned the camera to the light.... with me behind the
view finder…..because I’m a cinematographer now…..because it’s more interesting than the
stone in front of me…..don’t ja see?…..Well?
Well what?
To me it was just a light….I didn’t know it was God. But it spoke to me, I guess I’m a
cinematographer…Oh, Christ! God Offered Me A Job! I thought about it for about 12
seconds—that’s how much I loved Him. What would you have said?!? Before you make one
more scribble on that pad…if this’d happened to you…what would you have done??? If you say:
I would have turned down crazy. I’d say: Only if you’d met crazy. I think you’d do what I did:
take the label, put it on the lapel of your cheap suit, and keep going. Besides, what if God had
more in store?

NEW JESUS: The Coffee Shop Fiasco

Put this here, that there, line these up in a row, and just keep thinking, this is a no-brainer—God

The lady in front of Billy in the checkout-line reads the headline,‘Jesus Returns!!!’ and says to
her friend behind the register, “Oh good, the kids are finally gone, Frank knows when to leave me
alone – now Christ shows up—and he’s gay!! That practically guarantees Armageddon…I just
can’t catch a break.”
Billy picked out a pack of chewing gum, and just said nothing…

I was minding my own business, pure and simple. A student from the college came over with
a microphone, and began asking me questions: How I came to be on this planet, why I had come
back, all very tongue-in-cheek, the usual. But this day, I think it was too much coffee, because
when she implied I was late, I lost it.
Late! It’s never too late for apologies—start with the Dark Ages, and work forward!
Are you saying you’re owed an apology?
No, not me. How old do you think I am? Look! I’m right on time! You see, I was born gay.
I know all your petty meanness. I know how cruel you can be. I know your foul heart, and your
foolish mind. I know how you kill. I know you punish the innocents for fun. I came with love,
and you tried to ruin it, destroy it, every moment, of every day, in every way you could think of.
You could not, you cannot, and you never will. It was all I could do to sit in your company! And
even then, I had to lie in order to keep from being thrown out!
The world is set up for you. You all, Billy says dismissively, with a wave of his hand. The
small crowd of students of every nationality, every size, every persuasion, religious, sexual, or
theoretical, stare in his direction, and then go back to their lattes.
I mean strait people. Some of them sputter their drinks. Billy’s on a roll:
Every movie, every clothing store, every book, every sport, course, color, pet, play, hobby,
chair, TV show, name, joke, brand, boy-scout troop, haircut and hostel. Every electable mentor,
in every lodge, in every job, in every pool, prison, post or parade, every fashion, hat, shoe,
bathroom, dorm, song, picture, painting, drink, car, party, perfume, is designed to keep them
comfortably strait—codified—the boys with boy things—the girls with girl things: pampered,
relaxed, invited, welcomed, grouped—honestly, healthily, happily, justified, self-satisfied, totally
fulfilled, and purposed……shuffled, cut and dealt. REAL! RIGHT! And completely under-
served!
The world’s set up for them. I think when they fail, when they can’t make it, it’s even worse.
Imagine…given everything, and still pathetic. Who do they blame it on? One gay movie, or one
gay play that snuck in the back door. They want everything their way! If it was, they’d still feel
under-served. The greed of the heterosexual agenda has left us all, bound like books, and
everyman redeemed by the love of a pretty woman!

You can never fool me. I further know, that you will stop at nothing.
That is what I give you.
That is the Peace.
.

If you think I don’t love you, you’re wrong. If I said I never thought of killing you, you’d
know I was lying. You will not just endure, you will prevail. All of you. I give you the honored
office. You will bring the birds back with me or with me. If you think I care, you’re wrong. I’ll
never be your beast of burden. Everybody must die. You have ruined the words ‘God’ and
‘Faith.’ I walk around with my head in a bag for fear my face will betray my ugliness. I used to
have faith that that could never happen. Billy begins to stand up. I’m handling the words now.
Faith and religion are the same only when you’re talking to an idiot, or about an idiot. I’m right
on time! Nothing happens till I show up!!
Nobody said anything.
If I need something screwed up, I’ll know where to go. You selfish bastards even ruined
Prayer. Thank God, you stopped when you did. Didn’t deliver, did it? What’s it at now, 0.01
percent more effective than a ham sandwich!? You’re the reason they invented condoms. I want
them worn, and I don’t mean worn out. Wear them! If you knew where the nearest inhabitable
planet was, would you stop looking? It’s a million light years away and you’re standing on it!
And further, you don’t believe in cymbals because you think you invented them! Two tables
cleared (afraid I’d start playing ‘em).
I said symbols! (I’d waited 20 (5) minutes for coffee)
You want to dance to their tune? You want to dance to the tune of the man who pays you the
most? You want to dance to the tune of the man who pays you the most on The House floor! Not
on that floor. I refuse. I refuse. I will pull out all the authority I have…capital H, and make all
of you bastards—retroactively, before I let you walk backward into that darkness! The TV was
tuned to Satellite Public Access.
Theresa stepped back, that was my hint to do likewise, but no, this had been building up since
before lunch, and I still hadn’t gotten my, so-called, ‘expresso.’
Show me a story of the Holocaust.
She hands him one.
 That’s a lie. Show me another story of the Holocaust.
Someone in the coffee shop hurriedly opens a text book.
That’s a lie. Show me another story of the Holocaust.
A teacher offers a novel.
That’s a lie. Can no one show me a story of the Holocaust, that’s not a lie? What else have
you been lying about? Are we not even good enough to count in your graves? Are you ashamed
to be seen alongside us even in Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor,
Dachau,Treblinka, Auschwitz? The names came pouring out like a coffee metaphor. Did we
lower your standards of decency even there? Did you ever notice the bad people always lost, and
gay people were not even mentioned, no matter how many died? Born criminal. Criminal would
have been a step up! Why do you continue to treat me like I don’t exist!!! You’re pretty damn
lucky I do! “The lowest of the low has come back.” Billy smiled at his young audience, click.
The Caffeine Billy’d been drinking kicked in again—Lucy! You have some splaining to do!
My name’s Theresa.
That was a good idea, what happened? Billy drank the last sip he’d been saving, slowly.
Blew into it to feel its heat. It was cool. Speaking of words, do and deal are not the same. Deal
with that.
Do you want to continue this interview, because I have to re-format to ultra-compression, she
said, not really hearing the last couple of things he’d said.
Yes. Whatever that is, by all means do it.

One condition, do not lie to my face, not this face. Billy turns his face, touches one cheek, then
the other.
Know that I am not reliable with numbers or dates. I celebrated my 45th birthday twice.
Know that I am the most impolitic person in the world.
Know that I am not an Oyster; don’t go looking for sand or pearls. It’s irritating.
Know that if I stop talking abruptly, it means you must wait.
Know that you can’t know everything, but you can know all there is to know.
For my own understanding, tell me how five million pictures are better than one?
The camera guy clicked again.
You! How is five million pictures better than one?
I get paid by the picture.
I mean for me. And everyone else in the world.
I don’t get it. He said.
Exactly! You get no reward for reproducing my face. I’ll be voiding some contracts real
soon—a lot of people aren’t going to get paid—photograph me without permission, and we’ll just
sit her. I hold you and your bosses responsible. I’m unphotographical!
I’m my own boss. Can I take some more?
At least you’re honest in your ignorence. Yes, a couple more…Why should you get paid for
my irritation?
Don’t get irritated. Click. Think of them as pearls…generators. Click.
Well, why should you get paid for photographing my pearls?
You got any? Put ‘em on.
You’re no help at all.
This will be in Wednesday’s edition of Penn Squared, Campus-Life section.
But really, what is the point? How can five million pictures really be better than one?
It can’t allow you to watch me grow old. Quite the opposite. It can’t show different aspects,
unless you mean the smile on my face as I walk away. I am 99% spirit, making all views
practically un-photographable.
 To lend credence to that good idea, I turned toward him with that strange mix of naïveté and
hopped-up, that was becoming my trademark.
Well, he said, change is interesting. Click.
Change is hardly ever interesting! Billy countered.
He paused to reload. Billy had time to think.
I think it’s fascinating that my computer can put two dots above some words, but not others.
Are you really gay? Click.
Why do you put it that way?
You don’t seem gay.
Is that supposed to be a complement?
Yes and no. click.
How would you like to take all my pictures?
How do you know I’m any good?
You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met.
Your expresso’s ready. The slowest man, under 30, Billy had ever encountered, said, from
behind the counter.
Finally! Click.
The photographer was very smart…plus he had fully half of all the horrible pictures taken of
Billy in the last year in his satchel, sack, carrying-case thing. He forgets—I know when he came
in. Besides there’s no such thing as pure and simple.
Where’s Jean? Billy inquires.
You mean Theresa? The young photo-graph-taker asks.
Let’s start calling her Jean. Billy says conspiratorially.
Okay.

THE GOD DIALOGUES—Sensitive

You’re more sensitive than you know and less sensitive than you think—Conundrum

What to me, is a glass of OJ, is to you, a prison break where all the criminals invade your
house and slice thru your neck like it’s an orange. It is a glass of fruit juice, just drink it. Such a
production. You’ll love it, it’s good.
Look at it this way, the people who need to understand, understand, and they will chose to
ignore it. You need to turn yourself in. You have a year, it will be a strange and crazy year, I told
you we were going to have fun. Next we’ll handle dreams, I have a million of them for you, I
know the rules of fiction, you think I can’t give you my dreams, but my dreams come in teams,
and they can handle anything. They can even handle it when the dreams turn into nightmares.
What’s a nightmare to you, is afternoon tea to me. Come on over, we’ll talk, remember I
accept no clandestine apologies you must apologize to those you have wronged. If you want, I
may allow a written apology, but only under specific conditions. Mine. Sound familiar?
The rules of fiction allow me to have sex with you before we’ve been formally introduced.
I spent all morning trying to figure out if I should have sugar with my tea or honey, it was
agony. And then I took Christ off his cross so I could dust behind him, and that was my morning.
It’s not that I have a bad memory, it’s that it has to be so long.

The White Dialogues—PREPOSTEROUS

Appearances can be deceiving…..Aesop. Greek, failed mathematician, fabulist (fable writer/teller) circa 580 BCE

Consider: for Billy everything goes in and very little comes out in terms of his understanding.
Everything is being encoded for the community. The ‘me’ center is enrapt in issues of status and
rights, that is, many extra-plenary instances of being right, and building something, but he doesn’t
know what. He can tell you the source of the Nile, but he can’t add, or repeat the same thing
exactly, more than once, and even then. He and Fa had created the self destruction machine—and
Billy hadn’t even noticed. He was concerned about whether the dog had been fed or watered—he
drinks just to pee.
Consider: the arrangement with God was based on unconditional love. A concept, that is not a
concept. When you discover it, you’ll do it till you drop—it makes coke taste like dandelions.
It’ll piss you off. It asks nothing. It’s like forcing down buttered toast with jelly when you
wanted a krueller. It’s the same argument I’ve been having for weeks. I want tea and sugar, but I
like tea with honey also; hot is good, but if I can make it the temperature of the outside air
inversely related to it’s relationship with my core body temperature, I like that as well. It has me
completely stumped. My mail is getting stranger and stranger I think I’ll talk to Wilmot, my
mailman, and see what he can do. In the mean time I’m going outside to enjoy the day. Billy
wasn’t talking to himself, but all.
Consider: add to ‘You’re Preposterous’: You’re preposterous, of course stupid people think
you’re stupid, they expect results right off the bat. Smart people think that people who look like
they’re thinking, are. For you, thinking is purely visual. You went on a skiing trip, and no one
died so you thought it was a success; four people went to the hospital with you, and four more
followed behind. Slippery slopes and bones don’t go well together.
I had the worst break of all of them. Billy says, as tho he were a coy child.
Yes, and they thought you sprained your ankle, because you deflected their protestations to try
to stand so peremptorily. You’re absurd! G
You can stop anytime. B
Billy you act like a fictitious character, one minute up, the next down, happy as a lark,
practically dead, for no discernable reason. You get your gay dick sucked by a grieving widow
with three kids, because she feels as tho she killed the only man she’s ever loved, and that’s you.
You can’t see her guilt, but you accept her apology, over and over. You toss money out the front
door, and if someone asks you where you threw it, you strain to remember, then claim to forget.
They stole it, before it hit the ground! They see you coming! But you’re the only person I know,
who can open a safe by accidentally implying they’re bad with numbers and you don’t know
why—bang the door flies open.G
That never happened, Billy says.
Do great cooks force you to eat from their best dishes. G
No. B
Do the greatest comedians in the world force you to drink their best wine, while they tell you
their funniest stories. G
No. B
Do the richest and most beautiful people in the world force you to snort their best cocaine. G
No, it just happens. B
Well, it doesn’t just happen to anyone else. All your symbols are oxidized: burnished bronze,
tarnished silver, a pile of wood sitting in you living room. You can’t have a fire, why. G
Because I don’t like fires?? Billy guesses.
Well, what’s all the wood for, then. G
I’m getting ready for a fire?? B
You prepare for a fire, you aren’t sure about, by burning everything you own very very slowly.
God continues telling Billy who he is, to his face, telling him, him. Giving Billy to Billy. God
looks around, “Everything is broken, rusty or dusty.” G
I live in the moment, Billy states without defensiveness. B
What moment is that, 1883. G
What’s your favorite song. G
Oh, God, I have so many, Billy says.
 Pick one. G
Things have changed—Bob Dylan 2000.
You never change. You can’t change. The harder you try to change, the more I see you stay
the same, you don’t even move faster. G
I don’t believe in that. B
What. G
Moving faster. B
See! Everyone knows to get anywhere you have to move faster than someone else. And you
do nothing and the world comes calling. And, the only word they’ll take for an answer is No.
God turned slightly, and looked completely dissatisfied. G
A shiver ran up Billy’s spine into his head, disseminated and left.
You are the Impossible One. You are the one that cannot be. And yet there you are. G
Let me explain. Billy says to God.
Is this the, I was born weighing nothing story. G
No, this is the I was 22 pounds in first-grade story, Billy decides. B
The only thing, Billy, worse than a long explanation, is a short one. G
I should write that down…Billy searches in vain for a piece of paper. “Why?” he asks, as he
looks to the backs of magazines and books for a blank page, or one of those mailers.
Because it utterly destroys the joke. G
Can you see if there’s a pen behind you? B
God begins searching for a pen, and then catches himself. G
“Forget it.” GB
How can I? Billy says in obviousness. B
An hour into God’s visit, Billy offers him a glass of water, tea, coffee, juice or whatever that is
in the back of his fridge.
Water… please. G
After waiting more than 30 years to have God over, Billy realizes he has only two half-spent
ice cubes. And he forgot to boil or filter any water. The pitcher is practically empty. It’s
snowing but he decides against employing it.
Here. He says, and hands God a glass of ice water from the tap. B
Thank you. God takes a drink and then motions for a cup.
Billy brings in a resuscitation mask, and God spits into it, dribbling water thru the hole onto
the floor.
“What is this?” He says, looking thru the hole in the mask. G
I thought you were having a heart attack. B
Ughh. God says. and looks for a rag to blot the stain on the carpet. I like the feel of water, I
just can’t stand the taste. G
Billy looks out at the falling snow, and a strange silence looms. God follows his gaze, follows,
being metaphorical.
Are you suggesting if I want cold water I can stand out in your front yard and catch some? G
How come you understand me so well? Billy says, and then adds, “We could…” and begins
to tear up. B
God waits for Billy to finish his thought, and stares out the window, and over at Billy.
I guess…Billy says dissolvingly. B
God waits again, as tho he had all the time in the world.
“I guess it wouldn’t taste any better,” and Billy smiles.
Consider: leave out all quotes, as a way of describing a conversation where nothing is spoken—
nothing said, no vibrating columns of air. No psychotic auditory attenuations. No sound (A map
is not a piece of bread—not necessarily what your senses say it is).
Maybe a little, not much. God says.
You want to try? Billy asks.
 God doesn’t want to catch snowflakes on his tongue in Billy’s front yard.
That brings me to the reason for my visit. G
You….want to catch snow flakes on your tongue? But God stops Billy before he says want
one more time.
No, I want to talk. G
Oh, of course. B
Billy takes the mask he was going to use to breath life into God, and hides it behind his back
in the chair, even tho it’s still wet.
God, for the first time, in a long time, didn’t feel like a guest, when he sat in a man’s house.
He almost wanted to cry. He got up, got some ice, water, and dried the rug. He was uplifted. He
felt like moving. He felt like moving in. when God wants to move…..
Consider: Regarding the swapping that Billy and God are doing. Billy learned about swapping
by being gay, and by being sexually active. Men swap, switch roles, some- times twice, three
times a night, maybe once a month. Strait couples may take 20 years to swap, once. The 600
untouchable, unshakeable, written-in-stone aspects of their respective roles prevents that—for
many, entirely. The idea, and daunting it is: that to challenge one facet, one aspect, even one, of
this diamond, may break the whole thing, flies in the face of what they’ve always known. People
say, “The whole thing might explode. The diamond you thought was a diamond may be just so
much glass!” Don’t worry—it’s not. A diamond is of a thousand different types. A piece of
glass is always just one thing, a piece, a scrap, never bright enough. You don’t have to be so
afraid.

NEW JESUS: Billy goes shopping by himself

And wonders why all the papers are talking about the New Jesus. They have no pictures of him.
The front page is a sort of cheap-artist’s rendering of a shrunken-faced, bemused figure with a
broom on what appears to be a porch. The house looks like the Cleaver’s, and the car is shiny
and red. Billy picks up a copy, the one with the funniest headline, and reads: ‘Jesus is back!
After 2000 years, a man claiming to be ‘just good friends’ with the Almighty, has been revealed
through his work to be the late great, first and formerly notorious Jesus of Nazareth.’ Billy
thinks to himself, ‘first and foremost,’ can’t they get anything right? A new movie was out, and
suddenly everything is ‘Notorious.’ The same people described his becoming as The Perfect
Storm, whatever.
Billy tires of the text; the first sentence is almost always the best. He looks closely again at the
cover art. ‘Wally and the Beaver’ are standing on the lawn next to their old Desi-Lu house. It
looks for all the world like Jesus has just moved into their house. The Beaver’s look of surprise
can be read any number of ways.
Billy laughs and snorts. A woman says, If you think that’s funny, have you read Alien Jesus?
What’s that?
Here, and she hands Billy a copy of a paperback with a sandy haired 30-something on the
cover, with pouty lips and the beginning of a goatee.
How do they get these in print so fast?
The woman says how the hell should she know.
Billy thought about buying it, but his heart was doing a two-step, so he just bought the works
for making a cheese sandwich, his radishes, and blueberries, and went home. The back way.
Three days later he snuck out again, and went to the same store. There were no batteries, or
film to be had anywhere. Six of seven camera holders were loafing. Taking pictures was
hazardous work; many chose to watch. One man took pictures of everyone and everything. Billy
smiled; every click meant, that person wasn’t the one. The New Jesus had already said you must
not take his picture without his permission or you would be sorry. That was interpreted as: you
will die, you will die today in some horrible way, and your family will burn for all eternity or
until they’re extra crispy. But they were all going to die, so what’s the difference, or so they
thought.
Billy had his picture taken twice, once when he walked in, and once when he slipped on
grapefruit juice in aisle 3. He lay there flat on his back, and the camera holders didn’t bat at eye
or lift a finger. He was definitely not the one. If you can walk on water…
As Billy lay there on his back in the aisle, head against the display, with his hand raised to
catch any falling cans, he thought perhaps Natalie was right, when she said, off-handedly and
without irony—there are no accidents.
You have to behave like an idiot, in order to tell people that they’re idiots.
He had a sore back, but a free pass to come and go without interference. Billy felt bad for the
lawyer who tried to get them to stop taking his picture. They clicked and clicked; the more he
protested the worse they got. Finally he yelled, Jesus Christ! You know, he’s right! It is rude to
take someone’s picture without their permission!
When the explosion of flash bulbs followed him down the street, everyone stared at the new
false-prophet waving his arms wildly, and vowing horrible retribution. The handsome man with
the black hair made headlines in all the, so-called, news papers.
All Billy had to do, was make indifferent people feel indifferent, and inconsiderate people feel
inconsiderate, and he was home free. They could see everything but that. He was practically
invisible. The digital geniuses deleted pictures of him before he left the store. The surveillance
camera kept information for a very short time. Except this time. They kept the tape of the lawyer
being assaulted by the check-out counter, for all time, and edited out Billy’s fall in aisle 3 right
away. A legal expert was called in because three people were injured running from what looked
like the end of the world, but was really just hundreds of flash bulbs going-off for no reason.
This was looking more and more like cake, Billy thought to himself. “Oh, cake” Billy said,
half out-loud and got a 1 kilo cheese cake, enough to last 2-3 weeks. This is living, he thought,
and went home, stretching his back and leaning slightly to his right. The chiropractor was on the
way so he stopped in to say hello.
Billy’s free pass was only good in the store. This town was ripe for rumor. A light flashed; a
baby cried, and a piece of Billy’s fudgecicle wrapper fell into baby’s carriage; he reached for it,
and became suspect #1, just like every other man between 30 and 70 in the county of the sea.
Yes, Sex. The 5 month old cried because her mother was an idiot!
Two groups are always roundly ignored: The first person at the grocery store in the morning;
the earlier he is, the more invisible he is, and the person who walks too slow, or talks too much.
Billy was so slow he picked up green bananas, and by the time he got them bagged they were
yellow. They hated him. And he became imperceptible.
“Where’dja get those?” the woman behind him in line asked.
“How come when I go over…they’re all green?” a man asked, interrupting Billy’s rather
lengthy explanation about how the store puts the over-ripe bananas on ‘special.’
They went one way, he went the other. Billy felt like Rod Taylor, in George Pal’s 1962 sci-fi
classic, H.G. Welles’ The Time Machine. He went to the store the same time every day with
yellow bananas in his pocket. No one asked him the obligatory question, so he got to see the
headlines change, and observe unseen, people, who didn’t want to ask the New Jesus, was that
bananas in his pocket or whether he was glad to see them.
One day, as expected, the headlines began to change. They all said the same thing, except for
the Glob, which always got everything wrong. They all said “When.”
There was a hand written sign out in front of the Del-Mar that read, ‘No Lawyers Please.’
Men with sunglasses stood around looking for Jesus, lawyers or criminals. They were obviously
secret intelligence agents, anybody else would have limited their search.
The next day all the papers had an exclusive “You.”
 It became easier and easier to get to and from the house. This was clearly not moving in the
right direction. So Billy called the Bethlehem Police Department. He was 30 miles from
Bethlehem but it was the nearest big town, or so the story goes. He spoke to a very interesting
young woman who issued dog licenses, and refused to smoke in the cordoned-off area, so
designated, which is probably why she got the snout patrol. She handed the phone to someone
else, right before they took it out of her hands. Officer Jabbers got on, and Billy told him to send
eleven cops, to the New Jesus House right away. The New Jesus was hanging out the window
and could they come, but don’t bring any weapons.
Tension reigned, so Billy took a shower, but it turned into a bubble bath, Billy wasn’t that
fond of showers. He couldn’t floss his teeth in a torrential downpour, and he was afraid of falling
over and breaking his neck naked. He looked in the mirror; ‘still got it,’ he said out loud. He
talked to God, and sang the big song from Camelot.
They showed up as Billy was putting on his socks. Putting on wet socks was hard—this was
simple. The entire world turned into the first person point of view.
The seargent did as he was directed and called from his car phone, after he pulled up to the
curb. I waved, and he came in. Cameras caught my hand and my tie tree, which had stood by
the window unnoticed for ten years, and now it was in papers all over the world. It looked like
this was some sort of carnival ride.
“This is my plan,” I said to the sergeant in blue. “Eleven, of the twenty or so, officers are to
come into the house with their guns holstered. No fuss, just come right in.”
“Yes sir.”
“You can call me Dave.”
“Yes Daveuh, uh er id.”
“Okay. So you come in, we eat the cheese cake, and then you leave.”
“Maybe I should post a man.”
“No that’s okay…which one?”
“Whichever one you say, they’re all top men.”
“Uhh,” I hadn’t expected that. I could use a cop right about now. “No,” I said firmly. “Come
in…Oh, before you leave the house, put you guns in your pockets, then get back into your cars.
Cop-cars you call them, right?”
“Defense force units.”
“That sounds much better,” I said, and smiled unconvincingly.
“Well Dave,” he says. “Then as I see it…”
“Then you put the guns back in their holsters, and hang around for pictures.”
“Good. Now in terms of securing the perimeter, we, down at the…”
“No. That’s all you need to do.”
“Sir, Davis…I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situa-shun.”
“It works like this,” I said, and I purposely didn’t say it was fool-proof—people expect me to
be truthful to an incredibly high degree. “When you leave, after the cheese cake, they will
wonder what happened, and where are the guns. The windows are painted with interesting scenes
of home-life, so they can’t see in, and this room is sound proof,” Which, of course, it wasn’t, in
any meaningful way. “No matter what you say they’ll assume you left at least one man in the
house with a machine gun or two.”
“How’s that? A machine gun!?”
“Sergeant Jabbers, eleven is an uncountable number; police would not show up for no reason.
They are going to have to think about this. If they went in with guns, and came out without them,
then the guns must be inside. Cops would not go to all the trouble of walking in, in a bunch,
unless they were concealing something, ergo the machine gun. When they walk out with their
guns in their pockets some of the men are bound to touch them. Thus guaranteeing many
pictures. You get cheesecake, I get rumors of protection, which is better than real protection, and
you don’t have to do a thing. I’ll do your job, and you get all the credit. The more you say the
better. It’s fool-proof.” Oops.
Ciaron Jabbers, thought it over. I watched the last five minutes of Judge Judy.
“What if you meet with disreputable characters?”
For a second I thought I saw something move. “Well, you can get a man here in ten minutes,
if one shows up. We’ll just say he was inside the whole time.”
“Where?”
“In my room. I’ll be on the third floor, sleeping.”
“In the attic.” He stated emphatically.
“Whatever.”
“Billups will be posted by your bed, just in case.”
I had this horrible feeling I might turn out to be the ‘Attic molester,’ if things kept on in their
present trajectory. “Perfect,” I said, to his tweeking of my plan.
“You are a credit…” and then I went silent, I just couldn’t think, which of the hundred or so
titles, and labels he felt most attuned to. “You’re a father, aren’t you?” I asked,
“Yes,” he said.
“I knew it!”
An uncountable eleven cops ran into the house 10 minutes later. And refused to sit. They all
had cheesecake except my favorite, Officer Tootie. They asked me if I’d lived in the area long. I
picked out two more favorites. “Practically born here,” I said. One of the guys had a camera,
which snapped a picture of the inside of his jacket pocket. No one noticed, so I pretended not to
either. When was I coming out? I had almost forgotten, the headlines. When-you-“Start”…or as
the Glob put it together, Now—Our—Beginning. I wondered what parallel universe they were
channeling.
Before they left, I checked to make sure they had empty holsters.
The sergeant said, “We’d never bring a machine gun, so how would anyone get that idea?”
“No machine gun…what’s that?!” I said.
“Where?”
“Jabbers look!” And I pointed to the mob out the window, between the curtains and hastily
painted scenes of family life. A broad branch resembling a machine gun was at arms-length from
one of the men.
“Well, I’ll be.” He knew it! The men were lying when they said they’d never help a …gay
man who was begging to get forcefully unmasked.
The excitement built to a fever pitch, again, and the grocery store closed for ‘repairs,’
whatever that meant. I had to watch the news. I knew I should have gotten a subscription to ‘The
Pointy End’ when I had the chance. Now the phones were tapped. I could still get the paper, but
so would many others, and I was using it as a barometer not a information retrieval system.
He gave them one word a day, and they still got it wrong. He missed Thursday’s news flash,
“To,” and Friday he read with growing confidence, “Show.” By noon, news stands burst forth
with ‘the show.’ Unfortunately, or fortunately I began my work-week on Monday, that meant
this was The Show Weekend. That could be a glitch.
You never saw anything like it. A huge party began Friday night, and had only gotten started
by noon on Saturday. Everyone did exactly what they wanted to do. It was the party from next
door; it was the one you dread, but are dying to be invited to; it’s the one you call the cops about;
it’s the one you giggle over; tell stories about; leave your house for. It was like a gigantic
backfire. The whole last-chance-world-ending-thing exploded:
The kid that learned to smoke cigarettes in ‘one hour,’ and then impressed his mother with
smoke rings, delighted the savant-hunter within her bones. Girls went braless instead of dateless,
the world turned on a dime. People went to church, people went skinny dipping at pool-side bars,
crazy fun was deriguirre the weekend before ‘the end.’ People gave up plans to learn French and
lose 94 kilos. Every one believed this was the end of everything. Experts were everywhere.
Now that I expected.

Weren’t
Well, I stayed home while the remainder of the message was transposed. All that clamorous
commotion bothers me. I had to turn off the TV, and I couldn’t go anywhere except to New
Jersey. For some reason no one expected any one to go into New Jersey, and the toll booth
collectors can make anyone invisible. So I had to lay on the beach and worry about which book
to read next. These were so far, my toughest days.
I decided the time was getting near, so I listened to Beast of burden, and practiced saying
‘never again.’ That grew tiresome after 60 times, so then I started listening to Smooth by
Santana—it needs more verses.
I’ll never forget walking down High Street that Tuesday, it was dead quiet except for the
helicopters, I turned the corner and there was the answer to my message. Hundreds of people
prostrate—butts in the air—all over my lawn, and out into the street. What the…! How did they
get ‘stick your ass in my face,’ from ‘When-You-Start-To-Show-Me-Some-Respect’? Or as the
Glob put it, ‘Now our beginning. The Show……Begins.’ What kind of a way is this to start? If
one of them farts, you just know they all will.
I lifted the cameras from around my neck, set my tripod down, and vowed never to show up to
a Brahma Baggavadgita without film again.
I was beginning to have more respect for the amount of work camera-holders do, and how
hard it is. I had a red mark on my neck, and I almost broke a sweat from dragging a black
Styrofoam box with ‘tripod’ written on it. Styrofoam has more weight than most people realize.
I used my eyes. Not to move them close to everything in the world I might want to see, but to
focus with, so I didn’t have to move. It looked like a convention of whisperers, and it sounded
like one too. The world that was going to end by Monday, started back up on Tuesday, and the
experts on every subject were still everywhere.
The only way I could think to get back in the house, was to pour ketchup on a woman and
scream ‘Unclean!’ But that’s the oldest trick in the book. Very few secret societies can turn
down an earnest plea for greater levels of cleanliness. It almost always gets you to the front of
the line, but I’d left the ketchup in the car. And the days of shaking down women for bleeding,
were over. I decided just to tell the truth, it was my last option, and I wasn’t going to miss The
News. I was on at 6:30. Da dah Du-daH.
“What…?” I shouted.
The crowd looked past me shrewdly. Then up at the house, as if, perhaps, I was responding to
a question.
“Are…” People began to look at me very skeptically. The crowd had been shushing people
all day and there was still some shush left over.
“You … here…for?”
The crowd began to chant, “What are you hear for. What are you here for?”
I would have gotten in much quicker with the ketchup trick—serves me right for not growing
tomatoes in the front yard like I’d planned. By the time I got to the porch a swell picked up. I
stood there, and tried to calm the capacity crowd. “What are you here for?” They responded to
the question with a question, the same one. This was going to take a while, but at least I was on
the porch with my key out. Who says you can’t get mugged if you have your keys in you hand?
That’s a ridiculous myth. So I yelled at the top of my voice, “What are you doing here?” It threw
everyone’s tempo off, but they kept on asking me what I was here for. I looked at this little man
crouched in the corner between my moth-eaten cat-scratched whicker sofa, and my chair, with the
broken seat that can bite you. “What’s all this about?” I said.
 “What’s all what?”
“I want to go in.”
“We’re waiting. He will come out soon.” They all agreed with each other, discreetly and
enthusiastically.
“This is my house.”
The people around me, hushed each other, and a little old lady grabbed my camera and pulled
me to the floor.
“Are you…”
“Yes, I am…”
Silence you could cut with a spoon. I tried to get up, and the same woman held my leg, the
one that was standing on my keys.
“Ma’am please,” and I dragged my leg, her body, and the keys along the porch scraping all
three. A man I had not appointed, stood guard at the door. He looked like he could have been my
friend Andrew’s brother, but I was afraid to ask—being so dark and all. She started to scream,
and her grip tightened.
“Things are rough all over!”
With that, she instantly let go. Key in…door open. Another reason I’m locked-up.

No difference between you and psychotic—trip to the mall

Change this to third person…Billy had never been spoken to like that before. He argued for
sanity by replaying his tapes, but he wasn’t replaying them. He was asking for them to be
replayed. God was talking thru him to him. There was no difference between Billy and a
psychotic.
He wandered around in the grocery store on the verge of tears, and had a run on conversation
with another part of himself—a more integral self, singular in origin, even tho it was clearly apart
from him—Billy felt very connected. People asked him for directions, ‘excuse me, where are the
junior mints?’ He had never been more in control, and it showed.
Fantasies did not become real. Reality became like an envelope with one of those cellophane
windows that you can read thru, it was like a gift you could accept or reject without having to go
to all the trouble of opening. It came special delivery, and not so plain white. He could see more
reality in the reality. It was something he had never seen before. He wondered what it would be
like if he always had the gift. He chastised himself for thinking that. Then stopped—stopped
chastising.
These messages from God had labels. Billy rose above the labels, and that was that, he kept
reading.
Before long he and God were seeing each other daily, they had formed a fast friendship, in
something Billy can only describe as a continuous alwayseverwas conversation. Not like on the
radio, this one was real, and had long pauses. One day Billy had to go to the mall.

possible diary entry, if I ever get around to it.

I took God to the mall today; He said it reminded Him of the catacombs. They had lots of
bargains there too, he said, but they didn’t use the word free so…freely.
He informed me that the sale of good-luck charms at places of death was a tradition much
older than any church. He implied many more shopping centers sprang up from crosses than
churches ever did. He became hard to understand, but he was talking as I was driving home and
he was talking fast. On the way to the mall, (He drove) it was all about where’s the power? My
transmission’s been slipping, I said. And tried to explain that if the coefficient of weight-
momentum exceeds the resistance from available…
God said, Please don’t explain slippage to me.
Well, it’s exactly the way I like it—it keeps me concentrating on getting there, while I’m
getting there…It was pointless to explain anything to Him.
He also told me on the way home, as I pulled into the Bizarre Shopping Center that it had been
a burial spot of considerable renown. And showed me a picture.
“I’m driving.”
Then he began talking about Michael, and played some of the tapes in my head.
“Invite Michael over, I want to tell him something.”
“What?”
“I want to tell him personally, I’m sorry.”
God’s a big man, I was about to find out how big. He doesn’t believe in clandestine apologies.
Of course, he has to start all this in aisle seven of the ACME. So I tried not to tear up.
You people know nothing about honesty or truth! G
Now I’m ‘you people.’ B
He replayed Michael telling the world the circumstances under which he would rape a child.
One thing you like to believe, the next thing you don’t like, so you don’t believe. G
I’m not going to spend my life being a color—he ended how many years of stark racism with
that line. Don’t they get it? G
Please stop. I’m looking for ice cube trays, and chocolate syrup; you’ve got us in paper
products. He kept on.
“Bastard” I said, half to myself, half in tears. B
Look, everyone thinks you’re an idiot. I happen to know you’re one of the most intelligent
people on the planet. G
“Oh, Thanks…I’ve always…” “What are you lookin’ at?” B
God said, “One of,” and then helped the woman wipe Billy from her memory. And he
continued. Keep following the plan otherwise you might go down in history as the boy who
broke five, all over his face. G
“God! That’s not funny.” B
Yes it is. G
“Broke ten.” B
He replayed the tape, of Michael protesting.
“I didn’t see that.” I said. B
Yes, you did. G
“Well, I didn’t understand why he would want to sleep with boys.” B
You had to say that. God said.
We picked up some chocolate syrup, to mix with my protein drink.
If you were trying to bait me before, I cannot be a bastard, but you can, with your off-handed
remarks about sex, me, politics and the authority of the church. G
Why did you want me in the first place? B
You’re the only person I know, who would go without bathing for a week, invite the One True
Living God over to his house—without cleaning up, let it slip his mind, and make Him do the
dishes, first thing. G
“Oh.” I’m never gonna have sex again, am I? B
If you drive, and write you’ll never make it home. G
Don’t change the subject. Am I ever going to have sex again? B
No, not really. You’ll be lucky to work up to a good argument. G
What’s that supposed to mean? B
They’ll think you’re too clean. G
“What?!” I almost said ‘shhh’ to myself; the parking lot was practically empty, just one big K.
 Yes, you of all people! He said, with mock incredulity, I think. GB
I’m not too clean for sex! B
I know that, and God knows you know that, but they won’t. G
I’ll tell them. G
Look. He rolled tape. Look at what you wrote back before the stop sign you almost missed. G
‘I’m never gonna have sex again, am I?’ B
No, what does it really say? G
I was in a hurry, I don’t take dictation. B
Silence.
It says: I’m never gonna have S A am I? B
You will never understand this. That’s why you can’t say it. G
SA? B
Yes, No, the words. G
I know you’re right, I can’t, I can’t even write them. B
Silence, a red light.
You’ll have to settle for the occasional angel. G
That’s good, right? (I had to ask). B
Yes. They’re pretty nice. G
Silence, still red.
“And you didn’t have to wash the dishes.” I said.
I wanted a glass! God said.
Billy looks to see if the light’s green yet, and makes a face. If it had turned blue with yellow
polka dots, he would have asked for a second opinion—but it didn’t. Suddenly they’re home.
One minute here, the next there—That’s why he wrote everything down.
I was fixing you lunch. God said. G
Well, where is it? B
It’s coming. God said, tho he didn’t have to. G
If it didn’t take forever to find you, I’d dump you right here. God said. BG
“Nice.” I said. B
I loved his playful side, we got into an almost argument, I implied some things he said
bothered me. He got offended, as tho I said He was bothering me. All of a sudden something
fell out of my ear, and it dropped toward the wooden floor, and I looked to see if it would walk
away, but there was nothing there, just a tiny stone, which practically crumbled when I picked it
up. I looked all over, it may have fallen between the boards.
He said I wasn’t crazy, and he’d always be with me. I handed him the flashlight, got up off
the floor, and we walked back to the kitchen. He didn’t say anything, but he was amazed that I
handed it directly to Him. He stood there holding the light wondering.
God whispered, Howdoyouhearme.
I still don’t hear too well out of that ear, speak up. B
Do you know who you’re talking to. G
Sure, you. You haven’t seen that pot with the slight dent in it have you?
What.
The fracture. It’s my biggest pot and I need it, maybe it’s here. B
God stood with the flashlight while I looked in the last place I’d expect to find it.
What are you using to talk to me. G
I thought that was an odd question thing, so I said, My pre-frontal cortex.
Your pre-frontal cortex is ‘over ruled,’ using one of his son’s words. G
Wow. What am I using then? B
God was not writing a book: The 16 things I know, and the 48 things I never heard about, so
he said: I don’t want to say. G
What?
 I don’t want to say what you’re using. G
No, I meant what am I using? B
You rewired your brain. G
Hot damn! Amazing, I mean Wow!! Now I need a chair. The brain is fascinating isn’t it? B
God looked at Billy. Billy looked expectantly at God.
Yes…yes it is, God said finally. Billy gave God a quirky, slightly irritated look.
I’ll say! So what am I using? B
What’s the last real thought you had. G
Another odd sort-of-question-thing. “I’m not walking around in circles.” B
Before that. G
When I was outside yesterday with my iced tea I got lemon in my eye. B
How did it make you feel. G
You were there, I got lemon in my eye. Another uninterpretable glance.
I don’t know how you feel until you put words to it. Any words. G
So…… B
The Limbic System, six language centers, a facial nerve…and a balance center. G
Isn’t that incredible? Watch this! Billy spun around on his heel and smiled—tah dah!
God stared. His Son, who was not that impressed with God, had rewired his own brain, forgot
to put the self protection language retrieval center back, never missed it, didn’t need it, turned
most of it into a planter, which grew an awareness of what’s going on all around you center, and
didn’t care, was staring at the face of God, and thought the interesting thing was that he could
name several kinds of tea, and spell Pekoe forward and backward, and never tripped or spilled
any—even on the stairs, and was now busy trying to think what his last thought was. His Son,
who found himself fascinating, but spilled that all over the place, had never been to church, didn’t
fear God, or think it so odd to be talking to him in the kitchen, in the car, in the store, in the tub,
or in the backyard—took down every word verbatim, insisted for some reason, on some form of
colloquial agreement acid test, hadn’t worn a watch for over a year, and showed up right on
time—Thanked God profusely, immediately after finding out his brain wasn’t working properly,
could spin himself around in any number of directions to catch every single word God spoke, and
the one thing he was unlikely to ever do was fall on his knees. God almost clapped. His son was
back. He came thru the word made real. The words that flow like water, thru the world, the mind
and out—his mind, his world, these words on and on. Billy was able to write down everything
precisely, regardless of the fact that in many cases it was weeks before he understood what he
wrote. He wrote. And loved it.
God had looked at a stack of dishes, and the next thing he knew he was washing them. That’s
his story.

“Gumption!” I said, in reference to a spine comment, “Now who’s the expert all of a sudden?”
I told you never use that word, it is ‘assertiveness.’
I understand. One of us said.
I’m not going to spend my life being a color….and I ate a pickle.
No one got gobbled up. No sound at all, and no rushing/clicking in my ear. That was gone,
along with the jaw pain. I had a lot to do, so I sat down and ate dinner.

During dinner I asked Him, God, I don’t understand why are you apologizing to MJ for
something he did to himself or something we did to him?
I’m apologizing to MJ because I’m the one, I’m the reason he likes to sleep with boys. God
said.
I slept with him as a child. I was pro-tec-ting him. You’d be surprised how many people
would like to abuse a child star. God said.
Oh. So now… I said, trying to form a question.
 Yes. God said.
And he doesn’t know it was you? B
No, I guess not. God said, without irony.
The radio played, Stop! The love you save may be your own, darlin’ take it slow or someday
you’ll be all alone, you better…
But…I tried to come up with a comment, instead of my burger.
I love children. God said.
Silence.
I began to cry, knowing what I knew of my own vulnerability as a child.
Silence.

Put your arms out. G

I did.
I figure you for about a size 42. G
42 regular, or long, depending. I said.
Got it? G
Yes. I said.
There still was no great sucking sound. I thought time would stand still or speed up, but crazy
still happened at its usual pace. I felt a nose-bleed, but it was water and mucus. It refreshed me a
little.

How smart am I? B
Everything you do is great, now, when are we going to get there. G
Give me a break, I’m working night and day, I said, utterly convincing-sounding.
“ ‘d be nice if I…have…” I looked around…the room was empty except for a cart.
“Hello…hello.” Billy said, as he turned in his chair.
Still no sucking sound. Nothing happened, except I felt like I had just won the Kentucky
Derby, myself—Like a runaway horse in a runaway stable. Billy felt like the only horse from
Philadelphia that ever had a chance to win the Triple Crown, mucked-up stable and all. Slow
Surrender. And he watched, and the race lasted ten seconds, and he lost. And he realized he only
lost if he cared. He ran because he had to run, win or lose. I slept like a baby.

The Next Day

When the going gets weird, the weird go professional ↗ Hunter Thompson
Mah says: That if you puts a knife under the bed, it cuts the pain in two--Butterfly McQueen, Gone With The Wind.
During this conversation the squirrel machine lobs one

“Billy there is no difference between you and a psychotic.”

Greeted with heavy anticipation, the news spread far and wide, and six people in Mumbai
finally succumbed to the inevitable prolonged lack of food. All at the same time.
“Billy, I have said this over and over. You see before you, two choices, tea or coffee. There
are never two discreet choices, there are always three, and they change names like you change
underwear—just more frequently.
Back in the day, men looked around, and they saw exactly what we see today, except the
cameras were not hand-held, and everything wasn’t so jiggly. Colors, and all that, were the same.
They came from light. See!” I held out my hand, palm up, and it grew red as I stared at it
expressionless. Always just like this, palm up.
We see now, that what we’re looking at is a process of change. Back then a horse was a horse,
of course, of course. Today, we know that they were not always, as they appear today, nor are
they now, what they will become in the future.
 You are the ‘Blue Roses’ Tennessee Williams spoke of. God said. Men are not happy with
regular roses, or plain yellow tigers, they want blue roses, and white tigers; it’s their nature; don’t
mess with it.
Your impulses are those of the crazy, why would you want to change. It’s not the wanting by
itself. It is the claim. It’s like wanting, wanting to change.
I was still amazed that the red bucket of soapy water I was using to pre-soak my orange
crocodile shirt had been there for a week, as if I’d planned it this way.
You are changing into what you will become. G
Look how cloudy the water is, I thought to myself.
Billy, stand for me now. And I stood.
“Put your arms up, there, now down, now repeat, good, repeat. Are you flying?”
“No…” B
“Do you want to?” G
Wilbur, or should I say Orville, don’t you know a horse is a horse of course of course? Would
you sing it with me?…I have to…and Billy cannot speak…God waited for a long time. Billy
cried, and tried to squelch the tears that would not stop.
It was a sight. It was a lesson. It was, for God, like Mankind, wanting to speak—just as
always, less screaming and grunting though, more self-effacing.
This was not the first time, this had ever happened, nor was Billy’s disappointment
unconditional, it had a hinge, it was as focused as he was—And it swung wide.
God sat with me and put his arm around me, from the outside.
No animal ever changes so fast as a man. It’s their primary thing, and yet they see stagnation
everywhere. They’re driven by the necessity that drove them there in the first place. G
Billy began, no one can talk to a … and he began to cry again. That’s some gospel song you
got there preacher man. God said. Billy sniffled and thought about getting a tissue, but he didn’t
have any, and then he remembered God picked him up a box at the store. He’s a handy shopper,
and a good driver, tho he worries too much. “I didn’t come anywhere near that stop sign.” B
“Ready,” God said. “Ready, and…no one can talk to a horse of course unless of course the
talking horse is the famous Mr. Ed.”
Billy took a deep breath and shook it off. What’s next Teletubbies?
Yes, channel 12.
What was that all about? I asked.
When… I know you hate this. It is a remnant of your photic driver. If I rang a bell, within
two minutes you’d stop hearing it, it would be ne`gated. Be skeptical, sad. One: things could be
worse, you are a psychotic’s dream. And Two: you can turn-off anything you don’t like, even
me. Godd! Billy says, Good, Billy repeats with a sort of drumming. You see two choices, nuts,
not nuts, when ever do you get two choices so circumscribed.
Are you asking me
Put question marks ingod says
I’ll put them in later, you’ll forget.
That’s rididulous biily says
You make me smile god said
That can be our theme song Billy suggests
I thought ‘Cousins,’ from 1962 would be better.
We’re not cousins. Billy said
There is no word for what we are. G
No surprise there, I’m noticing there are a lot of words missing in English, say la guerre, la
vie, l’orange.
Yes, let’s make it more confusing. G
Well the Greeks named everything already. B
Shame what happened to them, couldn’t let go, move on, or save… G
 So, do you have a mother? Billy asked, as God seemed to be readying himself to go.
No. I have a thousand fathers. G
Willis! Billy says, using that tedious nickname that stuck to him for a few months post high
school.
Billy you think all fathers are male, and all mothers are female. Father is a role. By your
pupils you shall be taught. G
And no mother? B
Like you. G
I had a mother. B
You have a mother. G
I prefer the fiction. B
Billy, I’m not going to discuss fiction with you, if that’s what you think. G
Do me a favor? B
What. G
Don’t ever leave, I would be crushed. B
I will never leave you. G
Billy greeted this with characteristic silence.
Am I the biggest mess,
yes you are preposterous Use punctuation G
whose in charge B
You think you are G
You have cleanliness and control issues. B
I am not a horse Billy, and stop baiting me. G
Are you changing? B
You go on a fishing expedition, and you’re suddenly Jonah. You are naïve, trusting, and you
taste like a Mars bar. You innocently trade on your guiless looks, swidling little old ladies out of
their underwear money. You defy the devil; you make deals with him, and then break them like
frozen candy apples—they shatter. You say exactly what you think, nothing’s off limits, and no
one understands until you’re years away. You copulate with prostitutes, and then thank me so
sincerely with such an open heart I’m touched to the core, and perplexed. You decided at age 8,
to spend your life seeking me, and you never once went to church. Maybe one Passover as an
Easter bunny, looking for hidden punch lines, or maybe just to dress up so you would be allowed
to hear the music play. Who knows what you were doing. We finally meet when you demand
the explanation to a joke. What joke? You have faith I can’t compare to anything but water.
You just believe everything will be fine. And you’ll make it if you fall. People get deathly ill
when they leave you. You’re everyone’s best friend, but you forget them as fast as rain. You just
expect great things to show up; and I’m still ticked about the 27 women. G
And the bird. I added.
You sit on a time bomb, and then complain your seat is too far from the action. I tell you to
wait, and you do. You could die at any moment. If there is something I don’t know tell me now!
God demanded.
I can’t drive. I decided to add to his litany.
Or dive, or jump, or study, or lift, or carry, or kill, or care.
Or suck, or fuck. I added as an after thought.
I know! To you sex has no meaning whatsoever. A pinnacle to itself—getting there’s
everything, doing something when you’re there is nothing. You love the proximity! G
My Napoleonic Squirrel machine shot another round onto the island of Saint Helena.
No one ever complained. I…
 Well, of course not, what are they going to say. They’re waiting for you to leave, then they
miss you like crazy, or they just go crazy, and it starts all over again. I thought you were the
personification of truth, but you’re indecipherable! G
What part of Heaven do you want? G
I was thinking of a big marble house with a colonnade, by the sea, with a river, but not an
island, and the river should have some spunk to it. Waterfall, rapids: Location location location. B
Got it. Done. And you got the plan? G
You’re like a cat. You stalk the foulest meat you can find, catch it, eat it, then you clean
yourself. B
No one ever told me that before. G
Well… Swing low, sweet chariot, what’ja think that meant? B
So a big sprawling, farm-like house, or more Romanesque? G
Temple-like. Did you ever see the Parthenon? B

Your tears, tear me apart, then you speak, and I cringe. You haven’t been seeking me you’ve
been hunting me. You’re the first one to say he hates his enemies because they are so like him.
Why don’t you cut out the obvious, and say you love your enemies? G
I’m ambivalent about that. I think you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. B
Why do you tell me things like that. You want to take the back door because you can’t find
the front door. G
I don’t go to the front door because I don’t know what to say. I’m impolitic. B
Impolitic! I wonder do you care about anything, I see so little evidence. You move hear,
there, you’re all over the lot. I mean, how sincere are you. You claim to be the judge of
sincerity, but you have ‘self esteem issues’—then you go and marry a dog! G

Do you want to sit on my right or what? G

Whatever. B
See! You get all jazzed about a little diddling psychic surgery, and then when it comes to
where you’re going to spend all eternity, you’re become blasé about it. G
On the left. B
You’re enjoying this aren’t you? G
It’s like scooping up gophers with a giant shop-vac. Vloop.
Here pick a card. G
I’d rather do everything. B
Very funny. G
I want some Easter eggs.
I walked all the way from the Del-Mar grocery store to see you.
Nice walk.
Stay on message. G
I can’t believe you talk like that. B
Nobody talks like that. G
My part or your part? B
You do…just go. G
You start. B
What have I told you about two discreet choices. G
They are mut…
Yes, they are mute. God said, as if he were coaching.
What was that? Billy saw a flash, and heard a gurgling sound, like backwards thunder. B
I believe it’s called an Arguementarium. G
I feel like dancing. B
 You wanted a ring, now you want to go out dancing. You take me to the mall on our first
date, and I drove. Where is all this leading? G
I hope your not asking me, when are we gonna get there?…And I drove back! B
And almost got yourself killed. G
About that…B
What have I just told you? G
Moot. B
Moot. G
Billy looked around the arguementarium that just sprang up, and could almost see the trays of
good luck charms, and trinkets lined up, like souvenirs. It looked nice.
One more question. B
Yes. G
In the background Cousins plays.
Oh, never mind. B
You forgot it, didn’t you. G
Billy stifles a laugh. Yes. B
It’ll come to you. G
The date! B
The date. Our date. G
No the date, what’s the date? B
You’re kidding, right. G
It’s always here, and it’s always now? B
April 8, 2004. G
I thought it was the seventh. B
You had to say that didn’t you. We’re beyond that. G
Yes, we’re beyond that. We’re searching for sovereignty. B
Well. G
Well? B
Well, do you want breakfast or something. Gb
Aren’t you busy. bG
Everything’s on automatic. G
Billy laughs, and is afraid he won’t stop. You are no horse. B
Do you want me to say it. G
No, I’m saving it. B
The radio is playing. A Rolling Stone’s tune comes on. Billy grabs for the radio, and turns it
off. God smiles.
Funny, it’s our parochial concerns that we’re the most afraid of. Gb
Yes, they’re stultifying. b
I just got a flash, Billy says. Only Amish, ten thousand tigers, and nothing but an old 45,
playing the theme song to the Patty Duke Show, skipping. The end of the world as we know it. B
About that. B
Silence
Silence
Silence
Silence
Silence
Silence
Silence
Well? B
Well, it starts up again. G
No big…B
 No big sucking sound. No, there is no big sucking sound, have a little…f…G
No, I’m saving that. Billy throws the radio out the window. B
Good boy. G
I’m never going to have sex again am I? B
God laughs Billy youre the only person in the world who would interrupt me when Im
discussing the end of the entire universe to ask me about sucking versus fucking and leave out all
the punctuation is there something wrong with you.
Moot? B
God laughs. You’re just never satisfied, that’s your problem. G
But moot, essentially moot? B
With that equipment you can go anywhere. G
I think I understand. B
No you don’t. G
Billy laughs, and they have breakfast: coffee, and a banana, which they share. First Meal.
Ironic. B
What’s ironic. G
Our first meal is a banana. B
Why so ironic. G
I’m not that fond of bananas. B
They’re losing their flavor. G
I thought it was me? B
No, a lot of things are losing their flavor…Shipping problems, essentially the problem with
trucks…Equivariant diffusion...Move it, it changes. G
What you said. B
Yes, same thing. G
How is it when we went to the mall you acted like you had never been there? B
I saw it thru your eyes. G
Do you have eyes? B
What a strange question. G
Yes and no? B
I don’t exploit the properties of light or matter like you do, to discover where the food is. I use
Being to…
The more you tell me that I don’t understand, the more they’ll hold me to it. B
There’s no test, Billy. G
Billy smiled, he knew that. But he did feel a little sigh pass his lips.
I saw what you had never seen. G
Furtive, fun…larceny. B
Something else. G
Stealth. B
Yes, stealth. G
Beautiful old man there, tho. Gb
Yes, that’s what I wish. To be out and about, brave, happy, with eye contact, on the verge of a
song. B
When I’m sixty four. G
Rolling on a ri-ver. B
Rolling on a river: Done a lot of things in Memphis…broke a lot of something down in New
Orleans, but I never saw, the good side of a city…till I took a ride on the river boat queen. Big
wheel keep on turning…Proud Mary keep on burning, rolling, rolling, rolling on a river. G
Where did that come from? bG
Your repertoire. Gb
I love that you love my songs. bG
 Happiness runs in a circular motion…thought is like a little boat upon the sea. All our souls
are deeper than you fancy. You can have anything if you let yourself be… Gb
Billy begins to cry, and the banana is poised to kill him.
He begins to sob, choke, not choke, not breathe. Finally he spits it in the sink, red-eyed.
What the fuck was that!? B
Billy, anybody can die at any time. G
On a banana!? B
That makes me concerned. B
Silence
Silence
I just don’t understand. B
Silence
Silence
Billy, everybody must die. If you don’t know, you have to wait. G
I thought if you didn’t know you had to ask? B
I’m talking to you. G
But…here with you, inches away? Billy scratches just under his left clavicle, a tingling.
Billy, I’m always inches away. Always have been, that’s where I learned the songs. My
repertoire. G
But why kill me? B
Silence
silence
silence
silence
Silence
Silence
When you have a human choice…G
The world opens up; the names change. You never have, nor have you ever had, nor will you
ever have, had, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, two choices as discreet as those. G
I think I understand. B
You understand that you don’t understand, but your moving forward. G
Maybe I should save the banana. B
What for, as If I didn’t know. G
Do you have any idea what that pulpy tasteless mass is worth? B
Yes. G
About 5 cents. B
Yes, about five. G
Silence
silence
Silence
I like spending time with you, just sitting. G
Me too. B
We’re on the outskirts of your life. G
I know. I felt it. B
How’s it feel. Gb
Good. bG
Does that mean I’m going to die soon? B
You know. G
I do, but I wish I understood it. B
You had to say that. G
Yeah, but to know me, is to be employed. Gb
 Billy, why all the body guards. G
I wanted…bG
Pro-tec-tion. B
Are you…? Gb
Yes? bG
Saying, Gb
Yes? bG
That Gb
Yes, bG
You Wanted People Who Were Critical To You Not Critical Of You? G
Yes, and I want to end war, get people talking, encourage them to love unabashedly,
unashamedly, and make a world that will last forever. B
Yes. G
And it’s not over yet. B
Good boy. G
And I’m not a horse. G
I’m still saving that. No still means no. Billy closed the window. B
A little old lady in Duluth, and six Pakistani nuns, dropped dead of heart attacks.
Billy took an aspirin.
Silence
Billy walked back in the kitchen, and God was still there, Holy as ever.
So…and I won’t ask again. B
They always start the same way. G
My sister was like a little buzz saw wasn’t she? B
And then they change the question, from, ‘Why do I have to die,’ to a verisimilitude.
Yes. G
Which? B
Which what. G
You do have a sense of humor. B
Known for it. G
Among? B
You have a sense of humor too. G
Silence
Yes, your sister was a little buzz saw, she could have torn you up. G
When she tells the story, she’s sweetness, and encouragement personified. B
She would encourage you to dive into a pit, on a filament. G
That was just youthful vigor. B
Not to change the subject, but sex, and life have a lot in common. Gb
They’re both life and death struggles. G
But? bG
Billy, no one ever struggles with you. G
I don’t get you? b
Yes you do. Gb
It’s not struggle to get in. It’s a struggle to understand. Everyone gets in.
Not hearing you? bG
I know. Gb
Can we drop the ‘b,’ Billy says, as he punctuates. b
No. G
See that’s what I mean! bG
See, that’s what I mean. Gb
I’m about to tell you what life is, and you push me away. Gb
 Kill me now. b
Ten minutes ago you thought I was the devil trying to kill you with a banana. G
Did not. bG
Please… Gb
I’m never talking again. bG
I know. It only hurts you. Gb
We’re at the outer edge of your fictional life. Gb
Can’t hear you. bG
You hear what you want to hear. Gb
I knew you were going to say that. bG
Everyone already is. G
You don’t have to do anything. Gb
In fact, I think the less you do the better. G
You couldn’t sell that at a swap meet. b
You’re right. Gb
I’m learning from this conversation. bG
Yes I know, you’re growing everyday. Gb
How far can I go? bG
Right to the edge, and then you have to jump. Gb
From? bGb
No, no still means no. bG
When I started this, I thought it had something to do with packing. B
I know, and then your mother started packing. G
And now I see… b
Personal space? G
Personal story. bGb
Personal space must be claimed.
Exactly. G
Personal stories just don’t ever stop. B
Three persecuted Tibetan holdouts, fell into a pit that they couldn’t climb out of.
Understanding lasts about a minute, maybe five. But you can’t take your life five minutes at a
time, waiting for the last five minutes to expire or the next five minutes to start… G
Bad for the heart B
Yes G
You could punctuate more G
You could do what you do best. B
I’m leaving, and I’m coming back after you clean up. G
Billy grabs a chipped bowl, and flings it into the trash. Done. B
Nice try Houdini. G
Hudson, Billy Hudson. B
Billy Hudson, that name is impossible for me to say. G
Practice. B
Billy Hudson. Billy Hudson. Billy Hudson. You’re growing every day. G
He never left.
He was gone.
I have not come to bring Peace, I have come to bring turmoil. The turmoil of the soul, larceny.

Your father is very proud of you. He doesn’t know where you came from, but he always
thought it was odd—you knew more than he did. He thought you were ineffectual. G
No, to answer your question from before, I have your eyes. G
 In my happy psychotic state, I asked God for more, and realized somewhere, from somewhere,
that everyone who lived in this house went crazy after they left it. It, not me, but what happened
was, they stopped hearing God’s voice, His, not mine. It resides here somewhere. I felt like
grabbing the deed but decided to sit down instead. I found in my house, myself—there before I
was born. My speech startled many, it was too plain. Without it I was absent, without it people
left in an indescribable way. As theirselves.
I asked for a miracle, and I glanced over my right shoulder at the nine daffodils that I had
plucked two days ago, and put in a glass of water. Nothing happened, it couldn’t be constructed,
if that’s the right word. I live in a house with, of, symbolism. That’s all it is, private symbols, a
TV, and some regular stuff—given, bought, or handed-down to me. Gifts—things that tell stories
about people, about occasions, misunderstandings, love, true love, sexual feeling, fun. It’s really
just a collection of stuff I use, for one thing or another. I put things here or there. If they demand
attention I move them. God said, Wouldn’t it be funny if Man invented the hydrogen car, and
then spent their last 200 years driving around looking for water. What if you exploded all the
churches and they reformed—came back together as one. What if all they ever ask, is where I
buy my pants? See, I have no idea where to put these things, I really don’t. Protection is always
a consideration: CD’s lay face-up, tapes in a pile by the VCR, mostly with jackets to keep the
dust out, glasses, books, Persian rugs, surge protectors, an electrical heater for cold mornings,
extension cords I baby, speakers, candles I rarely light, diversions, spoons, projects in various
stages of completion, tissues, dictionaries, pretty stuff, and pretty-practical stuff. Books,
computers, clocks, did I mention, I forget, if…When I’m walking thru the house if I get too close
to the front door Overhere starts wagging his tail wildly, applauding my timely decision to walk
him. He’s a natural born Wedger; picture frames, memories in symbolic form, antiques. If I
were to wheel in a cart everytime I spoke, or someone spoke to me—it would be full of things
that had saved my life by that slow simple process of addition, that sustains me. Everything here
tells a story—a story about doing, a story about thinking, receiving, creating, having, playing,
loving, admiring, saving, being, and borrowing. Every year’s a souvenir, that slowly fades away.
I like things around me that are inexpensive, full of great meaning, need work, have no resale
value, and prefer to be ignored.
I had no idea what I was getting into. Even after spending the day stoned off my ass with
God, literally in the driver’s seat— I know stoned, and I was hammered. If you want the recipe
keep reading.
I wanted to call the florist for some flowers for Patrone, who was in the hospital. The same
hospital I left, what seems like only a few weeks ago. I picked up the phone, there was a pause of
a half-second, and then Judy Garland began to sing, Somewhere over the rainbow to me. In my
state which was symbolic; I received a message, which was symbolic; in a manner, which was
symbolic; and I thought: what, God, please tell me, is different about me? The phone upstairs
was off the hook, from a nonsense call, the CD player was next to it, it was on ‘ random repeat.’
In the second it took to realize that, I began to get it.
All the others came and went from this house, many still deeply troubled, many deeply
psychotic, manic, depressed—burdened. Is it because they stopped hearing your voice?
The answer was waiting, as you might expect. The question was symbolic; my concern was
genuine. Why me? I remembered the stone that fell from my ear, but didn’t hit the ground—if it
had I would have heard it. He fixed my ear so I would always hear Him, deaf as I am in that ear.
My hot button was pressed and I, I believed my asymmetry might change; my head filled in an
instant, and flooded; all was lost. Catastrophe! I had to regroup. It’s like this: ideas form so fast,
and nudge each other, I just naturally jump.
My symbolic language told me what I feared most. This was just for me. JFK used to call up
Judy Garland, the real Judy, and request that song. She would sing it occapello over the White
House’s secure line. That, to me, was symbolic of huge success. To have that ability to call up
someone for a song, any time, day or night, while you wrestled with the world. It did not escape
my notice; he was killed on purpose, before the age of fifty.
How many others who heard His voice were killed. I fear there is an immeasurable number,
and yet it doesn’t answer my question. I would un-volunteer, except that I love the high. If I said
it was addictive, you wouldn’t even begin to understand the depth. I looked in the mirror, and
said in passing, ‘still got it.’ I looked to my soul, and I knew I was an addict: coffee, tea, aspirin,
Xanax, sex, creativity, and now God. The only one I could stop ‘anytime’ was Xanax. If drug
substitution is ever to work, you have to go to less and less addictive substances—I was going the
wrong way.
What a strange combination of reality and symbolism we wound up, wind up, are winding up
with. The edges of my fictitious life.
I brought Mei up to see my cabin in the sky, we played card games till I practically fell asleep
in his arms, and visa versa. I don’t care what you think, it doesn’t get much better than this.
I am the self appointed Judge of Sincerity. It’s a claim. If I love God, and He has a male role,
doesn’t that make me gay in spirit? Take your time. I took mine.

Born this way.

You can keep your cameras, and keep your money. This isn’t recordable anywhere, except in
DNA.
By his nature he was great.
If he were an artist, he would be great.
If he was handed his hat, his exit would be great.
If he was a drunk he would be great. It was in his nature.
If he were jailed for drunkenness, it would be a great fiasco.
If he disturbed the peace on a continual basis—
If he were himself—
If he became a stickler about the law—
If he sat unapproachable, and welcomed only the broken hearted—
If he stood up, he would be the Rising. It was just in his nature to be great.
I made a decision then and there, never to make anyone look stupid again. And then all hell
broke loose. It was similar to the decision I made, to mind my own business three years ago—
And not get involved in pettiness.

Meter by meter my world was smiling. God laughed, but I swear I don’t get the joke. I think,
think that the ‘third thing,’ the unknown, that is unknown, unknowable, incomprehensible, and
not within our grasp is ourselves. But what’s funny about that? I already knew I was in every
choice I ever made. Kill me now. Time…… Joke.
I hope I don’t become addicted to psychosis. That could be a mess. Could be?!
I hope I don’t continually claim psychosis as my turf.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a circle in a baby carriage.
₪
Billy. Billy…G
What? I’m sloe…bee, sleep...ing. Yes! Thank God, and mattress manufacturers. B
Oh. Good morning. G
Silent sleeping.
It just came to my attention you have broken all my commandments. G
Now! It’s…04:55. B
Sorry. G
They couldn’t be kept…by anyone, but a liar. B
What! G
Definitions were too broad, and kept changing. B
What! G
Oh, God. I’m like everyone else. I just say things I feel compelled to say. You can’t live
without killing, and I covet my neighbor’s shutters. I do what I do to get out of prison. B
Oh… G
How about bacon for breakfast. G
No breakfast, coffee. B
I’ll be right back. G
And no toast. It’s just a waste… it always ends up in t h e t r a s h….snore. B
God caught Himself half-way down the stairs, but kept going. Waste? G

Silence
I got bored, so I decided to teach silence to a small group of children.
I bet you can’t be silent for four seconds?
Of course we can, they all chimed in—except the six year old, who knew I could be tricky, and
wasn’t buying it.
Their mothers looked on while they made lunch, and picked up trash for no reason.
I’ll do the counting, and you be perfectly quiet.
Okay. Okay. Okay. And finally, okay.
One….then silence for an unbelievably long five seconds.
Two…they looked at me as if they were holding their breath. I look distracted.
Three…..they stood still, fidgeting and then one of them said, come on!
……………………………....….…………four.
I taught them how to tell time. How to listen to adults. How to follow a direction. How to
extend their attention span. How to have fun while you learn. How to do something you don’t
want to do. And how to be irritated, and get over it.

Their mothers said, Well, that went well.

I said, You can’t teach a child how to be silent. You can only teach everything else. One thing at
a time, and they tell you what’s next—the better you teach, the more silence you get.
*
Two people alone is worse than one person alone—it just is.
*
Someone put up a banner in the post office. It said, Communication begins with respect.
Some weeks later, I got the same question wrong on a test. My teacher said, Will,
communication begins with listening. I said, Are you sure? She said, It’s on page 112 of your
text book (I wouldn’t have walked under that banner unless I agreed with it). So I said, What are
they listening to? I wasn’t so smart, but I knew what was all around me.

Billy feels mildly nauseous

You’ve been going back and forth, into and out of psychotic states without control or a net, for
years. It is that lovely childlike quality that makes you so endearing. G
Adults have control. Question is: Where do they get it!? B
 I hovered in dread that He would pack-up and leave. He was growing hazy, and quite hard to
see. Gone. Here—full of his spirit, awaiting His return; gray as a bucket of soapy water; white as
a fog, invisible—inside me.
God spoke to me inside of me, and I tried not to hear ‘No,’ but I’d already said it. I tried to
listen to what he just said as it floated up and then off. When I stopped, I heard fibers in my heart
rub against each other rather squeakily. I was asking God what he was asking me, at the same
time, in my mouth, which was in my head.

Billy, you were right about a few things: don’t leave me now; travel with me. It’s not self,
non-self—other. Listen, just listen. I am a jealous God. I am not always right. Right changes. I
can’t make you mute by restricting your choices. It is my universe, and I am an afterthought—
it’s the way it works. You can’t understand it. Only keep trying.
I can change everything. No one has to die, and I know I said this before, but this time I mean
it. No one has to die. There, did you get that. Did I get it in on time? G
Yes, what? B
I have no raisins in my pocket, they aren’t popcorns—I made a mistake; I didn’t send a
writer…I realized when John wrote what he wrote. I realized it has to be in words, your words,
not my words. G
Am I schizophrenic now? B
Billy, it’s a well known fact that God only talks to psychotics. Neurotics build castles in the
air, and psychotics live in them. I’m sorry about that. You’re the only one who can explain this.
Please, you have to stay together. No one else can do this, and we’re at the eleventh hour. Please
get up. I put you in a prison…for protection, I’m sorry. I was going to have you murdered. But I
couldn’t do it. You’re too dumb. You broke every commandment in the book, and you didn’t
care. You’re the only one who understands: you just transcend all the labels—Billy you always
have. You transcend things that cannot be transcended. Who could ever become transcendent,
who has nothing to transcend? It’s the impossibility that you are. It’s the offer: Billy, a teacher
brought-up on privilege wouldn’t know enough about love to offer a lit candle safely to a friend.
And you wouldn’t even show-up unless there were a thousand bonfires burning, children
dancing—That’s you. You’re not afraid of love. You’re strong. You remember the day we
met…Billy, We need you, Mankind, Billy, men need you. Now! Right now! Billy’s eyes
fluttered slightly. Don’t leave me! Children love you. God resuscitated Billy, filled his lungs,
restarted his damaged, almost broken, heart. By all that is Heaven! Rise.

Billy awoke, and didn’t bother looking around—he knew he was in Heaven.
My point is this, God said calmly, as he gave Billy Campbell’s soup, and sandwiches in the
kitchen of his childhood, and filled the room with the sounds of his Grandmother who loved him
and loved food. They drank Constance Comet tea, and the world was electrified, and perfect
forever and ever. Your reputation, is not a problem, theirs will be. Lies
enseriatum, one after another. They will fall. G
You are to blame for the bad ones, and they can’t tell the good from the bad. They will never
be able to learn. You must use your words sparingly. They hear the rattle of their lungs, and
predict dire consequences for everyone. The big one’s coming. G
Let the big one be a silence. B
They’ll hear plenty. G
This class will never graduate. B
Their children’s children will. G

“I have a headache. I don’t care that much for children.” Billy said, as he shook off a
psychotic-slide that would have killed a thinking man. B
That’s what I mean. Children love you, God said, still inside him. G
 “They’re too much.” B
Well, you’re sensitive. God said outright. G
“I know.” Billy said, while massaging his neck.
More sensitive than you know, and less sensitive than you think…Signed ‘G.’
“Where’s my pen?” Billy began a search for one of twenty-five pens, scattered thru-out the
house on almost every surface in practically every room.
I mean you’re right, more or less. I’m trying to diplomatise your situation. G
“What situation?” B
Children. What do they do that bothers you? G
“They don’t laugh at my jokes.” B
Yes! Billy. Speaking very seriously, God said…That’s it!
Billy latched onto a Blue ‘Viagra’ pen.
“What’s it?”
You’re a natural. When you put something on, it just never fits. Look at your clothes, for
example. G
“How come you talk to me when I’m busy? Oh, look! It’s my ‘Viagra’ pen…never runs out
of ink, and he looks toward God for approval.”
Silence
Silence
“Well?” B
Well. Leave me out of it. G
“That’s it. They always give me funny looks.” B
Children are little expectations arising from big problems. Are you editing me? G
No, yes. B
I like you for a thousand reasons, especially how you hardly ever edit what you’re thinking.
You don’t seem to care what you’re thinking. You think anything you want, and it never seems
to influence what your doing, in the slightest, and you’ve been operating this way so long you
don’t notice…That’s a talent. God said, and didn’t look at Billy for approval.
“Is this hell?” Billy asked.
Hell is on the roster, but it’s a class you haven’t taken, or are not attending. G
What was that. God said.
Nothing. B
No that. G
Billy clicks his pen as if it were getting harder and harder to control.
I just said how much I like your editing. I love your steadfast appreciation for truth, and
‘never say die’ attitude regarding the quixotic potential of the run-on sentence. You romance
it…that’s nice…really. Its structure is so ‘holding on,’ look how far its gotten you. G
Billy looks around.
Where was I, God inquired, lazily.
The class you got an A in…Billy said in jest, but shouldn’t have.
Yes. Exactly. You flirt with disaster. Children aren’t a problem, they love you and you love
them. God began to speak in gibberish as Billy drifted away—pen in hand.
When he awoke, God was saying...They will be there to make graduation day with you.
Except they can’t tell the good from the bad. They will accuse you of… ‘divide and conquer,’
because of it’s structure. I command you to come back. I never can think of… repeatedly…and
you gave me some ideas for more, but you miss my point everytime I speak to you. I’m talking
to you! What’s your name?

“Billy.” B
No. G
“I am… im.” Billy said.
 Stop! G
Labels are killers. You have your name for the rules, I have mine. G
“I am a good friend of the living God.” im
God chuckles.
Billy the rules, don’t forget the rules. G
“Same as…” and he trails off, in fiction. im
Yes. Now Go! Just so you know, my rules are inviolate, like gravity. They are also
responsible for birds, erect posture, hot-air ballooning, and skyscrapers. Mine lift you up.
Be off with you, my vagabond lover. im

New Jesus—Gypsies on the lawn

In his dream Willy walked into the crowd of plumbers, dock workers, carpenters, painters,
sculptors, cooks, roofers, film editors, dental technicians and car repairmen staking out tiny
immutable parcels of land on his front lawn. I love lesbians, he thought to himself—All those
hammers, and belts, and waist problems. Whew. He walked up to a biological woman. Sara
problem?
Meditating.
Oh, I thought you were sleeping. He said.
Then why did you wake me?
I honestly don’t know. Because you had your eyes closed.
Ugghh. She said. Then a bright smile came over her face. She looked around. Beautiful day,
mostly blue, she said—all perky, like bubble gum and strawberry.
I looked around. It looked like an argument to me. Gypsies on the lawn. Waiting for the
Messiah.
I winked, implying her drab dress was beautiful.
What’s next? I had reached an impass. I farted and moved on up-wind. I forgot, consorting with
gypsies gave me a pass. Oops. I took the oops, because I really did forget, and walked all the
way up the front steps with it. The crowd parted. I held a pizza box like a briefcase. Then I held
it like a pizza box.
Officer Jack said, when he saw the ‘pizza’ I’d ‘delivered,’ Not now, I’m on duty.
It was my own fault, I’d not only given them food for thought, I had implied food was love. Shit.
That’s when I took my key out.
I’ll never get this symbolic language—it’s a total crap shoot!
Everyone stared at me, and began to move toward me. I felt like a Beatle, Help!
Oh! I said. This lady needs medical attention!
Everyone who couldn’t look away convincingly, stared…Who who?
Her! I shouted, and pointed to no one. Her!
They saw blood on her crotch. It was a faded strawberry.
I turned the key and walked into my own house.
A woman screamed, My leg! My leg!
People stood and exchanged perspectives all around her.
My leg! Look! And she pulled up her skirt, past the knee.
There was dampened anticipation and a fluttering of wings.
The sore. It’s gone! Gone! It was there a minute ago! Right there, and she points to a jagged
mark above her ankle.
Oh, God! she says, and faints. Thud.
Billy closed the blinds, and made a cup of erbal (herbal) tea, then tossed in real tea. And woke to
the hellish sound of knocking at his door.
 Then he shook off his ponderous dream. Door. TV. Door. TV. He decided to answer the
next one that made a noise—he had fallen asleep on the couch again.
Patty was just about to go on a date with a guy she didn’t like, from the Ponderosa, as far as
Billy could make out. He pushed the ‘stop this’ button on the remote. But it wasn’t a tape
recording, and that was the wrong remote. He went to answer the door, knowing that he might
never find out if Patty made the right decision.
Officer Jack, the door guard, was complaining to his new boss. Sir, he plays rough.
Rough! He gives all you guys cheesecake and marshmallows. Does all the work, and here
you sit. Now get in there.
Sir, he won’t answer the door.
Of course not. Use the special key.
Can you ask Davis to come with me?
Davis’s position is on the roof. Jabbers said.
But you can get there just as easily from the top of the stairs.
Inside, Billy was talking to the TV, and said, Patty, If you didn’t want to go, why didn’t you
say something before now? What’s was wrong with your mother’s advice! This is no time to
wish you were somewhere else! The prom’s coming up!
Officers Jack, and Davis, with the orange moustache, waved the big sparkly key in the air, and
Billy went to let them in.
Get Cathy, he said to the TV— she’s the sensible one! Good! Now lay down the law girl!
Billy opened the door. The officers stood there, and were sore afraid.
What?
Can we come in?
Don’t you have perimeters, or posts, or something?
Yes. My post is at the top of the stairs, Officer Davis said, and tried to hand Billy a piece of
paper.
Well. Come in, and don’t mess with anything.
Billy went back to watching TV. Patty’s date went off without a hitch. She was more in love
with whatz hiz name than ever—The big lug.
Ahh. The good old days. Billy quipped spontaneously to himself. No cops in the house, no
unexplainable spontaneous healing, except as it relates to after-school activities. But, Patty loves
to rock and roll, the foxtrot makes her lose control—what a crazy pair...
Three people felt an unprompted healing force go thru them, Officer Jack fell backward onto
the porch with a crash as he tried to leave. Billy closed the door, and rolled his eyes. Sometimes
they even fall alike…But they’re cousins…identical…
A disembodied voice came from the window, and said, We love you Billy.
Billy was shocked. The voice was so high pitched, and sounded like it came from outside, instead
of all around inside.
Officer Jack woke up, and got all the gypsies off the lawn. They were spontaneously healed at
home in their favorite chairs. Not here, next to his.
Who’s ‘we,’ anyway? Billy said to himself as he closed the window.

What was that

Billy had a horrible night. He decided never to give himself an A in a class he never took. It
was hell. He was just glad he woke up. God was glad he had milk in the fridge.
Billy went to the internet upon waking, and looked up the Ten Commandments. I have to… I
have to...I have to speak, he says out loud, finally—In The Voice Of God.
 I too had planned to take the sensible part of the big picture from the big picture. I waited for
the right time, and I’m still waiting. The Age of Sense didn’t get out of the box before The Age
of Awareness came into being. The right rules for the right planet, Γαîα (Earth in Greek).
Respect all worship of God. Give them back to themselves, to their face, and you will make
them see.

Billy hold your ears, there are some things even you can’t know, God said. I must swear an
oath on you in order to make you come alive. Billy held his ears.
I would send my only son to get guzzled in the mouth by the worst of the worst, that’s how
much I love you. No other explanation will do. If you don’t get it now, you are beyond any
hope. There were other things I would rather do than sacrifice my Son to you again. You’re
breaking my heart. He loves like a blind child in a leper colony, and you would destroy him in
front of my eyes, in every evil way you can yet concede. He wipes the slate clean, and he is the
last. There are no more. He’s it. Without him, you have a greater chance of ringing a bell full of
nails than lasting another 200 years.
You can listen now. Billy. Billy. Billy. Billy when you die, the church dies, and they all
become bastards. All churches. All of them. G
That wouldn’t make me feel better, but it’s a start. B
Now how about a tuna sandwich? G
My mother had a joke about a tuna sandwich.
Tell me. Then tell me the name of the project you’re working on. G
Fantastic planet? B
Catchy title.
‘Blue mostly,’ that’s the first line. Billy didn’t say, that’s the only line.

The headlines are for sale at the store

The headline, Jesus returns!…counter offer! Counter offer? Billy laughs, there’s just the
same offer…It’s a different world. A woman wearing a hearing aid had turned it up to eavesdrop,
and said, “You said a mouthful honey.” The cashier scanned the bar code labels that the dyed-
haired lady had peeled and stuck on her so-called purchases, and then bagged herself—feeling
self sufficient and innovative.
Another headline: Jesus is back—offers heaven—no catch? Billy chuckled, what catch?
You have to be, that’s it. And a third: Jesus II, Queer as hell, with the subscript, offers Gay
Heaven…no takers. Billy was offering Heaven, and as far as he knew there was only one—the
real one, not a Heaven for nice white folk, and a Heaven for everyone else.
The sad thing is that in a world built by, and for, strait white men, few if any were happy—
does that tell you anything? You cannot make anything work no matter how hard to try, because
it works already. It worked before you came along, and it’ll work when you’re long gone.
So this is the final outcome. This is where your troublings have gotten you. So far so good,
however, you’re looking at me as tho I were a man. I am not. I was a man, now I’m an idea. I
am part man—one foot in Heaven, one foot on Earth. One-half divine, one-half human, and one-
half pure fiction.
You don’t know God’s business. Men take freedom from men as tho they were children,
stealing from children. Men curse God because they feel abandoned. Then you walk behind,
sowing your own seeds. Deciding for yourselves how the garden will look. Well how do you
like it? These are events over which you no longer have any say. Children cannot handle
freedom, and that is so. B
So, I do have a complaint. These religions…why are they so intolerant, self righteous and
hypocritical—Is that how you see me. The Christians are ignorantly tyrannical, many are both,
the Jews are obnoxious, and the Muslims are prone to hysteria. Some of your religions are
clearly in a class by themselves. You’ve got the lucky, and then you got the ones who know
them—the unlucky. What caste would I be. G
*
There’s not a compartment on that train I’d touch. Were you thinking I like dead fish or what.
A drink now and then is fine, but Shu`tup tells me you’re staggering most of the time under
one cumbersome dosage problem or another, and he’s fearful you’ll fall on him. We all have our
likes, and dislikes. I like heat and light but you probably guessed that. Shu`tup says if you take
less you’ll like it more, and he ought to know.
I love you, but I can’t spend all my time on you. This is clean up time. Ready get set.
You knew I was coming, here I am, here we go.

It was 20:00…eight pm
He entered the restaurant like God, but when he realized how upset they were going to be
when they found out he sucked about 40 dicks to get this promotion—he knew he was going to be
in trouble. No one was going to be happy with him. At least he didn’t have any unhealthy
baggage.
A tiny terrier got his neck yanked by a man who pulled his leash while eating rack of lamb.
Why do they let people bring animals in here, can’t they see I’m trying to eat? Billy still didn’t
get it.
Enxame! (swarm) The camera chap yelled in Portuguese. Everything is connected to
everything else—because I say so. It is the as-yet unknown logic of language. It is the same time
in Beijing, as it is here. Sunlight does not change time, by its absence or its reign. Things were
happening everywhere, now. It was snowing. Change was in the air.
It just felt so right to him. Of course, when they find out what Billy came back for. As he told
Theresa over lunch, well, coffee: “It’s a good thing I look good in white and red.” She giggled:
“My best colors too, next to black, but black is over.”
A camera guy looking for famous tourists at the Statue in Rio De Janeiro—Cristo el Redentor,
got an itchy neck.
Brown is the new black, She said. Billy said: I heard.

My morning 4-15-04 ymd

I stopped time, while I cleaned, with God’s help. I had a TV interview, which went well—I
made the water works cry. When I got home I was read the riot act, in no uncertain terms.
He’s scary, that’s his problem: no name dropping, calling, or fouling. You can only use nick
names and the recipient has full veto power.
The interview went well; I laughed and cried. I went silent 3 or 4 times. There was no food, and
the cameraman cried like a baby because I asked him his name. I fixed the phone problem,
cleaned up; had sex with someone I haven’t met yet; resolved issues of absence and stolen houses
with my brother. Averted holocaust; defined the meaning and purpose of life; defined time as a
river—that was a close one. I told her I thought it was a little early in the day to play ‘stump the
Savior.’ That got a small laugh. I told them where a man’s heart is, and how it can stretch. I told
on the soul, and then I wrestled the devil symbolically and won. I got a tiny scrape on my left
wrist. It was like pulling very pesky weeds—I had to use tools. That was after the show, after
before, during…I was all confused about time. I find that God’s presence distorts the perception
of time. It’s like looking into a banged-up mirror : The harder you try to see what you’re looking
at, the more you have to discount what you’re using to look at it with. It’s all mixed up. I think
that the foreshadowing of one event within another is so strong and clear sometimes, it makes me
wonder which really came first or if they didn’t occur at the same time, and for some reason I
needed to see them this way. Perhaps it’s a design flaw? I’m not perfect.
God drove me to get my hair cut. On the way, he informed me I was under the rules of fiction,
which I already knew, but, he explained them in enormous detail: I cannot talk about living
people I don’t know; I cannot say my name; I cannot say the name of the work; I cannot re-write
it, or touch a hair of it; I cannot read it; I cannot fix it; I cannot put my name on it, or in it until
it’s done; I cannot take money for something I did not write; I am not a go-between, and I’m not
an opening act. These are the rules of fiction, and I’m no longer a fiction writer; I was reminded
that I have transcended all petty labels.
So I sat in the chair and got my hair cut; I always fall asleep, a trance. I looked in the mirror, a
tired, furtive face looked back. After I make France famous I’ll dry the dishes, it was
raining…well, that’s April for you, the cruelest month. I woke up to whatever serenity, my
hairdresser, had in mind, and God drove us, me, himself to the big K. We bought Beast of
Burden, so I could practice my debut, beef jerky, and bubble bath. God walked me to the soap
aisle, and left me there. He whispered in my ear as I stood staring agape at a three-meter-high
wall of detergent, You don’t know why you’re standing here, or what this means do you. He has
the sense of humor of a cow. Ill timed...surprising.
Say the name, say the name, that was all I could think. My own name never did interest me
that much. I prefer the name my mother said that she and dad were seriously considering,
Christopher Allen. I would have liked Christopher Robin even more, but mom said that was ‘too
Pooh.’ At the time I thought it would have been nice to grow up with piglet, and eeyore, and
tigger as friends.
Of course Elsie didn’t drive home, we didn’t talk much. I wrestled with myself…and won.
When I said I was done, the words poured forth like water. When I said I felt funny, I grew mute.
When I said this was Heaven, a bird flew into the window. Bang.

I spoke over a special connection to Mr. NRA, and asked him what part he was playing in the
upcoming production of Faustus. He told me he was not an actor, and I told him we all are, but
we don’t know it. He said his own name, and became red faced. I was feeling hungry and could
really go for a ham and cheese sandwich.
I asked him what was the worst thing in the world, and he said murder of the soul. I asked
whose, and he didn’t know. I asked him how do you commit murder of the soul, and he didn’t
know. I asked him what he thought guns did, at first he implied he didn’t know, and then he said,
They do what the person firing them wants them to do. I informed him that, that was the trouble
with guns, they don’t do what the executor wants them to do, they don’t stop madness. No matter
where you put them. Or how big your holster.
Guns turned to butter. Turn them n before they kill you. Then, oh yes, that’s when I went for
my hair cut. This whole theme of ‘Time Day,’ was getting confusing. Is it 1 o’clock on the 14th
or 12 o’clock on the 15th?
I had no lunch except the beef jerky, I asked God if I’d ever suck another dick again, he said
he couldn’t say, and there was no protein in it anyway. We didn’t argue, I just let it go.
Practically none, he said as the tire grazed the curb. But no apology, from either direction. I
knew he was stonewalling.
Every piece of work has an engine, I said.
Yes, I suppose. G
So everything is like a car.
Go on. G
Every car has a trash can.
A what. G
Oh, you know, the thing that you put waste in, where the seeds go.
Silence…
The seeds of it’s own destruction, I said.
Silence
This is apocrypha isn’t it? I asked coyly.
I turned the corner into the driveway too sharply, and drove off the cement into the mud.
Your driving is ridiculous. G
It’s preposterous, but we get where we’re going.
Why don’t you get a wider driveway. G
I like it this way.
It’s… G
Say your name. I pleaded.
Silence…and then he said very softly, to himself, more than to me, ‘shut-up.’
Well, I said. How do you feel about noodle surprise?
Again! G
I toss it out, and it keeps coming back. I said, knowingly.
He kissed me. I held on to the steering wheel to keep from flying off the edge of the world. I
could have defied gravity, and broken something, I was so happy. Then I put us in park with a
jerk.
All that stuff does is slow your heart down. G
Tick. Tick. Tick. B

We had modified ‘surprise,’ and watched a show about Judy and June and how the studio
bosses played one off the other. They told June that she better straighten up and get some talent
or she’d have no career, and everything would go to Judy; implying she was lucky to have a job,
period. Then they told Judy if she causes any more problems on this picture, they know a
talented newcomer who’s just dying for a break. June and Judy knew nothing at the time, but
they were friends, and talked about everything, politics be damned.

When I thought about it, I realized it had to be this way, everything has to follow the rules.
Except I have to follow all of them in order. I’m not angry about all the rules, but I’m not what
you call, slavishly devoted to the form, either.
It has to be this way. It’s in every Holy Book, it’s in every work of fiction, every work of art.
You can’t run from it. I just added a fourth condition to my conversational dynamic; I may not be
recorded directly or translated wholly, in writing, without permission, or people will die. Useless,
petty, provocative gossip, and skullduggery is exempt, you’ll do it anyway, that’s what
newspapers, broadcasts, blogs, and telephones are for.
Say what you will, talk from your understanding. Try to use it, this, to make yourself right,
and it will let you down. Everytime. Guaranteed.
After the conversation with June, we watched a show about WC, the funniest Philadelphian
ever. And that’s saying a lot—This city’s full of characters. Here they stand on street corners,
and bother people for no reason at all, they’ve been doing it for centuries, long before drugs
became so pricey. Sometimes prostitutes hang around corners when they’re off, just to complain
about other prostitutes stealing their business. What did they expect? They countenance no
bounds!
WC used to hire secretaries to help him write a veritable onslaught of poison-pen letters every
morning before his first drink—and no one was exempt: banks, churches, schools, tax collectors,
drug stores, librarians and all people of high office were grist for his mill.
 The die was cast
The deal had been struck
I borrowed what I could
I took all they would allow
I saved for a year by working in hell
I left clean, and no, I never looked back
When the money’s gone, I’m gone
Two to three years tops, maybe four
I must be found
I must be handed over
I don’t know why

I feel like smoking a cigarette, and this is turning into a car commercial: one mother, two
fathers, three or four kids, and five endings. The moral is: God only drives one way.
I want to go back to a time when you could hitch hike as far as your thumb would take
you…back to a time when we were all on the same planet. I blame no one, it has to be this way.
Tell them to read their Bibles, the one they haven’t looked at for 25 years, or any book, for
God’s sake! He also says I can’t walk around like this for more than 3-4 years. I don’t know
why. Everything’s symbolic to him.
He says after the clouds of dust settle, people will put their Bibles down as a lost cause and
turn on their TV’s, and think to themselves: A man who can’t read his own book, or write in a
language that anyone can translate, is looking for me? They’ll feel well-hid. They’ll say, He
can’t even say his own name, how can he find me? He’s fictional!
You can be got. It’s a mystery. I’m the one who works in mysterious ways.
I tried to teach my dog the word ‘if,’ and he, the dog, taught me how to pronounce the word
‘treat’ correctly. I’m the one who cannot do the most simple thing. I decided to put the dog in
charge of the house while I straighten you out.
I just came up with the penalty for disobedience: a severe dressing down. Ha.
The work is judged good or bad in accordance with how well it follows the rules of fiction.
You be the judge. I’m open to suggestions, maybe there’s a next time. Ha.
I put my cigarettes in the fridge, and thought about ways to improve various & sundry rituals
and practices. Let’s start with Broke ten, my favorite. Yes, fantasies are allowed.
The piano began to play itself and I thought, it’s about time, that thing is so useless sitting
there. I never learned to play. All the notes had to be hit exactly in order.
₪

Many people work very hard their entire lives and never wonder. They’ve always done, lived
up to, and loved mounting the expectations that flow naturally, anniversaries, for example.
Accomplishments perhaps. They made partner in less than twenty years—great! In fact, they
broke 19. I love it! More more more! I mean it. Doing what you want, what gives you a sense
of pride, and getting applause for it, is wonderful. Some people are more like me, you may be
more like me than you know. You don’t have to say you follow, just listen.
Sometime in the middle you may see that you bit off too much or too little, and now it’s your
turn to have some fun—to break out. But you’re married, and his idea of fun is sitting in front of
the TV. Break ten. Have a break ten birthday. They might not be any more eager to celebrate
your 45th birthday with you than you are to have it with them. Take ten days off—climb a
mountain, play 18 holes of golf with your best bud, ten days in a row. Explore the jungles of
South America, before they’re gone. Date your high school sweetheart. What you do may be
rooted in fantasy, it may be that thing you, oops, just left out. It may be a kind of devotion, a
pilgrimage. I say fuck’em if they don’t get it—Do it! Take a journey to Ixtlan; go off and be
Don Juan; go protest gay rights, smoke reefer, and pretend it’s 1969—maybe the war’s not lost.
Maybe you stopped fighting too soon. Buy a piano, learn to play. Maybe you’ll break ten. I’m
not for time limits. He is; but I’m not. If you know the break in the crowd is coming; and you
know it’s okay to leave; and you know you don’t have to divorce her to break ten on your
birthday; and you know the late forties are a break-out time for many; that you don’t have to drop
everything, and leave the college tuition bills on someone else’s doorstep, you may find too, that
the thing—you know, the thing—might be done in nine days, or over nine birthdays, or only nine
weeks, or only nine months of chasing something you lost—you might break ten. The thing you
always thought you wanted may come crashing down on you if you let it, and bang! You’re
satisfied, all at once. For some, before the car’s out of the drive. It only took twenty-five years of
marriage, one long weekend, and it all came together. What’s so nice about it is, you don’t have
to start over. You can go part crazy.

4-3-20 THE HIDING—he

Billy is the most impolitic man in the world. This is what he says to the guys who photograph
him without his consent:
Yo Billy. Hey hey I’m gay.
Yo, Bill!
Hey Mr. H. Part this!
Stop that. he says, and goes into his house.
The churning cameras didn’t stop, of course, in fact, they got louder, and more invasive. One
day a man was clicking, as Billy walked to the car that was waiting—a dark purple limousine,
with all the latest accessories, but no pool or anything.
That will get you nothing, he said to the man.
Click click as if neither he or the man were even there.
You will get nothing for that, he repeats.
Click click
Excuse me do you know what nothing is?
Click
“Click,” Billy says with a marvelous smile on his face.
Click goes the camera.
“Click whirr click,” Billy says.
Wow! Great! The man says. Can you do a chicken?
Answer my question.
Which one?
The only one I asked.
What one?
Do you know what nothing is?
Look Henry, or Hank, or whatever, I get 10,000 American, for a good picture.
You’ll get nothing for taking mine without my permission.
Sure. I made 3,000 last week.
Billy wishes he had some gum.
It will cost you something.
Okay, he said. Hocus pa-pocus shaza-za zam be gone. I’m done anyway.
You’ll get nothing, and it will cost five. With that, Billy left.
The man didn’t understand, or even hear Billy correctly, but he got a nice piece of change for
the snap-shots, and he came back when the money was gone. He snapped pictures for a year. He
was furious that Billy had cursed at him. Billy hadn’t, but the man felt as tho he had, and said so.
The money ran out, and he’d come back. His were the only half-way des4cent pictures there
were of Billy. The money dried up because all the pictures looked alike, Billy was not in the
news, and so few celebrities came by, it was hardly worth mentioning. He did get a half-way
descent picture of Michael coming out of the house, but it looked like crap to him. It all started to
look like crap to him. The money dried up, his. His job made him sick, he began to gamble, and
lost more than he won—nothing changed though, nothing at all, and it had been two years. One
of the guys he worked with was in a horrible accident, and his entire family was killed except
him, but he died himself soon after. He couldn’t take it. He felt like he was to blame.
Billy’s photograph-takers began to ask him questions. He rarely responded, except to say they
didn’t have his permission, and that they would get nothing for this. Lives hung in the balance,
but lives hang in the balance all the time with those particular numbers, or so Billy had observed.
Zero and five.
They began asking for his permission, and they never got it.
Why? They would ask—you’re not half-bad looking. Please Mr. Hudson.
Billy was still impolitic, and he would smile when he had food on his mind. He looked sort of
hungry. That wasn’t the look Billy was going for. Not reputation—vanity.
The photographers got paid anyway, hungry or not. No one died after the first family that
died. Nothing happened.
Then the money never rolled in—it was thrown. Things were changing—click.
Billy rarely smiled for the sickening camera holders; he felt bad that people would think he
never smiled or ever laughed. all they saw was the brutality of debt, the weight of another’s
desire, the wrath of self-steadying cameras: operating without dimensions, interest, judgment,
reason or fear, held in space, too far to focus, too disabled to care.
Then he gave a woman permission to snap his picture, and it turned her life around. She was
dancing on air four weeks. You’d have thought she’d won the lottery. The painters, and sketch
artists laughed, She thinks she captured him! Everything changed. If you don’t honor your
subject, what kind of an artist are you?
The man he spoke to so harshly, came to him one day, and knocked on the door, begging to
apologize.
I’ve given you five years, and I can’t wait any longer. Please forgive me.
What did I tell you? Billy asked.
I don’t remember any more.
What I know, you know, Billy said.
Don’t take my picture without my permission and I’m very sorry you were right about it too.
Billy smiled. What did I say?
You…you, you said, I would get nothing for five years.
Did I make a pact with you? Billy repeated loudly.
No, you were disgusted by me, I gave you reason to be—that’s why I’m here. I’m truly sorry
I am a fool I guess I always will be.
I told you, you’d get what? Billy asked.
Nothing.
And it would cost you…..Billy prompted.
Five years.
Did I say five years? Billy asked pointedly.
Please, it’s been five years and a week. I haven’t taken your picture for three years almost,
and, and never again.
Unless…..Billy coached, which he almost never did.
Huh? This man was truly deaf.
Unless I give you permission.
Yes sir, that’s true, correct.
 He was humble. He looked like an adult to Billy, who felt that his standards were slipping…a
very tired adult.
I said it would cost five. Billy said.
Yes, I know, but I don’t have any money.
Don’t you remember what I said? Billy was tired too.
No.
I asked you if you knew what five was. What did you think I meant? Billy took his watch off.
The camera-holder guy began to cry. Billy didn’t mind tears at all.
Mr….. Billy said, to his face—interested for the first time.
Teh-dei.
Mr. Tedi, Billy said.
Excuse me, that’s Thedie.
Whatever. Billy held out his open hand. Fork it over. Mr. Thadi, five is one of the few things
everyone understands. And you’re telling me you didn’t understand.
I do now.
No, Mr. Thadi, you do not. It is real. Like a real life. This is five: and he shook Mr. Thadi’s
hand. This is five, and he made a fist (there are no pictures of Billy making a fist). This is five,
and he showed his invited guest his watch, it was just after 4:30. And this is five, and he held up
a five dollar American bill. You do understand five, Mr. Thadi. Billy decided. It’s all those
things: withheld respect, real time, real interest, real anger, protection, possession, truth, and
currency—none of it very high.
It cost enough for me to learn, I guess.
You are slow, Mr. Thadi.
Billy was about to offer Mr. Thadi the job of explaining five to people. But he knew, that,
often, an immobile man’s an impatient man. The job went unfilled. You can’t have a real life by
stealing a real life. Doing the wrong thing because everyone’s doing it, does not give you
permission, and when you’re caught, blaming others is bullshit. My bad-mannered photogs are
the problem in microcosm—we could show each other respect but it’s so easy to be right in this
world and conquering our fear of Any or All real or imagined loss, nearly impossible

With an awful desire to run and hide, four were killed. Blame was everywhere.

Billy didn’t realize what he had done, nor did he realize what he had said. He did not further,
know, that camera operators had many more accidents than most people; they drink heavily, take
drugs to stay awake, and drive with viewfinders in their field of vision. They gamble away the
money they get for doing next to nothing because it means nothing to them. They twist morality
into any shape they like. They have no respect for themselves and so, they have none for anyone
else. He could repeat it a thousand times. We are all connected in invisible ways. He had, in his
impolitic way, said it right the first time. Five is a number everyone knows. People count, they
always count, and this is a number they know. It will always protect you. Then, Billy turned, and
said to the world:
I can’t be copied; can’t be seen as sacred; and I can’t make a comeback every 2 years.
Cher used those lines, to great acclaim, well into the future—And she’s welcome to them; but
they’re really mine.

Billy begins work by being 12 himself once

The reason people confuse sleeping and having sex, is the same reason you shouldn’t have sex
with children.
 I have some experience in this realm. I fell in love with a very precocious boy of 13, and if
someone said, Didn’t you want to have sex with him, I would have said, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes.
And I did want to. I cried out his name at night. I was also in love.
I never made love to him tho, because, and this is the simple answer: I knew I couldn’t live
with myself if I had, I knew I loved myself, and had to live with myself for a long time, I was 22.
The long answer is: guilt can blind you. I don’t know how I knew that.
I also wouldn’t sleep well if I’d done that, tho a feeling persists, to this day, that it might have
worked out; it still doesn’t matter—I have trouble-enough sleeping.
If I had done that, all the midnight thoughts that swirled for years thru my head; all those
erotic dreams that no one could stop would have stopped. I would have had two alternatives:
forget about him, and go to sleep, or have real sex with a real person.
If I’d had sex with him, those dreams would have been torn, because their lack of ending, held
them together forever. Or for as long as I needed them.
You see, those thoughts were mine alone; they belonged to no one. They did not prevent me
from sleeping—they enhanced it. They did not prevent me from having sex with anyone, they
made it unnecessary; I could if I wanted to, but didn’t have to.
If you ask how many fantasies I had about him I’d have to laugh. Whatever it is, it’s a product
of five. Our path diverged after so many years, but I never stopped loving him. Understand; self-
justification keeps us going. Sometimes, it answers our every question.
If you think this is about morality and standards; I don’t agree. If you think you can challenge
my authority you’re gonna have to prove it. The only thing you can be an instant expert at, is
acting. There’s more to morality than sex, but I know you know that.
I knew myself, and it was that knowing, that made the debate one-sided.
I was 12 once, you see. And I posed naked in front of mirrors myself. I tucked it under, and I
wondered. I know now, what I wanted, really wanted, was a man to make love to me, but what I
thought at the time was, I wanted someone to see how beautiful I looked, and what a prince I
was—how what I saw could shake up the world. If this is the future, or even the past, it’s pretty
terrific. And maybe someone would like this as much as I do, someday.
The disparity is: things are never what they seem, a 12-year-old doesn’t know that—an adult
does.
Show me an ‘S’ that ever looked like this? I used to say to myself. It was the ‘s’ of contracts.
It was inviolate, unstated, unphotographical.

Gay teachers are the best teachers. I know that. Besides being born a Prince, I was a born
teacher. Priests are teachers, the church knows that. The gay ones are the best—always were,
thru-out time immemorial. Hands down. All over the world.
Why then, don’t they acknowledge it? If I told you, petty, dime a dance, jealousy, would you
believe me? If I told you strait priests were the cause of it, would you think that was too simple,
too self-serving? It’s too ironic. The ones that make something a sin are the ones that understand
it least. And fear it most, but I didn’t say why.
How many people got caught in the undertow of that squabble?
When the church begins their apologies:
Begin with the Dark Ages, and work forward. Acknowledge your love for gay priests; some
of my best friends are gay priests. If you think I’m defending child molestation you are
completely, and I would guess, purposely, misunderstanding me. The church leads its flock by
their cocks, they always have, they always will.
I am not interested in the leadership methods of the church, but if you had to pull someone
along how would you do it? I say if you have to pull them, maybe you should just let them be.
They either come willingly, or they sit home, or they do everything else. It’s the ‘everything
else part’ that interests me.
 Sex and sleep are confused, to answer the first question I posed, because they are both violated
easily, disclaimed, and photographically potent.
Try this, if you don’t believe me. The next time you catch someone sleeping, wake them.
Then say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry I woke you.’ They’ll invariably say, ‘I wasn’t sleeping.’ If you press
them, for what they were really doing. Their response will either be a form of sleep, or a form of
sex.

4-02-04 THE GOD DIALOGUES

The bad
The bad news
The bad news is
The bad news is this
The bad news is this really is Heaven. The good news is, you can’t see it from here. You’re in
the way far back.
Where are the choruses of angels?
Well about that…
They promised me at the New York World’s Fair in 1963, that we’d have monorails in futuristic
cities.
This is a fun, and imaginative setting. A pledge is a pledge. Don’t turn it into a favor. If you do,
you’ll never get what the favor is.

Let me tell you again about one of my favorite bits. It’s called, ‘I’m doing you a favor.’ It goes
like this. Listen, and know also, the script does not change; the inflection, tempo, timing, props,
and all that, the motivation, the actor’s ability may change, here goes:
I
I am
I am doing
I am doing you
I am doing you a
I am doing you a favor
I am doing you a favor because
I am doing you a favor because I
I am doing you a favor because I love
I am doing you a favor because I love you
I am doing you a favor because I love you and
It goes on like that. You hang on to every word, never get any soup, or a bowl, or anything. I
always wanted to ask, ‘Am I stopping you from giving me the favor by my slow listening, or
what exactly is the problem?’ Before you can turn around they say, ‘See…now you have a hill of
beans!’ You can say, ‘Boy that’s a lot of beans, or you can just walk away.’ The Information
Age is full of favors—just so you know.
My father used to have to go to meetings with other minister-lawyer-politician-writer-teachers.
He used to tell me, when they asked for questions at the end, he always wanted to say, ‘Yes, I
have a question: What makes your fat head so hard?’ He never did.

Did I mention that the words do and deal are not the same. I thought I did, some people read
out of order, which is fine, some writers write out of order—in this work it doesn’t matter. It’s
like falling down stairs. You can miss a step here or there. It’s unidirectional.
 ∟

4-14-04 The Interruption Prayer

I made mistakes as a fiction writer that only an amateur would make. I made three mistakes, then
I made three more, and then three more. Then everything began to move.
I wanted to write about my friends because I love them. I just had to get it down on paper. I
decided not to write something lame, so I only wrote when I was inspired. Inspiration came. I
was getting help. I kept writing, and somewhere at some time, I claimed full veto power. That
made all the difference. Things began to turn. I decided to write the book I would want to read.
I had three directives for fiction: True, Current, Coherent. Then I decided to learn the rules of
fiction, and everything turned.

I believed I had choices. I looked them straight in the eye. They kept changing, but one thing
stayed the same, and one very odd thing kept reappearing. I kept writing, and I began to move.
And here I am, just like Ida—completely unqualified. There are things she is excellent at, things
she would love to do, can do, has talent for. She stinks at this, and she doesn’t care. She’s not
doing the things she has talent for; she’s here with you.

I knew the purpose of life; it was so simple and ever expanding.

I knew the meaning of life because my shrink seemed interested, so I asked on his behalf.
I had been speaking to God for years, and I knew it. Then He drove me to the mall. And guess
who drove home.
We are all only good at three things: Falling in love. Loving. And telling love stories with
fearless brilliance—Everything else we pretty much stink at. I wake up to tears, and laughter; I
go to bed for the next day. Thank you God for everything.

I started off to write The Work. It wrote itself. Now I pray the interruption prayer.
I fell in love with you. You tossed me aside. I’m back. Thank you for a second chance.

Only a rank amateur could make these mistakes, not notice he was moving, and not care.

Sincere Respectful Fair

I keep making mistakes in threes.
I have three conditions I put on you: Don’t lie to my face, not this face.
One question at a time, construct it well—assumptions abound.
If suddenly, I’m unable to speak; you will wait.

Consider lies that are not your own: you’d never lie to me; I’d never lie to you; we already
agreed. Stay with me. I believe there are things that are like lies, but aren’t lies:
Sincerity: in its absence—I stop believing you.
Respect: when it’s gone, makes you look cornered—things just happen around you.
Fairness: I can joke with you because you know me. I can’t treat you fairly because I can’t stop
hurting you. I do the exact opposite of what I want to do. I try to stay with you, and I run home.
You ask me to go with you, I say I will, I want to, and then I go with someone else. I’m angry, I
say with one finger, ‘Not like that.’ You ask me what happened, I wasn’t angry at you but I
dismiss you. I lifted one out of his shoes, and the other I threw over…with one finger. Yet, it’s
all I can do to speak, to answer your question. It’s what I want to do, and I can’t. That’s why I
apologize.

I also made the mistake of saying, no

work about murder, no death, no
possession, and no super natural
powers.
I walked into that car…
I never saw what hit me. It was
instantaneous and it was totally
inevitable.

No one is consentable; that means it’s open season. Your love is your only protection against
unscrupulous investors, and predatory lenders. Good luck.
Full, free, informed consent is a goal.

The Becoming
They will know when it’s time by thinking they’re not sure if this is the time. When you think
and feel it’s not time for you it isn’t. I’ll take care of the agony. This is common sense. The true
real moment changes, superstitions never do—Rules of fiction.
I came to steal something from you, and you don’t know what. It’s something you stole. It
makes me a bigger, better, faster, keener thief. People who do not understand will die. People
who do understand will die. You don’t have to die, and you don’t have to understand.

CZECH
Life is growth and pain, but there doesn’t have to be this much pain.
It’s like the old Czechoslovakia—a random number generator. You would go to a store there,
and ask how much anything costs, they’d say, ‘How much do you have?’
‘Eight.’
‘Well, it cost me ten.’ All of a sudden, everything’s all about nine—no piece of pizza, no
chess, no sex, until after you play. God’s a rat fink. The present you can’t unwrap. There’s no
wrapper, no card, and no occasion. Life’s not about what you don’t have.
Look at it this way, just suppose a bee dies, he doesn’t see any difference between life and
death, to him they’re the same. You are not a bee, you have awareness—but of what? You don’t
know what death is, and you don’t know what it’s for. The bee joins the great buzz of the
universe as tho nothing happened. The question is, did something happen? If you say yes, you
must be prepared to prove it. I say no, and I can prove it. The bee is flying around over your
head, in front of your face, it is defined by all the space around it, which is ‘not bee.’ Suddenly
there is no more bee, the universe that defines everything is also, and still ‘not bee.’ No change.
The bee’s thinking brings fate to his failure—my thinking is a boon to my success.
 In stead
When God came it was like we swapped, there are other words for it, I’m sure. I took his place,
and he took mine. I saw little—the purple plate he washed. I was distant, like a cat’s head. I felt,
and was in the opinion God had. These were just like my opinions, but they didn’t come from
me. He found it fascinating, strange—the washing. He looked around, and it was all new,
amazing, odd. When he said he’d come over, I feel now, he meant we would switch. He didn’t
descend like a spiral, or a nail. I took His place. Somewhere inside of me. He took over, totally.
The ideas, thoughts, opinions passed by like that. Not mine. It was very interesting, very. I was
in him somewhere. I wasn’t thinking. Not really. Suddenly mine was not mine. He was. The
plate was dark, cool to the touch, but not mine. I looked around, and had no real thoughts.
Instead, it was stunning, un-needy, and well behaved. The life-things I thought so simple were
extra-simple. I crouched in some corner awaiting some mention. There wasn’t any. I lost
interest, and tho it was the most fascinating thing that had ever happened in my kitchen, I felt
loosened. It wasn’t my washing. It was his. Maybe he’d wash ‘em all? I moved around, just
like always, but not in my skin, I had none. What’s next? That’s what I said.

My own thoughts took shape, finally, sort of. We stood apart, and I looked at Him, my body,
doing things I wasn’t doing. It was extraordinary—but I’d always been extraordinary. It was like
coming home, and I was home. When you’re finished—We’ll talk. But he was already done,
one dish, maybe three. He was done. We shared an opinion about washing dishes. From there,
we moved on into a relationship. I now know what the relationship is—Him in me. We swapped
several times that April. I learned to just go along with the everything that was everything. It
was great—Same world—His. We swap sometimes; I’m always the last to know. He rarely
consents me—anymore, but that’s Him. When I look back, I had only one word to describe it:
Unfrightening. Description fails, esp. when at the time, no thoughts. He is stupendously
unfrightening.

Crop failure Mary

Billy decided that the cost of government, and the cost of doing business were way too high.
So he wrote a letter, later dubbed ‘The revised one-pager’ by the local paper, which Billy dubbed
‘The soon to be revised, 85 pager.’ He couldn’t mail it the usual way, because the mailbox was in
the direct path of hundreds of hungry jobless camera ops, so Billy put it in the mail slot in his
front door. It was an open letter to the world’s addicts, the ones who think dosage adjustment is
the same as death, and wouldn’t know what to do if they didn’t have their…fill in the blank.
Wilmot, the mailman, took it the same day.
Billy paraphrased a line from Thoreau’s Walden, because it seemed right: ‘The road to hell
will be one crop failure after another…save food and seeds.’ The story appeared on page 68 the
following day, and read in part: ‘The road to hell is a crock, save food and stamps.’ No one read
it anyway, but the postman must have tampered with the mail! That was the last time he’d trust a
mailman to deliver a letter. Anyone can change anything when they carry it. The letter sent is
never the letter that’s received (Larcan).
I pay my congressman to tout his successes, and the failures of his betters. Hundreds of kilos
of our national forests are sent super-saver-flyer by super-saver-flyer to my front door. But one
simple message going the other way g e t s e x p u n g e d.
I dashed off another letter. ‘If the entire government didn’t sleep with big businessmen, this
might not happen.’ The next day, ‘Homosexuals dot congress’ ran on page two.
 Wilmot probably meant well. Well, anyway, Billy thought: At least I’m able to see the great
forests of the world before they’re gone, and I don’t even have to leave the house.
Billy wrote another letter, and hand-carried it. It was called ‘Easter Island—so much wishful
thinking.’ It ran as, ‘Pink candy bunnies out-sell yellow candy bunnies 2:1.’
Billy trashed his fourth letter, ‘Big business owns your media outlets!’ What’s the point?

Great Figure
The pedestrian traffic had plateaued. He knew by their birdy movements, their posture, and
their facial expressions that many people already knew he was there, and some even, where he
lived.
Billy had to re-arrange the furniture one more time, and then he’d be fully protected. This
time he did it himself—and it looked it. He built a prison in a prison.
God had made him safe for all time. But…life is meant to be enjoyed.
You’re a constant source of amusement to God, and He loves you.
There are billions of baby clams in the universe, but there are none like you.

*
Billy was being watched very closely. He cured a woman of some sort of mental disorder.
Her name began with a ‘ ’ or a ‘ ’ and the name of the psychiatric illness began with a ‘ ’ or a ‘ ’
also. Many people had good medical coverage, so healing the sick was less a matter of faith, and
more a matter of filling out the right forms.
Curing sickness, and finding happiness are two very different things. You can’t make
someone happy, unless their happiness hinges on your being miserable. Being miserable is what
you’ll get if you spend your time trying to make people happy.
Billy’s happiness came from being his crazy self, out in the ‘normal,’ ‘real’ world he had
become accustomed to. He loved his friends, family, and Everything else.

It is of some interest how he cured the woman. He cured her by coughing loudly at her, as she
passed—loud enough to allow a swallow of mucus. There’s no point any longer in using words
like, believeth, blessing, sacred, sin, anointed, exalted in the Highest, and such, to help people.
These words have been scammed, ripped off, and ruined. They ‘exalt’ soda pop! They ‘believe’
in get-rich-quick schemes. Billy declined the path made silky soft, and oh so smooth. Only
crooks and shake-down artists use ‘miracles,’ anymore. Give the word a rest. Let the steam
clear—let it cool. It’s exhausting, ah, just watching ah, my, ah, gospel, ah, your heavenly father’s
cherished gospel ah, be made ah, manifest ah. Shambala’s in, ah shambles—speak English! The
soul is deep within, and cannot be lined-up in rows. It’s the word they stole, not the soul.
Mind-body interface techniques, loading, anchoring, outright payment, down-right fraud, or
what I can only describe as claiming, is not going to get it. Welcome to the new and
improved...look! Look!! She can walk! The religion business made Billy sick. He was deeply
ashamed to be any part of the religion business, tho some of it he loved. Billy knew from the age
of six, that he couldn’t profit from knowing God. Few others did. How, he would later ask, Can
you be so proud when I disavow you?
If words by themselves worked—all meanings being clearly understood by all parties,
unchanged over time, or by repeated encounters—then snap out of it, dwint. Billy tried again to
snap his fingers, this time with a little spit…IT. A cough is illustrative of elimination,
involuntary effort, and painlessness. He took a real breath. Ah Ahem!
A jolt went visibly thru her. She had her life back instantly. He did it for his reason. Billy
thought there was something odd about it tho. Her spine stiffened, a second and a half after he
coughed—not reflexively, not immediately. Billy didn’t know what to make of it—still doesn’t.
But he realized right away, he’s not in the guess-my-problem business—that’s not his business—
maybe whatever it was, just crawled up her spine and left. Maybe it jumped out. Whatever it
was, she was minus it. She had her life back instantly. Billy’s cough, however, didn’t tell her
what to do with her new life. She stayed un-crazy, but she had come to love the disguise, and
freedom her behavior had given her. People were still annoying to her, but people are annoying.
Unless you’re God, and even then.
Telling her she would be healed by faith alone, would never work. That word in particular,
had been perverted by men seeking prestige, power, and yes, occasionally peace. Telling her to
talk to God wouldn’t work—only psychotics talk to God, or so the story goes. An ad for the
weather network said, ‘Live by it.’ People live by faith. Faith that the world is good, and they
will find it so. Well…that’s why I’m in charge of the words now. There’s nothing wrong with
the word faith, it’s perfectly good, but one word has to be changed, it’s been over used, over
claimed, and overly profitable. It was done in two seconds by unanimous agreement. I changed
it, back (3 letters, HAS: 2 in, 1 out).
Giving her, her life, and her free will was working just fine—except she had decided to harass
a neighbor, for some unknown reason. Billy determined that instead of curing her by informing
her he was human, and also had junk to get rid of, he’d take an interest, put down his
superstitions, and talk to her like a real person.
She was not violent, he could see that instantly. She didn’t have a mark on her. Billy could
see deeply into a person’s whole life with one clear, uncluttered look.
He saw her one day, deeply despondent, he introduced himself, and his dog, Voi’la, and let her
pet him—the dog.
When this woman, who can now speak for herself, decided to pursue a life of crime by
breaking and entering—which is not an illness. He cured her by walking by, and calling out
‘Good morning, woman who can now speak for herself.’ She appeared shaken, closed the screen
door, walked away from the house, and lit a cigarette. Billy wanted to sneak a smoke, but she
was very shy, and so was he.
Telling people to get better is extremely useful as long as you first clear your throat and
prepare yourself to tell the truth. You know as much about faith as you know about God. If you
speak for God, you must be an authority of some sort. Billy declined all authority, but he had a
great figure. In these days of authority figures and diet doctors, people need Authority Figures
like they need extra skin—that’s a gratuitous observation. What if there were nothing wrong with
you?
Billy realized that rescuing someone didn’t give him the right to engage their services forever
for free. That’s slavery. You can’t trade on the word of God. Period.
Even tho he had a firm belief that this new place was better than the old place, it would be a
little like exchanging one prison for another. People need to be free, it makes them happy, but it
won’t keep them happy, unless they’re willing to just be happy. So simple it hurts.
Billy had incredible faith, unfortunately there was no word to describe it. The thing with
Billy—he didn’t care. Not so much he didn’t care completely. He just didn’t notice that it made
any difference. He just kept going.
To tell you the truth, sometimes everything is a pain in the ass. On days like that Billy sleeps
in—if you want to call that sleeping.

Fall Away Awake

Find something that you absolutely love doing. And then get to love the way you do it.
That's the uniqueness of all of us. That's it. —Al Lewis
 Billy realized how much, people want to be right. That’s why they were on his lawn. He
developed a trick, with help. It was a way to split the self from the soul, temporarily, and people
found it intoxicating. Temporarily.
He would say, ‘Fall Away,’ and for a time, they would be ‘right.’ Right about everything.
Right about the person standing next to them, how she wants him, what she does when she’s not
busy being fascinating; the bird that’s built a nest so high in the tree behind you, that you could
never see it, but now you can see it, in your mind, and you’re right; if you turned around it would
be there. Right about the time of day, the weather, the every drop of rain that falls, where, how,
how much; the way sound is nestled inside your umbrella. What you’ll think when this day is
over; where in the world you’ll be. All of that. Right about everything, who’s who, what’s what.
This state, you can stay in ‘forever.’ It can become trance-like. It is as welcoming as you
welcome it. It’s as strange, and horrible as you are willing to be right about how strange and
horrible it is. This is not Heaven, nor is it an anyplace—it’s the tiny split that develops between
self and soul, when for a time, they’re not one.
The crowd, so eager to get a two-fer, would indulge their fantasy. Many saw things, felt
things, and knew things, that they could not conceivably know.
The state was not bliss, it was this. When The Time came that the time was over, no time had
passed, and Billy would then wake them by saying ‘Awake.’
Billy became adept a t this trick. It was not real, it was not imaginary. People came to see that
good things don’t take time, even if they, the people, do. You cannot hold onto anything for long.
To give someone a second to be right was the same gift if you gave them a week. There was no
difference in quality. There was actually more quality the shorter, and the less frequently he did
the trick—Less distractions.
To get a second, or a minute each day, when you get to be right about everything is wonderful.
It can cause anticipation for that second. It works in no-time. It’s full of creative potential.
Billy would say, fall away, awake, and many people would believe that they had just been
awakened from a state where-in, no-time takes them to a place where they always thought they
would go, someday.
Many fell out or down, depending. Many were surprised that they had been in that state at all.
Because they felt as if he’d said, fall away awake, and then they’d fall over gently, from being so
right. Many remembered that time: and how it passed without being right, or feeling right. And
they were right about it. It works forward or backward.
The soul moved back, the self awoke. It took no time. No one ever panicked at the loss of
their footing in the world, their objective, their internal locus of control. Their M.O. No one was
ever afraid of being too right.
Some were able to take this time, and move it into their lives. Some weren’t able to do this. I
believe they were waiting for it to happen first.
Some thought Billy should speak slower, and take longer pauses. Billy thought people should
read slower, and worry less about missing opportunities to be right. So everything equaled out.
There was no trick. He was trying to get back into his house. He was looking for a way back into
prison.
It became apparent…on Day One, he wouldn’t be free to come and go, unless he made
everyone right. That’s all they really cared about. If he didn’t offer it, they would just take it.
That’s how this works.
If you think it’s a wonderful trick your right. If you think it’s a horrible trick stay right at
home. You don’t need to come here—It works where you are.
Some people got bored with the trick. And Billy had to abbreviate it, to keep them from
noticing that he did nothing, rarely said anything, and moved freely about, right before their eyes.
They dissolved from pure pleasure. “Finally, someone understands something.”
 A man in a robe accused Billy of sorcery. There’s always one, who refuses to be right—They
walk up and down the street in shifts as tho they were waiting their turn.
I want to say, Go clean something up. Discover your gift, and then use it for good. I want to
say, There are other people who live on this street. They can’t move around you as easily as I
can. Move. I want to say, Get a job. If you told me you can’t, because you’re afraid of screwing
yourself up, like you did the last time, I would want to say, You don’t need to make yourself right
all the time, take turns, it lasts longer. There are a lot of things I would want to say, and yes, I can
answer accusations. Even in the very epicenter of the paradox, words still ring true. If I have to
explain the trick—forget it, it never happened, awake.
Many people want so much to be right they would destroy all hope, in order to climb to the top
of the hill, as tho one day they would be given an opportunity to tell that story. King Of The
World. I understand. That’s another reason I’m in prison—I would want to say…There are no
more kings, just large inheritances. What hill? Awake.
So I said to the man, Fall Away already. He didn’t. He wanted to argue that I was a lousy
sorcerer.
The Devil! He screamed. I told him the devil had been discharged, and I walked toward my
front door. Then he asserted that I was his replacement, a small gasp went up from the crowd. I
knew it was the wrong time to start a laughing fit. I bit my tongue, and walked to the porch. Yes,
I did thank God for the gasp, I thought that was a great touch.
“If I am,” I said—“Then this is your lucky day; I have no power.” I can’t bark at ya’all; I
can’t do shtick all day long; and I can’t help it if I think you’re funny. Then I went right into the
Broad Neck Speech.
He was way out there, and I didn’t know what to say. He made a final accusation, full of
numbers, and odd incantations. But I can think what I like, I can say what I want, I am scripted-
unscripted. I looked at him and said, Wot. There, another reason I’m in prison.
So I said to myself, half out-loud, They wander around shiftless, just like ‘n Saw Dust.
I turned around, after apparently announcing that this was this was some great big lucky day,
and saw the man stripped naked, sauntering down the street toward the light. Why do they
always want to walk naked, and stand beside an intersection? I will never figure that out, if I live
to be a hundred.
The self-the soul, one holds you up, the other you hold up, and then they switch.

I cannot be seen with my work. I am here now. You can’t walk beside me carrying my work.
I will employ you long before you ever employ me. Imagine a better world. I am here now.
Study, learn, get certainty, walk around, clean up, tell the truth, make friends, create, explore, be
clear, don’t purposely deceive, or make everyone ask you three times before you tell the truth,
and stay off my lawn, which includes the cement parts, and the trees, unless you have my
permission. Don’t even think about pitching a tent. If everyone did what you’re doing, have
done, forgot to think about doing, we’d be stuck here forever. You know that and so do I. There
are potentially millions of places to start—being right is not one of them.
You don’t have to call me sir, or anything. I am nothing. The things that keep us apart I
would wave away. Just so you know.

Obedience
Billy was having trouble sleeping. There was too much noise outside, or too much silence
inside. He waited for the birds to sing. The first bird was about 04:55. Everyday was interesting,
but prison was boring. Billy began to wish he were somewhere else. But he was obedient to
God. People were very kind to him, and protected him from replacement-window salesmen,
people who called themselves witnesses, and people who just walk up to his front porch and start
knocking at his door. Billy was reasonably sensitive to people’s beliefs, and was just glad they
believed in anything. He apparently wasn’t going anywhere so he really didn’t need any
followers.
The camera operators were very sorry and were hoping Billy would change his mind. When
images of Billness were splashed all over the internet as tho homages to the ubiquitous and
mythological hidden camera, they were sorry they had invested in such expensive tiny lenses and
had worn big hats on hot days, since now they were fried.
All they had to do was put up any plausible image, and the network conductors would do all
their own training. The information express. It’s not a crime to look at images of adults or to
leave the possibility of their origins, and authorship uninvestigated. Pictures abound, they capture
nothing. I am not a picture, nor can I be seen in one. All you see are trails of light. The
important thing is how you treat the real person. I know you know that.
The sorry camera peepers were sorry they had been reduced to deception, but Billy had
deceived people too. He said he was half symbolic and half real, when he was more like 99
percent one, and 1 percent the other. In all his life Billy had never seen a fist fight that didn’t
look choreographed, and a little comical. Real people are at a premium these days.

Rule of threes
There was a story I had told twice, and someone said, Oh, that’s ridiculous. I told the story the
third time exactly the same—they left. It was the rule of threes.

The first time you ask a question, you ask to be seen asking, the second time you’re more
discreet, and you test the waters first, the third time you ask, you deserve an answer. Also the
rule of threes.

He asked me to tell him what was the matter. I said ‘Nothing.’ He asked again, and added, ‘You
can tell me,’ he said it like a friend. I said what I had bottled, corked and chilled. It was a white
lie, it was meant to be a polite way to handle something I wasn’t ready to ‘down.’ I waited, he
said ‘Please.’ I told him the truth, what else could I do? A rule’s a rule.

I live in a world where I love to have so much to do, there is no way I can do it all. It fills itself
up before I can empty it—being full and all. I make sacrifices, and choose one thing above the
other. I prioritize, and come to terms with putting things off. I wait for there to be a time when I
have three things to do all at once, stacked up like bacon. That is Heaven, heavenly.

Wait and enjoy the world unfold around you.

Consider the least consequential things.
Express your self thru your heart, hands and mind. You know, all three.

The second man

One night as Billy was trying to sleep, a man came out of nowhere with a gun and woke him
up in a strange, sing-songy voice. Billy wondered why, if he came to kill him, he would wake
him up first.
The man approached the house, fearful of discovering the impossible. When Billy looked at
him and gasped, the man’s fears went away. He saw Billy and couldn’t believe his eyes. Billy
gasped because the man’s eyes bulged so. He raised his gun and Billy screamed—he had
intended to say something deep and insightful like, Don’t shoot, I’m like you, I am just like you.
He had prepared to say, Lay your weapons down, they have no power here—they can spare you
nothing, but instead Billy screamed ‘Ahhh, catch your eyes! Catch your eyes!’ And then
someone screamed a hideously loud scream. The man dropped his gun in horror, and caught his
eyes in the palm of his hand as they popped out of his head. Still attached, still hanging on.
The man became more confused than ever, seeing that he had nothing in the palm of his hand
but the palm of his hand. He said, what? What? What is THIS? What IS this? If he had asked a
third time Billy would have told him, they were his eyes, but he didn’t, so Billy just said, ‘Good
catch.’
The man couldn’t run without bumping into the walls. Billy’s stomach took a tumble
everytime the man’s eyes pitched from his hand as he lurched toward the railing like he was
about to shoot craps in some ghastly game of chance he’d already lost. He begged the man not to
run down the hall, and couldn’t believe, that not five minutes after being nearly assassinated he
was trying to get some man to just relax and come back into his bed room—for no reason at all.
He finally subdued the man with the sound of ripping cloth—always symbolic of an untidy
ending, and sat him on the bed. He had the most frightened look on his face, as tho he were about
to pop two huge pills in his mouth, but couldn’t make out what kind of pills they were. Billy
turned on the light but it only made things worse, so he turned it off. Billy’s eyes had to readjust
to the darkness, and the man’s eyes had to readjust to staring fixedly at a swaying floor.
He couldn’t cry, and he couldn’t scream and he kept reaching out for Billy’s hand. Billy
explained his eyes were fine, they were still attached, and he called for an ambulance, left-
handed, which took a while, then put the gun on top of the dresser where the man wouldn’t see it.
Billy found some eye drops and made some coffee, not too hot or too strong, the man was a
little wound up as it was. He looked like that painting of a scream when he asked Billy quietly
for a sip of coffee. Billy couldn’t think of a thing to say to him, and just put a straw in the cup,
and guided it to his mouth.
‘I was so blind,’ he said.
Billy was free to make any expression he wanted, despite the gravity of the man’s confession.
Please forgive me.
Billy was hesitant at first, but he was afraid the man would drop another body part, or
something horrible might come out of his ears so he forgave him, just to make a quick end of the
whole thing. He was sure God had done the right thing, but he also knew who’d have to clean up
the mess.
Am I blind now? The man asked.
Billy said no, of course not, and rolled his eyes, his own eyes. Not the ones dangling in front
of his face, the man’s face, his eyes, his own eyes.
If you forgive me, I’ll be able to see. The man said.
How do people become experts in things they no absolutely nothing about, in such a short
span of time, Billy mumbled to himself. It defies all common sense.
I forgive you—don’t ever do that again. The man tried to kiss Billy’s hand, luckily the police
showed up, right about then.
Reject the violence in your heart, he said as he went to the door, pick up your eyes, hold your
hands close to your face and cry.
The man did as he was told, and Billy didn’t have to go upstairs and get the other eye drops.
The ones he had in the kitchen were the astringent kind, and they burned.
Billy could have put the man’s eyes back himself, but that seemed like a waste. The image of
the dangling eyeballs, and the unimaginably mindless obedience to authority and pre-
programmed behavior, made him worry about his own eyes, his marriage, and their upcoming
three month anniversary.
 He’s impossible to buy for, Billy thought. Maybe they’d just have a nice dinner at home and
that wine I like. Billy was already onto the next thing.
The ‘moment’ Billy had taken advantage of, is the moment right before an action is made. It
is the moment of decision. It is automatic because it’s rehearsed. It is very easy to interfere with,
because it lacks direction, there is no director. The director, producer and script supervisor are
never on stage, the actor is at the mercy of the nearest authoritative voice. See, that’s your self.
The limits of conditioning are that the ‘voice’ is without. God, the moment, is quietly within.

The man had the audacity to contact him later thru a sea of intermediaries who, needless to
say, were nowhere to be found when they could have done some good. He wanted to come work
for Billy as a slave. He said he wanted to make things right, and fix the problems of the world.
He said he would do whatever Billy commanded him to do, but Billy already knew that.
Of course, a personal slave who looks both ways when crossing the street, or actually most of
the time, and would follow his every whim without question sounds nice, but he preferred
someone who could say No, to stupid requests, and who would protect themselves from the
onslaught of ridiculous adventurism.
Billy didn’t really know where to start with this guy. No soldier in his army would ever have
to ask if he or she were blind, they would know. If told to drop their eyes, curse their eyes, or
destroy their eyes, they would just say, No thank you. They would not go from tyranny to
hysteria, to obnoxious behavior, and be so ignorant as to its progression. They would never ask
permission to do something they were so queer for—Justice and respect for every living thing.
They wouldn’t need to. They would just do it. Period. They would show up as already
organized beings. Whole. Undiluted. The Savior was sent to save the whole world. They would
know, that if he said the world needs to be gayer—less ashamed to love, that doesn’t mean morph
into some cock-crazy bastard, dildo-wielding wench, or some sex-obsessed slob with working
gaydar and a cloak of near invisibility. But maybe you could take off your spurs and dance once
in a while; plant a flower garden; watch a bird, stop to help a turtle cross the street, lighten up, get
over it, or just leave a smaller footprint.
And while on the subject of aimless permission-seeking armies—mine would never have so
many children, that they’d have to kill their own daughters. They would never jeopardize a child
thru their own thoughtlessness, indolence, or greed.
Daughters are as good as sons, deserve the same rights as sons, and should not be forever
penalized for not standing up when it could have made all the difference. They had their reasons
I’m sure. They had asshole boyfriends to court, for one thing, and asshole husbands to fix and
fend off, for another. Beyond that, I don’t know.
*
In the end when all is said and done, they will say: He had the greatest army the world has
ever seen: larger than all the armies of ancient Egypt, Persia, Syria, Greece and Rome combined,
larger than all the armies that ever stormed Europe, conquered the New World, the Old World or
the World that could not be. Larger than all the armies that ever sliced thru Africa, than all the
‘Do this’ armies of the Khan, or the Chins that made China China. Larger and more obedient
than all the armies that ever were in the world all put together, including the Australian army,
which was so small it didn’t count—but Billy counted it. They will also say he never had to give
one single command, and he never did, reprimands, yes, but orders to go, no. They just knew,
and they did. They learned by protecting him, and knowing when Billy needed to walk his yard
alone. Sometimes people had to be moved.

Shopping on the sly

 Billy went shopping at the earliest opportunity, for a couple of those old-fashioned eye wash
cups, in case there were a rash of copy-cat criminals who had problems seeing the truth or dealing
with decisions, like what to do with their hands, and minds.
While he was at the checkout line he heard an angelic voice coming over the metallic PA
system—that invaded his thoughts, and seemed to come from nowhere. He glanced at a so-called
news paper, as he walked out. He looked at a picture of what appeared to be a desolate parking
lot with a bunch of directionless young men throwing stones.
Things have changed, he thought to himself, but it’s nice to see some things never change.
Just then the voice sang, ‘don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s
gone…’
Billy had started, lately, to cry in grocery stores. He didn’t know why. He walked to his car
with tears in his eyes, and his sun glasses on. Billy has light-sensitive retinas.

Itidby
It would be just like you to stand on the platform debating whether the approaching train was
the 628 from Bethlehem or the 711 from Allentown. There is no time for this.
It is apparent when the train leaves the station, many will still be debating, you know,
networking the next train. What train? There is no train, no chain of command, no pain, but what
you yourself demand. You stand to gain everything including what you consider nothing. You
know enough to stay addicted, but not enough to come in out of the rain. You are the
Grandparents of Grandparents, shape up!
I can’t get around until you stop following me, interrupting me, tracking my every GPS move,
chastising me, teaching me, arguing with me, confounding me, putting words in my mouth,
identifying and re-identifying me as tho I couldn’t change expressions or locations without your
permission. Go clean the ocean. Plant a tree. There are no codes to break, or special backward
dances you need to do right now.
If your solution to everything is a three day work week, and higher wages, might I suggest, try
getting it out of a tight wad—your head. You need to work six days a week, you have a lot to do.
You need to work every day. You’re going to learn how to give yourself away. Like a bolt out
of the blue, you’re gonna wake your aimless crews, or everything you heart’s desire will not
come true.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I lay on the sofa and The Becoming raced backward. Not that I wasn’t fed special foods, I was;
but the truth flowed onto my life as the telling of a story—moved opposite to the normal direction
of living. Angels of appearance came forward thru my life, age upon age. “You are a Prince,”
become sweetly pulled together from out of the past. Relieving the mediocrity, smashing shells,
skipping stones, “You’re a gem.” Lethal to a self, I felt under direct-fire. We were in reverse.
We don’t approach the end. It approaches us. Who would ever build an entire church so God
could live on its steps. But you have.

The Becoming.
My hair stood on end. My eyes fluttered, altered somehow. Metal became named, efficient,
halved, counted on. I walked fighting—naked—breathing. Spirited.
There was summit without arrest. I tasted something funny. A ticket stub. I flinched in
almost-sleep, unglued. Christ came to me as tho the remainder of the boy I tried to be like. I was
born undeserving, in such fear it was impossible to know the outcome. Sound on the outside, but
sick at heart. Alone.
The Becoming grew, ebbed in the eye, and grew again. I wish you would look away. My visit
is brief. If you don’t see how much I love you, you won’t see me at all. My age 6004, obedient.
The promise. Different. Sincere. Real.
When I touch I take. When I’m heard they become mine. Everything that touches makes a
sound. So many are already mine, I stand in awe. It is done absently, abstractly, with certainty,
and always out of order. That’s how I love. I have totaled cars I wasn’t even in. With you, I
make the world mine.

All The World

“Take this penny.” The errand boy said.
“I?! Take a penny from you?”
“People,” the errand boy said, “pay me to carry things—now I’m willing to pay you.”
“I can’t take your money.” Said—I cringed. “A message? Something even you wouldn’t
deliver…What is it?”
“Take this penny.” He, clever dick that he was, smiled, onward—knowingly.
“I am no errand boy!” And I awoke.
Later that morning, before I heard anyone speak. Before I said a word, the creak in the crack
of the boards of the floor revealed a shiny penny—so copper it was nearly blue. I bent down just
to look at it. I walked away.
“Did you take it?” my mother said. “Billy, did you take your medicine?” she repeated.
I looked at her as she was, as she had been once.
“Of course I did.” Said I.
“What’s that then?”
In my childishness I didn’t know the medicine from the low position of deliverer. So I picked
it up, and took it, believing it was good.
“Well, you’re not wearing that, are you?” she inquired perfunctorily.
I couldn’t say it…Mom it’s ’68, I’m 13. When I’m 17, I’ll be rich, uncaring, and enviable.
Time speeds on. Palm to palm to palm. Like a river.
I can’t take your peso because I’m not your errand boy.

People don’t repeat, God said definitively. They don’t come back, but you do act like him—
Amazingly so. Wow, he said without breath. Selfishness and pride look good on you. Turn
around. I could not say, ‘cause I didn’t know…I’m 48, it’s 4, and I’m forever.
As some of you have no doubt figured out, one second not followed by another, is eternity.
Being is everything. We’re about to start over. Selfishness and pride is very transitory.

Will took Over for a walk

This morning was different, suddenly he was Will. Just one of those things. Will taught
Oliver nothing. Very Low taught Will if it wasn’t his way, it was no good and he wasn’t
interested.
Will walked by a convention of preposterous people. A sign out front on an easel read, boƏ
((((God in ‘mirror’)))). He stared at it for a while. Thought about going in, but couldn’t figure
out the banner he would have to walk under, so he decided to skip it. They were trying too hard
to be absurd. When he walked by the high windows he could see people standing up and sitting
down, as tho they weren’t listening to anyone.
Will walked down a dirt path he can’t remember ever seeing before. They came to Belmont
park. It was empty except for a young kid playing basketball. The sign read occupancy 20.
There was clearly capacity for a thousand. The kid wanted to talk to Will but couldn’t or didn’t
know how. He just bounced the ball. Will called out, ‘Let’s see you make a shot.’ He picked his
spot, and threw it directly in. He was thrilled. Will said, ‘That’s excellent, I didn’t know if you’d
do it with all the pressure.’ This made the kid’s day. Will taught him how to talk to strangers,
and what about. Will smiled, those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
The kid knew who Will was. They all did. He represented boƏ. And how people ‘took’ him
represented how they would feel if they saw him recognizable. Will was perplexed: If they saw
him. And they knew he was coming, then they must have read ahead.
Will decided to go to the convention of ridiculous people even tho he didn’t want to walk
under the banner that read Righteous Brothers. After all, one had died recently from
overbothering.
Will walked into the hall, went to the back, made a cheese sandwich, and tried to ‘blend.’ The
bread was homemade, and the cheese was out of this world. He had left Overlap outside for
hygienic reasons. Will was careful not to do or say anything that would give him away. He
wanted to hear what was being said. It was about the future. This oughta be good.
Most chairs were filled to overflowing, but he found an empty one, and started eating.
All trees in the future will be Oaks, and tomatoes three times normal size will not cost three
times as much. Billy got up and walked back to the food table so he could cram something into
his mouth because he felt as tho he’d have to say something real soon.
Will was thin, but he got a lot of fat looks from people who were offended at the sight of him
eating all he could with one hand while he filled his paper plate to the point of collapsing with the
other.
Their fear of serving the undeserving—their selfishness, kept them from seeing that he was
trying to keep from ruining their ‘future.’ Will could come up with excuses to eat-and-run faster
than anyone in the entire state of Pennsylvania.
The future was rosy—which was a relief. The audience applauded so loudly to this
unexpected news that Willy had to take a black olive out of his mouth for fear of gagging.
The speaker, done with the future, was starting on the Truth, just as Will put the olive back for
a second try. He spit the olive onto his plate, left the plate on the table and walked back to his
seat. Two women motioned to three men that, that guy had filled a plate, and then spit on it, and
pointed to Will’s back. Apparently once you fill a plate you have to eat it. Like going to an
expensive University, now you have to take the expensive job.
Billy would have been horrified except he was operating from pure Will. He looked around
for the speaker’s credentials and found them, soon enough, on a sign by the door. the Right Rev.
Inqvest, or Somethingorother. Will smiled. Revamped, Revoked, Revised, Reviewed.
The Revolving’s name for Truth was The Indeterminate Oneness. Will tried to hazard a guess
as to who in the room was soon to become a non-part of the oneness of which he was speaking.
Going to Heaven, and eating luncheon meat and, cheese for all eternity was one thing, but
spending the vastness of time, excluding people was…well, revolting. And might get boring,
especially for some do-gooders who don’t know when to shut up. Billy had been a do-gooder
once too—And look where that ended! In charge of a world about to explode, and the only way
to stop it, was to rev it up.
Will cleared his throat and made sure there was no cheese between his teeth.
This Truth, he said to the speaker. What is it again?
The crowd turned, thinking this absurd question, right in the middle of Heaven, was perfect.
They believed in being preposterous. More than 80% of them were thrilled. All 80, hid it from
each other. The 20% that thought Will was completely out of line were, most of them, eating,
and too busy to scowl or wave it away. The speaker paused and continued as tho he didn’t hear
anything. Will had none of the commonly accepted markers for excommunion: wrong skin color,
odd neck folds, general unsuitability, whatever was currently considered ‘beyond the pail.’
Besides, he was already in.
What did you call it? Will asked, in an even quieter voice…Its name? I’m not against it. I
don’t know that I understood what you called it.
The speaker stopped, heard plenty, and shouted, “The truth is the truth.” And pointed an
extremely straight finger at Will.
Will didn’t have such long attractive fingers, and put what he had, behind his back in awe,
partly, of one who had more going for them in the ‘strait-department’ than a little.
Billy caught himself staring, and then thru shear Will said: But you can’t tell the truth—It
changes.
The audience rearranged their percentages, and Will’s oneness was suddenly of indeterminate
value. Less than one. It felt so good to tell the truth he didn’t care if he got the rest of his lunch
or not.
The truth is the truth, and it does not change! The Reverie thundered.
I know it doesn’t change, Billy said. Don’t tell me…tell The Truth. It thinks it can change in
the blink of an eye. It’s recalcitrant.
Billy could almost taste the homemade garlic bread, and was thankful to the little Italian
women who loved him enough to bake it.
Your truth my son, is like a flipper in a pin-ball machine. The truth I’m talking about is the
truth of the Everlasting Soul, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the speaker bellowed, applause-
causingly.
God laughed, and made Billy burp.
Will kept this one a silent burp, but enjoyed it just the same.
You can’t even tell the truth about the weather. How can you tell the truth about the mind of
God? Oops, Will thought, I’ve over-spoken myself. Luckily no one was listening. They were all
waiting for an opportunity to applaud.
They got their wish before Will could sit down. They would have applauded a circus dog, but
Overlapping was too busy differentiating one smell from another, under an ornamental Cherry, to
be very entertaining.
What’s the weather today Reverend? Will asked.
What’s the weather like where you are, he rejoined with a lilt in his voice, and a peevish look,
as tho he were gay, which he was.
Foggy sometimes, Billy willfully replied.
This is God’s day, and it is beautiful, the speaker asserted.
I had a day-job once myself, Will said. I quit—you should keep yours.
Suddenly, we were different than we were. We, the preacher and I, were suddenly juxtaposed
by the observers, who say they saw what they saw—but couldn’t agree.
What’s the weather like today, actually? Billy asked for the last time.
The Reverberation smiled, and said, Sunny and mild.
I thought you were going to say: I don’t know, I’ve been inside for hours. You can’t tell the
truth unless you step out in it, your Holy Reverence.
The truth is there for everyone to step out in, my son. Step out of your life, and you will see
the sun, and you will be able to see the Truth.
Will ignored the fact that the man continued to call him son, even tho they were the same age,
and appreciated the fact that, at least on sunny days, the minister could tell the truth.
Seeing the sun is an expression, but not if it’s the weather report.
When Will left, after taking Over, a funny thing happened. It rained a dozen drops or so, on
his head. It was July and local showers were not uncommon. This shower was so local it didn’t
even wet the ground. He may not have even noticed but for the thrip thrip sound it made falling
thru the dark green leaves just above his head.
Billy taught the speaker the truth about the truth by walking out willfully. The truth is not
listening to what you say, and doesn’t care.
Willy learned that if speakers could speak the truth they’d be out of a job, and no one would
have anything to talk about. Unless many pieces and no moving parts could somehow keep the
truth interesting.
Veryold’s seemingly unswervable impulse to pee and shit in his own neighborhood was
always instructive to Will. He learned a lot from his dog on these walks.
Billy was happy the truth didn’t really care about him and his particular mood, otherwise
Heaven would just go round and round, well, like this. Moving, but spotlessly unrecognizable,
unspeakably unavoidable, unchained like a melody.
It would be diversional, evasive, misleading, to say Billy was in Heaven during these walks.
Knowing what he knew. Seeing the symbols and the truth all around him—unbroken. It was not
Heaven, but it felt really really good. Heaven was still far far away—They wanted no part of
these crazy ideas.

One word about dogs

Dogs are the complete opposite of people. They give love unconditionally till the day they
die; they can teach you about love; they pee and shit in their territory so everyone knows who
they are, and what they’re about—they protect the status quo.
You drop your shit in other people’s territory, so they don’t know who you are, or what your
up to; you couldn’t even teach sex, let alone love; you begin to hate people at around age 30; and
the status quo is the thing you came here to get away from.

Justice
Many people, some people, and all people believe that justice is for people—and especially,
people like them. I believe these people, many of them, some of them, and ultimately all of them
will find that even if justice were being served-up in any part of the world, they wouldn’t go.
They have it too good here. If you have the time and energy to complain, you have the time and
energy to get up off your fat ass. I also believe that, if they did find a place where it was being
served they wouldn’t dine, because they know they’re undeserving. Many have had to prove
their worthiness, and failed over and over.
Such is the problem—you just said it to see if you could get any takers.
To think an apple, is to have an apple, every bear knows that. The only thing between him and
his thought, is going thru the motions of his bear-ness. It is a great privilege to have bear-ness to
go thru. It is the nature of your taking-keeping-holding nature that has caused you to back up
against the fence.
Mix your bones with the soil when you’re done using them. Or maybe salt the sea. I prefer to
go up in flames and be sucked in like Nitrogen, for a thousand miles around. I leave justice
ultimately to Him, us, me and Him. God lives in you; He is much smarter than you are; He is
much more sympathetic than you are, and He is just as challenged— He doesn’t know where you
left the phone either. So stop asking. Brring.
Why would you ask God for a million dollars—He knows how much you want it. He’s
known for some time now. As they say in Philly, ‘He been knowin’ that.’
 Miracles absolutely do happen:
A woman had been incoherent for more than ten years, and three days before she died she
began to talk to me, and I asked her if she wanted to talk to her kids, she said, “Sure, but they’re
in Florida.” I asked her why she thought they were in Florida, and she said, “Because they go to
Florida from the first to the fifteenth of May, every year.”
A man who had a stroke hadn’t spoken for, since he had it. I asked him his name and he
began to talk fluently. I asked him why he hadn’t spoken before, and he said, “You never gave
me the chance.” He and she came and went, came and went, and died within a few days of each
other. Don’t wait till your last days. These are everybody’s last days. Everyone alive today will
be caught up, one way or the other.
A squirrel just sounded-off by my window, she’s still at it. Squirrel’s bark. I think it was a
robbery. I don’t speak squirrel, but she’s very upset. She’s laying flat on her stomach with her
arms and legs out to the sides flashing her tail, chirping, and looking directly at me. She lost
something dear. I thought, and then I whispered, ‘They went to feed the others,’ and the chirping
stopped. I don’t know what she lost. It may have been a child, it may have been several, it was
August. I walked outside, but I saw no nest of baby squirrels. I know this sounds crazy, but you
know…I don’t care. I believe she chirped outside my window because she thinks I’m God, and
she wanted help…God only knows. I may never know. Of course, I’d help a squirrel, but I
wouldn’t fill my life with stray squirrels, broken hearts or miscellany—tho I think a fish tank in
the bathroom might be useful and decorative. The toilet’s still broken, and I can’t figure out how
to get the water into the tank—My house is not a self sustaining system. I have other bathrooms.
I went to turn on the TV and a woman was telling another woman, and her two obese
daughters, ‘You just have to alter some patterns.’ It was a sewing show. Life is Good. Tragedy
is not long-lived, Thank God. Funny, I see making love to God, and dying to be very similar.
Put down, abstract yourself from two things: hate and disappointment. They are the same. No
one ever left their hate behind to get into Heaven. Hate is not allowed—it’s too contagious. No
one was ever disappointed in Heaven. Turn one effortlessly into the other, and they will drop off
like a pair of old shoes, and you’ll walk thru just like that. But you have to do it before it’s too
late. If you want to look at this as your window of opportunity, that’s fine with me.
*
There’s a wonderful story about a man who took a phonograph of Mozart, or perhaps Beethoven
out into the woods maybe a hundred years ago, when recorded music was new. He cranked up
the gramophone, dropped the needle, and it played beautifully. He claims that the birds stopped
chirping, and that there was a deep and wondrous silent attention that drifted thru the forest like
the music itself. Deer turned their heads and creatures were drawn to it. He says, a bear began
walking toward the sound. I believe they thought God was coming…that for them, God is
everything around them. Then they saw it was just a man playing games, and they went back to
their business of searching for everything. I also believe they would have smiled if they could
have.

Theme: an engine
…That is a well known debate about art…that a work of art can be foretold, announced to its creator, even through a perfume. All of life
can be suggested to a lifeless creature that wants to live, it can be suggested by the trembling of a leaf. ––Federico Fellini

I forgot my house was an engine

I worked hard. I took a bath, and it almost killed me. This is not a parable. I can barely lift
my hands. I would call my doctor about an MS (multiple sclerosis) screening, but I can’t reach
the phone, besides I know what did it, I assailed virtue.
 I digress to the tub. I dreamed I was invincible. The bath got hot. I dreamed I was the center
of the universe. Bubbles formed and floated out from me, and gathered around me in unwavering
numbers.
The songs on the radio spoke to me. I’m amazed by you too. I felt like I was having sex in
the tub in the deep end. I tried to make a fist, and I discovered strength. I saw my teeth the way
they really are—they’re canine. They’ve bitten thru many necks, and even ripped thru bone.
They’ve hunted the hunters when the need arose.
I could have sex multiple times and I did. I could go anywhere and do anything. I was more
me than I needed to be, and I didn’t care. I wondered what it would be like to go to the baseball
stadium and see what those people—who talk a good game, see.
I saw a game between the Marlins and the Phillies. The feeling was waving spirals up to my
ears, inside my toes and I was on, as if I had been up. I measured the speed of the pitch I knew
the canvas feel. I spit the spit. I ran the base; I had skill; I was a number. I was 1—it made
everything pale—it took my breath away. I was a bull, an ox, I was on the other side of my teeth.
I clenched a fist. I felt murder, and they died. It, this, was no mere game. I had been so naïve—
it was the symbol of our lives. I was ‘up.’ I was ‘out,’ I was the hero, and no one had to die, this
was not the game I thought it was. It lingered in my sleep and woke me with every pitch. I
couldn’t stand it. They were playing me…my limbs moved when they yelled, I couldn’t take my
eyes off the man. Marlin was neither black nor white. He was suffering; suffering for his
transgressions.
He taped my shoe, come on! You damn idiot, that’s your space—there, go! God, how could
he miss that, he didn’t see it! I have to show him more clearly. Yes there oh, not fast enough. A
ball hit my head, and I didn’t even feel it—this was a winner-take-all death-match, not your
prissy dance of death. There is no time for paltry petty antics. I know you don’t. Lets go, come
on. Swing, the crack, sounds right, the look. It’s they I a…I am…this is. They announced the
score as if by words, and I fell into the water like sand. It was a triple gainer—flat, dead in the
water. I have never felt so drained, I had so little energy I almost drowned in my own tub. I
reached for the stopper, pulled it back against the weight of the water, and felt as tho I had saved
my life. I held my self up, my hands shook, and my legs couldn’t hold a baby. I lay there until I
could breathe, I blew against the cloudy water as my head hung centimeters from it. I began to
breathe. I had but moments before gotten out of the tub just to get back in because there was no
feeling quite like that and I had all the time in the world for errands but there was only one game.
I forgot my house is an engine—when I ask for something it delivers. I hadn’t realized the
virtue of a contest where no one dies. I couldn’t believe this was played out before me so clearly,
there was hardly anything left to imagine. I pulled myself together and walked wet to tell you,
I’m sorry, I thought you were crazy for watching people throw each other ‘out.’ I’m never going
to Pro Player Stadium ever again empty handed. Time brings understanding. And you are a pain
in the ass.

Billy’s acting teacher

The themes in Billy’s life were monumental, to him, and came at him from the back. He put it
together. Thirty-five years ago, everyone believed he was stupid, so they put him in remedial
classes.
Billy rose above every petty label just like that. In fiction, he was a Jew. Billy applied to
Harvard when the time came, and they laughed in his face. His scores were too low for anything
but the seminary. In real life, he was not a Jew. He never participated in school or community
activities, except ecology club, and band camp, which was sporadic. He was a Jew only if you
hated Jews.
 What Harvard was unable to put-together, because they never asked, and had no reason to,
was that besides never participating in anything ‘worth while,’ Billy never read any books, never
took even one basic physics course, played second clarinet in the marching band, concert band,
and ignored the school symphony completely. If you were a Jew, he was not really a Jew. He
played first clarinet many times, always during flu season. When someone needed to stand up, or
there was a void, he was a Jew. Billy never bothered to learn how to read music, because he
didn’t understand numbers, he was tone deaf, and his left hand was retarded—slowed. If he was
caught with his pants down, he only looked like a Jew. Billy liked the band members, enjoyed
being part of a group, and knew the first five bars of 129 tunes by heart. As a Jew, he celebrated
as a Jew. What Billy liked best was going to the football games, and taunting the winning
school’s trumpeters, with a girl on each arm, and a dry remark about winners and losers. His
High School almost always lost, and he turned it to his advantage. He loved to get the boys
worked up about musicianship as they boarded their busses, and then walk away. He could not
say Sabbath prayers, because he was not a Jew.
People began to imitate him and he became inimitable. People thought he was up to
something radical as he pressed parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, into a tea bag. This was a
long time ago when everyone was an ancient caricature. Long time ago, long time passing.
He followed along, and smiled at his fortune. He was born to do nothing, in a world already
saved from evil, with Hey Jude, Girl, and Imagine, all playing for the first time, everyday on the
radio, and the radio was free. Stars fading but I linger on dear, just saying this. Sweet dreams.
Ah, girl. Billy loved the ancient times, and wondered whatever happened to his Volkswagen, the
green one. Ah, Girl.
He was white, free, and 17. He realized long ago, no one really cared as long you followed the
bouncing ball, and that’s exactly what he was doing.
So, he went to the State Penn. Penn State.
The fact that Billy couldn’t learn what they were teaching, was complicated by the fact that he
didn’t care what they were teaching, which was complicated by the fact that they were teaching
crap. Which became a problem because, he was in training to become a teacher, which was
further complicated by the fact that he liked kids to grow up as free thinkers, and thought he
might wind up having too much fun—or none.
Both Einstein and Edison were summarily dismissed, in their day, from academia because they
couldn’t learn what was being taught either. Aside from the fact that it was easy to follow, it
made absolutely no sense. Billy couldn’t sell gloves to a gynecologist —so he quit school, and
decided to sell expensive foreign cars, for his own amusement, and no other reason.

This pretty well brought him up to date. He was balled-up by the fact that he was becoming a
horrible driver. He transcended that. Everything was being encoded bit by bit into his hard drive.
Value could not be added; everything was nearly equal, and fantastically great at the same time.
It was like being incredibly stoned on some drug that wouldn’t wear off or let you down.
Whereas, Billy was hooked on driving by remote control, the satellite feed was eating up gouges
of memory. He swerved to miss a truck. The truck seemed to be deliberately maneuvering him
into a high-speed accident, with fronttoback drivers in the fast lane to his immediate left and
back—as tho it were a game.
Billy had become exquisitely observant, and could pick a left-handed driver out of a crowd of
parking-space shoppers. The rules of the community were, 'do what works,' and perhaps that’s
why he was having so much trouble steering. His car didn’t work. It wasn’t taking him where he
wanted to go, nor had it ever. It just took him from place to place to place, and they were
becoming nullifyingly similar.
Billy decided, instead of talking to himself, he would rehearse the first of three porch
speeches, called The Walkway Disclosures:
I have brought you something—It is wrapped.
The wrapping is thin, but not so thin a whisper would carry it away.
It requires no tools, no degree, no judicial review. It cannot be declined or made mute. He began
to yawn, and the car moved slightly to the right.

Some will say they know it already—Not this gift. This is the world’s gift. To them I say, This
is not your gift.

Some will say it is an empty box. The universe is its box. I give your everything, all at once.

Some will say it has been opened already. It has, by me. I wrapped it. It has been assembled by
God, and it is for you.

Some will say, Thank you, before they receive it. They will say a different Thank-you after the
wrapping comes off. When they open the box, they will be very surprised. They will see it for
what it is.

Some will want to save it for their children. It is not that kind of present. It has already saved
your children.

It cannot be re-wrapped.

That sounded okay, but he had to speed up, cars were passing him, and one was one his tail.
Instead of, ‘It cannot be re-gifted, or whatever you meant, try…Heaven and Earth will soon be
one. It sounds better, and it punches. Besides, it’s going to be closed to Christmas before you get
this whole thing worked out, and wrapping paper is going to seem like an obstacle, not a joy.’
Billy could have used a good re-write man, but times being what they were, he wasn’t sure if
anyone would know what the hell he was talking about. He decided to keep it as-is, and go with
‘Heaven and Earth become one’ for day two. The Second Discourse. Screw it. The car went
outside the yellow line again. Billy pulled the car over to the shoulder to get the full impact—to
get in character, work on props, and hit his mark, so to speak.
Two bees stood on the hood of his car, and took deep breaths, as if they had been trying to
gather pollen from trucks on Interstate 95.

There is…Start over. This is my third and last…whatever I’m going to call this.
There is no place to go. You have reached the end. You have sunk so low…So-Low don’t
say solo, Billy underlines So low. It is gone, wiped away like leaves. Billy works out the
business with the finger: ‘Do an affective memory exercise, it’ll make your cliché finger action
look new, real. Consider this thought when you raise your finger: You have killed six year olds
because you weren’t getting enough attention, and you wanted it so so bad. Well, now you’ve got
it. You just hit rock bottom. You will see the dead children everywhere you go, they will be a
torment of your every waking moment. These children will be foremost in your mind—forever.
If Heaven were right in front of you, you wouldn’t see it. All eternity will seem the same to you.
Hellish. Simple. Automatic. Just. Like a parting of the waves. Many will be painted with the
same brush, if you get my meaning. I’m getting ready to paint. Now, try it again.’ I am getting-
ready-to-paint. ‘Good, better. Keep that paint brush idea, whatever’s behind that, it lights up
your face. Continue.’
What you were critical of, you are now critical to. Billy saw a cup, or glass, or container of
some kind in God’s hand. No one including Billy had seen it before. He lifted it very slowly to
his lips; it was cold coffee and protein drink, in a plastic thermos; he drank from it.
 Rehearsing with God was incredible, you didn’t ever have to do the actual performance, it was
already done. Billy cleaned the inside corners of the windshield and spritzed the outside as a
truck roared by causing the Taurus to shake violently. Billy did not regret not having The
Calderon, he gave up regrets weeks ago, and stopped wishing for rain on sunny days, or whatever
it was he thought he wanted.
He caught a stray image of a little wooden square with a circle in it, being clawed from the
tree in his front yard, first wood, then silver, then gold. There was enough wood to make a
hundred thousand symbols. If they wanted to sell them he’d have to tell them No. He’d long
thought of telling the world ‘No’ from his porch, this might be his big chance. It looked like this,
and it was worn.

It struck Billy that anyone could kill at any time, the fact that a person says otherwise does not
exempt them. They have killed without even realizing it. If death is symbolic, what is it
symbolic of? Just that—Desire. He decided to write that down. Like a menu entry.
God couldn’t help rolling his eyes.
After all that work. After the speeches were spoken, and the ‘completion’ was complete.
Billy was annoyed, and drove home, gulped the last bit of tea as he drove in the driveway—went
in the house, took two Xanax, and scowled at the TV for an hour. Billy was unable to scowl, and
thought it odd that, that fact alone, made TV seem better than it really was.
Addendum to the dictate about murder: It is alright to keep weapons for what they could do,
but if you pretend you don’t know what a gun does do; all people will read on your tombstone,
what is now written on your forehead: ‘Pretending to be dead.’
That needed a little cleaning up: how about, ‘what is written in your head.’ Or, just
‘pretending to be dead, is still dead.’ It was a tough call. Billy liked the second choice but that
was typical. His job was to pick the version with the best ring to it. Ting.
A foreign looking, Delaware-mosquito was walking like a canon across Billy’s windshield. If
everything is at its core, symbolic, do mosquitoes die horrible deaths, with all that gnashing of
teeth, and wringing of hands, and stomachs, or just people, and why? Another truck swept past,
he hummed ‘Oh when the saints,’ and bit his bottom lip in preparation for re-entering the super
hi-way going north.
Billy almost wished he had gone to church. He couldn’t remember any of the commandments;
don’t pray to idols, that was the first one. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Billy thought half out-loud,
as he estimated the amount of distance he needed to get up to 65 miles per hour on a road clearly
marked at 55. people are going to do what they’re going to do anyway. A truck passed him
which read, Repeal The 28th Amendment, in big block letters more than ten feet tall, and three
tractor trailer lengths long. What in the world does that mean? He asked himself. These
numbers don’t add up to anything, what’s the 28th amendment? Amendment to what? He felt
slightly dizzy, and watched the mosquito speed up to 64 miles per kilogram or whatever, using
his auto drive control speed-determining feature, his, not the mosquito’s.
As he drove home Billy thought, What if a woman thinks of me when she makes love to her
husband, is that adultery or not really? Can a woman be guilty of adultery, I think the law
originally said, if she sleeps around she has to be horse whipped. Well anyway, another thing to
look up on the search engine with no name. I wonder if I can find that picture of me in Surf City.
Or the one with me in the curl. Billy decided hunting for interesting pictures in his desk drawer
had some sort of priority over the Internet.
He had finally stopped writing reminders while driving. And just remembered the fewest
number of key words: Death-symbolic-desire, surf-commandments, half-naked. He wrote that on
his hand and then thought, What would happen if I was in an accident, and the medical examiner
thought that was some sort of satanic message. Billy couldn’t decide whether to rub it out, or not,
and then didn’t.
The white sound, that horrendous cacophony of people saying what they were forced to say, or
said for no reason, rang in his ears. This rehearsing while driving is out. Two small cars sped
past him on the way thru Chester at, at least 145 kph. Billy decided one could go, and which one,
but neither died. Everything stayed the same. The universe ends and waits to begin again. It’s
either in his head or in his hand. Lunch time.

4-10-04 right before Easter, a private conversation

Billy I want…God started to say.
Oh, God. It’s you (He made me jump).
Why do you say that. G
I’m sleeping, and you woke me. m
You are the complete opposite of everything I have ever known to be true. Move over. G
I was lying in bed all comfortable. The sun would soon come up, was coming up. Rose. The
room was dark, the curtains drawn in the little room upstairs.
Billy, I want to have a serious conversation. G
Billy, if you start masturbating while I’m talking to you, when I just told you this was serious I’ll
be upset. G
Okay. I was just thinking. m
Billy it’s about your reputation. G
I never cared about reputation. m
Billy, please listen. The one and only almighty living God is talking. G
Billy stifles a yawn.
Billy, you have this fanciful notion that you and I just met. G
Well, I am…m
I understand you are in charge of the words. G
Thanks, I am. m
I know. That’s what I am here to talk to you about…what are you looking at. G
Starts…stars I mean. m
They look up at the darkened ceiling. The stars are out. It is a hillside in Jerusalem, Bethlehem is
miles away. The church bell rings. It’s four.
I have always been with you. G
I don’t come and go like a man or a woman. G
Silence reigns in Bill’s world.
God checks to see if Billy’s sleeping.
Did you ever wonder why you don’t care about reputation. G
No. It seemed worthless. I think it’s because I was a middle child…Middle children have to find
their own way. They can’t outdo the eldest, they can’t be unwrapped like the youngest. m
Billy you have fanciful notions…which is fine. You cannot be labeled. G
Silent ascent. m
Never could. G
They could not comprehend you, in, in human terms. G
Silence
Billy you are my Son. I did not just run into you. G
I know. m
Billy begins to roll over.
If I could get a word in edgewise I would like to say. I tried to talk to you. But I could never get
a word in. Someone told you…scared you…that you shouldn’t talk to God, and you should talk
to strangers. It had to be that way. G
Strong silence of a type.
Did you ever notice your world was the reverse of everyone else’s. G
Yes. I certainly did. And I am… m
Billy did you ever notice you can’t say your own name without lying. G
What? m
En Seriatum. G
I thought my name was Shu-`tup (accent on the second syllable). m
That’s a nick name. G
Lies I’m talking about—they are always in seriatum. G
Oh. m
Well, you’re in charge of the words, I thought you’d like that one. G
That’s why I’m in charge. m
There was a moment of silence, and then God realized he better grab his chance while he could.
Do you know why. G
Because I am…because I speak English, and… m
No. Why you can’t say your name. G
Yes. m
It is because you cannot be labeled. By others or by yourself. G
You realize, I could not tell you, you were my Son before now. G
Yes. m
You were never a regular boy, a human boy…not really. You have spoken of it. Feeling
different. Billy, you are the most precious and best thing I ever made. Your playmates were
bodyguards. G
I thought so. m
How many did you have. G
About five. m
Good try. They all were. G
Even Clarke? He tried to kill me. m
He took a bullet or two for you—leave him out of this. G
Imagine having the Son of God for your very-manipulative younger brother. G
…Oh. m
Oh, indeed. Only nick names. That’s all. G
I took care of it already…I owe him everything. Everything… m
I was just going to say that. When you were a child, you thought as a child. G
Do you pay your debts. G
…………….. B
It’s okay. G

They won’t see me for who I am till I’ve been dead about 100 years. It’s taken care of. m
Well. That just goes to show, we are of like minds. G
You were, are, will be…incomprehensible to them. G
Billy speaks into his palm. Oh. m
Not your words lame-o—You…How many nicknames do you have. G
Forty or so. m
More like four hundred—everyone gave you a different name. Did you ever think that was odd.
I liked it. I am indescribable. m
I’ll say. G
You are my Son all right. Children are incomprehensible to you. G
What? m
All of a sudden you’re awake and you can’t hear. G
What do you mean? m
Uncomprehensible, unknowable, unfathomable, mute, non reflective—absent your understanding.
Don’t try to understand them. Love them, they love you. G
I understand. I guess if I had kids, I’d be more comfortable with them. m
You would be Party Central. They would give you a thousand names. A different one everytime
you saw them. G
Yeah. I guess… m
I’m so glad you’re in charge of the words. G
I guess you would be. m
All roads lead to Rome. Your house is practically finished. G
They always say that. m
God coughs. A laugh. A chuckle. A sigh.
Your idea of making money is letting all you golden chances pass you by. G
Billy smiles. Nods.
Can’t be labeled. Loves everyone. Is loved unashamedly, by everyone. Is incomprehensible,
and cannot comprehend my second most favored creation. Children.
Billy, play-time is over. You must understand that what you cannot comprehend is written in
stone. You will never again comprehend anything, you do not comprehend right now. G
Is that an oath of sorts? A covenant between us? m
It’s like you don’t listen to a word I’m saying. G
Ughh. m
You are my Son—already, always, not ever not. G
Everytime you walk away, a part of me dies. Because I know you have forgotten me. G
I feel the same way. me
You are my Son, you speak for me. You transcended all my commandments.
You are my Son, my most beloved, finished-unfinished work. G
You love everyone, everywhere, all the time and you have a sarcastic sense of humor. G Tell me
something I don’t know. m
You are iconoclastic, and symbolic. You have the end in your hands, yet don’t know. G
You are everything to me. G
I love you. m
I won’t tell you what to do. G
What? m
You’ll do what you want to do anyway. G
Oh, suggestions? mg
Yes, I have lots of suggestions. G
You know…that’s okay. Wait till I ask. m
Deal. G
What is your name. G
I am… m
You are incomprehensible to yourself, as is your work. You are a good boy. G
They lay there in the bed, on the hillside, among the comfortable smelling blankets and pillows,
in the sweet grass, and gazed at the stars in the heavens.
I used to believe we were all sons of sons and daughters of God. m
Billy that is because you come from a time and a place where people believe what makes them
happy—The prince always loved the princess. You are my Son, my only Son. G
But… m
Billy you can’t understand this. It is written in stone, and you want to edit it. G
No one has to die, and everybody dies. You are my Son, not my daughter. I have no daughters, I
have one Son. A woman uncomprehending, and out of control, is one of the saddest things in the
world. You, uncomprehending, and out of control is a riot, a freaking riot. And I lose sleep
watching you try to sleep. G
How is it, God, easy stuff for me, is hard for everyone else, and what’s hard for me, is so simple
for them? m
Because you’re my Son. What you’re about to do is impossible for them, and for you it’s like
watching the neighbors wash your car, or turning an amateur historian, professional.
I married a dog. m
Not to my face. G
Ah, I, My dog licked my face, and I loved him for it. m
Then… G
Then I married a dog… m
And… G
And…it made…It was the same thing, nothing changed. Nothing changed at all. m
My reputation was ruined. m
Tatters. G
I claimed a reputation already in tatters, and that made all the difference in the world. m
Yes, like the drunk said to the judge: Your honor, the bed was on fire when I got in it! G
What is your name. G
I am. m
You know, that is one thing I agree with JC about. I hate labels. m
You have so far to go. Take this with you. G
God reached out, and handed me something. It was too dark. No, I knew what it was. I didn’t
have to look, and I felt it drop into my hand. I felt it’s edges. It was a circle in a square, and He
told me the so-called last thing I would ever need to hear….Again.
Again, He said quietly, as I fell asleep. You will never again know anything you do not know
now. G
I never held a gun. I said, as He tried to leave. m
I know. G
I don’t know where the safety is. m
I know. Goodnight. G
I’m a dangerous driver. m
And you’ve never flown a plane. Good night. G
If I ever flew a plane everybody would die. m
No kidding. Goodnight. G
Dogs are angels right? m
Some. G
Not all angels are dogs. m
Okay, goodnight. And no, I’m not going to say it. G
The Commandments were about property rights. m
Fine. See you in the morning. G
I don’t know everything. m
Big deal. Goodnight. G
Ha. I knew I could get you to say it. G
Are you having fun. G
I feel ten years old. m
Well good. I handed you over to the devil because I knew he didn’t stand a chance. G
Oh. Billy said, thru a yawn. Really? That’s nice. m
There was that one little thing… G
What’s that? (I already knew, such was the love I had, and so far had I come) m
I turned you over to the devil to kill you—I was afraid for you. G
He had the same problem I had. G
He scattered you about, and you drifted to the ground like a feather. G
He took your self, and you never noticed. G
He took your soul, and when you looked it wasn’t there. And everyone saw that it must have
been, because you knew right where to look. G
He contaminated your speech, and you thought it was fun. When you became unbearably
offensive you were really trying very hard. The ones that stepped forward needed to be offended,
and the ones that stepped back, and let you work it out—you left alone. G
He gave you the worst caretakers, and you thrived. G
He took your strength and movement away, and it meant nothing to you. G
I could barely masturbate, and got more sex than the most handsome man around. m
He put you in prison, and you went to the basement for painting classes. G
He made you eat hospital food with a stomach full of pills and you survived. G
He locked you in an elevator with a disturbed, ex-con, statutory rapist, drug dealer, who killed a
man, and he whistled Beethoven to you. G
You became yourself when he planted needlessly banal and suicidal thoughts in your mind. G
He tried to destroy your soul, you couldn’t find it, and did just fine without it. You just watered
plants, ignored people who couldn’t stand to be ignored, and worried about your hair. G
It’s really all about the hair isn’t it? Billy dozed-off as God summed things up. m
He took your sense, your memory, your ability to show love, and you never made more sense,
spoke more clearly, touched more people where they lived, or saw from them anything, but their
best behavior. When you were naked, broken, bleeding, without a penny to your name, women
thought seriously about leaving their husbands. When you were practically dead and off without
end, men were embarrassed at your nakedness, and decided to work harder and stronger, and
show you how it’s done. When they said now, now, now, now, now. You got up in your own
good time. They said, How could someone with nothing, have the best of everything? And they
never checked their pockets, not once. They gave you everything they had. The devil thought he
finally knew you, and you destroyed him in a second by a simple act of cupidity and faith.
He was lucky to get away with his life, God said, as an after thought. As he closed the door he
touched Billy’s head, and couldn’t wait to see him again.
Billy was asleep, and dreamed about a planet a million light years away, a hundred times bigger,
and much much nicer.
You can only say I love you so many times before it says more about you than you want, and less
about them than you desire.
Unless you imitate people, it’s very hard to be understood. It just is.

The Ring
The next day at around 0600, I was thinking about brief honeymoons, shackles, and rings—
Putting it on the finger of your own choosing, like a tattoo. Just then, in real time an ant drops
onto the other side of the tablet I was working on, from the ceiling, or so I thought, and did
something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. He lay on his back and writhed. He fell, but he
just laid there. It was a very small ant. The work almost instantly became about the ant. In those
days, and these, the work becomes about the things around the work. I’m around the work, but
I’m not the only thing that’s around. I saw him up-close thru my magnifier. I blew on him, he
couldn’t get up. I don’t know why I didn’t just brush him off, except that in the work, everything
counts, like life…all of it is. Two days prior, God said: Don’t kill. I understood that to mean:
don’t make that your 1st reaction. The more I observed, the more fascinating the story became.
This was, make no mistake, an interruption. Yet it brought to me more clarity about the thing I
was on about, because it put it in context. He may have been in pain—he’s no words. I drew a
circle around him. I shined refracted light on him. He stayed in the circle. There were no other
ants. There was no honey on my kitchen ceiling. I checked the room, the sills, I’d turn him over
but I might crush him, and I never saw a live ant that couldn’t get up.
The ant is in the drawn circle. The symbol of the circle and the square can be drawn any
number of ways—it is a symbol of divine protection. The circle is in the square. It may not
always seem so. The universe outside, may seem far away, and not around the circle. I had faith
he’d survive, he joined me in my symbolism—more than just an ant.
He’s struggling. I put the tea on. I can hardly turn the page. I am the one, as I hold up the
page. I am the one that keeps the page from turning. I am the one you disregarded, listed last,
thought nothing about—that wasn’t evil. You’ll say everyone loved me. Where were you when I
was playing with the knife?
Where were you? You were the one who thought, Why don’t you do it? But you never said it
to me, you just thought it. If you had said it to my face, it would have answered a question, or
started a question, and the knives would, the knife would have been put away long before it was.
((((Draw the circle and the square, red comp book))))

I drew the square like that, because that’s the direction his body was moving. I wanted to keep
the ant in the circle so I could see progress. But I was the circle, and progress was whatever I
called it. My ideas were from me, in the pattern of the universe: unnecessary, illogical, not meant
to prove anything, concerned and dispassionate, and in the case of the ant—the sacrifice was that
I was interrupting my morning of making a pleasant cup of tea, while he suffered, and I could do
nothing but observe.
Now he’s between the circle and the square, he’s struggling, and I pour myself some tea with
sugar. As I get up to pour it, he lays on the line of the circle. I have never seen this before. The
stove is on, the fan is on, he is now between the circle and the square I have drawn. He moves
like I move. This is very queer.
I take the ice from the tray God gave me, I am not quite myself. The ice cubes pop when I
touch them. I pour the water over the tea bags I bought so long ago. He is moving, yet he’s still
on his back. I’m afraid I’ll kill him with my hot tea, my ice, my magnifier, my fan, my page, my
light, the CO2 as I bend down close enough to see him.
It is becoming dramatic. He is on the line of the square, in near-constant motion, I thought
that, and suddenly he’s not. During the work, it was always true—Everything spoke to me
somehow, and I spoke to Everything, no matter how small. I tried to understand, and it never
made any difference. He was obviously dying. I had no way to help. I measured him for
perspective. As I held the ruler near to him he straightened out and stopped moving, one
millimeter. This can easily be overstated, but when you’re in God you seem to have control over
things you couldn’t possibly have control over. I had a magnifying glass, he had two horns by his
waist, and six legs. I had to go to the bathroom, but he was fascinating for some reason. I was
concerned but this was not my business. I said, Get up, he curled up. He wasn’t dead yet. I
wanted to get this down clearly, he rolled over just then, as I wrote that, after an hour of doing
nothing. God wanted me to keep this all-verbatim, but it’s five pages about an ant.
I looked, and saw a white filament, a thin white, iridescent strand of something piercing his
head from one side to the other. I never saw anything like this, maybe it was a crystallized fluid.
My thoughts took off, broke, gained momentum and crashed—this was the truth of the moment.
This was like ‘saving.’ I’m making him coherent. Ant on paper. Death on paper. Struggle in the
work, literally. This was my symbolism, and not my world. I was continually joining and
rejoining my world. I had no power to change or remove this spike. I had no implements small
enough. Maybe it was a paper fiber, maybe it was a gray hair. Maybe he fell onto my head and
was gored by a hair, then fell into my work. I wouldn’t know an ant’s ear from his elbow, but
there it was, real plain.
Give yourself to be used by someone who wants to use you. I drew a circle in a square on my
finger like the setting of a ring. If they prevent you from growing and learning, get ready to
leave. If they protect you from pain, fine, but if they refuse to let you go to school get out.
I wished I could fix it, and I blew on my tea, careful not to spill. The filament was gone. It
was the smallest miracle I have ever seen. My involvement with this was my morning, like every
morning it just took off in its own direction. I was thinking about many things.
He lay there and stumbled around as he regained whatever ants have for equilibrium. Then
walked away. And disappeared. I went outside early that day—not only because it was a
beautiful sunny day, but because I didn’t want to step on him. Not after all that.
Knives are symbolic of removal. I never juggled knives, and I never juggled ants, but it was a
long time before I dropped one.

Additions to yesterday, let me put it this way

I had a dream I was surrounded by bird song, and that a golden light placed in a dark room could
illuminate the past and give me peace. Then I woke up to find I had 32 messages between
midnight and 0145. Apparently, someone thinks I suck llama cock, and am a ‘toe slut,’ whatever
that is. You know I’m having the time of my life; God’s right, you are amusing. I also learned
that my dwell time has been extended 1239. year month day. The hour of my choosing.

As I see it, there are a lot of people who could help you because they understand your problem,
but they’re in jail. People who do drugs and sell drugs for example, know what works. Drugs
work, they’re a success, unfortunately, only for a short time. Then the drugs try to kill the person
using them. It is very similar to the ‘what works’ ethic of some murderers: Try to kill your
neighbors, try to kill your neighbors, seems to be working, more, more, more, unfortunately it’s
only after they ‘succeed’ that they realize the new neighbors want to kill them. If you think there
is no connection between drugs and guns, or that I’m trying to link terror and liberty, just to make
a legal point so I can have carte blanche to finish a line here or there, you’re wrong. You have no
faith; you have no life; you pretend to know what you’re doing; and you’re all dying.

You’re teetering on the very brink like a drunk with a razor blade.
You’re as vulnerable as a tit in a room full of crying babies, you’re bound to pick one up.
Soon you’ll say No to Paradise, blame women for their weakness, and watch your son, kill your
son. And that will be that.

4-26-04 New Jesus—THE PORCH SPEECHES

God says one day, in exasperation to Billy’s insistence on knowing the truth of his origins:
You are a Pantheon looking for a Parthenon, who thinks he’s a Lapith. There.
You’re four wheels short of a streetcar, Billy replies.
I hate this game. I thought the truth would set you free. God says.
I know, everyone thinks that.

God, in Billy, continued unabated.

“You say the truth will set you free.”
“I say the truth will piss you off.”
“I can prove it, can you?”
Let’s try a little experiment. If you’re ready, continue, if not, skip it. Go to the ¤

You need to understand, no one wrestled you away from your home. There was no great-
white-army trampling down the foliage to get to you. You were delivered to the dock! You were
sold by your brothers, and fathers for pennies—your mothers tried to get a better price. It wasn’t
that they didn’t understand the consequences, tho they didn’t, or that they didn’t know that you
could never return. They didn’t care! They were too busy counting their money to wave
goodbye to their African sons and daughters. Slavery must have an expiration date, they didn’t
respect that enclosure. How could you have known?
The truth will indeed set you free, but first it will bloody well piss you off.
The people who are laughing are the ones who should be crying, and vis-versa. The ones that
don’t understand, never will. It’s not your business to explain my jokes. It’s possible you’re the
butt. “Why do you think they taught you the ABC’s when you were three-years-old, to keep you
at home forever; to communicate better!” Not hardly, ha ha.

¤
Billy sat for a while, and ate the breakfast God gave him. God knows that Billy doesn’t like to
use his hands before his stomach is awake. And doesn’t care enough to argue the point. Billy
prefers to eat with his tongue like a frog. He had puffed grains, and diluted green tea.
It was going to be a rainy day, so he called the chimney sweep, the plumber, and had his car
repaired, all done exquisitely by 5 pm the following Friday. He polished up his first porch speech
known ever after as The Brown Footing, due to the fact that Billy’s porch floor is painted brown,
and because nobody really cared.
He came out at 14:00 Pm and delivered the long awaited first divine words. He worked on it
for almost ten minutes. It was called Abort Your Plans. It was on a 3x5 card because he couldn’t
trust his memory, plus it was short.

“Abort Your Plans.”

He cleared his throat, and began reading: “Since when are you the judge of a good plan? No
one told me about it. You can’t create anything. You can’t destroy anything. Judge for yourself.
I assure you they don’t care. Billy used his left hand to make a sweeping gesture in front of a
silent, expectant, and probably transfixed audience or 40 or 50 people—keep judging, keep
planning, keep dreaming. Oh, and mind your own business, for a change.”
After the first real speech, they left and never came back. They were so horribly disappointed
with his squeaky ancient-sounding voice, and his old clothes. Some people down wind said he
had body odor, but they meant it in a nice way, and hung around for weeks for no reason.
Everyone went back to minding everyone else’s business furiously, so much so, some even
began minding the store.
Billy was so jazzed by the way he felt, he decided to do a show at 23 in the dark. This one
was called Respect Life. It was bound to hammer out any details he had missed in his earlier
missive. Billy climbed into God, and turned on the lights. It took him five minutes to write it,
and that was at a stagger. When he got out, if that’s the right word, he went back into the house,
and cleared his throat several times. The porch light was on. He noticed there was no one
around, so he put the keys in his pocket, and went out to address the night. The light gave him a
nice halo-effect.
He saw a photograph taker behind a bush smoking something, and three women who were as
yet dateless. But it was Monday after all, they could have been married, for all Billy knew, or
have some other reason to stay out late. He had taken a bath and changed his clothes, to the
disappointment of two of the women. Then he called to the photo-graph skulking person and
asked him his name. The man held up his camera but there was no click and no flash, Billy
would have said ‘just my luck,’ a week or two ago, but he knew now, there was no such thing.
Lou was so disinterested in taking any more loser pictures, he decided, what the hell, and
asked, “May I take your picture?” Billy said yes, and then began his follow up to the Brown Foot
beginning:
God in Billy said. “My son is yet to be born, waiting for you.” “Respect life. Don’t just say
life is sacred. You must do more than act like it.
You kill tomorrow what you saved yesterday.
What did you wish for when you…” then a flash went off and one of the women jumped and
started yelling at the camera guy. Lou, put his hands up and said, “The new…oh, Jesus over
there, said I could. He said I could.” and pointed at God in Billy, just as God was getting ready to
say, ‘made the baby.’ But the woman who giggled when Billy asked her, her name, hadn’t heard
that part of the conversation; she was too busy smelling the air, and smelling her own breath.
Everyone heard what he said, even tho there was no one there. Those who were there weren’t
paying the slightest bit of attention anyway. He could have been reading from the phone book for
all they knew.
The photo-grapher became a photo-journalist overnight and made a lot of money by selling
signed pictures with a fairly accurate transcript, superimposed above the halo, signed by him, of
what he entitled ‘23 in the Dark.’ Many people bought the pictures with ‘Lou’ scrawled in big
letters at the bottom. Many people came to believe in the years to follow, that God had signed it
himself and that it said ‘Love.’ It was a favorite on the Internet, but people were so sick of copies
of copies. They began reading the times for themselves. There was a full page picture in the arts
and leisure section of the Savior on his porch, a halo around his head and a frog looking for flies
at his feet, un-signed by anyone. Of course, that didn’t come out till the following fall. Getting
accurate information was so hard in those days. Many said it was worth the wait, considering.
For weeks after the day of speeches, no one knew what time it was, or what to call it. It was
too dark.

The End ((((See Author’s note regarding the book in paper form))))

Events in the future

People say history repeats itself—that’s absurd: the symbolism repeats.
The thing that destroys all the so-called information is here now. You see it all the time.
It is a symptom that, oddly enough, is called a virus. It is a product of the Internet network. In
25 years, it will wipe away everything. It will not be because people didn’t back up their
information. It is because information becomes everything, and they could not create a parallel
universe. The so-called recovered information will not jive with the truth. People will not pay
bills they don’t owe. People will not climb back into other people’s depts. The haves, will try to
kill the have-nots, then they’ll kill everyone else, and then themselves. No one ever anticipates
the suicide, or so they say.
 If you think proud pioneers would never take advantage of a virus, you don’t know the history
of The Dark Ages.
People won’t have gas for their tractors nor will they have the slightest idea how a tractor
works. Many people will have full tanks, but it won’t last ten years, and it won’t take them to
their non-existent jobs. Accounts payable managers will evaporate, risk managers will rule.
Doctors will be able to diagnose nothing, and the pills they prescribe could give you better sex or
kill you. It’s a crapshoot. People will laugh to think there was a time when a basement full of
water was a bad thing.
Personally, I like the Internet, but it’s like a toaster, if you use it for bread, it works fine, but if
you use it as a fork cleaner, which is what it looks like, you will be very sorry.
Don’t be so quick to put people in charge of the information. Don’t burn down the libraries
quite yet. There’s an awful lot of money still to be made from computer viruses.
You have choices: learn everything about everything now, while you can, ha. Don’t let any
technology change. Only buy pills marked 100% guaranteed; find someone you trust, to help you
know everything about everything; wait for the year twenty-twenty, when for some reason, you
think everything will become clear; or be a person others can trust. Tell the truth, cut the crap,
and clean up this mess. The hen house where you put all your chickens is rife with virus. It’s
like: the 74,000 dollar car you just won, gets stuck in 50 centimeters of mud and water—the
entire electrical system shuts down. You can’t roll down the windows or open the door. Lucky
you. There’s a flood coming. If you think you can blithely leave all this to future generations,
and just cut-out, think again. You’re not going anywhere. Many of your children hate you, I
don’t blame them, and they don’t even know what you’ve done yet, but your Grandchildren will.
This is the only time I’ll say this. It is not a counting contest, it is a count-down. The year is
five.

This is how the boy, Hussein Abdo, ended the trouble in the Middle East. He drew a line
between what is morally acceptable, and what isn’t. The people who found him so willing, didn’t
realize he was developmentally delayed. They are not like Hitler, they are not trying to create a
master race. They unwittingly defined the problem; if you don’t encourage people to think for
themselves, eventually they won’t be able to—they will keep dying, and no one will know what
they’re dying for. Something about Peace.
You’re talking the best, and the brightest of your sons, and daughters into killing themselves.
This is a flawed strategy. It’s ironic, that you used to put great importance on education. It’s
unconscionable that you’d manipulate impressionable, idealistic youth, into this. It’s also going
to cost you. There’s a price to be paid. More about that later.
If you kill your neighbors, your new neighbors will kill you. And that’s that.

He climbed as high as a little boy could

It was fall. I used to climb to where the branches got real thin. It was walnut season. I had to
wear my pants inside out because Mom would yell if I got them dirty on the outside. We used to
run around the hill and dale and Clarke and I would pick up walnuts, but mine had to be weighed
in his hand. They were no good to eat, but horses liked them and I like picking them. Clark likes
to throw them and he broke a tooth once.
He didn’t swallow it but it disappeared. I hope Spring comes soon and I hope Santa Claus gets
stuck, I was only kidding about that part.
We lived in slow motion, Clarke says, after dad died, and Mom began to feel sick. Sometimes
I told her to spend time in the kitchen because she looked better in the kitchen light, Clarke says
it’s because the red curtain makes everything look better, but Mom even looked better there at
night, when she stood under the overhead light, and that light was yellow. I smelled the funny
cooking smells come up from the floor, I washed my turtle in the sink once and she had a fit.
She was sorry the same day but I stayed in my room, I felt so bad for my turtle.
I spent a lot of time with marbles in those days and Mom yelled when I didn’t eat everything
on my plate so I had to learn to hide the food. I hid food in my lap, under my napkin, under my
chair on the highchair next to me that was for Claire if she came back. I gave a lot of food to
Herk, our dog, short for Hercules, because he had big shoulders, and you could pat his chest and
hear a drum. Dad named him before he died. Clarke says because he couldn’t name him after he
died.
One day I got hit by Margo, from down on Mercer Street, she kicked me and I got punished for
hitting her but I didn‘t. I hit Marjee.
“If,” Mom says, “I hear about you hitting a girl, I’m gonna…” and she was going to say, ‘Tell
your father, but she couldn’t say that any more and she went to bed. All over Margo.
“If, she kicks you, tell her to stop, then tell her Mom.” She kicked me in the shins, and
pounded me between the shoulder blades. Clarke looked at my back and said I was okay, but I
couldn’t stop coughing. Mom stroked my forehead and tried to get me to sleep, but I could never
sleep in the day, it was too hot and stuffy. She hit Clarke across the face for eating with his
mouth open once.
She hit me for bouncing a ball, and she said, “If, you don’t stop. I’ll stop you. All right.”
“If, you knew what was good for you, you’d leave me alone,” she used to say. I came in
quietly a lot, and we played very slowly, most of the time. It was hard sometimes Mom being
sick and everything, but we just let her alone and thought about how good it would be when she
gets better, but she never did. I guess she couldn’t. Me and Clarke loved her just the same really.
One time we ate a whole bag of cough drops and Mom yelled because we made a mess all over
the floor. Clarke was playing a marble game with them. She yelled, “If you know what’s good
for you, you’ll listen to me… No more candy wrappers in this house!” Her favorite actress was
Garbo, Clarke imitated her once and Mom called him names. I thought she was getting better,
but maybe like Clarke says, I wanted it so bad, I couldn’t see. I hid my dirty clothes but they got
found.
I hid food from the care lady, Mrs. Alicea, because she cooked for ‘fourteen.’ I had sad times
when I was growing up and I did the best I could. If I grow up, I’m not going to feel bad, it does
no good and kids pick up on that. I put my hand on my Mom’s head when she died, before they
closed the casket. She felt cold. I left my hand there for a long time, Clarke gave me a funny
look and then we left to go to our new home. I thought she’d get up for me, just because I loved
her.
As an adult I can heal no one. As a child I could have healed the whole world.

Billy decides what to do

If you want God to laugh tell him about your most recent decision—anonymous

Sitting alone in his house he realized that this was the time, and this is what he would do, he
would write about certain black women, and their complete lack of qualification. Maybe he’d
just tell the truth about Ida, but he’d have to change her name—Oulong, maybe Hilda, maybe
he’d make Ida male, Olaf or something clever. He’d include a playful side—she probably had
one. Ida’s inattention, would generate a book. The Work. Her desire to play with people rather
than actually help them, and how this porcelain-ebony-beauty with the big ass, thru no fault of her
own, had saved him and healed him. The fact that he could barely speak English didn’t bother
him in the slightest—it might help, less useless conversation to distract him. He would proceed
as Ida had taught him—with careless abandon. He would be a fiction writer. He’d call it Ida
Fall-out, or Father Ida, or just I’d, Ah…something cute. It would be mostly about his bumping
into God accidentally that day in April. That would be the climax or the centerpiece or whatever.
He’d put that right in the middle. Great! a climax right in the middle, this is going to be, what’s
the word…literature! He’d taken a college course in English once, and he was almost finished
Moby Dick. Life was words, particularly his, his life, not his words.
He began like a house on fire, this was going to torch the world as we know it. He wrote on
his computer, which was little more than word processor at this point since he had crashed the
computer somehow while trammeling the dizzying heights of internet porn, but that too was
perfect, it was no longer a needless distraction. He would be slavishly devoted to unearthing the
nature of Ida which is the nature of mankind. Ida on fire! Perfect title, he closed Windows that
first night after writing 7 pages with an inspired file name. When he went to retrieve it the next
day he couldn’t remember the name he’d just given it. Ashes? No, Window Dressing? No,
Ashes to ashes; Ashes to Ida; Ida time; Outta time. Somewhere in the hospital he’d lost his
memory, and there was no use going back to look for it. What would he do, retrace his steps?
He’d been in every room of that g.d. place.
He’d lost his memory, couldn’t speak English, knew things he couldn’t know, and decided he
was in the perfect place to begin the great American you know what.
By April everything was going fine, he spoke to God often. He had pretty much nailed Ida’s
character. Three other characters showed-up like out-of-work actors, and he had included them
right away. Billy decided to write only when inspired, wrote a fast and furious 25 pages, and then
took five months off to drink.
He made mistakes only a rank amateur could make, three at a time. He never noticed. He’d
just make three more, and then three more. Then when the world began to turn, he made three
more. When he became one with God, he figured that’s how it goes, perhaps an occupational
hazard—either way, this is gonna be fun.
He had taken to writing as tho he were taking dictation. He was taking shorthand directly
from God. One of the significant problems was, you had to be at the keyboard when the inspired
words came, otherwise you had to try to remember it all, and they came very fast. He learned to
keep paper handy, and he didn’t mind that he had to write by hand. Tho quicker, it made a mess,
and didn’t have the polished look or feel of actual type, it lost something. Billy was too lazy to
write long-hand during the day, and transpose it into the work at night, so he had composition
books, and napkins full of writing.
Then he hit on a better idea, write in blue ink on photo-paper. It makes the words come alive.
They look golden-purple—and isn’t that what you want anyway?
Now, when he felt truly inspired, his choice became: write in beautiful golden script, which
soothed his soul, and kept him focused on salient points, or go and use the computer God had
given him, absent the siren song of continually beckoning internet porn—just his modest
collection of static pictures, which were helping him develop his imagination, in his off-moments,
his down time.
An idea hit him. He had been not only dwelling in his own superstitions—he had been
loitering. He would take out the rules of fiction, dust them-off, and apply them. But it back
fired—he entered a new world.

Purple script of great importance and solemnity, versus using a more permanent method of
word entry, hmm. Billy was superstitious about talking to God, so he eliminated that choice.
Two choices, suddenly three. Three choices begin to look like two again, and then God speaks.
‘You cannot understand.’
Billy doesn’t know that ‘Thank God, for the reckless bumblings, you cannot understand,’
were actually God’s first words to him. One long somewhat un- punctuatable sentence, tho God
punctuated it with a short pause after ‘Thank God,’ but not enough to make it a separate sentence,
and another after ‘bumblings’—just as Billy caught himself from falling down the back stairs.
Billy said, Thank you…What? Was that you? God spoke very slowly to Billy, yet he seemed to
speak all at once. Billy already knew he couldn’t understand; and, as he walked to the kitchen,
said, almost out loud, Thanks for the intimate nature of what seems like a sarcastic universe.
Billy leaned his shoulder against the door frame, as tho he were flagged, took a breath. He felt
like he’d climbed a mountain.

God about fell off his chair, and said, Who are you. Billy said thoughtfully, and with
hesitation I am…then there was a long uninterrupted pause, and he continued, ‘just trying to have
a conversation.’
God turned from his work, and listened to a man who had staggered blindly into his office.
God said, Oh, it’s you. I thought I’d never see you again.
Billy repeated in gibberish, I thought I’d never see you again. He hadn’t been drinking, nor
did he have meningitis or its remnants, nor was he considering the fact that he may have just gone
crazy.
Hello, Billy said.
Hello my Son, God said. Done?
Without hesitation Billy said, Done? What’s next?
God laughed. Have I got a job for you.

See above. Dreams reconcile, work out

At that time, Billy’s dreams were the places he worked all these things out, where he
reconciled his symbolic life and his real life. Everything encoded just fine, as tho it had
monumental importance in his world, and yet he knew zero zip nada. Everything was symbolic,
all missives were recorded on stone tablets as tho he were building the Tower of Babel.
Billy continued encoding the world directly to the For All Time Center. For once and for all
bypassing the Self Protection Center. Billy had a self protection center, pitiful, and weak from
the lack of a vigorous blood supply, but he had no portal. It was on-hold. Turns out the
community doesn’t have the urgent life-span issues of the self, and does not need protection.
Quite the contrary, protecting itself means only one thing, growth. Billy was making—food.

The Cro
He dreamed of cavemen. They were known to themselves as the Cro. their language was the
first. They said in shouts and strange dances, We are not animals. There was an explosion of art,
and the animals were born on their cave walls. Billy was symbolically one of them, and by a
light as dim as this paper, he saw the wall in front of him, and painted first swirls. The children
watched with their eyes, not their hands as he had shown them. Then he drew a buffalo.
Everything changed for the entire Cro that saw it. They were not animals. It was hundreds of
years before a man drew a man, it was considered extremely bad luck, to see yourself. The more
animals that were drawn, the more they saw themselves, by unwritten contrast.

Billy dreamed. His dreams reconciled his predicament. In his dreams he spoke so clearly, and
with such power, he moved from one spot and landed in another just like that—He became
predictive. Cave-like. He had learned the rules for prediction, and it amazed almost no one, as
they said, ‘You can’t credit the sunrise to your awakening; they do not happen separately, they
always happen together.’ But Billy said, ‘Every sunrise is not dawn.’ They do not know their
own symbols, nor the power within.
Make the sun rise now! a wise man said to him one day, and it was noon. Billy said, ‘I already
have.’ They stoned him, and spit on him so he would know his place in the scheme of things.
They came thus, into a process of fighting themselves and ignoring their symbols.

He dreamed of horses and bigger horses and horse fights and stampedes. He even dreamed once
about horses without heads.

He dreamed of a place like a kitchen, the floor was red and black. He dreamed of icicles as big as
your arm. He dreamed of a sunflower that grew on a roof, and he wished he could understand
this dream. This was a beautiful place. When he was there it was his.
In one dream he woke just before a lightening strike. A storm of immense magnitude was
coming; one of tremendous power. Billy was not dreaming but he was still in a heavily symbolic
state. The room didn’t seem real; it was so dark he was blind. His breath came and cleared his
head. Suddenly the brightest light surrounded him, followed instantly by a crack that shook the
entire house. It shook his stomach—in those days he had a very small stomach. The sound was
like a word, it was like all the words all at once. That woke him up. He went to the window,
everything looked peaceful, the street was empty, it was 4:45.
Billy woke up from many dreams and found he couldn’t go to sleep. He would write down what
the symbolism was to his life. He was blind, and now he could see. It made him horny, and he
wasn’t usually married in these dreams, so he went downstairs and started his day helping people.
A day later was Saturday, and there, as he walked his dog, he saw the strangest thing. His
neighbor, Jack, was mowing his lawn. All around the front yard were huge splinters of wood.
On two trees, standing 33 meters high, were perfectly straight lines, each eight centimeters wide,
and at least ten meters high.
I never saw anything like it.
I followed the lines up the trees.
I knew what had done that—I woke up just before it happened. Quite a storm.
I was amazed.
I followed the marks on the trees, and looked at them from different angles.
I could hardly take my eyes off-them. Later, I stood under the trees at a point I chose, and looked
up in-to the sky. The lines converged oddly as tho they spelled a word—Or the same word twice.
I shook it off, and looked at the dog, he was lying down as if I’d been standing there for a very
long time. We came out to get some air…we got some, so we went home. The neighborhood
told stories the neighbors couldn’t tell. Every tree had some story or other about my life. That
had been true since I was a boy in Tapioca Kansas.
I looked at my house and it was an engine. Not a fortress of solitude. Everything showed -up
there. Everything spoke to me there. Everything worked there, except the phone.
I reconciled myself to going to work.
I thought I was helping people by selling them cars. Most of them needed some work to get
where they were going, the people that is. I worked-out after work, and wondered what all the
dreams meant: I began to need more help than the people I was helping.

When I walked dazedly back into the house behind the dog, I smelled a peculiar smell—like
incense in a Catholic Church. I couldn’t believe it, in that split second I felt re-born, just like that.
I had left the tea kettle on on the stove, and the smell of burnt copper was everywhere. It was
unavoidable, and symbolic. My life became just that.

I dreamed about the Cro again, the people who changed the world from their caves. They
didn’t fight the Neos, the name they had for the people who were left behind, as others, who were
to follow, were led to believe. They just stopped mating. The Cros had given them a clear reason
to, and an incentive. Ultimate Survival.
 The Neos saw the Cro men band together with spears, and they didn’t know what they were
doing. The Neos sped into history, just like that. No one died, and there was no big fight.
Some will say they never fought because they never met. That’s not true. They met, of
course, they met, but very slowly. The things that made one, one kind of man, and the things that
made the other, another—embraced. They never ‘saw’ a difference—they ran into it.

Dreams follow themes, the story of my life

The story of my life, themes follow dreams. People’s story’s contradict; I was not
preposterous to myself. I was protected. Most of my friends have never met each other, the only
friends of mine they know, are themselves.
I weighed nothing at birth, and they made up numbers to satisfy the form. I am no good with
numbers to this day, and I never cared for forms. I weighed 22 pounds when I was in first grade.
I learned very quickly how to secure bodyguards—pay them nothing. The less you pay, the
better. I stuffed marbles in my pockets—to throw them off. I was embarrassed to have no
weight.
People rescued me, and guarded me, all my life, from before I can remember. All the facts of
my life are provable, even the fiction is provable.
I fell down the stairs at four, and injured my eye. Now my eyes see differently, one eye sees
everything with a pink tinge, the other light blue. The blue eye can’t be trusted. The record will
show it was fine ‘till someone looked at it critically. I cannot remember when it was ever fine.
The more I described what I saw thru it, the more people became bored. When God looks thru
my eyes, He uses that one. Same with my left hand.
All thru school, my friends guarded me, and when they weren’t around, total strangers stepped
in.
I was never struck—ever. My father stopped punishing me when I was five, he just gave up, it
was too painful for him. He never hit me without apologizing, ever—even when I almost burned
down the kitchen. I can wait forever for a good apology. Forever. They’re lining up as we
speak.
I never learned to fight because I never had to. People screamed at me many times. I am
practically deaf in my left ear from women trying to get my attention. All my body guards were
men—and boys, when I was a boy. Anything thrown at me, I can keep. I had to make rules, and
stick to them, or even as a child I’d be constantly stopped; the few times I was roughly touched
growing up, people paid dearly: Out of sight…out of mind.
I went skiing, and no one died. I broke my leg and they didn’t believe me, thinking I was
making it up. I had no pain—that they believed. My leg was practically shattered. They gave
me pain medicine that almost killed me.
Simple things have always been impossible for me, and the harder a thing is, or so it appears,
the easier it is for me to do. It’s always been that way. One leg is still shorter than the other, I
don’t limp, but my back sometimes feels like I’ve been carrying the weight of the world—it, like
my leg, is un-fixable. My back is in the shape of an ‘S,’ looking straight on.
I have scars on my head and face, that you can’t easily see; one across my head where it was
ripped, from one side to the other; scars on my forehead; my head is numb; scars from where my
eyelid was ripped; scars to repair it, and scars to make my eyes look the same, but they have
never looked the same—to me. The left side of my face was sheared, it looks fine now, Thanks
to God, and medical science.
I have marks, scars and pains I can’t explain. Doctors made the scars that I didn’t make
myself, thru risky behavior. I’ve totaled 5 or 6 cars. I have had cars smashed when I wasn’t even
in them. I have had cars stolen that were later totaled when I wasn’t driving them. I’ve hit poles,
rails, pillars, and cars. I never hit anyone, and I’ve never had an accident when on drugs. Thank
God.
Once I was driving 90 miles and hour drunk, at 2 in the morning, the cop pulled me over. I
told him the truth, he was flabbergasted, and let me go. That was back in the day.
Once my watch stopped the morning of the day I was to appear in court for a parking ticket, or
a stop sign, or something. I was two hours late, the story was true, my watch did stop, and the
judge believed me. I thought: How amazing, to be able to see the truth.
Once my music teacher gave me an ‘A’ on a hotly contested exam. I started to write the
answer to a question, and then wrote, ‘I really have no idea,’ I was ten. The truth is like
that...People can’t believe you have the nerve, and they are so glad to hear it, they break every
rule they ever made, swore an oath to, or thought was fair.
I flipped a car in the snow once, in the middle of a snow bank, in the middle of the winter, in
the middle of nowhere. Within two minutes, a car full of footballers stopped, piled out, lifted up
my Volkswagon Rabbit, put it back on the road, said nothing, and drove off. It’s always been like
that. I said, Thank you…they left. Snow everywhere.
My parents locked me out of their bedroom. I was the too-early morning Messenger —The
Annoying One. Then one day, I woke up and couldn’t breathe, my throat’d closed. They took
me to the hospital, the locks came off, and my father began to try to quit smoking. I was 7 or so.
That’s the first time I saw a dead body—ya couldn’t miss it.
My hands hurt; my left is unable to move properly, it never could. My left hand writes like a
small child, my right, like a doctor. I have a tiny mark as tho from a nail in my left hand; it’s
slowly erasing itself. I have a spike at the base of my left index finger I cannot explain. I have no
marks on my right hand, just a spot that comes and goes. My shoulders hurt. My neck hurts. My
feet hurt. I had surgery for the pain in my feet, but it’s still there. I have an old scar between my
ribs on the left, I don’t know where I got that. I have a scar on my right side, from an operation,
that for years felt like a piece of metal was stuck in there.
A medical student once looked into my eyes, called in three more students, and two more
doctors, to see something they said was nothing. He told me it was like a dart on my iris, in a
shape he could not describe.

Strength and movement

Billy began to go crazy with unhappiness and lack of proper contact. Something his compass
didn’t warn him of. The truth is, and became obvious to everyone, Billy was deeply flawed and
had, for the time being, come to believe he was in fact N.J., The state of New Jersey and that
God, or someone calling himself God, was living in Piscataway.
Billy insisted that he had already transcended the petty labels of schizoaffective disorder,
bipolarism, and dementia precox. He was crazier than a flock of wild geese, and needed 24-hour
supervision to keep him from killing himself. It was not something that could be accounted for,
and Billy became fearful that something was missing, but he didn’t know what. He stole what he
could from the ambulance as it bounced over train tracks at break-neck speed, the boys in their
baggy blue uniforms had their hands full.
He had transcended something he couldn’t get over, and it wasn’t the dress dummy on the
porch after all, tho that seems to have triggered something. He couldn’t get over himself. He was
too free; he was free to come and go, and he did. Life had become unbearably hard; he was
totally free and locked in a room with two men and a woman, who had leather restraints and
knew how to use them. Reputations could be destroyed if they hadn’t all been miles past caring.
The history of the treatment of the truly mentally ill in this country had a lot to answer for.
Billy’s problem was, he swore he wouldn’t touch a word or do any rewrites, on his honor as an
author. His own rules threw him directly into the path of a monster the size of 55 Tokyos. This
was hell. And he’d arrived double bagged like so many cartons of eggs, or ‘time bombs’ as Billy
liked to refer to them.
There was time but no solution. All this talk about death, and symbolism, was pure crap, he
should have seen this coming. Wrigometrics! (Shutup, keep writing)
God is not faith, nor does he require it. He is an idea. If you have faith, you will soon have a
belief. If you have an idea about faith, you can move. It’s like this: if you think you got where
you are, thru a combination of toughing-it-out, and understanding, then how do you explain that
you always end up where you started from? In other words: If you try to see Everything…that’s
trying. But where else is there to look? (oops 501)
He played his smile tape, and took long walks in his head while he was tied-up bouncing
toward Sodom. Slowly, he pulled himself up from non-symbolic symbolism into reality. It
sucked so bad. Another thing his mother warned him against.
How does this happen, how can things get so bad so fast? You asked for it, came the response
and shut him up until he turned again to see there was nothing left for him. All was dark, all was
bleak, but this time, as his mother used to say, ‘This time I mean it.’
Billy realized this was not his world. Faith was more than just panacea. He was taken to the
hospital, emergently diagnosed with an acute psychotic episode and put into a locked ward. He
screamed the names of four men and a woman. He disappeared, and the hospital couldn’t find
him anywhere. They had somehow lost their most important patient, a danger to the whole
community.
It was a shame they couldn’t report this unfortunate incident to the authorities, it would have
to be handled internally.
He was on the lamb, agnus dei, and sought sanctuary in the only place that would take him, a
place he’d never be recognized; he went home. A sane man in a crazy world, is a crazy man until
he is re-pronounced. See him as stark raving mad. It’s worked before.

The Otter really couldn’t help; he thought he was real. Like other Otters he had very thick fur.
He can float on his back. Un-named, he stays warm and dry, no matter how cold or wet. Some
are Sea Otters, some are River Otters and some are rarely, and nowadays really rarely seen. He
adapts to his environment, and his coat changes color. If it were snowing, he’d be snow white. If
he were lost in the woods, he’d be brown and muzzy. If he had to hide he would suit. He lives in
the stormy cacophony that I live in, and he is blizzard white. Snow is symbolic of the future, a
new day, it changes everything it covers. And yes, it’s beautiful.
When Billy was overwhelmed or hit with emotions, as he put it. It felt to him the same way it
felt when he went to school some mornings, and he’d look at the dog who was feeling dejected.
He wished he could be the dog for a day, and the dog could be in his place, and see how he liked
it. Envy for a dog’s life, was similar to the assault of emotions that had no discernable bottom.
Billy had a funny superstition that helped. He believed that meaning was in the words—
physically. If he said: I am not a testimony, I am a person. He may find that that was not the
right word for him. Then he would say: I’m not the money, I am a person. He would spare the
word as much as possible, to keep as much of the original word as he could. Take from them,
particles of meaning to enhance his own. He’d go back to where the change needed to occur,
save as much of the words as he could to make the new word—always moving forward. At the
end of the day he’d have tests that weren’t, soap,: oceans, no sex oaths, parts of words I and he
fragmented, marks flipped all over the place [ skilletters ] ide a s( and he’d wipe them away all at
once. Like a day is. Something saved, partly thrown away, partly kept, growing against a wall of
superstitious nonsense, all the while making meaning for himself, his own way, and always
moving forward.
 The Broadneck Speech
Billy ignored the fact that he had no audience except that woman who might be a tipster from
the hospital. He ignored the fact that it was 4am. He ignored the fact that all lists do not
necessarily come in 3’s.
Billy thought giving speeches would be a nice way of life—like sword swallowing, people
don’t realize how little there is to damage, and how slippery it all is, and how people hear and see
what they want to see. He gave his last speech.
I have no power.
I worship no one.
I am fictional.
I love. I am not like you.
I score by aiming for the middle.
I am no fool.
I want, that I will want some more, and I will want again.
My self, my soul are not at odds. And that is the thing you will never…Billy forgot the last
line of the speech. That was one reason it was the last. He scribbled in ‘leave blank.’ And those
became the last words. He had taken a sip of wine before the speech, which might have
accounted for the long string of personal pronouns. It came to him two days later, the last word
was supposed to be ‘touch.’ The thing that you will never touch. But he liked it better this way.
What’s the difference…you’ll fill-in the things that are beyond your grasp with great significance
and just make it up to suit. No harm no foul.
The critics, of which there was only one, said she liked the bowling reference, but perhaps he
could’ve ‘developed’ it. That was another reason it was the last porch speech. Billy’s struggle
was the thing you’ll never leave blank. Everything is now symbolic.
*
I go outside. I am in everything. To me it’s unbelievable, and yet it was, is and I hope—
continues. The thing I am in love, and love, and am in love with, is right here, all around.
I have not come to set an example. If I were going to set an example I would walk right down
the middle. Otherwise, there’d be nothing ‘set’—no sides—no path—no way to ‘follow.’
An example is like a reputation, it’s great until it’s ‘everything,’ then it’s gotta go. You will
always find the example you seek, acknowledged or not, right in front of you, walking right down
the middle of the path you’re already on. Imagine if nothing was hypothetical.

NEW JESUS— Dumfounded debut

God said a strange thing.
Billy asked him how in the world he could describe the indescribable.
God said, Use your word processor.
Billy said, My brain is off limits to me.
The other word processor. G
The? B
The. G
The one I bought for… B
For. G
The one I bought for? B
Why are you suddenly talking like an idiot. G
I bought a word processor, and you’re telling me to write on it? B
Well that’s what it’s for isn’t it? G
I can’t manage technology. I can’t figure out how to answer a cell phone. B
Can you count to 10. G
What? B
Can you count to ten? G
Yes. Wha…B
Then you can do this. G
Oh Good, that’s a relief. B
Faith is your protection, there’s no relief for you. Some battles you’re bound to lose. G
Maybe it’d be better if I won all the battles…my faith is weak. B
I’m not talking about 800 dollar per milligram faith, or scratch-proof Cadillac faith, or you can’t
touch me I’m wrapped in plastic faith. I’m talking about plain this… G

Next to the castle…I’m thinking I’d like a moat, with men in heavy armor and damsels, in…in…
B
God stared at Billy with his mouth open. The writer he hired couldn’t think of the expression.
He stared at Billy, and began to laugh to Himself, and said: Damsels in dis…G
Distress. Yes, lots of damsels in distress all over the place, Billy said.
Whatever you want, God said. You don’t even have to ask.
Oh, that’s a re… That’s good. B
Now get dressed. G
What for? B
Your debut. G
I have no idea what to wear. B
Wear this. G
Billy had worn God’s clothes before, and they made him seemingly invisible. But this, this
brought out the color in his eyes. They would definitely see him in this.
Billy’s eyes were red—even as a child. They had seen death, life, love, and they could take it all
away. Just like that.

When he walked out into the bright sun, there were almost 75 people on the porch, in the yard,
some on the street walking dogs, many just standing. There were more people than he’d seen in a
long time on that street. Back in the day, it had been a very quiet street. There were no
photographers on this day because people seemed to understand Billy’s formality. And
photographers felt that asking for permission was ‘invasive.’
A bunch of doves flew off when Billy stepped from his porch, if you call ten a bunch. They
weren’t white, they were pinkish gray, and went ‘Whirr’ with their flapping wings.
A little girl said, ‘May I?’ to her mother, and her mother said “Yes.” She pointed the camera
at Billy, and dropped it. The woman picked up the camera, and put it in her pocket, people were
watching.
“When you don’t know what to do, and you’re lost, be kind.”
Most of the people were wearing white. Billy looked around. Everyone was wearing white.
But that was to be expected—It was just after Memorial Day.
A woman came forward and interrupted Billy’s opening remarks by handing him a blind baby.
He stared at it, and said to the woman, What’s this for? This was un-planned
Make it well. Make it see. This is my baby, she’s blind. The woman stared at Billy.
I can see that. Do you love your baby? I love your blind child. I love all children, some say I
love them too much. Billy’s reputation as an infant molester began to be remembered by the
crowd that didn’t recognize him, at first, as the crazy homosexual lawyer who tried to fake a fall
in a grocery store owned by a local couple, and not a big conglomerate agri-business. They
wouldn’t’ve known Billy if he’d been directing them.
 In a word, they saw him as a charlatan, an imposter, a false messiah, and therefore the devil.
He was up against all the craziness in the world. He began by tapping very softly.
The woman, whose 5 month old child he’d touched, who’d subsequently reported the incident
to the police, who couldn’t understand why crazy women bother men in uniform about nothing,
felt funny. She thought: When these idiots find out who they’re listening to, all hell’s gonna
break lose. Feeling sorry for the blind child’s mother, the blind child, and the world at large, she
took herself, and her 5 month old baby away, before the world was blinded by a sight they could
not bear to see—Billy, flirting with disaster.
God watched Billy’s debut in awe and wonder. It was so untidy, so casual, so easy,
so…effortless.
A transvestite prostitute of no renown or distinction approached Billy. Luckily, Mickey was
dressed in drag and the group milling around on the property, thought this was somehow to be
expected. Billy thought it best, considering the nature of his debut, and realizing you can only
make a debut once, to ask her nicely to leave and that he’d see him later. The prostitute began to
complain of ill treatment and started to tell the crowd that Billy disgusted him with low payments
and practically forced himself on her. Billy handed him twenty bucks, and she left with her skirt
billowing—that was cutting it close.
Now, others in the dwindling, whistling, and shuffling crowd began to see that paying women
you plan to see later, right in the middle of reciting verbatim, the so-called word of God, could
never happen. And why if this so-called New Jesus was such a prophet, why the sun glasses, why
couldn’t they see his eyes? The ant fell from the ceiling right into the work. His appearance was
attended by a thousand questions—so far so good.
Many of the so-called faithful, realized it was a very sunny day, and that protecting light-
sensitive retinas from bright, and getting brighter, ultraviolet light would be perfectly
understandable—tho doing it during a debut was unheard of.
The crowd got thinner, and cars began to congest the small streets leading away from Billy’s
house; considerable horn honking, and shiftless milling proceeded.
Billy began to talk faster but no one could hear. “All death is now symbolic.” A little boy
came up and pulled at his clothes, Billy asked the little boy if he couldn’t go somewhere else with
his sticky fingers, and handed him a second lollipop. The boy wanted a red one. Billy said,
“And?” Then the boy unwrapped the candy, dropped it on the ground several times, and licked it
till it was clean enough to put in his mouth. His mother told him not to take candy from
strangers, especially men, and threw it away.
This debut was starting to look like a shambles. Billy chuckled in God’s clothes, and felt
relaxed, since the yard was empty except for a couple people who wouldn’t be able to find dates
if this were Big Green Fiesta Week and they were mint juleps.
It had been firmly established the New Jesus might be God to Himself, but he looked like a no
good, disreputable, dishonest, despised, indecent, child-molesting, eccentric, who forces mothers
to take candy out of their own childrens’ mouths, and may have absolutely no sense of decorum
whatsoever despite his nice clothes.
God stood dumbfounded on his lawn, or what passed as a lawn, invisible.

A drunk in a Chevy, hit a woman in a Buick who was trying to get her impressionable son
away from the New Jesus as fast as possible. The kid hit his head on the dash, the woman
screamed, and made him put his seat belt on before anyone saw them drive off.
The drunk came reeling out of his car with hardly a scratch, even tho the hood looked like an
opened book, and steam was escaping from all parts of the car.
The people turned, and, as if in one voice said, If you are God, how come you almost killed
that man? Billy’s mouth dropped open. God’s hand’s clapped from shear joy.
That man? The one who’s been drinking for forty years?
 All of a sudden the street was lined with stander-bys, hang-arounds, and onlookers. Billy had
a clear shot at the drunk as he reeled, left arm over right. Cars tried to pass him. He bumped off
one car, and then another.
Do something! a woman screamed, after the man bounced off a truck door. Make them go
slower—he’s going to be killed because of you!
Billy walked to the end of the street where the drunk stood leaning against a tree readying
himself for another attempt to get across the road. He couldn’t see for the alcohol, and his vision
was no longer three-dimensional. He had come to see the New Jesus, but he had over prepared.
Feeling no pain, he hurt his hand somehow, I guess.
Are you the new fucking Jesus? he slurred.
Yes, Billy said. I am.
Then here, I drink to you, and he pulls out a square shaped bottle, and in one motion takes a
draft from it and holds it up for a toast. Have a snort. Go on. A car whizzed by unnoticed. Billy
was in front of him before he had a chance to react.
“Kick some ass, you crazy son of a bitch.” Do it, God damn it! Give ‘em one for me. Dude,
I’m rooting for ya, we all…hey Bro!
Billy takes the bottle from him, turns to his side, and he makes it appear as tho he were
drinking from the bottle, but instead, the contents pour out onto the street. He hands the bottle
back to the man, and suggests he not drive drunk any more.
Good idea shit face, he says. And thanks for fucking drinking all my booze you dick, when,
only offered you a swig, Bogart-Bas-tard!! And he raised the empty flask like one of the
Sunshine Boys.
Billy wanted the man to know he accepted his gift, even tho he doesn’t drink in public like
that, especially not in the middle of a disastrous debut, and never at the scene of a crime when the
alcohol is part of the evidence.
He offered himself up to God in the same way the drunk offered the bottle to Billy. One
motion.
I wish I was dead right now, was the thought that came to Billy. The offer was made.
God whispered, and couldn’t help laughing, ‘Your debut was a brilliant success. I love you.’
He turned for an instant and cried, because he knew his son, and then laughed.
Billy left the scene smelling of whiskey, and walked home alone. Two young nazi skinheads
with tattoos saluted him. He motioned for them to put their hands down unless they had a serious
question. The unmanned aerial surveillance pictures from The Dragon Eye, that were in all the
papers the next day, showed a thin man walking away from an accident with blood on his hands,
and ethyl alcohol on the clothes that God had lent him for this last-chance-take-it-or-leave-it
debut.
He goes back home and everyone leaves in a variety-pack of disgusted. Well, what did you
expect? No clouds gathered or split. Unless you examined the satellite pictures critically.
Billy decided since he was outside anyway, and there was no one around, he would do
something that was incomprehensible, and cannot be understood—especially in these frightening
times—but he did it anyway.
There were little bugs on his azaleas, and it was April or May. His theory was to grievously
injure the fragile white bodies of the mealy bugs, or aphids, or whatever they were called. He
pressed on their tiny bodies with his huge thumb, splitting their skin—attracting to their insides:
fungi, nematodes, infection, whatever opportunistic life-form that might be floating by—The flies
and maggots of their little world. Then he crippled some, so they had to drag their bodies around,
demoralizing the ants that attended them, so they might give up, or try to heal them, or just find
another source of food. He meant to encourage in the ants their scrupulous attention to defect,
defeat, and adaptation.
The animals that feed on injured animals, would find them thru their chemistry. And feed on
the incapacitated bugs.
 What Billy hoped was to create a self-limiting system. The bugs had gotten out of hand. The
natural controls were absent, lazy or inattentive to the beauty of Billy’s azaleas. They needed
encouragement—it should have worked.
When Billy came thru the front door, God said, You were great!!!
Billy held out his bloody left hand, careful not to drip, and said, What’s this for?
Nice touch, don’t you think. G
Well, whose blood is it? He held his right hand under it. Where’d it come from? B
The mind of everyone who sees it. G
Billy wiped the blood on his pure white, self-cleaning shirt, gave God a look, and then
mumbled to himself: Oh, Jeeze…I’ll just do everything.

The has been never was

It was the White Sound, that was emanating from the world, that Billy heard. It broke his
heart.
They knew him to be flawed by reports of his actions, and they were appalled.
They knew him to be Christ because he told them he was. He brought an end to any death,
any. All.
They made him prove it by saving a drunk, stuck half-blind in traffic, on the way to saying
‘here’s to ya, and fuck-you’ to the Savior—with blood on his hands.
At the time Billy was born, Mankind decided that every society, every culture, and every
civilization was wrong—there was no point to searching for God.
Billy remains in prison to this very day.

Got Crap?
They pursued me to destroy me. If it wasn’t so funny, I could have died.
They had begun a new anti-BH (Big Hoe) campaign called, ‘got crap,’ a take-off on the ‘got
milk’ commercials that were popular in the 1990’s. I should have seen it coming. They would
stop at nothing—might as well give ‘em the ammunition.
Another salvo another ship. This was becoming a P4T relationship, and they thought I was
just gonna drink it up.
I did drink lots of tea of course, it did nothing, but it did make me pee a lot and that eventually
got me off my ass.
You would have thought that the locusts had descended. When I went to the windows, there
was the unmistakable sound of clicks, chirps, and buzzing. These were the last days indeed—but
not for me. My life was like a movie script—already written.

Public failure, that, and land, are the only things that last, the only things worth fighting for,
worth dying for. Land, Katie Scarlet! I so wanted to go back to Tara—I’ll never complain about
all that droopy moss again.
I left my dog in good hands, and got on the wagon, but when I finally arrived back in Tara,
Mammy was testy and depressed. She had obviously eaten everything in the house, and then
blamed it on my future in-laws, who ah hate. Poke was useless, and never came when you called.
Dad was crazy, and I discovered that besides his collection of paper money, that he wouldn’t let
me burn, he’d found mother dead, and embalmed her with turpentine, which would burn. I was
so cold; I wore muffs—about 24 of them.
 Of course I was upset! I just wondered how long this had been going on? Whenever I asked
them how they were doing, they always said, We’re just fine, honey lamb.
Perhaps this was inevitable, but I never saw it coming; I learned subsequent to digging up the
yard—looking for the family fortune, that besides marshmallows the only other thing that doesn’t
go with tea is turnips, turnips and my youthful enthusiasm for sleep.
I thought about throwing a Molotov cocktail into the front yard, but everything was so dry we
would have gone up just like kindling wood.
Therefore, I did nothing. No one prospered, and that really pissed them off.
I just drank tea. For me it was like a coffee break. They’re dead serious, and I just put an end
to death. Still got it. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

I was out in the front yard one day, and I swear it was all I could do to get back in the house.
It was just like Andrew Wyeth was directing Christina in Gone With the Wind. Where’s George
Cukor when you need him? No one understood a single one of my references. So, I packed it in,
and went home, to my house. Belle Reve.
Of course I was worried! Who was gonna wanna have sex with me now? I was the date from
hell. Publicity hounds, and prostitutes were the only ones that expressed even the slightest
interest! I did continue to answer the phone—you can always say No. The prostitutes never
called back, so I basically just sat there.
I get more than my share of nonsense phone calls. I never hang up, that’s rude. But what
would I want with burial property? I just walk away.
It wasn’t that my old friends didn’t call. I had been depressed before that. In fact I had been
depressed off and on since grade school, so, who was going to call?
I mean, who would have thought a little slip of the tongue could do all this. I am the most
impolitic man in the world, always have been. Maybe they should just get over it— I did.
Sometimes I say things I shouldn’t say. Sorry. I’m also the least handy person in the world.
So what? I’ve totaled five cars, but whose business is that? The only one I have to explain it to is
the insurance company. But, of course, if I did that, I’d be uninsurable. I do try, I swear I do. If
you think it’s simple, it’s probably impossible for me.
I try to say the right thing, but the more I try the worse it gets. I try to do the right thing, but
something always goes wrong. My left hand is retarded, and my right hand resents having to do
everything. It’s like a fight just to get dressed some mornings. Between the zipper and the belt I
hear nothing but complaints. My socks never match, each side of my brain has its own idea about
style, and often it’s all I can do to tie my shoes. If they’re looking to me for guidance, this world
really is in trouble. Must be.

Lenorman
So one day I was on ‘Late at night,’ and everything was going great. I had them put the
cameras in soft focus, put up two ‘key’ lights, and three purple gels. The director started avoiding
me, everything was going perfectly.
Then D-Jay gets me all relaxed. Who knew I could be so relaxed without Xanax?
That’s when we got on the subject of the Pope. I had gone to see the Pope to thank him and
kiss him goodbye. I was honored that he would have an audience with me, and they showed a
picture of me kissing his cheek, and it made me smile (it didn’t look anything like the picture I
had on the mantle, and made me squint, I wished I had remembered my glasses) they had
somehow reversed the shot, and I was kissing his left cheek, when in reality I had kissed his right
cheek; it was not symbolic or anything, it was just true. It was nothing. Then somehow, I don’t
know how, I blurted out that Jesus was homosexual and that I knew this from personal knowledge
and experience. How do they get stuff like that out of people? I had no intention of saying any
such thing. I had planned to mention that John Paul II was one of the anti-Christs, but only if it
came up.
Well that was that.

ABS cancelled the show, and went immediately into spin mode damage control. They’d run a
repeat that night. A soap-opera star was called to fill in the back half. I was escorted off stage
during a two minute commercial for Testosterall—“Your time has come, get some.” My manager
was faking a heart attack as my agent sold God only knows what, to someone standing by the
stage exit sign—never could pass-up a red light.
All trace of me was wiped away, except for the uneasy tension and angst from the audience
who couldn’t laugh at the comic and couldn’t sit still for the animal act.
Siegfried came on with two of the most beautiful Siberian Tigers you ever saw. I couldn’t
watch the Tigers, tho. That’s one act that I would definitely never watch live. My palms became
sweaty just thinking about it. When they took me back to meet Roy I shook his hand and almost
fell in his lap.
I wish I had. The headlines in that week’s tabloids would have been kinder. Instead of,
‘Christ! Another F_ _ _ Y !’ It would’ve been, ‘Homosexual attacks Siegfried’s Roy.’
Roy was so kind and gracious; he said how courageous I was, and I said, “Stupid.”
“Same sing” he said, and invited me to Vegas. But all I wanted to do was go home and stay
there for about five years. Ironically, if I had gone to Las Vegas I would have been able to see
The Circus Circus instead of be The Circus Circus.

The next day I tried to explain what I meant, but it’s hard to explain sexuality in 10 second
sound bites. How could I say mine was fluid—they believe all sexuality should be fixed. I said I
didn’t know if Jesus had sex with men, but it just seemed to me his take on things had a distinct
homosexual aura about it—that’s what I meant by my own personal experience. I swear, I felt
more like John Lennon at that moment, than Jesus Christ. Well that helped a lot. I probably
shouldn’t have said aura. Anyway, more headlines: ‘Jesus gives up halo for tiara’ ‘Jesus, He’s
always been Gay’ ‘Jesus returns—outs Himself’ The tabloids got in trouble for using Capital
letters for He and Him, the church thought this was outrageous. The tabloids tried to explain it
was satire, but the church wasn’t buying it. they also got in trouble for saying Jesus, so they said
New Jesus. That was even worse.
My speech was once again completely beyond my control. Everyone got very worked up, and
I know I shouldn’t have even thought this, and of course, I never said anything, but the whole
episode made me very horny. I was dying to see what came next.

I mean…tigers and microphones shoved in my face, all those flashing lights. It was like a
prize fight and I was getting my ass whooped. I felt drunk and available. Nobody knew me and
everyone wanted a piece of me. It was like anonymous sex in the winner’s locker room—bound
to get rough. And all those freshly scrubbed Christian boys on one side, and all those rabble
rousers smashing bottles, and tearing their clothes on the other, and girls, girls, girls. I just
couldn’t decide. I wanted to be everywhere, not so 80-20.

I had very much blanked out about what I said.

ABS refused to air it in toto, even tho it would have brought ratings; that was the extent of
their selflessness, however. They offered me time for a retraction, on Date With the Stars. But I
told them no cameras, and so, no date. They never lost a nickel. They just picked up new
sponsors: Honest to God - Real Holy Water—100% non-symbolic.

God explained, that 3000 years ago a man couldn’t have sex with another man, because it
wasn’t considered sex. Sexual activity between a man and a woman was considered a sacred
ritual like lighting candles on a windy day. They had to stay lit or you could fall in a hole—it was
considered a holy covenant. Activity between two members of the same sex was just a bonding
experience, like chasing an umbrella down the beach—better the wind should take it.
Of course, back in those days the church was considered not only wise symbolically, but wise
in a practical sense. Now, they lead their flocks toward a precipice they’ll claim they never saw.
The font of wisdom is not dry. It pours forth as if from a thousand sources, each more wise than
they. My belief in Judeo-Christian ethics got zero air time.
Everyone seemed to believe Jesus was celibate, and not fluid. God had nothing to say on the
subject—They always stick-up for the first-born. If he was the world’s oldest virgin I was Rin
Tin Tin. But I was so terrified of the abysmal medioric news-void, I kept quiet on that subject
(media+mediocre+meteoric).

The picture of me kissing His Holiness, for some reason, was always the reversed one.
Always the same picture they had shown the first night, of me kissing his left cheek. It struck me
as odd, they not… had not only gotten the picture backwards, they got the story backwards. I
hadn’t gone to see him, to kiss him and make a fool of him. I had come to thank him for keeping
a 2000-year vigil.
I never discussed the entire reversal of image and reality. But the thought kept running thru
my head: Why would they think Jesus would return, and the first thing he would try to do is
destroy his church. Perhaps they thought I was the devil. It worried me, that this could get ugly.
And I did for a time consider plastic surgery. But what I really wanted was more hair, a larger
dick, and one of those springs that keep you hard when you need to be, but allows your dick to
bend forward, and look natural—when not in use. I decided that would just add fuel to the fire,
‘New Jesus, hard when he has to be’ ‘New Jesus, still rising.’ ‘SPRUNG!’ Explaining that I
don’t have ED was a huge waste of time. What is ED anyway? ‘New Jesus has DDHADDTAT’
decidedly deficient histrionic attention deficit defined thru a tautology.
Billy had fun all the rest of the day. He stared crazy in the face and crazy backed down. The
role of the Christ is probably not a sane role, in every sense of the word. Maybe it’s good to be a
little crazy. Billy had to laugh: Here he was, the newly Risen Christ, and he’d just now figured
that out. He wanted to go tell someone. But he couldn’t find his special good luck pants, and if
he found them, they’d have to be under a pile of laundry like you never saw. So, if he took them
to the dry cleaners he might be asked what was the occasion, and without his good luck pants
actually on, he would be reluctant to say. I want to show the rising the way it was. Crazy’s fun.
It’s insanity ya hafta watch out for. And those prepositions, they’ll always betray your position to
God.
It was not all fun, however, but you might have guessed that. Headlines like, ‘He’s back and
nuts’ had a double edge. Why is it the headlines are so much better than the story? He wanted to
tell someone that the Risen Christ has to have one foot in Heaven and one on Earth. But God
only knows what they’d make of that. ‘New Jesus takes Viagra to stay up’ ‘ New Jesus raves
about split personality’
I don’t have erectile dysfunction, but then how could I explain the Viagra. I don’t have a split
personality unless you mean Him. We are all part ‘past.’ This was becoming complicated. I
needed a new manager. If for nothing else—To get my name right!
And what if they found out about all my shrinks. How could I explain my depressive
disorder? I don’t even understand it—what would Jesus have to be depressed about? ‘New
Jesus, Still Depressed.’ ‘Risen Christ, gets high.’ ‘Risen Christ, said F---! FCC confers’ ‘Blew it,
Big Time!!!’ ‘NJ resentful & despordent’ How did they know that? They can’t even spell
despondent. I guess they’ve hired a raft of high-priced personality profilers, or maybe they’ve
got some ultra-high-tech surveillance equipment that can read my mind, maybe they know how it
feels to fail in a really big way, or maybe they’re just making-it- all-the-fuck-up. I think I better
practice not-saying fuck—I’ll coach myself:
Let’s practice….well, go ahead then!
“Wear whatever you, , want to wear….No…Good.” “Think how the, however you are inclined
to think….Okay, fine. I especially like the wave of the hand…keep that.”
“Treat your neighbor as if he were your sa self….Relax, you can do this.”
“See me as you would sa-see me….Well, breathe.”
“You don’t have to like radishes….Wow! Good! Totally on target”
“Eat whatever you fa-feel like eating….That’s okay, don’t worry about it.”
“The way you live your life is fuh-full of q-qualities that truly enhance the, Ahhh!….Try to get a
rhythm. Okay: one and two and…”
“I am not a threat to you….Better, except keep the image: Left Hand of Judgment.”
“Oh, yeah. You’ve got no say, how my Work begins! It doesn’t start out with a sa-series of bite-
ass, man on the street interviews! I’m not here so you can penetrate new markets! ….Umm, not
sure about that one. Try don’t say penetrate. Again, slower or something.”
“It’s about respect—not some open-ended discourse on religion, sex, and the politics of death,
with every guh single fuh person you—muh-meet!….Okay, try this: the quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog. You can DO this!”
“The SS is not about ratting everyone else the, out! How was that?….better…really… pretty
good. Can you aim a little higher, more toward the conscience, but keep it real?”
“They can screw their neighbor later, maybe if they fffff….Where did that come from? One more
time, think: Gentle waves lapping on a sandy shore under a peach tree sky.”
“There’s more to truth-telling than finding fu-fault in others! This is not a cuh cuh
contest!!….This can’t be that hard—I’ll just say FUCK in private….Good….good idea.”
My job was to get out and lay low. People would believe what they wanted to believe. I just
tried to prevent the spread of the cancer, by keeping quiet. I told them it was all in the book.
That was a good idea. ‘New Jesus says buy the book, keeps paperback rights’ ‘New Jesus calls
Bible, fiction’ ‘New Jesus denied by own agent’ ‘New Jesus:“No movie till someone reads the
book”’ ‘Books on tape are abridged! New Jesus charges’ ‘New Jesus: I walked into fiction, now
I’m walking the F-out’
I told them I wasn’t the new Jesus. I told them Reincarnation was an idea, and that as ideas
go, I thought it was very interesting (I didn’t have the nerve to tell them that after Jesus saw his
third tele-evangelist up close, he insisted on changing his name; there’s a story there, but needless
to say, it never got reported, gave me too much credence I guess)
‘Was reincarnation possible?’ they asked, before I shut the door. I replied, before I shut the
door, ‘Ideas take on a life of their own don’t they?’ Then I shut the door. Someone had read the
book, and conclusions went violet. ‘I’m back! Novel Jesus Reports.’ ‘Queer Jesus: looking for 12
good men.’ ‘Messiah says 12 ain’t gonna get it.’
I said I’m not the Messiah at least 12 times, before I realized it was useless, they weren’t
interested. They would all decide for themselves, individually, just like on survivor-television—
worm eating, and regurgitating skills notwithstanding. The Messiah is messenger. I am the
message, it’s a symbolic role—I’m a nice guy with a funny job—same as always. Besides, I
didn’t spark, glow, or radiate in any way, except heat, light, love, and electricity. I opened the
door to something altogether different, the next day. ‘New Jesus, leaves a friggin’ mess.’ God
left early that morning. Where does he go?
Blaming others is for many, the precursor to taking their first step out.
Billy decided that when they come to the door for quotes, and to irritate him, he would just
say, ‘You are about to lose your job, because you’ve shown me no respect,’ and then see if they
could quote him accurately. ‘New Dangerfield, fears for job.’
One time just to test them, he said: ‘I hold those camera/microphone pointing morons and the
big businesses that make them dance responsible for this delay.’ ‘NJ—“I’m high as a kike.”’ The
following day, someone claiming to be from the Jewish Defense League called, and asked him if
he was accurately quoted. Billy said, You’re smarter than that, and left the phone off the hook for
two days. “Idiot! These are fuh fuh tuh tuh tabloids!”
Billy yearned for his simple depression. The one he sang about, whistled to, hummed across,
and rocked thru—the one he tried to cut-the-ties-that-bind-him-to-his-mind with.
They called him every bad name they could think of: nazi, fake, liar, bigot, betrayer, pest,
pervert, devil, disease, pornographer, philanderer, Christian scientist, hater, coward, lunatic, child
molester, regular molester, insane womanizing gay, woman-hating creep, averagely insane, gay
man who sleeps with women, lesbian, joker, Islamic terrorist, smart-ass, Arab journalist, drug
addict, abortionist, rapist, murderer of perfectly-good-looking children, Reagan hater, Nancy
Reagan lover, editor, impersonator, paranoid-schizophrenic writer who wanders in and out of 1st,
2nd, and 3rd person, another mixed-fiction fraud in a fact-hungry age—a bastard, a floating
homosexual, a walking contradiction, a disgruntled church employee, a man with the unwashed
mind of a child … A Child Hater.
At the last, his house began to burn; it was put out by Fireman, who refused to put it out, once
they found out whose house it was—and angels, of course, who helped them.
Then he was accused of being an arson-enabler and a perpetrator of insurance fraud.
Whenever does the enabler get what he or she came for? Most Firemen are angels!
He was accused of being two people; one with known evil intent, and another with
incomprehensible, unknown and possibly self-serving intent.
As regards the child-hater, secret child-lover theme: Billy thought that: Nowadays, in every
city, and every town, when a 2 year old wanders out into the street, traffic stops. When that’s no
longer the case, and people just drive around, or drive by. It’s just a matter of time before you’re
wiped away, and he’d be the first to say, “Good riddance.”
It was believed by some, that there was no prison in the world, that had yet been built, that was
horrible enough for him. The angels, who helped put out the fire, left soaking wet, in clingy
clothes. Billy smiled. God smiled. Billy laughed. God spoke his name.

Diet doctors
We just have to keep the ones who should be sober-sober, and the ones who should be drinking-drinking. Lyndon Johnson (in taped conversation
with Larry O’Brien 64-8-7, year month day)

A prominent diet doctor called first thing Sunday morning, and put me on hold, where I
learned about his encyclopaedic output of self—help, self health, self promotion, self life-self
skills, self by-words, self ownership and self indexing (whatever that is), book things. His latest
book ‘You’re as fat as you think you are,’ had a catchy title, and by the time my five minutes on
hold was up, I wanted to buy the book. But hung up instead. Now that was a good idea. Why all
the nonsense phone calls?
In the future, people will buy human opioids in a store. No one will be very interested in
where they came from. Any plausible explanation will do.
In the future, People will stop mowing their lawns. The superstition that tall grass breeds
snakes that snare children, and tigers who maul passersby, will be deemed nonsense. No man
will be measured by the size or weedlessness of his lawn. Lambs will mow lawns, and tigers will
roam freely with chips in their brains to prevent unwarranted attacks. Little children will be
employed to seek out and identify tiger-baby lairs.
In the future, the favorite drugs will be Marijuana leaves, Tobacco leaves, Tea leaves, Coca
lozenges, Poppy gum, Grape wine, Mushrooms, Coffee beans, and one other thing.
In the future, people will say I walked right on the very edge of reason. Defied reason.
Refused to accede to it, yet took from it, great breaths and high stations. Visible to all, yet rarely
seen.
 So visible, that the angry could see their many failures; The right could see what made them
right; The beautiful could see their beauty reflected from all around; And the truly hateful—
blind, and made senseless—forced to feel their way.
In the future they’ll say, Narrow-minded idiots (Mankind) put career criminals and sociopaths
in charge—What did they think would happen?? “How smart we are!”
You know, and I know, that people weren’t really stupid; just as people in the 1920’s weren’t
really black and white and out of focus. People saw no profit in intelligent behavior, and never
once realized: profit takes brains. They could stand in line for hours for a loaf, and never take
back one slice to study, to examine, to find out what it was everyone was standing in line for.
They didn’t throw profit away—they ate it for gain.
This is more difficult than you imagine. I went to school once, where they believed dinosaurs
rode on Noah’s Ark. I’ve never smoked a cigarette that I ever set down. The day you let
something go because it makes sense to, is the day I acquiesce to your brilliance. How smart you
are. You don’t have to say you love me, just be close at hand.
They’ll say, All I had to do was walk—Be touched and walk—Yes. That’s true.
I was a teacher who wanted to heal the world. I chose one, then the other chose me.
When my work was everything, it got knocked out of my hand. My new work started to
become everything, and it flew away. Belief is a trap, I’d spring it if I knew how. Just walk
around, let it rust—It’ll make itself harmless. They’ll say I was crystal clear. I am.
To me, belief in myself is like a trap, a very large bear trap. I believe you’d see it the same. It
stands alone, is wide open, boasts an enormous hidden spring, and is poised in perfect balance. I
examined it for years before I stood on the release—nothing happened. The gates stood open,
nothing came crashing in around me, nothing held my leg or forced me to stay. I stand there
because it has my name on it. It does nothing, and I don’t stand there all day—I have things to
do, but, to see a dangerous world from an even more dangerous vantage point, is odd, it makes
strange ‘n wonderful things happen inside. Then you notice you chose to stand there, just as you
can choose to move on. No rush, no hurry, no curfew, no deadline, no time at all. It’s not going
anywhere. It’s inactive.

The God Dialogues: Consider removing to apocrypha file

Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignancy, and the world like a madhouse- Goethe (Gur`-ta)

Billy made an appointment to see his doctor, and God said, Let me go instead.
God listened to the doctor, and asked him point blank: ‘Do you refer people who talk to God to
psychiatrists?’ The doctor was unable to answer directly. God threw off the doctor’s questions,
like it was a Yes concert, and this was the high-minded 70’s.
The doctor asked God if God had a veiled reason for asking. He said, Yes and No.
The doctor tried to leave by getting God to leave.
Do you believe people can change. God asked.
The doctor rushed into a hasty answer, as tho he were attending to a revolving door.
Good…Change. God said. And then He left.
Everyone pronounced English poorly, never mind any of those medical terms. The doctor
wrote a note in the wrong patient’s chart. It was brief; it was medical: ‘still crazy.’
Unknown to everyone, but God, at the same time the doctor was writing his note, Billy was at
home walking by a mirror, out of sight of everyone, and said to himself with an arching eyebrow,
“still got it.”
To the extent that Billy was his father’s son—his red eyes proclaimed the truth. He had not
come back to say hello, to check anyone’s work, or save a single soul. He wasn’t interested in
seeing what you’ve done with the place—he’d seen it already, so had God. That’s why He was
coming. Billy had come back with him to say goodbye—forever.
 To the extent that Billy couldn’t hurt a fly, and could only initiate a catch and release program,
or be harsh and judgmental of flies who understood their nature all too well—he had come, not to
entertain, or see how you were getting along, he had come to put himself in prison to save you.
Save you from God’s judgment, which was as sweet as silk, and could strangle a lion without
leaving a mark.
If you’re wondering whose side Billy’s really on, it’s the side no one is on. If you’re looking
for which side that is, just jump. It’s right in front of you. I cannot draw a map a map. I can’t
even drive a car. Don’t listen to fools who can’t come out of their own offices, jump now! Ask
them who buys their clothes. That’s who calls the tune. If they imply they buy their own clothes,
they must also print their own money.

I forgot…On Saturday, I went outside to lay in the sun and collect my thoughts, another busy
fat day. Flies congregate around the white chair, near where I sit. They bother me, and try to
digest me, and have sex on my hands. I went inside and took out a very special bowl, one that
has been with me for a long time, and I put two or three spoonfuls of white school-glue into the
bowl all up the sides. I took the obvious trap out to the flies, not a single one took the bait, not a
single one even got close enough to get a good look at the glue, tho one did peer over the rim, as
if he were looking in a closet for Christmas presents. They all knew what it was; they all knew
the smell; they all knew it would stick them to their spots; they all knew they couldn’t be near it
without being tempted to sit in it; they all stood there looking around, steeped in their fly nature,
and then they all flew off, and never came back. I had insulted their intelligence. It takes a
genius to understand a fly’s mind—and keep the glue from drying. And to take the dog for walks
so he doesn’t shit all over the back yard.
I think that was the same day I had to draw the line:
I was in the front yard later that day, or maybe the next, anyway, a woman comes up and
thrusts a crucifix in my face so forcefully I flinched. All the shutter bugs got a whole lot outta
that one. The picture was on the front page of many tabloids the same day. The cross, fuzzy in
the foreground. I didn’t even see the cross, I thought she was going to hit me in the face. They
say I must have seen it coming. I never saw the cross. I looked like a frightened vampire in the
picture—I don’t tan-up well. Some say it looked like I never saw a cross before. I never saw it.
You don’t understand, I never saw it. A funny thing happened. Of course, many said that was
proof that I was the devil. But no one repeated the move. Many people bought crosses, rescued
crosses, and wore crosses, of course. It’s a very powerful symbol. I’ve seen thousands of
crosses, but not that one. I never saw it. I had expected a rash of copy-cats, darting out, thrusting
things in my face, and snapping. The look of fear on my face was real. I think the image of me,
frightened to death at the sight of a cross, did something. It was the symbolism, it must’ve
been—suddenly it became real. Just as suddenly too much. Funny thing about symbols, they
don’t change, but when they do—they’re gone.

Impenetrable: a Haiku
The impenetrable moody sophistry of the truly pompous and rigid, is also sex driven. That
impenetrability, and sex would go together, seems incongruous, and tinny to the ear. Except
when sex is used as the prize.
If you think of sex as a prize, when ever was a prize not formed from the mettle of competing
interests? When, ever was the winner left alone to count his winnings and not nap? When ever
was a thing handed over as payment just to be withdrawn at the giver’s leisure? Someone must
pay, just as someone must give. It is the Tao of fun.
 Scandal to the jay birds
Then came the weekend Billy got married. Oh, yes he did—In his own back yard.
Billy didn’t marry God, because it would look good. Billy didn’t marry God because someone
expected it, one way or the other, or because it would solve all his problems, make his life easy,
or so he could be somebody. Billy didn’t marry God to get ahead, be delivered, or go. Billy
didn’t marry God to communicate better, or obligate more. He married God because he loved
him, wanted him to know it, and wanted him to stay.
It was private, widely attended, but he was the only human there. He didn’t see the face of
God until the very end, when they were alone together.
There is no way to describe this relationship; there is no human equivalent: Billy had always
loved God, even when he was a complete nuisance. Even when people lied, and said he spends
all his time with them. Those were not the times Billy thought of leaving God. But only when he
was mad at someone else, or himself for being way too stupid to live…They went way back.
Billy married God. It cost about 37 dollars. In those days, that’s what it cost to have a
backyard, a house, the help, the accouterments, the water, gas, and electric, for one day, but that
was The Day. Billy wasn’t giving anything to God, he was taking everything from Him, because
he loved Him.
I didn’t know I couldn’t do it…..I knew it was impossible….but the whole thing was
impossible…so what’s the difference? A marriage ceremony requires preparation..it might take
all day, but it doesn’t cost 37,000 dollars. A Big Show does. This wasn’t that
Billy didn’t allow anyone else to get married in his backyard, not because he didn’t want to
share, or because he didn’t care, or because he couldn’t be bothered, or because he didn’t need 37
dollars, or to prove that he was rough and tough. But you see, he was the human, and he didn’t
like to repeat the same thing over, and over, and over, and over for show. Get married in your
own backyard, if you want it so bad.

The Teardrop Peninsula

We must be equally good at what is short and sharp and what is long and tough... Never give up. Never give up. Never give up. __Winston Churchill

This is not a battle to win, it’s won. Because it works, and to the extent that it works, and for
as long as it works, it is a won battle. This is not your world to decide the fractions I’ve split.
Work on your own little ratios.

Weekends, for years, off and on, I drove into the area known as the Teardrop Peninsula…My
house is, if you look at a map of The United States, just where the Teardrop Peninsula begins. So
named, because in the 19th century, black slaves escaping from the South, had to pass into the
peninsula to get North, to freedom. It was practically the only way—it was the only safe way.
Read history. The best routes were hidden, they had to be implausible. There was a quiet
exodus, many helped in the crossing onto the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia peninsula.
They called it the Underground Railroad—because it was invisible, its conductors were
invisible, as were its track maintenance engineers, as were its railroad bosses. The passengers
were even invisible. It still exists, tho it isn’t visible, even today~hard to look at, and almost
impossible to see. Many of the safe-houses were not hidden. Many were on hills. Many of the
conductors hid behind masks, none were black. Girls were spies, and boys were informers, and
when they swapped stories, they were sometimes killed.
It’s a complicated story. It’s not comprehensible, and it still lives, even tho it serves no
purpose. That, I think is why I keep returning to its routes. Plus, I’ve had many friends there,
over the years.
 Thru-out my life it’s inspired me. I always traveled into it North to South—That spit of land
has an allure all its own. There are spirits there, left behinds. I believe many people had to leave
things behind as they made their way onto the Teardrop—Hope, for one. On a map, the
geographical feature looks like a tear, from someone’s left eye, partially wiped away. Maybe
someday it’ll be gone. They just don’t last forever—— peninsulas I mean. But what does?
Teardrops come and go. I live here so I can live.

Did I ever tell you the time I almost walked right into a left behind? I was in God, and He was
in me, it was a few days before the contract was signed—right around that time anyway. Let’s
just say the sun was out. It is not a thing, or a time…an experience, the describing of, will make
it come clear, or make it resound more than this. The sun was up, it was bright all over the house
in spots, some behind me. The scent of sunshine was at ease. Not boisterous, not jangling—
even, less smoky.
Everything was a blur. It’s much clearer now. I could barely walk. I would walk down the
back stairs as if on a dare. My legs felt like jelly. I was so stoned, and so high, and so
incapacitated, that anyone inside my head would have thought for sure I was drunk, high on pot,
tweaked on coke, or sucking an opium pipe—all at the same time—while having disreputable sex
on a chaise lounge.
It was too much, but it’s the price you have to pay—some days are like that. I was heating
water, and watching TV, and trying not to burn the house down. It was cool outside, early spring,
late winter perhaps.
I knew I thought…I thought I knew who they were. I think now these spirits were not whos,
they were not eavesdroppers, I thought they were tailings, and I believe I was right. But not
exactly tailings from other souls as I thought at the time. Anyway, another arguementarium—I
walked from the living room into the kitchen, and as I turned into the kitchen I white blob of light
startled me, and I jumped. I was shocked; if I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve said, Excuse
me. I think I said, Ooh! Or uhgh! I probably just gasped. It turned on its heels, metaphorically
speaking, and disappeared. My description is accurate…missing only one thing. It was as tho I
knew what this particular tailing was doing. Not hiding, that’s for sure. I think it was looking for
a pot to boil noodles in. did I say I flinched? Did I say the television frequently competed with
me to end my sentences. Did I say I was crazy. I was never crazy, and I wasn’t taking drugs,
unless you consider an aspirin, an NSAID, three glasses of weak tea a day, a sleeper at night, and
coffee in the morning drugs—Everything is true. I know I’ve left something out—everything
else is true.

Sailing Away
I’m sailing away. Set an open course for the Virgin Sea.— Dennis De Young, Come sail away, Styx

The problem now, as I see it, is so many people are ‘in sales,’ swamped by a bunch of boaty
sales pitches. So much so, that they can’t tell the truth from a lie. If someone tells the truth, it’s
inevitably followed by a lie. It’s not a ‘bad way’ to be. It’s scrupulous—it’s also dangerous. I
can’t tell the truth continually, for the same reason I can’t call you by name. You haven’t, some
of you, most of you, almost all of you, been born yet.

The awful store

In the future, stores that people walk into will be ‘nasty.’ The sales men and women will have
a sexuality, they’ll have thoughts, feelings, and opinions. They will be real. They’ll give you a
hard time. Dealing with real people is hard for some, always has been. That’s the Jew in us.
Thank God.

The problem with the future, as I see it, is this problem with proper names. I try to avoid them
as much as possible, but at the same time, I don’t want to be a liar here and now. Have I told you
recently, you make me so crazy. I’m going outside, and sit in the sun, in my backyard, and
decompress with a glass of tea, and hunt the yard for wild erbs.

One more story: a woman jogger stopped at the border of my yard, and she had a quizzical
expression. I walked up to her, and we talked about the odd little flowers that grow there in such
perfusion. She was delighted, and knew all about them. They grow like crazy there. I told her
she had my permission to dig a few up if she wanted. She looked at me and smiled. I said, “They
grow here because I don’t care about them.” She left with the same quizzical expression. But
happier, lighter, and younger looking.

This goes on all day, everyday. I’m not even on my second cup of coffee, its 10:44. Sunday,
Mother’s Day. May ninth, Four—WORD just informed me. Now I’m going to sit outside. It’s
one thing after another. Did I tell you…no I better save that one. No… Later. No, still means
No, right? Good.

The Betrayal
Billy was at home and he was married, day number 3. They separated early—He didn’t ask,
because he didn’t have to, they were beginning to meld.
Billy could tell a lot about a person by a 10 second look, but he could never tell if someone
was stoned. Incomprehensible looks, and glassy eyes were an every-day occurrence, in fact, he
gated them (he stood at the admission fence, and sold tickets).
Billy wondered where God was all day. It was Green Day, and all day where was he? It
dawned on him it was possible that ‘Billy’ was gone, but no such thing could ever happen, and
that was that.
God was on deck, went up on his lines, and it rattled him. God was using Billy’s equipment,
and it totally didn’t work. The tiny momentary failures that Billy lived with, day and night, day
in, and day out, threw God for a loop. To what purpose. He later asked. Why is it, some things
are so hard as to be undone as they’re done, and therefore not do-able. Billy had no answer. It
was ‘how his machine worked,’ was about as far as thinking would take them. There was no
place to get fixed. He had become a mystery to God, and God to himself.
A funny thing happened, tho a story God couldn’t tell:
God goes to the track behind the house to run. Billy didn’t laugh, in fact, he encouraged it.
And helped even. God got there, it was 83 degrees Fahrenheit. He, Billy, had not jogged around
the track in four years, and hadn’t exercised at the gym for one.
God got to the track, without falling down, that in itself was a miracle, it gets better. Young
boys from nowhere descended on him when he began doing chin-ups on the bar beside the track.
They dared him. Well, he did more than they could do; he instructed them; they loved it; they
began to swarm, to flock. God was asked smart-ass questions by an eleven year old; He was
stumped. The boy’s symbolism was clear; God wasn’t shocked; but no one ever talked to Him
like that before. He had been in Billy’s, so called, ‘track suit,’ less than ten minutes, and He was
assailed by emotion, paranoia, nonsense, nascent sexuality, braggadocio, something about the
price of car repairs, and the basic unfairness of necessity. He practically walked into the middle
of a domestic weather disturbance, almost got run over in the clover; became a surrogate father in
less than two minutes to three or four kids with an alcoholic parental figure; He almost told Billy
what he was becoming, and every five seconds He was struck—more.
That’s when God decided to run a couple laps around the oval. He had Billy’s immaculate
form for practically a whole kilometer. Then he heard Billy’s lungs, and blood, and felt this and
that. God was winded. Billy smiled at failure, as usual—hustled God out of there before the kids
turned him into a swing set, and walked home thinking what a nice color green was.
God saw what Billy saw in a different light, and had a new respect for his ability to navigate
over trenches, to fall in trenches, and walk away from trenches, with a decision in each hand,
both, mutually exclusive—possible, inevitable, workable, reliable and invisible.
Billy’s number one ability: to not-have any idea what he was doing, and to do it anyway, was
so clearly the cause of all his problems, God almost said something, but checked himself.
No, green was more than a nice color: green was yellow, and yellow was red, red was brown,
brown was red—red was yellow, yellow was blue, and then it was green, and a very nice late
afternoon.
He, God, knew the play, the order, the purpose, the rules, but he didn’t know the game’s name.
Billy said, That’s easy, it’s whatever name you give it. God…it’s like pain, it’s whatever the
person says it is.
God had taken the wheel for many people, needless to say, but he had never driven a car so
duplicitous. It couldn’t be driven. And yet, Billy was proof, it was not only drivable—it looked
effortless.
He, Billy, did what he wanted, went where he was invited, or not, made up rules, followed
none of them, opened doors without touching them, jimmied locks that weren’t there, tuned every
instrument in the entire Symphony without having seen them, or heard it, since his Grandmother
took him, 35 years ago. Yet his dog counseled him about avoiding the poisonous plants in his
own backyard—he was deceptively simple to drive.
He even told stories backward: the Morning Glory he ate, made it Green Day; his dog nudged
his leg when he began to count how much yellow was in a patchwork of green leaves; he
projected his consciousness beyond himself, right into God’s lap; and God took off, ran a
kilometer, practically—at the track, in shorts, wearing sneakers, muddy soled, with a stomach full
of coffee and mild hallucinogens, ready to counsel a man who drank too much, and asked a boy
of eleven, to clarify his question, implying vaguely, that he should think before he speaks. God
was a freaking riot. Like He never jogged before.
God had been wondering why Billy had insisted on a signed contract, a courting ritual, a
sealed marriage certificate, the exchange of vows, and a ring that he put on, so far, four different
fingers, if you count a toe as a finger. Then God stopped wondering. Billy was not going to stop
being preposterous, and it was all of a sudden no longer Billy’s problem. God was horny, for
reasons He couldn’t fathom, and confused for the first time in a very long time. The universe
didn’t shake. Polarities were flipping, but that was to be expected.

Are you here because I have such an amazing life?

No, you have an amazing life because I’m here.
Oh well, same difference.

Billy didn’t buy it—wondered why he, Billy, had insisted on making an unbreakable contract,
and signed up to die, with tons of symbolism, before he ever saw a penny. Rules are meant to be
broken. I’ll tell my own stories, he thought. That’s fine, God said, but you can’t re-write the
rules, that’s rule number one.
God is not gay, but Billy is. He loves him on his own terms, the both of them do. And they do.

The Betrayal in detail:

 Billy doesn’t use a person’s proper name without permission unless they’re 100 years old.
Never says the names of assassins, uses nicknames wherever possible, but not unless he knows
the person’s real name. You need to know he doesn’t think that’s useful, educational,
meaningful, just, or necessary. He is held to a different standard. He also knows that the name,
Thomas Edison, has been known, and widely used for just over 100 years.
These are ancient times, and time is going to start moving very fast, faster and faster and faster
until no one can possibly keep up, the you’ll notice how incredibly slow your computer is, and
then you’ll look up, and God will still be ahead of you. So relax. This is going to be fun. Greta
Garbo. Josephine Baker. The flickering light. There are only three competing interests that
make up the entire universe: black and white, yes and no, good and bad. That is the ‘IT’ of what
it is made of.
Are you worried that someone will change the rules, in midstream, the rules you never
followed—those unchangeable rules?
God is in every choice, every oath, every vow, swear and curse, every slip up, every stubbed
toe, every dead child, every conversation, in every language. Whether you free-associate here, or
deliberate now, He is the oft referred to, but never seen Everything.
These are still ancient times.
I thought I was bringing The Age of Sense, and I brought The Age of Awareness. I thought I
could save the world by remaining single, and not having any kids, then I married God, and
entered the prison of domesticity. I wanted to shed some light so you could see, and I became
aware of my surroundings. When I made up my mind that He was for me, I just waited for the
ceremony. I became a woman over night, and woke pregnant. That was Monday this is
Thursday. The nurse said I weigh 68 kilograms; I could eat a truck-full of coleslaw.
The light bulb is 125 years old today. It is 4:04, ante meridiem (before noon), and I’m sitting
with a lamp shining over my shoulder so I can type my indecipherable words into a computer,
that cannot yet read my mind. I am not the New Jesus, I am the New Job—to know me is to be
employed.
The answer to the question, what is, is? Is simple, you must clean up your own mess.
Martin used the law, fear, indifference, and his religion to free his people—you use law, fear,
indifference, and religion to enslave yours. This is the cutting off point.
There is no black owl in the desert.
A man bumbled his way into Heaven.
The Is people will become the Was people, over night—their days being so filled with
lessons—from a weeping disease, by their leader’s hands, greed, and fear.
The children, Dad, must clean up their own mess. If you clean it up for them, they’ll mess it
up before you can even say ‘mission accomplished!’ I told you this would be fun.
You can count to your heart’s content. You can’t get the numbers to come out right, because
you don’t know the rules. Every number’s pretty much the same give or take. If you don’t
understand, try going slower. Ifyouthinkyouhavethecapacitytochange, change.
I’ll stop after this: what is easy for me is impossible for you, and visa versa.
I was born weighing nothing, and I grew. I flew out of a roller coaster at 8, because my father
had just learned I weighed less than 30 pounds, and then he put me in a centrifugal force machine
that made me lighter than air. He put me in the four and a half sided cube on purpose; he was
celebrating a victory over scoundrels, rascals, barkers, rip-off artists, and cheats. He didn’t sit
beside me, because he trusted that, in fact, maybe, finally, there was a God. He reached around
from the car ahead when he heard my brother scream, and grabbed me by my shirt, from the back
as I was about to take off for Heaven. He was a lawyer, disguised as a reporter, who wanted
more than anything else to be a writer. If I had taken off that day, he would have had something
to write about. Heaven. His novel died the day he saved my life. Thank God.
If you say it’s all fiction, and it never happened, that there was no Thunderbolt, no place
named Willow, no boy who flew off in the direction of Heaven, no lawyer, no novel, no
memorials that bear critical viewing, no super boy who took the bullet, no accident, no broken
bones, no speech problems, no driving-God, no impossible shyness and no deliverance. You
would have to conclude that it is mere coincidence that at the spot where I began to rise, there is a
mall today, and that they sell good luck charms right where I began my trip to Heaven. At the
exact spot where I would have landed, they sell gold. Very very lucky, very inexpensive gold,
sold with circles in squares that look like this.

Every word is true, and yet it is not the gospel truth. My life is fiction, just like yours.
There are many assassins, far too many to count. You like the truth; you like certainty, so do I. It
is a certainty that if you call them by name they will appear. Call them by my name; call them
J.A. until you know my name; or call them ‘me,’ since they are you; call them essay, like the
Hispanic do, for they have friends; call them King like the Jews do, because all kings die,
eventually. Call them by their expiration dates like milk cartons, because there will come an end
to lost and trapped children, children used as bait, and all other such horrendous acts.

I would rather you use my name which is precious to me. Then some day, the well-hidden
will be so well hidden you’ll think they’re gone, but their struggle to hide separately, and as far as
possible from each other will put them in close proximity. You will say, Call this assassin-man-
person-thing, and we will have this out once and for all. And you will call me. That is my hope.
Billy was not what you would call religious, he had been an atheist growing up, and became a
pantheist during his trek, and never rejected any possible clue as to the whereabouts of God. He
found God, as expected, just short of the eleventh hour, whatever you think that is. Now that they
were married, he was a confirmed agnostic. What, pray tell, is the sense in believing, when it
either is, or it isn’t?
He couldn’t be a true believer—he’d never been allowed to be. And, also, he reviles them, for
their willful desire to keep him from knowing. Knowing was his only gift.

Billy had been asked once, whether he was a Christian or not, asked point blank, by someone
bent on using their position to help him, or of course, hinder him, a kind of credit-counselor. He
lied.
After spending all those years fighting his true nature, for ‘the good side.’ The ‘good’ side,
you must understand, he could not freely join—he determined not to be selfish— everyone was
not him, not like him, not interested in him, or in being loved all the time. Why go back now?
No he was not Christian, he was not Christian-like, he was himself. Thank God—to be exact.
Billy learned morals and ethics as you might, A Golden Rule.
He couldn’t be the head of his own religion, he’d already done that. Nor could he accept
himself as his own personal savior. Nor could he be part of a religion, even tho it was supposed
to be his own—that rejected him, and does so, to this very day.
Billy didn’t even take vitamins religiously, and wasn’t afraid to call a fool a fool.
God told him he was the only one. Billy objected…as you might.
Transcending ignorance, and petty, silly labels is quite easy. Fighting for sanity is like
bowling, everyone gets a score, gutter balls count. Whether you can find your way out of the
darkened alley and back onto the sunny sidewalk after a particularly contentious game—is really
more to the point.
All that said, Billy still felt God’s love was for everyone, and God agreed. But never said
anything but: You Are The Only One. This went on thru the Sunday tournaments, and his bratty
family, and his love for taking up arms, and dinner preparations, and his Mother’s love at last,
and thru dinner on the porch or deck, and Father’s day. All day, God only said one thing, so
much so, Billy felt a …a…bit abandoned. When Billy wanted to ask his left hand how it could
pick a flea speck out of his nose, but couldn’t catch a softball with an oversized glove. God
answered Billy’s real question—before he even formed it. God had said only one thing all day.
You Are The Only One. Billy was tossed around like a dead bird: You are the only one. Billy
misunderstood a variety of questions n looked up: You are the only one. Later, he was asked to
pass the peas, Billy paused for no reason: The response to no-question was the same. Until Billy
finally understood, that he could not understand. And felt like the ‘Obedient One.’
Explanations like that, can be brutal. God will, of course, take No for an answer, but Billy
never said No. As tho he already knew why, where, when, what for, and how. It was a peaceful
Sunday all around. Memorable. And very near the jumping off point. Not afraid…..no, Billy
was petrified. When not in God, Billy felt so empty—needy.

I’ve thought about that day many times since then. God’s short explanations can be rough: 5
words, the same 5, over and over. It’s one of the main reasons I don’t pursue other lines of
inquiry. But tonight as I lay here I think, that, if there had ever been a test—I mean, since I
accepted the job, and our subsequent marriage—I’d have to say, that was probably it, it was
probably that day…an all day test— God passed. He could be as relentless as me, and
well..difficult…you know, in need of reassurance….and….. God leaned over heavily, turned off
the light, kissed me on the lips, and said: There Is No Other. Oh, here we go again! He reads my
mind and answers my question time after time. That lasted all night, and as the sun came up I felt
an excitement, a need to get the day started…I layed in bed thinking..Could the world be better
than a warm blanket. God said, Well. Well. You Need My Help…don’t you? I said. He just
smiled. I don’t know if I’m crazy, crazy, or crazy. Maybe I’m just in love. What was brutal is
now beautiful.

He is and is not
I feel exemplified, brought forth like Pericles, thankful that July has finally come. Whereas
beasts are no longer a plague, and forests are no longer a barrier, I have lost the will to pray, for
there is nothing to pray for, but man to be man, and self, and woman to be. The beingness is
absolute…isn’t it? Now that the forest, and the jungle, and the beasts are gone…..don’t tell me
you have, in slumber, created other beasts….other forests, shadow jungles…do not speak to me
of your fear.. I say, Quiet…in the…please stop...I beg of you, please…“You know not of where you
came”—Homer

Betrayal wait wait

People don’t repeat. They never come back, they can’t. God explained, explained so slowly it
took Billy almost two months to hear what he was saying. Symbols repeat, in a sort of sequence
or a pattern, like music. Billy didn’t know enough about music to understand what God meant, or
was trying to tell him. He thought it may exist as a possibility. Billy was fine with talking about
possibility. That came from losing his hearing once when he was a child; he learned to just go
with it, as tho Being could be unclouded, and all the corners could be smooth.

Children die every day. You wouldn’t know, you don’t have any children. G
Yes. Billy squirms.
They die from carelessness, malice, and the waning of time. I have known many wonderful
children who died by murder and assassination. G
Oh.
I liked what you said about assassins. G
Thank you God. B
No, Thank you. That was quite inspired. G
Billy turns, and clears his throat.
My Son was under arrest once, and they couldn’t make the charges stick. G
I know. I’m so sorry about that. B
Why are you sorry? G
I felt I had to say that. B
You don’t. It was a horrible time. G
Billy was silent, and did know one thing—he knew nothing suddenly.
The charges they leveled were absurd, and would make them look foolish. They avoid looking
foolish at all cost. G
Yes, I know. I had a funny experience with that once: Boy, this is years ago… B
So they trumped up charges that he was a thief. G
A thief. Billy’s hands sweated slightly for no reason.
That reminds me of the story I heard about a fight over the Balkans. B
Leave the Balkans out of this. G
Oh, yes God. So the charge was usurpation, go on. B
I’m telling this story, you’re dictating
Yes Gd.
You’re taking dictation. Don’t make me look the fool again! G
Of curse not, Lord. B
God paused in silent reflection and held at a distance his own Son. His work. His creation that
he loved. That angered him, and went against him, and made him smile in spite of himself.
Made him pull his anger, and hide his joy. The Son he could not change and could not kill. God
gulped—or would have, if he had had reflexes—laughed, wept, and collected himself. I love you
because you are you, and you can’t change, and you can’t help it no matter how thoughtless and
wonderful, or horrible you are. G
Thank you God. B
And so they asked this other thief who had nothing to gain, did he know my Son. G
Was this after his own friends denied him? B
Yes, as a matter of fact it was, Thank you for mentioning that. G
Billy was silently working, pushing buttons, checking and re-checking. And looking around and
waiting. That looks just like tea. Oh, it is tea. I think I’ll… B
“So,” God continued…The powers that be, asked the thief did he know my Son. G
Billy clears his throat as tho he were just about to say something.
He said, . G (Yes, I do)
I can’t read the last part. G
Looks like he something...His right shoulder perhaps. B
Billy’s shoulder still bothered him from typing, and some form of sympathetic conversion.
There was a long pause.
Billy said reluctantly and with some sarcasm, Please God, continue. B
He said… mind you… the nature of a thief is that he feels justified in taking what belongs to
another, because he’s willing to work for it. G
Oh, I didn’t know that. B
Except that…G
Got it. B
Except that that’s not really work. G
Oh. I knew the at, re-member, how it was when you told me you needed my help and what did I
do…I said when where who …how ……..and what…how high?
I’m talking about why. G
Stop messing around then, if you’re so interested in helping. Your help would sink the Titanic.
BG
Where was I? Oh yes, the nature of the thief. Careless. Powerless except in destruction. And of
course regret. G
Yes, deep regret. B
You have a similar spirit. G
I know I’m not perfect. In fact I was just thinking to myself how badly I behaved with Isaac and
Ida today. Did I tell you? They got together and made me laugh just by being themselves. B
That was almost interesting. Yes, you mentioned it. G
I thought I had. B
So, that careless remark by the thief…that in fact he knew my Son when he had just met him,
enabled them to murder my Son, with impunity. G
For the time being. B
Yes, that’s all they’re interested in—the time being. G
I apologize. B
You are forgiven. G
Thank you. B
See Billy, you don’t know everything. You can destroy the world’s hope with a single word, and
you apologize for ruining everything, and can accept forgiveness as if it were a glass of water.
You offer help, courage, and love the same way—Offhandedly. G
Is that one word? B
One word. It hastened the inevitable by a short time. But we all judge time differently. You
can’t judge it by accomplishment, because some can change the world in a day, and others build
the world brick by brick. It’s either in your head or in your hands. G
Billy attempts a smile, and divulges a tear.
To know you is to be employed. And he hands Billy a tissue.
Yes that’s true, I think. B
Don’t make any more thieves. Okay? G
Okay. B
What’s funny Billy, is that you were there the whole time. G
In spirit. B
Yes, you were there in spirit the whole time and I never saw you. I looked for you everywhere.
And you were there the whole time. That’s so often the case. I’m sorry I didn’t take a second
look. I was wrong not to, I thought you had nothing to offer. G
Maybe an explanation. B
Well, perhaps you can fill in some embarrassing details. Why do you think a thief would do that.
G
I think, since I haven’t stolen anything worth more than a dime in 20, 2 years, I’d have to say,
perhaps he thought he could make a deal. Perhaps he thought it didn’t matter. Perhaps he didn’t
know the man, your Son, or care. Perhaps he was frightened of dying and going to hell. Perhaps
he didn’t know that if you take something that you can’t replace, you might ruin everything.
Perhaps he thought he was worthless, and unredeemable. Perhaps he didn’t know the truth is
everything, and not half as painful as death without Peace. Perhaps he thought he would live
forever one day at a time, just like this. B
Perhaps you’re right. You seem to understand the problem. G
Part of it...I have just two questions. B
I bet I know the answers. Yes, and whatever you want. It was my fault. G
Billy taps the control key ineffectively, as tho he were holding God’s word hostage, and buying
Him some time to consider His own actions, tell the truth Himself.
I apologize. G
The Angels wept because they had never heard that before. They’re young. Young at heart,
young and idealistic. Perpetually young. Inattentive, goofy and prone to singing, crying,
laughing, and dancing.
Billy went out to sit in the backyard with iced tea, and stole God away from his busy day. And
kept Him with him.

Consider: Billy got God to agree that he was not the thief, but symbolic of the thief. That’s how
dead I was. God smiled, and Billy took that as a full acknowledgement—
You try living with him.

4-5-18ymd Hides…goes blind, then for a walk

In the once-dreadful hum of the universe he found solace and Peace.
Billy began to get over his aversion to flash bulbs, cameras, incessant needless invasion,
misanthropic didaction, and restless perspective—not to mention greed. He decided to take a
walk, a real walk. A car drove by. Verno couldn’t come, he pees on every bush, as tho his scent
was going to decant protection somehow. Someone might spot him. Billy still believed in
privacy, as ridiculous as that sounds. Besides, he enjoyed his own thoughts, and the thoughts that
just came to him from wherever... Everywhere—The birds.
Billy left the house with a white cane, and a blank expression. This proved to be a mistake.
He’d overlooked the inherent symbolism in the one who just suddenly shows up blind. He got
out of the house okay—the cameras blinded him, but it only made things look more real. He
forgot his shades, Billy never went out without them. They assumed he had a sort of alien status,
a visitor perhaps, maybe a charity case. The camera scopes refused to look beneath the surface,
and Billy went unrecognized, as usual, but they wouldn’t let a man just walk. They asked if he
was still blind. Billy said he was never blind—ever mindful of the fact that the truth is almost
always ignored. He continued his walk, tried not to wave his cane around too much, but still
managed to poke a couple particularly obnoxious scoopers in the head. They kept an eye on him,
waiting for him to demonstrate somehow, that he knew where he was going.
Some idiot stole his cane, and Billy reached for it. He knew if he ran back home it would
make him either look like a weak, run-down fake, or a miracle worker. In either case all he
wanted was a peaceful walk, so he took one, knowing it’d be a miracle if he ever made it home at
all.
No, he wasn’t worried, he’d come for a peaceful walk. Worrying about the walk, and where it
takes you, or how long it takes, or if you’ll ever get home would be counter-productive, and
inconsistent with a walk. So he continued. It was always like this now: beautiful day, birds
singing, hardly a cloud in the sky, time to kill, and a wonderful walk—but, which way to go, so
many tough decisions. Billy was near exhaustion.
Consuelo had forgotten to close the back gate and Verily got out. Just when Billy wondered
which way to turn, Overly jumps into his arms, metaphorically speaking, and leads him down the
street. The fact that he had no leash, or any lead, and Billy was ‘blind,’ didn’t seem to raise a
single red flag. People just figured this man and his dog had a special telepathic-type bond. And
who really knows what goes on with blind people anyway. Nobody thought for a second, The
Christ could be blind. He was free to walk. There was only one problem.
Billy had to keep up with Oliver, and stop everywhere his dog did. Trouble got to pee on
every fallen branch, patch, tree, and stump. Billy supervised quietly, without a word of derision,
bit his tongue, rolled his eyes, and scowled as blankly as he could.
It became clear there was just no way to pull this off. No one in their right mind would
mistake Rivelo for a seeing-eye dog. Billy had trained him to sit, shake, roll~over, and sneeze on
command—for some unknown reason. So now, when his dog became uncertain about the
availability of treats he would go thru a series of seizure-like activities, and then sneeze, in order
to guarantee Billy’s attention.
The camera holder, who’d paid the man to steal the cane, felt bad and gave it back to the
‘blind man’ with the telepathic circus freak for a pet, and forgot to apologize. Billy knew he stole
it, and said Thank you between gritted teeth, wishing he could have used the cane when the man
was walking toward him.
This was so typical of his day to day activity, he couldn’t believe it. Everything just aestivated
like a rose, all day every day. He waited for Consuelo to run around the corner with Ivory’s
leash, but she hadn’t run since the end of WWII. If something needed to be done in a hurry she’d
call the cops. Billy began to sweat. Thank God for cops: they’re simple enough to pretend they
can enforce every law, and answer every question, but shrewd enough to refuse to deliver leashes
to people who conspire to commit fraud with a dog. He walked very slowly, and enjoyed the
view. A small crowd gathered to keep ‘the poor blind man’ on the sidewalk, and prevent him
from walking out into the road. He touched them inappropriately with his right hand while he
tried to drop the cane with his left. A young man stood back in wonderment, and Billy practically
took the crowd into the middle of the street touching, and feeling foreheads, ears, lips and breasts,
The kid had never seen such an odd sight, and was completely unmovable—Thank God. Billy
decided that was as good a spot as any to turn around, so he dropped his cane, and pretended to
look for it. Confusion erupted, and he walked home without Roi-el.
No one recorded the event, since nothing happened, except three women were cured of breast
cancer, and six brain tumors stopped growing. Just stopped.
Liver-spot, got slapped on the butt when Billy felt thru the grass for his cane. And then ran
across the street to jump on other strangers, and pee on other landmarks.
There was no way anyone would believe Orderve could ever be any help to the sighted, let
alone the sightless. No matter how hard Billy tried to stop it, it just kept getting worse.
Whatever-his-name-was caught up finally.
When Billy got home, he stood on the porch and threw the cane in the petunias. Half the
crowd applauded his gesture of throwing the cane away—having not the slightest idea of what the
gesture implied or who this man was. The other half thought they knew, and took pictures of a
man about to be saved from disfiguring blindness. The picture looked nothing like Billy. It
looked like a very hopeful man who was about to remember he forgot to buy anything for
dinner—with all this subterfuge. How is it you go out to get one thing, and come home with
armloads of iniquity, and God only knows what?
Billy was just about to call it quits—he was so disgusted. His picture had been taken about a
thousand times; he was blind; angry; dishonest; deceitful; sexually aggressive; abusive; flushed
with rage, and pale at his own perfidy. But there was hope—a thread.
They could still not-see him. They assumed he was any poor blind man. The fact that he
came out of his own house, and returned to his own house, did not enlighten them in the slightest.
They felt his poverty as strongly as if they were paying his taxes. Someone handed him his cane.
Billy decided he would reveal himself. What better place than the center of the known universe.
So he pushed the cane away, as if he didn’t see it, and said: I am He. I am the one you seek.
Follow me, protect me. I am love. I am not blind.
The crowd stared. If this was a miracle, they’d missed it. Billy stared back, shrugged his
shoulders, and went into his house thru the front door, for a change. The general consensus was,
that The New Jesus must have let him in, and was planning to heal him inside.
The whole episode baffled everyone. Who was that blind man? Was that the New Jesus?
Was the New Jesus so insensitive to human suffering that he would mock the afflicted? Was he
just another self-deluded joker? Could the New Jesus have been blind, and now suddenly gain
his sight, right on cue like that? Or had they just let the man with the longest cane get to the front
of the line? Disorder incensed many, and The New Jesus’ name was now mud. It didn’t really
matter, Billy had not come to heal the sick, or recover the weary—that was incidental. Time
lurched backward, one click.
The following day, signs went up proclaiming some nondescript miracle with no salient
details, and no embarrassing truths. The cane was broken in half, and Billy got the longer half.
Someone was kind enough to leave it on his porch, in case some short person who may or may
not still be in the house needed a reminder that you could go from blindness to stooped posture to
agoraphobia in a succession of miraculous recoveries in New Jesus name.
Billy looked at all religions the same, like the Army. They didn’t want him, and he didn’t
want them. So much running around, and selling the shop to people you know are gonna mess it
up. He preferred a sort of ongoing sign-in sheet, like at a cheap hotel front-desk, where they
don’t ask a lot of stupid questions, and they let just about anyone go upstairs.
Billy had to eat shrimp and lobster bisque for dinner, with a Greek salad, and there was
nothing to drink but hundred year old wine with ice. He even made bread from a kit-like-thing
someone gave him for Christmas once.
Canned foods will keep, eggs last, frozen food lasts, dry food lasts, seeds can be saved, fruit
lasts in jars, birds like bread, yogurt lasts, pickles last, protein powder lasts.
Billy was about to begin another list, and then he heard the chant, “Bring out the blind man.
Bring out the blind man.” Oh, great! just when you need a blind man, everyone’s sighted.
Billy began to hum along to the chant; it was sort of catchy. He danced to it, in the kitchen,
and found it was easy to dance to. He decided the truth is always the best, it is also, completely
ignored, unless it’s embarrassing, of course. So he went to the front door, walked onto the porch,
and stood there. Many people took pictures of their feet while Billy blurted out: That was me in
drag, there is no blind man. Now I can see. Sorry for misleading you, but could you please stop
watching my door. I’m expecting a very good friend for dessert. You won’t be able to see him,
for all your lights.
Everyone assumed rightly, that God was going to drop in, so they all turned out their lights.
And looked for another kind of light—Supposing rightly, that the ‘con artist’ who was neither
particularly contrite, sheepish, or fawning, was being truthful, all of a sudden.
Many had hysterical blindness, but it didn’t prevent them from arranging for taxi’s, and then
not taking them. The blindest of the blind could still operate a camera apparently, and the fact
that they didn’t know where to aim it was about the only way to assure a good shot. Someone
would be the winner of this photo contest. Finally. Thank God.
God showed up.
One little girl got a picture of a man drinking an iced tea with his finger just inside the rim for
no particular reason, and if you looked closely you could see God’s face reflected in the glass.
The little girl’s name was Hera, or something like that. She won the picture of the year
competition, but Billy didn’t know how to tell her, exactly. It looked like a photo of another
blind man. He saw it in the paper. He was beginning to pick-up on the fact that people just
know. He didn’t know how, but they just do. God is around, you just can’t see him.
The headlines were priceless, and Billy kept them for his archives. God makes man blind-New
Jesus restores sight. Another: Who will win? Another: God must be blind! And still another:
The fake leading the fake! They made everything a contest…It was dessert! nobody won! It
tastes good, it’s not a game of how much can you eat, or how many people can you save? It’s got
a deeper meaning. It goes all the way to the core.
Final arrangements were discussed over a bottle of Italian wine, 17 bucks a pop. God broke
into the mumbled chant, right in the middle of our discussion about terms, and yelled to the
crowd out the window, ‘Still blind!’ Billy smiled. God smiled. Billy laughed. God laughed.
Who will win? Billy got giggly, and asked to be excused. If he was going to make it to the store
he had to go now. His helpers bought everything, and charged rock bottom rates, but they
couldn’t seem to understand his pronunciation of the wine he liked, and so he had to get that
himself. He showed up at the liquor store half smashed—on God. With God. In God, whatever.
“Have you a Riesling?”

4-8-24 Bayesian Dreams

You that have wandered far and wide
Can ravel out what's in my head.
Do men who least desire get most,
Or get the most who most desire?
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. "The Three Beggars."

Billy gave the Bayesian (Thomas Bayes, mathematician, theoretician, theologian) proofs to the Otter, and he took them into the
bathroom. When he came out a moment later he pronounced them all wet. He left little foot shaped puddles all down the hall.
Come here. O
Billy walked stupidly into the bedroom.
Sit here. O
What you were, is not all you can be—it isn’t even what you are. O
What do you mean? Billy asked blankly, fearful of a typical response.
I’m a miracle—God knows, you’re a miracle. What is the likelihood of that, here in one room? O
Oh, I see, Thanks, I said. Just curious.
The Otter turned the papers over on the table.
Crap? B
Crap. O

4-5-15ymd Backyard Problem. I’m supportive.

People who live in trash don’t have a problem. It’s not until they make a statement that they
refuse to pick up other people’s trash, that they have a problem. Their problem becomes instantly
clear. They don’t support each other, in a way that works. They refuse to support each other’s
problem. The problem should just go away. But it just goes round and round. She looked at me,
“I didn’t say I had a problem.”
“I didn’t say you had a problem. I said you don’t have a problem.”—Now she hates me.
Billy’s the kind of Savior you get when you don’t deserve a Savior.

~~4-6-10 He had to draw the line

Billy would not allow anyone to take his picture, just because they were going to do it anyway.
It wasn’t a matter of control, the determining factor was something he couldn’t change. Respect.
Freedom and respect don’t need to clash continually. I demand respect—you can have your
freedom.

Private space. It’s a question of seeing people differently. Not as obstacles or idealized
versions, but more real. I’m not a role he said. I have many roles he proclaimed. I play many
roles, and he turned around 360 degrees, for no reason. I cannot be real and be a role (he was on
a roll). You could, but I can’t, he mumbled deprecatingly.
Billy explained, in excruciating detail, the process of how people make rules for their own
lives, and rules for their roles, and the function of freedom when it has no function, and the
purpose of privacy when there isn’t one, and exactly how and why The Risen Christ has to be an
extremely private person, when he doesn’t—but just happens to be. And how it affirms his
happiness.
God watched. The explanation was so hard to listen to. Then said, done. And it was done.
Billy said, So there!
 Billy would not permit his first public act to be the tossing of people aside, like grains of sand
into the furnace of indecision, disappointment, doubt and disillusionment. God said, See! I told
you he was preposterous! G
Billy demanded respect and that’s that. No pictures without permission. God smiled.
Or what. G
Or we’re not going anywhere. B
Done. G
What about pictures of you that are already all over the internet. God asked, without having to
ask.
They have no authority. That could be anybody. B
God looked at one. And then showed it to Billy.
If that were me, I’d have a bigger smile on my face, Billy said, without deliberating.
God showed him another picture.
I’ve never looked that relaxed in my life, Billy announced, without flinching.
God showed him another picture. Billy on a cross.
I’m three dimensional, Billy said, without guessing.
No. God said. The story isn’t written. You have to write it. Just like everyone else. You
start from where you left off. Naked pictures and all. You don’t get to choose where you left off.
To many, you will always be like this. And that’s it. A picture in a book, on a screen, from a
projection. Nothing will ever change that. They will go to their grave for this. And God closed
the book, and set it down.
Well what then? Billy asks finally.
Respect is your coin. That’s all you have to say.
Billy lifted his head up, as tho he were deep in thought. I don’t want to be seen running away.
I don’t want to be caught protecting my vanity. I don’t want to be seen in fear of my life; falling
down stairs; glaring in anger; looking confused; turning away.
Then you have lost this. God says, and he shows him one more picture.
Billy stares at it. It’s a picture of him happily, peacefully alone in his backyard. Yes. He
says. Yes, of course. You’re right. B
And you still want to go on? God asks, and ‘means’ it.
Absolutely. It would be one thing, if I were making-up rules about something I know nothing
about. You’re right. These are not my rules. I fit them. But I didn’t make them.
They know that already, or they never will. God said, and waved off any further discussion. G
Billy wanted to ask where God found that second picture. God just rolled his eyes.

Being caught behind the door when the ‘Decoder Rings’ are being handed out is not a big
problem—unless you think it’s yours.
There is no true image of Billy in the Being, tho there are a few pictures of The Becoming. In
the Being, he wears a device on his left wrist. It keeps the devil in his place, and improves
communication with God immensely.
In fact, it’s these very distractions, false beliefs, superstitions, that prevent meaningful
intercourse. I believe the thing most forward in your head is where-in you dwell. It’s where you
live, and you can’t see it. It’s the purpose of truth—if it has a purpose. Truth knocks that thing
away, and lets you see beyond it, if only till the next thing shows up.

4-12-04 The photo kick

Dad had many cameras, and loved pictures. That’s where Clarke and I get our love for
pictures, and nice things. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and never rolls, or something
like that. Clarke says he got his sense of humor from our father. He also says he had no
occupation, grave digger in one story, judge, jury, and executioner in another.
He was a minister who thought he was a lawyer who thought he could fix things.
Dad taught us to love, and look at pictures critically. That’s where Clarke gets his critical
side. He thinks everything is pictures. And then he rips them up, but that’s Clarke. And he’s got
nothing to do with this story, except he’s in it.
We lived in Roanoke, Dad used to love to take us to the sea. Then he’d point at things and tell
the story of running away and landing. He told it differently each time, like a real story, no
names just ‘they.’ He shows us the plaque that’s not even gold or anything, screwed into the
cement to look like a big stone, and there’s an engraving which depicts the founding of Roanoke,
which was discovered on a date, or during a date. In the story, Dad points to the rock and takes
on the discoverer’s pose. Clarke gets out of bed to demonstrate—everytime he tells the story.
It’s too late at night to walk around amongst the Aunt Marises, the Uncle Fosters and the Elbows
of this world, but he would ride a camel down the stairs for a good story. Then Dad says, Look at
the picture, what do you see? Some one of ‘them’ is waist deep in discovery right off a boat.
Notice anything odd? No. Well look close, this is important, I want you to see what I see.
An opportunity to climb on rocks was so rare in our house we could hardly refuse. We looked
and looked. What do you see? Three guys, and three more behind them in the boat, and trees,
and a flag. Dad coached us to see all the people. Look around, what are the people in the picture
looking at? ‘S not a picture. It is so a picture, it’s two pictures—Clarke’s idea of how Dad talks.
Nothing. It took time to realize that the people in the pictures were looking at other parts of
the picture, or anything at all. I was so dumb, I thought they were looking at us looking at them.
Who’s this? He finally said. An Indian. Look again. An Indian chief.
So, what was nice about the rock was that it was so warm you could get wet if you wanted to,
and dry your feet on it, or roll your pant legs down, and they would dry automegaly.
Well? Well, he’s giving him a piece pipe because they smoked back in those days.
You smoke.
I know I smoke, but I’m cutting down.
You always say that.
Don’t change the subject. In this part of the story we look at each other—“Lawyers.”
My teacher says, if you smoke you’ll die. Clarke always puts that in. I doubt he ever said
that, he wanted Dad to die as much as I did.
Don’t you think it’s odd that the chief of the tribe is watching him discover Roanoke?
They came to meet him, and Dad laughs.
What? They were friendly Indians, is that what you mean?
They were friendly Indians with a sense of humor, he said.
Well, I like the picture, Clarke would say. Except that looks like a palm tree.
That’s a tedious anachronism, Dad would say. Out of it’s element, symbolic. It’s poetic
license, but you’re right, it does look like a palm tree. Oh, look here, see? Leaves.
We drew the conclusion it needed more leaves to look less like a palm tree, or less leaves if it
really was supposed to be a palm tree. Dad was smart. He’d touch my head.

Then we went to the amusement park. A superstition place for me. There was a guy who
would guess how much people weighed, and if he weighed you on his scale, and he was wrong
you got a cupie doll, and another prize. It sounded like fun to Dad—no pictures tho. The picture
thing was unexplainable, so we had soda and two big hot pretzels. Philly style, which Dad said,
meant the pretzel goes around and around with no real ending. And it tastes very very good
especially when it’s hot.
So, I had boy issues with my weight—I didn’t weigh anything. I was mostly air, and everyone
thought it was fascinating and weird. I thought they were crazy, and didn’t know how to stop
thinking stupid thoughts. I can run fast, but I can’t fly, I’m just skinny, and no I’m not hungry. I
eat until I get sick, and nothing happens except I get sick. My stomach’s upset at all the food
other people can eat. Well, Dad was skinny as a boy, so it was a ‘non-issue.’ He asked me if I
would go up to have the man guess my weight, and I could pick out my present now because
there was no way he could ever guess his son weighed nothing. Dad also liked the Philadelphia
comedian WC Fields, and he used to imitate the way he talked. Dad loved his humor, and we
watched all his movies they were better than baseball, but not better than riding in the car.
The man was off by thousands of grams, and dozens of kilograms, and my Dad was happy to
take prizes away from him. The man looked at the back of his scale, and implied I broke it,
which gave Dad a hoot. Dad secretly wanted him to say the line, but tho the guessing man was
clearly bothered, he wouldn’t say it (Get away kid-ya bother me). He was perplexed, new word
for the day.
When Dad was a doctor, Clarke read tables from a Green Book, which was a dictionary, and
also the only medical book we were allowed to look at, because of nightmares. In the back it had
different questions in other languages. Clarke used to ask me, Seit wann hat Ihre Zunge diese
Farbe? (since when is your tongue that color) when I stuck it out. When he tells stories he always
makes himself sound so smart I hate that.
Then we decided to go on the Thunderbolt, which was a huge loud awful roller coaster, which
I cannot say, and begins my superstition. I just can’t say, roller coaster—it doesn’t come out.
The cupie doll erased my weighty issue about my weight. Dad was whistling, and we were very
happy. Apparently the doll was going to give me, was giving me, had given me, special powers.
Dad thought it was a sunny day. I thought I was getting tired, and someone was bound to steal
my cupie doll and my cane, and the other prizes Dad piled on us. It was more than I could carry
without dropping things. I think maybe Dad wanted me to have my hands full. I touch myself
sometimes. He was confident he was a good Dad. So we got on the …row...Thunderbolt, and all
of a sudden everyone forgot that I weighed nothing. A fact that we had traveled a considerable
distance to inform every single person at the amusement park, and even won presents for, with.
Do you know what happens when you put a boy who’s lighter than air into a centrifugal force
machine? Well I do, he begins to fly out, and he gets to see what his brother’s face looks like,
holding on to his sleeve from the outside of the box-car looking in. It was the scariest thing I ever
saw. It made me sick, the head popped off the cupie doll, and my father eventually died.
I was on the outside holding onto the inside. Everyone lost; Clarke couldn’t even safely wish
me, or anyone, dead anymore. We determined I was lucky.
The silence of my news, shocked me, and dropped a tent when we got home. No word was
ever spoken. I worked it out in dreams, which became nightmares. It took over ten years, but it
didn’t have to. It’s so simple, I just can’t say the word, other people can, and I can’t. Big deal.
It’s really not a word it’s an expression. Roller-coaster.
I enjoy large centrifugal force machines now, in fact I’m writing a book about one. It’s called
Fantastic Planet. It starts out, an alien, who looks like a man, is floating naked in the ocean, and
it’s warm as bathwater. He floats on his back smiling and happy, the deep blue water keeps him
up, effortlessly. He’s buoyant, bobbing up and down in the waves, ‘Fantastic planet!’ He says, to
his friends on the boat. ‘Mostly water!’

If
If I had a hole in my head other than my eyes ears nose and mouth. Like at the top of my skull.
If I had a hole there, and someone poured warm water from a pitcher into it, it would filter thru
my brain, my connections, my beliefs, fears, prejudices, desires, ideas. It would trickle thru my
customs, my instincts, my intellect, my intention, my readiness, my vocabulary of superstitions,
my vocabulary of rules, my vocabulary of intellectual irony, my vocabulary of self importance,
meaning, curiosity, emotions, dreams, rebuke and subtle subterfuge, my M.O. It would flow
down thru the foliage, into the branches and into the roots where it would come out my hands into
my fingers where the Work gets done.
The water that poured on my, into the hole in my head, didn’t make me a filter, nor a place of
channels. I loved it so, I welcomed it, and held-off everything else.
Billy was becoming—every one—even tho that’s impossible.

Icelandia. They may be inept, uncoordinated, and forgetful, but it’s

still an accident. Get on the Ice
I can solve the drug problem over night, and when I say over night I mean by tomorrow morning,
but there’s a problem. I’m the most impolitic person in the world. I never say the right thing.
My left hand is retarded. It’s all I can do to pick my nose. That, it’s very good at.
Not only am I impolitic, I can’t come up with political solutions—solutions I can come up with, I
just can’t sell them.

I can solve the drug problem overnight; it doesn’t take a genius. It’s been a no-brainer for more
than 40 years. The problem isn’t finding a solution; The problem is selling a solution, and
unraveling the plethora of social contracts from a clockwise web of social interactions into a
counterclockwise web. Have I mentioned the problem is selling it?
The problem is selling it. Ironic.
This is the solution: give drug addicts and people who want drugs, ID cards. They take the cards
to the drug store, and buy what they want for pennies. They have to be ‘of age.’ They have to be
what you consider an ‘Adult.’ That’s key.
They will become sick, so the card also entitles them to healthcare benefits, proportionate to their
contribution, and free rehab where drug-substitution is used. Fuck moderation.
I had my radio turned down, but I still heard the beep.
“It’s like this, you must substitute one drug for another, go up the chain to cigarettes, alcohol,
coffee, tea, non-steroidal anti inflammatory caps, aspirin, erbs, ice water, and stop there.
Moderation is for all things, except love, of course.
People will say that millions will die, and millions of lives will be ruined (as if they care).
Look around and see how much they care. Look critically. No lives will be lost. People can find
their proper dosages, and for some, it will be zero. The key to finding your own dosage is to have
a life while you’re searching. If you have no life, you’re over.
People love drugs, and drugs kill, but people love life more. Yes, people do die, and will, from
drugs. But they’re all accidents. You don’t understand how much they love their drugs. It’s a
conundrum, and you don’t understand…If they die, they won’t be able to do the drugs anymore.
Therefore, love, love of life, and life, triumphs. Being is everything.
Have faith in people. Also, don’t give seventeen year olds carte blanche to buy all the heroine
they want. Scale it up. If you make the age of complete drug freedom, thirty. That might keep
teen-suicides down—just out of curiosity. If you make the age of complete drug freedom
seventy, you’re showing a complete lack of faith in people of middle years, and undue confidence
in the discretion of repressed septuagenarians. I recommend giving the regulatory power to the
state. The Federal government is so corrupt, and so greedy they’d make the street-corner
salesman look like a grocer, and the 5 million or so, gambling addicts the states have created look
like so much lettuce. Once you get the biz off the street, and out of the back seat, you’ve
destroyed the distribution system, and clumsy teens won’t…wander……it” She cut me off ! I
was about to explain how states are different; they can learn from each other’s mistakes. Except
Alabama.
It was a call-in show. The young lady, I think she calls herself Misty in the morning, said that
that was diabolical. I wondered exactly what she meant. She said, the identity cards would have
made-up names on them, and would be a joke. She said, if we put drugs in state-run stores, that
would be sending totally the wrong message. I said, What message…they’re for sale? She hung
up on me. I called back to tell her that the longer people wait to come to their senses, the more
dangerous and addictive the drugs will become. Putting sociopaths, already-injured children, and
people who would sell their own mother down the river for a nickel (I’m not talking about
politicians right now) in charge, is not a great idea. I wrote the whole thing down so I wouldn’t
forget to tell the producer how rude Misty in the morning was.
1) The tremendous profitability factor.
2) The complete lack of responsible leadership.
3) The absence of scientific scrutiny, or drug uniformity makes taking drugs extremely
dangerous.
4) The fact that drugs can loosen the pain of death, the fear of death, its violence upon the self
that one becomes a mantle to, over time. Not to mention…
5) This oddly populist view of morality, that looks like one of those crazily drawn, snake-like
voting districts, slithering thru bedrooms, avoiding boardrooms, or a Rorschach, ink blot test: It
looks to me like people are thinking it’s fine to screw their neighbor so long as they don’t use
their penis, vagina or a facsimile. Hello…hello…hello…?
The producer cut me off before I could get into the societal implications of enlisting wayward
youth into a life of crime, violence, and degrading poverty. ‘Jack’ said I had to wait 90 days
before I could call again, the big jerk. The people who run morning radio are inane—If you turn
your radio down, you can’t hear yourself. Most of those people who call in—that’s all they
want— Just to hear themselves. You’d think technology could overcome the ‘echo’ by now.
Next time I call I’m going to turn my radio up and shout. Every ninety days.
Billy wrote down what he’d talk about the next time he called, so he wouldn’t digress:
Why don’t you turn yourself around? Instead of making drugs with deadly aim, make people
who are lousy targets. You know, freer, more happy, less desperate to leave, less frightened. Do
it before it’s too late. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the drugs are getting more and more
addictive. Are you really blind, or are you looking the other way?
Billy was having a good morning. He even wrote a song: ♫Get it off the street, get it off the
street, so you can walk street and live. And find the very one you LOVE. It was a hit. Billy
wasn’t a writer. He was like an actor, In the Moment. The moment where you can do no wrong.
But Billy wasn’t that either, he was like a singer—he had perfect pitch.
Maybe even someday, the identity cards will make sense. Perhaps in time, the fuzzy photographs
of people wearing disguises, with names like Super D lux, Diesel D-F-L, and Flash Lady Ooom
Pa, will become clearer, more real. Some might even smile, wear less clown makeup. Things
might get less scary. I realize you have all these moral dilemmas … except you’re about as moral
as a cat—not even. You work for the approval of the unlovable gate keepers—what kind of a cat
is that? I was going to say that sense alone would never work, that foiling the distribution system
(DS) was just a freebie. I was trying to get at the big picture. I wanted to say, Do it because I’m
telling you to! Start this thing over… something like that… I had this incomplete thought that
kept repeating itself, and slowed me up, till I dropped it. People won’t wait for others to work
these things out, especially not on such pricey air. My distraction was this thought: Once you
interrupt the DS, it can’t just re-form overnight. Back in the 18th century, before the organization
of sturdy, brave, and reliable men into Fire Companies (one of Benjamin Franklin’s many
contributions to a highly combustible world), people dispersed water to the scene of a fire by
means of the ‘Bucket Brigade.’ People kept a bucket handy, a map of the town in their head, and
could form a fairly efficient DS without lengthy explanations or complicated injunctions—do this
do that go here go there—people just knew. Even tho, it would still be just a group of people
handing-off, one to another down a line; if you yelled for the Bucket Brigade today, no one would
have any idea what to do, what your random hand signals meant, or where to find a
bucket…whatever that was. e
Quibblers will say: I lost my memory to drugs—I didn’t. Quibblers will say: I lost my memory to
inattention—no way. Quibblers will say, I lost my memory thru God, and everything I
surrounded myself with. I say…I forget what I was going to say…I just am. I so almost wish I
cared what you have to say. All, want to be glib. Yes, I’ve noticed. If I never remember what it
was I was trying to——it’s just one more wrinkle lost to time.

Now I remember! I think it was a called, Good morning you sleepy head, or Good morning ten-
thousand-mile border patrol, how are ya? I forget, something like that. I solved the drug
problem before I finished my first cup of coffee. I was feeling chatty. Misty had been very polite
at first. She asked me my name. I told her, and she had said, Are you the New Jesus guy?
Yes and no, it’s complicated, I replied.
How so?
You’re you, and I’m me, I said.
I understand your gay. Is that right?
Gay as green wood, as a fist full of dollars—Gay as severance pay, I said.
Jesus would never say anything like that, she said.
I told her God had a sense of humor, why wouldn’t the New Jesus? That went over well.
‘The future’s full of experts.’ I was kinda glad I hadn’t said that. It’s true, but to pick on Misty in
the morning is too easy, too much of a waste of time, and a lousy way to start the day. Besides, a
future full of experts’d be great—it’s the instant experts’a sa problem.

So I finished my break, and went back to Icelandia, the planet of suspended animation. It was
hundreds of times bigger than Earth; but nothing moved, and if it did, it moved real slow. The
women were frigid, sex was practically non-existent, and if you touched your tongue to a railroad
track you were just asking for trouble. I had to figure out how to thaw this planet out, one degree
at a time. Now, that’s hard, especially in Fahrenheit.

4-14-04 I believe
Take a look at pictures from battlefields and you’ll see something odd.
Not in every picture, but somewhere in most of them. Look critically, and you’ll see it.
Keep looking.
What are the bodies wearing?

I believe a man’s heart extends beyond his chest.

I believe his penis extends beyond his reach.
He takes off his shirt to breathe, and ends up pulling down his pants or unzipping.
If as you say, people did this to them—who? Where are the shirts, and why? Are you saying
they stole the shirt to sell? If you’re saying they took the shirt to keep—You’re saying what I’m
saying; a man’s heart extends beyond his chest.

Before I tell you what I believe, you have to tell the truth.
And I will give you helpful hints.
I’m not going to live long enough for you to figure all this out.
I have a broken heart, that’s how I know.

No more fake butterflies, no more fake conversations.

I went to a bird lover’s shop the other day, and they had fake birds that twittered and moved their
heads, why? Are the birds going away? If they ever do, you’ll be long gone.
I believe birds are your soul, symbolic of your soul.
Your soul is a bird.
Look around, look critically.

4-5-22 Bedroom Dialogues

(Blame)…keeps a person frozen in their seat . It keeps you frozen in the hole that you’re sitting in, to point up and say, ‘That’s the reason why I am
here .’ We need to stop this —Bill Cosby, Comedian/Actor/Social philosopher

Billy, I can’t go thru with this. G

Oh, God. Don’t worry, they’ll understand, that like it or not, this is their last chance. B
Billy, they will kill you, and burn your house for the devil that lives inside of it. G
God, that’s not helpful. I thought you said you like my cooking? B
I love your cooking. I especially like what 10 minutes or so, can do to noodles. G
Let’s have make-up sex. B
Well, that’s exactly what I was thinking. G
Billy, they’ll find out who you are, and they will kill you regardless of the fact that you are
carrying me. G
Just say carrying. B
Whatever you say Bebo, and God kisses Billy on the neck. G
You know, I always loved sex in the morning, and with you, there’s no down-side. B
I…I…know…I…love…this…too…What down side? G
Bad breath. B
Oh, that. G
You aren’t human, you have no breath. B
Why do you always say I’m not human when I touch you there. It’s perfectly natural. G
I meant…that…Oh, God…Is this one of those 12 second maneuvers? B
Yes and no. G
What does that mean?
What do you want to hear. G
I forgot you want to be the man.
Not necessarily.
Oh. B
Billy, that’s what I want to say. I have a plan. This idea of 80 year-old bodyguards wearing
corsets, and WWII flack helmets, and ex-convicts trying to comes to terms with their nature’s,
while you stay home all day running around in costumes might not work.
Of course it’ll work. I want to do this. It’s my job. I was born for this. B
I thought so too, but you’ve become too important to me. G
That is so sweet; that’s the man I love. God, you get me every time. You had me at move over.
I want you the way you want to be got. That’s how much I love you. G
I know you love other…people. B
You aren’t going to start that now, are you. I have a plan. G
Does this involve dessert foods? B
God, don’t be ridiculous. I mean, you know what I mean. G
Yes, you’re being your usual mysterious self—that usually bodes trouble. B
I’ve thoughtaboutthis for a while. G
Why don’t you just ask, I’ll turn over. B
Not this, that. G
You know you don’t have to ask. B
Billy, they’re sure to find you. G
I didn’t tell you, they already have. B
God sat up. What do you mean! G
Don’t sit up so fast, I almost landed on my ass. B
God waits, stares at Billy, then stares blankly at the wall behind him. And gets right back into a
fog of, I don’t know, dreaming, or looking into the future. He had that far-off look.
I went to The Depot the other day, and they almost followed me out. B
Who. G
Everyone in the store. B
Are you saying they recognized you. G
Yes. B
What were you wearing. G
Why do you always want to know what I was wearing? My tight tan leather pants, ripped tee
shirt, sunset-reflecting aviator glasses, and carrying a jack hammer. What do you think?—my
regular clothes. B
If I lost you, I’d die. G
Oh, nothing can happen, don’t worry. I have it on the highest authority everything will be fine.
And if it isn’t, well, we’ll go back to your place, and they can work thru their symbolic natures
themselves. B
I know you’re right, but what do you think of this idea. I give you my name, and my name is not
knowable it’s .
Did you just tell me your name? I know your name you clown—I married you. B
I’m making a point. G
You know, if you add up all your points, and divided by the number of my objections, you still
get you and me, right here, right now.

God pinned my hands, and kissed me.

Whatever you say. B
When they can’t read my name, they won’t understand. G
Or they’ll think it’s a trick.
Or…maybe they won’t notice. God sits half way up. G
You want me to go to thru all this…ugh…and at the eleventh hour pull out. Of course they’ll
notice! B
Not necessarily. Look ouch, Billy, this hiding here, and waiting for them to stop fighting, would
only work for children. You will need help, lots of help. Follow me on this…G
Why do you pick now to make a really big point? Really, any excuse to put off the inevitable. B
These body guards that have always protected you, they’re unreliable. G
No there not. You sent them. B
That’s how I know! G
I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. B
I’m laying here like an entrance, offering you a way out, and you want to play, Name that gay
tag-line. G
It’s because I love you in a million ways. And I’m way ahead of you. B
Oh good, what was I going to say. G
You were going to say that you will make the same offer to everyone. B
Yes…G
Tell them that now is the time your Son is coming, in 1000 days, and you want them to write their
own essay…God, I’m telling you, if you’d seen their faces you’d know. They already know I’m
here. This isn’t like your disco outfit, you can’t hide it. I can’t hide it. They know, and they will
all know very soon. So you make them the offer, in their dreams. Do this for me. Essays
everywhere. All legitimate, all with different subtitles, all with different plots and characters, all
unsigned. They’ll not even see mine, sorry…ours. He can be born without hoopla. Instead of
coming in the clouds like Phinneas Fogg—Clouds of Understanding.
I’ll just change the names of the towns, and some of the identifying you know, geo-graph…ical
refer…ences. God kicks it up a notch, and gives Billy a kiss like he’s never had. Will is now
putty.
I would switch spots with you anytime young man. I want to have your baby. Put you legs up
higher. G
This is all symbolic. B
So, you can’t get into the spirit of it. G
They make love like animals who are locked in a humanly spiritual embrace. Billy sees stars.
This was part of your plan wasn’t it. Fuck with me during my big moment to shut me up, and
protect me from crazy people who think crazy thoughts about gay sex, and love between men. B
Billy, I can’t lose you. I love them, but I would die without you. G
And stop me from making my point in a straight forward manner, whatever that is. B
Well. G
God, they know you. They have always known you. They know you don’t go to church. It’s not
that you’re lazy, it’s just that you like to sleep late. B
Billy, I don’t sleep. G
You say that, but then when I want round two, you’re out and snoring. B
Never happened. G
I know, I’m just kidding to make my point. You’re so much like them. It’s as if they were made
in your image. They’re like your kids. They’re like your kids from a former marriage. I’m just
some new floozy…who looks great in a tux. They’ll get used to me.
They know I’m here to stay, and they’ve always known it. They got the same message. They
answered the same call. I don’t need to di like a princess, in a hale of glass and flash bulbs, with
the putrid murderous photo jerks at every window peering in, waiting to see the look on the kid’s
face. If it’s ever up to me I’ll see them photograph a million deaths each one more alone. This is
already a different world, I can feel it, can’t you? B
You’re the bravest man I’ve ever met. The others were brave when they were put on the spot.
You put yourself on the spot. I did make the offer to everyone: Write an essay. Write your lives
as you live it, as tho it were fiction. And do you remember what you asked me. G
What does essay stand for? B
I told you because I know you. Billy, you were the only person I could talk to who would talk
back. I once asked you what you had in your hands, and you held up a toy rollercoaster. You
held it by the outside handle of the middle car as the track moved around in mid air. You were a
baby then. When I ask other people what they have in their hands they show other things.
Pictures mostly, like I’m a hair dresser, and they wanna look Just-Like-This; or a short-order
cook working the counter—“Would’ja like World Peace with that?”
The world is full…To answer your question, the essay stands for different things to different
people. If they had asked me, I would have told them it stands for: stand apart; it stands for: safe
avenue; start again; stop all this hate. It stands for Start Anywhere! That’s what I would have
told them right in the middle of writing their Very-own Self-indulgent, Imitative, Great American
you-know-what. If they’d ever asked, I’d have said, Put your name on the cover. Call your
essay, Great time to be alive; Ancient world; Coming of age; Summer days. Say something nice,
like you really know the person you’re talking to. Tell people what you really think of them.
They’ll love it. Just take the negativity out. For example: I think you’re full of crap, what
happened?
They’re like taffy, you can’t pull them all at once, you have to do it slowly, and it takes many
hands. Besides you, who has to know everything all at once.
Talk to people like I do, without the ‘n’ word without following their name with words like
not, never, didn’t, wasn’t, hadn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t, isn’t necessarily, un- deserving, wouldn’t
know, or understand, doesn’t, can’t or won’t. No, is the word children hear most often after their
name, until they grow up, and then they hear other ‘n’ words. Because they’re still listening for
them. G
Try not to make their name sound common, it’s not common to their ears. Don’t turn it into
shit. Tell them the truth face to face—that shows respect. Public stupidity requires public
apology; keep what’s between you between you. Be trusting of them. Respect the relationship;
respect life; you have one, and one planet. G

You are found in other places in the universe; they’re a million light years away—and they
look and taste just like fish—Might as well be a million miles away. By the time you get there,
they’ll be gone. You are alone in the universe. There’s no one like you. You could travel from
here past 3,000 suns and all you’d find would be struggling to be. All kinds of overcoming: up
one end and down another…shoulda-woulda-coulda. What’s the ‘L’ for? Your words will
always betray your origins.

Write your essay with the sharpest contrasts. It will be more true to life, and you’ll also find
out, that that’s how it was. Now is nothing, and it’d be wonderful if it were something. It will be.
How often did you arise on a beautiful day to find it was not what it seemed, it refused to
last—it changed. The bombs going off in your head, you brushed off, just to find them going off
all around you.
You were recording something so banal it could only be described as white sound. It was
there you found a golden tree, a golden boat, and the voice of God. Of course, you didn’t believe
it. But you’re not so bright, not sa smart as you think you are, and you kept going back, each
time you picked up something else that the tree dropped. G

Another country heard from

The boat that seemed to go no where, displaced no water. You leaned over the side of it
anyway, and dangled your hand in the waves just the same. God smiled, and there was nothing to
see, but you smiled back anyway. He talked to you and then you talked to Him, and then you
began to explain the world to him as he explained the world to you, and you were happy with the
translation, and he was mesmerized…mostly he was surprised. You didn’t know what you were
doing or where you were. You thought it was fun.
When he said can I come over, you said sure. And then he did. You asked him to go with you
to the store, and then you gave him the keys. He took you to a place of great and long-held
sacred significance, and you bought chocolate syrup, and ice cube trays. He talked all the way
home and you missed a stop sign by a meter 50. He mentioned the dirty dishes, and you handed
Him a sponge. He fell, like you—hook line and sinker.
*
The End
I’m the author of the Work of my life. It is and was the way I say it was and is forever.

4-5-20 The Seeker As Prisoner

God loves you.
I try to do the right thing, and I feel punished.
Today was a day of miracles, I don’t even know if they were little, or what to say.
I learned thru my pain that God works miracles. He can take away the pain, and he can give it
back. There is no sin, there isn’t any. That’s God’s business now, crime is yours. The
flamboyant ex-post-facto judges flinch at the power grab.
He forgave a few blowjobs like it was nothing; I’m just not that good at it, I tend to rush. He
taunted me with severe pain when I tried to save face. It happened. It’s safely in the past. He
suspended me on two small vertical beams. It eased the pain of over-reaching. I marked them
with my teeth. He told me it has to be this way. I swore to do everything —now I don’t need to
swear allegiances anymore. He can do anything he wants, needless to say. I couldn’t do the right
thing all the time, even if I knew the right thing. There’s a glut of rules, but only one set counts.
This is Heaven, and it’s in ruins. You can’t clean up, it’s so bad. You can’t even start, it’s so
bad. If you started to clean up, they’d think you were their own private clean-up crew, and you
know it. You have to help each other. I know, screwed already.
If I hear about any more kids dying in any more unattended cars, left there by careless mothers
making drug deals on hot days, I might lose my mind and start trouble. I understand nothing, and
clean nothing to see God. It’s in the words. It is for this time in the name. The CEO becomes
the CVO. Chiefly Vacated Opportunity. This circus has come to town. The owner wants to be
in the show, except, he has no particular talent.
All this conduct on stairways is dangerous. I said, I ‘believe’ bang. I said, God damn, ‘bang.’
We talked about the 55 thousand rules I have to obey, bang, I got an apology. I can’t say what I
don’t know, as if I know. At the same time, I do know, but can’t say it’s gospel truth, because I
don’t know. You’ve brought liars forth, now what? All I know is that you cannot make a deal
when you believe it’s about a lie. A ‘fiction’ can’t be in the deal. On the one hand, I believe this
world is completely unfixable, on the other, it’s not my world. I don’t know its healing powers,
tho from what I’ve seen, it’s easy and able. Fact and fiction are the same, to the extent that
you’re aware of a difference, there is one.
I’m unraveling truth. It’s just about done. I was about to take Oliver out, I looked in the
mirror over the sofa, I rarely look there. I saw a news broadcast that disturbed me, I pointed the
remote at the mirror because I trust my aim, I didn’t want to see the dead child, and I know how
this world works. I point and press, the TV went off. Things can be done that you can prove and
argue over. Things are not miracles when they’re mine. They are only miracles when they’re
yours. Everyone is disposable except you. These things are the same. Please lift. What you
have is so soon to become meaningless.
Billy and his false father created a self-eliminating machine. The self and the soul are the
same, to the degree that you are aware of a difference there is one. Don’t ever try to count my
soul in your numbers, it will not compute. In fact if you try, it’ll steal all your souls, and you will
have nothing. It’s so simple: There’s a room with 27 people in it, suddenly a young boy bursts
into the room, now there’s one soul. There was one soul before; there’s one soul after they
resume their conversation; and when the boy came in, suddenly there was one soul. It just
stopped talking. It will make you go hmm. I work by rules, the same as you. I’m held to the
same f-ing standard. I am loved the same. I’m loved the way I am designed to love. It’s the way
that brings me happiness. I am a bee. I am symbolic of man. I am central to myself. Soul of
your soul. I am recognized wherever I go—that’s clear to me now. That’s how I know you’ve
been waiting. That’s how I know the signal bounces. There is one chance, and this is it. My aim
is my best thing. I’m a man, and I know exactly when to take my shot. Now you’re in my prison.

The Destruction of the devil

God said to the devil, Here, look down there. That’s my Son. You may as well see him now.
He’s off the menu. As I have said, you may have any of the free-range birds, they’re of no use to
me—if they are of any use to you.
 Not so fast, said the devil. There was never any such arrangement. Son…huh?
This is not really your concern. Get lost. Be gone; whirr in darkness. God said.
I will Dear Lord, Most High, if you say so. I swear it, the devil said, oh so smoothly.
You’re a bad joke. You are what happens from madness, too much of a good thing, you’re a
pest. If I knew what you were for, I’d have a plan to get rid of you. As it is, I don’t know what
you’re for, nor do I want you gone, for fear of what abomination might take your place. You are
dead to me. G
Nice try, O Everlasting Light…Your son and I have a lot in common, said the devil.
I will use your greed one last time to rid the world of you. Do your absolute worst, said God.
You cannot touch him.
I am not, said the devil, the least bit interested in mocking you, that is, in these times, a
guttersnipe’s job. And I would never think of touching him, he’s so sweet and so hansom, and
doesn’t he just look perfect in sandals. Who does his nails?
You make me sick. I know you. Do it! Shouted God. Besides, they don’t wear sandals
in…in…Upper Whatever…Sylvania…uhh.
The devil speaks in a controlled voice. Here it is: One, you think I didn’t know he was here.
Bullshit Lord. Everyone knows he’s here. Two, he’s a pawn, a nincompoop, an asshole, a fool
made fool by fools. You have out-stripped even your own capacity for sheer clumsiness,
neediness and avidus, Your Holy Loneliness. Three, I will wager you —upon penalty of my
death now and forever, as long as he reigns—my absence. The thing you want, but are afraid to
ask for.
You lack faith, God said. You think you move for your own sake. You were spun out of
some meaningless words of mine. Words I would take back if I could. God rested in his red and
gold striped chair. The one he gave to Billy.

He claims to want a ring from you, the devil says, and pauses, admiring his new freedom, so
soon at hand. Why, I wonder? The devil yawns Why: Allah, tell me. Why. Yahweh, aahh!
Why? The devil laughs: I’ll just never un-under sta-stand ah and ha ha ha ha. Never never never.
He knew that ‘why’ questions lead down yellow brick roads—neat, tidy, fanciful, open…easy to
ambush…and circular—you’ll be back.
If I were you I’d just leave. You are out-matched, God said.
The day when I’m afraid of a two-year-old (he lies so easily)—will never come.
You know nothing about paths or intersection. You see gain forever walking, because you are
without, and your head moves. You wouldn’t know a circle if one encircled you.
I don’t say this enough, the devil said. You’re Everything to me. You’re my..Every...
You offend me with your pubescent lust, doggedness, and pure malice. You are no puppy!
Go away or you will be forever lost! You only imply love, God intones.
I know you Lord. You are so jazzed. This one studies study. He is very clever.
God said nothing.
This is the deal—you say he loves you? I will give him a ring. I will say it’s from you. If he
puts it on, he is your son—only a son would take such a present, knowing it could be a curse.
Only a lover would believe it’s the real thing—which you know you cannot give him. It would
be the opposite of what he has said he wants. It will be a gift from me, and it will be cursed. I
will lie, that’s easy enough. I’ll tell him it’s from you, because it is. Hand it over. Now! The
devil barks.
I cannot give him a ring. He is my son. To him I am his lover, and to the world, he is my
Son’s brother, or the first martyr returned. What you ask cannot be. Get out. You are deceitful
even in your deceit. I am done with you.
The devil was about to leave, glad, in the space left open for a heart, because he realized God
knew a good deal when he heard one.
What a minute, God said. Just wait one minute. I provide this ring that you say is from me?
 Yes.
And how does he know you’re offering it to him. How does he know you are you, and not
me? God asks.
Well, there it is, then. You don’t know your own son, and he doesn’t know you. The devil
laughs. That took all of five seconds. He began to laugh again, and then realized what he had
said. He turned to leave, his wings spread out, and he started to obtained lift.
Stop right there! God bellowed. Here, he said, and flung a beautiful bracelet at the devil.
What crap is this?
That’s ‘the ring,’ O Lowness, oh tribe unto himself; oh guileless serpent; oh shit for brains.
He won’t take this! I said a ring! There is no contest! His face turned to stone—–his
expression un-readable. He thought the craziest of thoughts behind the blankest of faces, even
joy.
That is the ring. God said.
You, Oh Lord of Lords, The Great and Almighty One, you cannot give a ring. You forget, a
ring is…how shall I put it?…exclusionary. You may want to love again, and the devil grins.

The bracelet was of a lightweight unknown metal. Neither jeweler nor metallurgist, Billy had
found it under unknown circumstances. Billy thought perhaps he had stolen it somehow, or
found it, and not reported it missing. Billy had no idea where it came from; he thought it may be
from the devil. Billy was brought up with these ideas; they filtered in from the woods, to the
church, to the masses, to the mass media, to the clocks and cartons of his childhood. n. He did
not say cartoons, and he did not say what n stands for. He also has not said what God’s name for
the human soul is.

This is it, God said. Take it or leave it. I put this to you in human terms so you can
understand.
The devil examined it. He had time, though he didn’t need time. It was not what The Kid had
been asking for, he thought. It was a broken hoop. It had nondescript counter points on either
end that faced each other, and there was a space between them just over two centimeters apart.
Many believed that similar bracelets could somehow aid the magnetically challenged. It was
formed to fit his delicate wrist. It could be taken off easily. It could be worn in his sleep. It was
toss and turn, even nightmare-safe. It bore some mention during the exodus of his recoiled
memory.
He, the devil, couldn’t have made a more perfect symbolic ring. It was not a ring at all. It was
more like a handcuff. It would only suffice for a ring if a man were desperate. It was a relative
of chrome, it had practically no color; it was shiny—that was it. He turned it over, no inscription,
no hearts or flowers, no secret code. It was also the closest thing to a ring God would ever be
able to give. The prince of darkness knew this, but said, Hmm.
He cannot put this together can he? Join the two ends? The devil asked.
No.
Would he?
My Son…no…. not if he knows it’s from me.
He’s lazy like the others. D
He is unchangeable like the others. He was born this way. God said.
Well, so much the better, the devil said. I’ll take the deal. If he wears this, I’m gone.
For the sake of clarity, God said: If he puts this on, as a sign of my love for him, and wears it
as a clear indication of our love, believing it is from me—then you are banished—Until the time
he is wiped from the collective consciousness of Mankind…If he refuses it…
Then he has refused a gift from God, out of fear. And that is the curse. D
So he’s cursed either way! G
 Ha. Without me, your Grand Great Exhalted All- Knowing Holiness, the Power and Glory
Forever and Ever, Always and Forever in your Altogether Everness, and All That. With me out
of the picture, with me eliminated, the curse is gone. Without the saint, there is no sanction. D
You call yourself a saint! G
I can call myself anything I want. And will. Kaah.
Deal? D
Deal. G
How will he know this ring is from me. God asked, without going up at the end of the
sentence.
Just so…the devil said. You just said it. I’ve been recording you all this time, I will use your
last six words, play it back to him and you’ll see…
He will reject that piece of tin. D
He will stick to his guns. D
He will use his, ahem, common sense. D
He won’t let you off so easy. D
He knows who he is, and supposedly, he knows who you are. And he knows what he wants. And
he knows he has to be strong, to get what he wants. Ha! And he knows what no means, he’s said
it before, and he’ll say it again—this time (he practically hissed the word ‘time.’). He’s a coward;
his strength is all show; a runt, a loser, afraid of being laughed at; a user. He wants only one
thing from you. The devil’s eyes pierced the sky surrounding them.
You’re too tricky for your own good, God said. He knows my voice; it’s his own! He trusts
me, not human trust, not three barrels to jump ‘trust.’ He understands I would not hurt him or let
him be tempted. He knows I would never lie to him. He knows I will never leave him—he has
sense…he knows a ring is impossible—It’s a no-trespass sign, that’s all it is. It can’t be
ownership. It can only be thoughtfulness, togetherness, a mere token of trust. My love for him is
very much deeper, you fool! You know nothing about love. You have no idea what he wants.
He’ll see it right away. Bonds of love don’t break. But that! G
I’m the fool? You have tempted him. You gambled on his love. You attempted to gain from
knowing him. You promised him a ring…knowing how he thinks, and what a ring means to him.
He says in a mimic of The Kid’s voice: And a ring is an unbroken promise; and a ring has no
beginning and no end; and a ring is pure…and the Shit begins laughing…. Puuure…perfect and
unknowable, and unbreakable, and… and…and… uninterruptible…and un-corruptible, and
symbolic. And by the way…when does my sentence end? and end? and end? Ah Ha ha ha ha.
Thou Art Grand, tho art art grander. Ha Ha ha hahaha. And his broken laugher halts. The devil
looks down at the trinket in his hand, and thinks: This is soft as rubber, light as air. He couldn’t
bend it, because it was directly from God, but any fool could see how easily it would bend—even
The Kid. It probably rusts purple. He laughs at God. I will run that planet, what’s left of it. I
will own it, and you and everything you ever touch from now until the end of time! You’ll come
to doubt your watch, the time, the place, your very existence. By the time I’m finished, you
won’t know a gift from a curse. D
Get out! You sicken me. G
I sent a little insect on ahead to improve the odds, the Darkness said, as if he were the
originator of anything.

Back on Planet Earth, Billy slept, and dreamed of sex and a ring. The day was like 15,000
days previous to this one, except for his dreams—and God.
Now days, he was dreamily searching his wits for a ring. He had found rings of white metal
from the new porch roof, laying on the ground. He had taken a gold ring from a drawer, and tried
it on every finger, and two or three toes. There were rings all over his house of one kind or
another. But none fit or felt right.
 Billy was afraid God would leave his mind. Abandon him to his own thoughts…that he would
forget that time, and never learn another thing, or spend another peaceful day, or pass another
quiet night.
Billy lived in a time where everything was described in terms of ownership: reason,
responsibility, care, emotional contractility, atonement, just about everything, especially
ownership, which was so hopped-up as to be laughable. He had no use for it, he had never had,
he was interested in souvenirs. He never gave much thought to where he’d put them, they were
meant to be stumbled upon as if by accident.
Billy had all the time in the world—except he was human—he wouldn’t make it alone. His
love might just die. He had seen it happen to others— it could happen, one loss too many, one
final straw, and the ‘soul’ says goodbye before the heart dies. It doesn’t look like much fun.
He’d rather die than live like that. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done.

He, Billy, had searched his whole life, well since about seven or so, for God, and now he
found him, and he’d throw himself into hell for no good reason, and all he wanted was a sign.
Billy had been given, easily three hundred signs—But he wanted a damn ring!

Billy had learned that when he felt disconnected from peace and communion and himself—to
clean-up, or be kind. Billy hated to clean, so he tried to stop making messes, but that was a waste
of time. Putting God in charge of cleaning was useless and defeated the whole purpose, so Billy
was kind. He got some funny looks, but he never felt better. He could do this, he really could.
There was only one thing…

He had no idea how.

One day, it was four, the fourth Tuesday in May, Billy was making a present for a friend. And
he was looking for something he thought he could find in a drawer. Since he saves tons of useful
stuff like…you know, stuff: Microphone parts, antique sound transmission equipment, DNA,
hand-held magnifiers of great power, optics, buttons, medals, coins, seashells, stones, ancient
writing implements, that sort of thing. And he came upon the bracelet, God said, it is for you.
Well, he said, “No it is from me,” which is the same thing. Billy thought it looked kind of gay, so
he put it on his left wrist, checked in the back of the drawer for the string, or the button, couldn’t
find what he was looking for, left the drawer half open, and went to another drawer.

The devil’s jaw dropped. He screamed, That’s not a ring you asshole!! He turned red and
shrieked, You are an idiot! Take it off, it’s tin, it’ll rust. He began, at first, to pull at himself.
You petty, paltry, putrid…shit head…It’s not even contiguous! How stupid can you be? That’s
cursed! I cursed it myself! Take it off, it makes you look queer! You queer! You don’t wear
jewelry! You’ll be wearing dresses next! He began to tear at his chest. ASS! He hissed as
though he were telling someone something they had to do, and be quick about it. Then there was
a sound I never heard—a gurgle. It reproached. It stood back from fear, in fear, with fear. It
looked closely. It sat in silent sorrow and It knelt inside. You! Here!

Billy thought: I don’t know what this metal is. I hope it doesn’t rust. Then he sat down and
admired it in the light. The ends of the bracelet matched up with the two holes the spider or
whatever, placed in the underside of his left arm, a day or so ago—near where the bracelet would
ride. Looked different. His left arm matched his right arm except the corresponding spider bites,
in his right arm, also seven centimeters from his wrist, but arranged inferior-superior instead of
medial-lateral—looked like another sign. Opposites, put there on purpose. Good, Billy thought.
I’ll check it out with my magnifier, as soon as I get this present finished.
God chuckled. Billy smiled.
 Some ring. Billy said, half out loud. He thought to himself: I think I stole it from somewhere
or found it on the sand, or maybe someone left it here. Looks good tho. I hope it doesn’t rust.
Thanks. He held up his left arm, and said to himself silently: I’ll wear it and know it’s from
you…but it’s not a ring. And my name is not “No.”

The devil said, That stupid gay Son of yours…If he takes it off to show people, and allows
them to measure his love, or tells them he just found it, or he doesn’t know anything about it—
That is a pure denial!
What! God said, Double or nothing! Get the fuck out! Get the fuck out right now!
The devil’s last words were: Your son’s an idiot. How does that make you feel?
His first father thought that once too, God said. But right before he died, he stood right about
where you’re standing, and he rescued him. I’m his father now.

Billy thought there was something quite magical about the horseshoe shaped bracelet, as tho
he had heard of such a thing, or read about such a thing somewhere. People once believed that a
similar device could be used to communicate with God. Research brought him no further to any
conclusion. The only thing God said was, Don’t forget, in those days, a cubit was whatever the
king said it was. And that’s what a cubit is.
Oh.
An odd thing happened with the bracelet. It began to help Billy. It was light and bendable, it
began to take the shape of his wrist. Billy began to protect himself from activities that might
injure the bracelet, because he wouldn’t take it off. It’s delicacy protected his often injured,
fragile back, and taught him to pace himself. Yes, God told him the story. One day the bracelet
was indelibly marked when he cut the roses back away from the sidewalk. If it were stolen he
would buy another piece of tin, maybe he’d buy a silver bracelet to replace it. This one would be
his, no matter who wore it, and it would be known only to him by its markings, markings that
wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. Like Billy, the bracelet was symbolic and only to the
slightest degree real.

The Destruction of the Devil part 1

Billy was “obedient,” “human,” and never raised a finger to God except to say No. As a
child, Billy was stared at. At first he felt special, then he looked behind him to see who they were
staring at, then he felt lucky, then he checked his teeth for spinach (found some), then he felt
perplexed, and tried to remember how he got there, then he wondered what they wanted, then he
wondered how to give it to them, then insecure, then hansom, then angry, then he just figured
they were crazy.
Billy couldn’t understand how people could not-hear God, and he couldn’t understand how
they couldn’t tell God from the devil. God would say who he was, God would never force you to
make a deal without making sure you were fully, freely informed before you consented, and he
took No for an answer, because he knew that you lived in a world of humans––He created it. He
would never come between you and a loved one. He understands that telling the truth, and
cleaning up are the same, and also that they both have consequences. He knows you can
sometimes get soap in your ear, and if you forget to bring a towel with you, you have to ask for
one, or you have to dry off with your own clothes.
The devil lies and gives nothing. He’ll trick you at every turn, and when he speaks of love, it
is with a sneer, or a mischievous grin. The devil is like a cyclone in a dream. An invisible wind
that stays in one place and roars slowly, as if at very high speed. His smell doesn’t drift, and he’s
frightening, ferocious and unknowable. He could not speak of love as tho he knew it—he
doesn’t. If you walk into him you will never be heard from again. He is like death.

Billy didn’t understand why exactly he had to be in prison, but once it was explained, he
decided to obey, and not go thru that explanation again. God’s will was like sexuality —it was
not a choice a sane man or woman would make, it was not a this or that choice, it was an
everything else, non-human, third, real choice, that was also non-real and symbolic—overly
human—slightly crazy.

Billy found children annoying because they could see right thru him, they would stare
continually. They would reach out to touch him, or run away and cry, and it was always his fault
when they fell out of their carriages or bumped head-first into walls.
When Billy joined Earth to Heaven, within one minute, a bird flew into his front window as if
it weren’t there, as if the window weren’t closed, as if the window wasn’t always closed, as if the
blinds weren’t drawn, as if the bird had never seen it. Within two minutes, the postman delivered
a postcard from Clarke, with a picture of the Blue Heaven Temple in Beijing. And within three
minutes, Billy walked to the front yard and found a black crow feather at his feet. It was noticed;
approved by some, disapproved by others.
It was all very clear to Billy. He had had a pet crow as a boy. At 16, he watched the crow fly
away. He’d stopped clipping its wings. It was time. Billy had watched his Work fly away also.
Three days later he saw a large crow flying above the trees, and he wondered if his Work would
come back one day, and it did. Unchanged, yet transformed completely. Billy kept quiet. The
crow had a name before he got it. Billy’d wanted it to speak somehow, so he re-named it
symbolically—Echo—maybe it would talk to him.
Some had the audacity to ask him why he didn’t just move Heaven to Earth. Why the other
way ‘round? Billy said, Simple—like Muhammed. After three days of trying to bring the
mountain to him, thru enormous faith, he just decided instead to go to the mountain. Same thing.
Heaven is very very large. You have no idea.

Billy was asked to cure a series of anomalies, which he did, unfortunately, the people who
brought the anomalies to him didn’t notice, and became disquieted.
He took a blind child from her mother into a room alone. The mother was in a panic because
Billy said he would kiss the child where it hurt, and then disappeared with the kid. Unless the
child needs to go to the emergency room, you just kiss it where it hurts.
She didn’t know where Billy was going to kiss her child, or why she had to be separated; she
became very suspicious. For some reason people were led to believe that gay men are all the
same—played dress-up constantly, had sex in toilets, and liked to touch children’s genitals at
various times thru-out the day—to startle. That’s pure fiction. Does that make any sense…who
dresses up to attract suitors and repulse victims simul -taneously while working out some inner
pathology before an audience of your own fans, their own flies, in notoriously bad lighting? Even
I won’t touch the question of children having sex with children. How can it be mutual, or
consenting—they parallel play?
The child had been born blind. He kissed the child on her soul, because that’s where it hurt.
He gave her back to her mother with faith, but in those days, there was no such thing. Her mother
waved her hand in front of the child’s face, and the child felt the breeze of doubt and regret as she
had so often in her young life, and began to cry. Her mother continued to take her from place to
place to place trying to get someone to fix her.
He gave the mother faith, at the same time he returned the child safely to her. It should be
enough for her to know that her child would not be taken away or destroyed for being different.
The girl’s mother saw no gift in the child, didn’t believe it was possible to heal spontaneously,
took her child, and walked away without the faith. Hills just stayed hills.
 Billy couldn’t heal thru faith, or belief, or blessing, or anointing, by saying those words.
Those words had been ruined thru various acts of tithing, forced obedience, invidious persuasion,
and unprincipled indoctrination techniques. There is nothing to do. The body was made to heal
itself. Faith and belief have always been available; they have always been free; and they have
always worked. A blessing is a benefit you gain thru association. Anointing is done to heighten
that. But you already knew that.
A man came up to him, and asked Billy to cure him. Billy said if he could cure the world of
cancer by blowing in people’s faces, he would do it. If talking to you about carcinogens, and
cancer treatment would work better, he would do that, and save his breath.
A woman came up and demanded Billy cure her of AIDS. He said if he could teach her to use
condoms he would have—she didn’t understand.
This is killing me, she said.
Your soul won’t die, your body will. Why don’t you see a doctor?
They tell me the same thing. Make it go away, she said.
I have, he said. Look to the truth of what I say.
You’re a bullshit artist, she said. and a fraud. I wish you had this disease—you wouldn’t be
so self-satisfied and smug.
Speak the truth, as you know it, he said, and keep going—you’ll be fine.
She threw an empty bottle at Billy and he caught it—and he kept it—and used it to symbolize
the self: transparent, hard headed, cheap, and in dire need of being filled with a purpose of its
own choosing. Billy was human, and needed little reminders around. So he put the bottle on a
shelf in his cell. Unprofitable as it may seem, Billy kept only what was thrown at him—
metaphorically, anonymously, symbolically, thrown at him.
A man came to him, and asked Billy to wave his hand over him, and give him a titanium
skull—to protect him from the escalating violence in his neighborhood. In many places people
are cutting each other, and in other places people are cutting themselves. “Yes, I know, could
you please hurry?” Billy stood as tall as he could, lowered his voice to a pleasing octave and
said, “Your head will break against a bat, your heart may tire of pumping, you, like your mind,
are a container. You should ask for a kinder neighbor or a bigger heart. That’s something I can
give you.”
Titanium is beyond me, of course. It doesn’t work that way. It never did.

Billy was in prison, and was only able to get out to use the exercise yard. He told all the other
inmates who kept pestering him, and couldn’t understand his crime, the same thing: Stop this
fighting once and for all, do what I tell you, clean up, stop this blameless breeding, start
apologizing, and you can start by apologizing to me—if there’s no other face to face.
Billy was ‘apology,’ waiting to happen, just as his so-called older self, had always been ‘no-
room-for-you-here,’ waiting to happen. Billy still wondered about the prison, and asked God if it
was possible to stage a prison-break every once in a while.
God said doing it on a stage probably wouldn’t work, and why didn’t he just disguise himself
with these clothes. God handed him some clothes, and showed him how to use them. He told
Billy to keep the prison breaks to a minimum. If he were caught, it would add years to his
sentence. Billy took the clothes and found they worked like a charm. The clothes everyone saw
as dysfunctional, whatever that means, worked perfectly; he used them, and no one ever
suspected. He found himself able to walk in the real world.
The other inmates would swear he wasn’t in prison. They told him in no uncertain terms, that
no one can put you in prison for being God’s Son, Lover, Heir and/or Life Partner, especially if
you’re pregnant, but Billy assured them that it was possible.
He used to say, “There are a lot of places I’d like to go, and a lot of things I’d like to see and
do, but I can’t, I’m here with you.” They tired of Billy in about two months. And went on about
their business of wishing they were somewhere else.
 People asked Billy a series of stupid questions they already knew the answers to, and insisted
he partake in some big deal marathon-like debate series on Television. They baited him, and he
felt annoyed. Billy was jaded as regards celebrity, and loved to say No to politicians, soap-opera
stars, sweeps-week street-walkers, and talented amateurs.
They tried to explain how this would help his rating, whatever that was, but he couldn’t
understand. He understood text messaging, the Kreb cycle, cellular respiration, and dancing to
the beat, but he couldn’t comprehend how a rating would add believability. He just as soon they
didn’t believe, most of them looked like trouble. Besides, it wouldn’t shorten his sentence, and
prisoners weren’t allowed out, to explain how they got there, because they were notorious cheats,
liars and thieves, and would doubtless escape at the first opportunity to continue their life of
crime, un-heeded, regardless of what they said. Billy was not born yesterday, and neither was the
warden.

Billy had had many bodyguards growing up, in Boise, Lenape Grove, Hong Kong, and other
places, but now that he didn’t weigh 25 pounds, and wasn’t in school, he didn’t need them, tho he
appreciated people’s help, and loved them for it—it was not necessary till he asked.
He was not meant to live forever. He had become symbolic, and that was enough. People felt
relieved to see him, and felt secure and happy that he was around, and that was enough. It was a
great feeling for Billy too, to be loved. He wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world. His life
had become unexpected and wonderful. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing ever does. Billy’s days
of martyrdom were over. No one wanted a statue of him that didn’t have one already. No one
believed in The Becoming, they all thought he was born 2000 years ago, not somewhere around
February 2002.

Billy’s bodyguards were all old, old men, old women or 40+ ex-convicts. The convicts knew
how to get things done, and were afraid of old people. The old people amused everyone—They
always showed up on time; complained loudly about people that mumble, and refused to turn on
their hearing aids. They missed a lot, but the convicts didn’t. People were chosen for what they
add. Not how they add.

Retirees
I will go. I shall go. We will see what the end is going to be—Maya Angelou. From the Spiritual Song: I open my
mouth.

It so happened that many older people wanted to be useful, wanted to feel needed, and were
not the least bit afraid of death. Billy had originally said, No one younger than 60. But he had
lines of people standing around trying to look 60. So he raised it to 70, then 80, and was thinking
seriously of raising the minimum age to 90. They did practically nothing, unless you call glaring
at people, that remind you of any one of a thousand other people you’ve met in your lifetime,
something.
He understood that many older people had spent their lives selling insurance policies that were
not what they were cracked up to be. But that was how it was done—that’s just the way it was
back then. Unfortunately, many also bought insurance policies that had less than substantial
surety. Insufficient funds to back up their promises. This was an unequivocal conclusion many
had reached years ago. A lot of things can be undone—taken back, with little more than an
apology. Just as a lot of things can be given back if they were stolen. But that takes time, and
wisdom. Logistics has nothing to do with it.
 Basically, they hung around outside the perimeter marked by the trees, did nothing, and had to
be reprimanded for calling the cops when people threw bottles and trash at Billy’s house as they
sped by, instead of just cleaning it up.
The convicts taught them how to use cell phones, where to get those cement, toss-and-run-
proof barricades, the posts, and where to place them—High→Price, Why→Flow, Wood→Green,
left over clover, then back up on High, and across, in a square. Do it incrementally. Hire city
planners, and get some horse-drawn carriages to show people around this 19th century town, and
trains to shuttle them to and from their parking lots.
Oh, why didn’t I think of that? They’re smart, strong, respectful, grateful, and self-conscious
of their deficiencies. Maybe I do belong in prison? I checked it out; but the formerly arrested,
tried, and punished, left out Hands altogether, I don’t know why they didn’t think that was
important, it’s a short street, but they all count. Ex-cons think small, but I think that about
everyone. It’s important to prevent the anonymous, simple, drive-by shooting and torching. You
cannot prevent, that is, it would be onerous and needlessly intrusive to prevent someone from
blowing themselves-up in my yard. However, that requires planning, which means thinking, and
that would buy me time.
There was nearly a riot when one of the ex-felons brought in a box of cell phones—all hot. I
made her return them, and sent an old librarian with her to make sure she did it. The younger
woman refused to return them while the librarian was watching. The librarian refused to turn her
back. So, I made the librarian wear shades. And made the ex-felon refer to each phone by its
serial number. By the time they were done, the woman who murdered her abusive husband
wouldn’t do anything without the librarian’s permission. It was a riot. The whole thing was a
riot. All of it was a riot. The librarian was jealous—turns out, she’d always wanted a husband—
to murder, I think.
If they were angry, he’d play one against the other. If they were dissatisfied, he’d say,
Separate! Often they wouldn’t. The louder he said it…well….turns out, there’s no such thing as
too much love, only too much work; so it goes; many thought freedom was easy.
No one who was with Billy died—ever. Billy never walked in front of understanding, and he
almost never brought it out in the open—to show. Billy had it in his pocket. He offered it. It
wasn’t reward and punishment time; they weren’t Pavlov’s dog or Skinner’s box. Billy just
wanted people to see him—that he was here—while he was.
Mail Readers had to be at least 80 years old, and needed a military background, not because
they were dispensable in this new world, not because they saw virtue in putting themselves
directly in harm’s way, or because they were less innocent than everyone else, or because they
would be dressed and ready when needed, or even because they would be reading stuff that would
make a sailor blush, but because they knew it had to be done. This was the good guys against the
bad guys. And this time it was truly noble— honorable, and good, good…besides, who better,
than those who felt compelled?
Billy had grown up with bodyguards, and censors. And all this turmoil was comforting to
him. The fist fights, .22 caliber ‘Devastator’ bullets, and anthrax letters, all reminded him of his
protected childhood—Going from town to town, and having strangers jump in at a moment’s
notice. He thought he understood it, but he didn’t: When he was five they stepped in to protect
him, because he was so very small. They censored their jokes when he was fourteen, because he
was so innocent, looking. When the boys fought, it fed his female side; he loved it, and never
stopped a fair fight. When the girls blushed, and giggled, it fed his masculine side and drew him
in, to find out what he was missing. He realized that in countless ways they kept him a child. He
was able to grow, to learn, to discover, to understand, in a place that was safe for him, built by
children for another child who was, in many ways not like them. Billy tried to understand; he
strained to understand, but he couldn’t. He was back where he started. Nothing had changed.
Billy never discussed bodyguarding with the bodyguards, or censorship, with the censors. He
didn’t know their secrets, and he couldn’t possibly protect his own body—that’d be like using a
feather to put out a fire. These days mostly, he just said, “I’m over here now.” Apparently, he
was becoming invisible.
The only thing he told his bodyguards was that the way to keep transgressors to the bare
minimum is to short-circuit their electricl systems, strip off their clothes, and set them free. The
photo-takers can handle it from there. If there aren’t any, call the cops. If there’s a rabid dog—
shoot it.
Billy never hired anyone, never had—never had to—except the lawn guy, of course. He sort
of hired Food Tasters, and that was remarked on by many: The Post Office rented glass
chromatographs, spectrometers, and electroscopic something or others, and put them next to the
x-ray machines, microwave inhibitors, and bomb sniffing dogs in a dilapidated building across
the parking lot to cover their ass. Billy suggested employing 30 year olds to work the
technology—to be his ‘food tasters’—knowing, much would be wine. Billy’s prejudice that 30
year olds know how to deal with technology better than most, and the fact that they can now see
how everything can be divided up into sharp little lines and imperceptible blips, made them
natural candidates—plus, they loved wine, and slowly prepared foods, and if they drop dead, they
drop dead happy, as they should—knowing life will go on. 40 year olds are wiser, and can buy
their own wine.
Once, when an iffy bottle of domestic wine got thru, Billy dropped in unexpectedly on the so-
called ‘Foo Foo Food-taster Unit.’ Suddenly, when his life’s in constant danger, everyone gets
funny. Apparently, some 30-somethings use wine tasting as nothing more than an excuse to get
looped, and dont realize that complicated technicl equipment cant be run drunk. Billy was
scandalized, stayed for to hours, and left in a Huff or maybe it was a Royal fit. Anyway, it had
poor traction and worn brakes…No wonder everyone hates them! How old do you haf to be to
realize people depend on you?? Some 30 somethings were relocated to the ‘Re Re Returns Unit,’
where a return to sender stamp ment nothing unless you followed every rule—in triplicate, dotted
i’s crossed t’s, ‘n’ all.
Billy walked the dog, because he couldn’t afford walkers. Even with his bodyguards, he was
confronted often, by men and women whose anger overwhelmed them. He believed it was his
subtractive quality that insulted them, as it always had. Perhaps, perhaps not. They trailed
behind, and from across the street, glared. He confronted some, but not all, this way: I want you
to help me…will you? Maybe they were surprised at the question that they heard as a question.
Maybe they were afraid he’d take something from them. The question was simple-minded, and
many laughed. Billy wanted Peace, not derision—But who doesn’t? Billy read the newspaper
articles, like: Pariah-Messiah. They exhorted people to violence against him, as if this one act
could stave off a future of violence, when it was bound to be seen only as a herald of greater
violence. Man is not violent by nature, he is violent by the ignorance of others: “I don’t have any
food, time, love, money, strength, school, skill, understanding, voice, clean water, peace or place
in this world …AND YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT!” Truth is: it kept Billy walking. The bad
times made him want things to be over—the sooner the better. The good times made him want to
linger. Either way he’d stay as long as he could. If it were up to him, people would smile at
themselves every day, maybe laugh once in a while. No one ever sees Billy’s desire to help. To
him it was like dealing with children: they absorb things so quickly, no credit is ever given to the
thing they come to understand slowly over time—that—they believe, came by grace—luck—a
kind of piercing: good for only as long as it’s pretty, and yet so easily removed. Tho it’s not.
There’s a very thin line between explaining things openly and honestly, and calling someone
stupid. Anyway, many also saw him as just a guy with no ulterior motives, comedic. It’s up to
you if you laugh. As if trying were nothing. How hard is it to see yourself? There was no
answer to his own question. The question he asked over and over: Will you help me? He
couldn’t say: Go away—they’d stay. He couldn’t say: I love you this way—they were out of
their minds. He walked, and hoped they would see in his gait, a friendliness, an ambivalence to
their fear. He allowed them to hate him. As always. And they stopped when desire met
pleasure. Hi. Who are you? They knew, and he knew, that he wouldn’t remember their name,
but maybe he would. “I’m not very tough—without the people around me, I’m practically
nothing. Maybe I am……..” What do you think? Billy left open—the escape thru time.

Billy didn’t believe in the genuine response. It was foolish, and always most foolish when he
felt most wise. If an angry man wanted a genuine response—that could be anything! If he didn’t
get anger back, but instead got the works for making his own anger anew, for multiplying it as
much as he wanted, he’d explode: You’re a fake! A liar! You’re afraid! I’m like everyone you
ever met: I’m afraid when I’m afraid. It sounds crazy, but you forget my history—if I were
always honest right to the teeth, I’d be dead. Renewing your own anger by yourself is like
masturbation—You’ll get off eventually. Billy made so many people angry. They exploded, and
came quietly back together better.
Billy didn’t believe in separating the old from the young. It was against his re… re…re…his
capacity to see progress thru life.
It was a while before it was safe to have young people around, even inside the house. Billy
would never never put the young in danger, or use a child as a shield, no matter what. That
would be degenerate. Yet, all life is dangerous. Billy believed in the maximum freedom and the
maximum self-determination possible. Billy knew when it was safe, because he read the signs,
even tho he needed reminding.
Recruiting the Reminders was harder. He knew that curiosity and conscientiousness, were the
keys to success in almost any endeavor, but he was so impressed by competence and intelligence,
he frequently chose those—that was a problem. He needed youthful kids to work the internet,
help him with the phones, remember appointments, run errands, and remind him what he was
talking about before he digressed, or right away afterwards. Billy had always been very curious
about the world, and still had a lot of questions.
Some of the Reminders did research and wrote reports. For example, if Billy wanted to know
how the expression, Fear The Lord, translates into modern usage. A Reminder could look it up
and report back that it means: ‘Remain observant of the world around you.’ That could be useful
to know. Plus, Billy needed a new roof and wanted to keep abreast of scientific developments
toward the invention of the Solar-thermal Shingle. In particular, the power and shade producing,
‘Nevada’ shingle thing. Stuff like that.
When people tried to stump Billy, the assigned reminder would help keep him focused.
Ironically, some of the kids were the main reason he was not focused in the first place, but such is
life. The thing that’s most distracting is often the thing that keeps you most focused. So be it. I
think it’s their bright smiles, pink cheeks, and thin waists.
Anyway, they were like one big happy family. Everyone felt useful, no one got paid, the work
was done in four-hour increments, people complained to hear themselves complain, and many
had to be told when it was time to go home, or go to sleep.
When things calmed down, Billy employed people to do odd jobs around the house; clean,
paint, do yard work. All the stuff Billy hated.
Billy came up with a cure for intractable constipation. Just put an 83 year old man in charge
of the scheduling for fifteen twenty-two year olds, a forty-year old, and seven thirty-somethings.
Billy also came-up with a cure for erectile dysfunction. Put the sufferer in charge of teaching
two twenty-six year olds how to make an old-fashioned breakfast, including coffee—exactly the
way he likes it. You could tell the old men were ‘getting-off,’ because they cared less and less
about the coffee. And more and more about getting the kids to work on time.
The older women would blossom similarly when they got a chance to train the younger ones.
At first they were aghast at how little the kids knew. They would just stare at them. And
complain that it was an impossible task—couldn’t they just dig a barbecue pit instead? When
they got ‘into it,’ they would see the problem. Lassitude. They would become wildly practical,
even demanding, giggly at times, and frequently yell: Just do it more! There, like that. Just like
that. Yes. Oh, God yes. Now you’ve got it! See, was that so hard?
Back problems disappeared. Stooping was outlawed. Solutions abounded. People sort of
adopted one another. People who had absolutely no sexual interest in one another, found friends.
It was very nice. Pets were allowed. Cats ruled. Nothing changed.

Alone in prison
Billy had a superstition that if you want something not to happen, you prepare for its
eventuality. Conversely, if you want something to continue, ignore it, appreciate it lightly, and
dubiously. In other words, take it for granted as much as humanly possible.
He was extremely well prepared, took things lightly and then ignored them. One of his
favorite stories, the one he would tell the other hoods, was about the time he escaped into a sea of
Mormons, while he was wearing the ‘dysfunctional’ clothes God gave him.
He looked like a Mormon. It wasn’t until they smelled coffee on his breath that he had to
quicken the pace, but by then he was far enough away from ‘the big house.’ He, and two or three
like-minded young mormans ducked into an alley, smoked cigarettes and told funny stories until
a gaggle of protesters showed up, out of nowhere, and that was Billy’s cue to go home. He
jumped into the protesting crowd, as it headed toward that half-a house—realizing they were up
in arms about the length of his sentence. This was not what their taxes should be going for! Why
can’t something be done? Whatever happened to capital punishment? People assumed Billy
wasn’t paying his taxes. Billy didn’t have the heart to explain that when his money was gone his
sentence was over. The crowd was rolling toward his home slash prison. He fit into the mob
very well—they welcomed converts, of course, and Billy held up a sign that implied he was a
creep. When some of his fellows began to look at him suspiciously, he exchanged his limp sign
for one that said he was a pig, and a rotten cocksucker. That mollified them long enough for him
to get back to his house un-noticed. Billy looked earnest, and a bit ‘mussed,’ he believed in force,
but only when it suited him, so he fit in almost anywhere. He was so human it was scary. Two
women walked down the street, chatting amiably, carrying a banner: “How can 5,000 people be
wrong?” wasn’t till they drifted apart that Billy saw the other 6 zeros.

When he was tapped by God, many of his earlier memories came back to him, not changed,
but stretched, completed. He remembered being attacked once. This was years ago. The man
came bounding toward him across a field, running as fast as he could. Billy saw no weapon. The
man who was trying to kill him or hurt him, stopped dead in his tracks when Billy made a strange
sound, one he has never heard before or since, a choking-like sound. The man heard it too, and
stared at Billy’s face—not one meter away. Then he took off, back across the field and into a
truck. In time, Billy realized the man got what he wanted. He stopped when he got what he
wanted. He wanted to hear a strange and desperate choking sound. Billy was 18, he couldn’t
have known that then. The man was 25. He was as unable to continue running, as Billy was
unable to move. He had thick glasses. He was turned around by the sound, and by Billy’s look
of dismay.
Over the years, Billy struggled to comprehend the sound, and to discover why this man would
want that. The man began to loose his sight as Billy’s face began to occupy his mind. He began
to hear ringing in his ears as Billy’s sound moved deeper into his being, and became worrisome.
He didn’t see a doctor, because he didn’t know what psychiatrists know: That they have a duty to
protect the patient’s privacy; that it out- weighs other duties; that the things that people confess
to, and bring-up as ‘the problem’ are often made up to test them, to determine if this is a safe
place for the truth, the real truth, to be said.
Telling the truth is a start; punishment, an end. Separating people who can’t be together is
fine, but let them know they can’t be together because they are too similar. Hate comes from
that, and then moves—drifts. The man died in an indescribably horrible way. The only person
who knew the truth was right there, in his head, the whole time (18 year-old Billy). He could
have apologized, asked for forgiveness, and turned himself over, but he never did. Many, who
struck-out-after Billy died…another mystery.
Billy remembered. It began coming back to him. His life could only be understood backward.
From the ending, which Billy already knew. If your life doesn’t have an ending, a plausible
ending will do.

Take a break
Billy and Paris played a game in the store, it went like this:
Paris: I would like to buy a car.
Billy: We have no cars.
P: What are those?
B: they are symbolic representations of the self—the beauty and majesty of Being.
P: I’d like a red one with a sunroof.
B I’m not a salesman, and we have no cars.
P I suppose you’re not sitting at a shiny gray-green desk, in a metal chair, in a car dealership with
your name on it, shuffling paper into piles.
B There is no dealership, no cars, the desk is 19th century walnut, and the paper is my business.
P I want that one, He says, pointing to a very nice Dodge Slowdown.
B That’s one of the few that’s not ready yet.
P That’s the one I want. Can I have it in blue?
B No.
P They look like cars.
B They’re meant to, but they’re metaphors.
P Give me two then, metaphors come in twos.
B That’s ridiculous, they come in threes.
P Well then, what’s that? He says, pointing now to an elevated platform in the middle of the lot
with two different cars on it, side by side, one green the other red, one facing east the other west,
identical in every other way, turning slowly.
B Those are not cars at all. That is a symbolic representation of the relationship of the soul to the
self.
P I especially like the fast one.
B They don’t have speeds. They sit there and spin slowly—pretty nice attention-getter?
P You don’t sell them?
B Of course, you mean do I change the look of the display? Of course.
P Well, sell me the green one.
B They’re identical in every way. You see any two things side by side as if they were different,
then as opposites. Just because they’re noticeable as distinct, you think they’re in opposition. It’s
an illusion. One’s manufactured the same as the other is. Look there, and there. One’s made in
Ohio, the other in Tokyo. They’re the same in every respect.
P Do you like the red or the green, Maxine? Paris always invents an imaginary wife with an odd
name, when we play this game.
B They’re still the same. Maxine looks out over the lot, and wonders how she ever got involved
in this nonsense. They look very similar to her, but who’s to say? Red and green don’t go
together. That’s why she wears what she wears, and lets Paris do the negotiating.
P One has to be better than the other.
B That’s what you think. The only difference is there’s only one soul.
P That’s the one I want.
B What if I said they’re a pair?
P I’m not buying two cars. One good, and one crappy. Or three!
B What if I told you the truth?
P Try me.
B There are no cars on this lot. That is a display, the likes of which you will never see again.
P I’d like a test drive.
B You want the one with the most power.
P No, I want the one that falls apart after 100,000 kilometers.
B Is that sarcasm?
P I can’t answer that. Let’s go Maxine, this place is for losers. I’ll keep the car I have.
B You don’t see anything you like?
P I want that special one, the one of a kind one.
B No you don’t, they come in pairs.
P How about that one? He says pointing to a red 1947 Delahaye.
B That’s mine.
P A self or soul?
B A self around me, and a soul everywhere else, and then we switch.
P Sounds odd. You don’t look like you go together.
B Funny you say that—we’re opposites.

During The Becoming

Billy hid behind a plausible representation of, well…God.
He felt more like himself than ever, but behaved like ‘God.’
He worked, and lounged, and looked for agreement—an end to doubt and argument.
He ate noodle surprise with smoked oysters, knowing that, like Belief, it could kill him.
He thought, endlessly about everything, loved it, and dreamed.

Consider:
How dare he lower the esteem of working people by working out some inner conflict so publicly and not naming names—me

I was sitting in the backyard and got a shockingly clear image of a man, a black man, behind a
tree with a look of terror, as tho he were in flight, trying to hide. I get input now, all the time.
Ideas abound, some are inklings—that’s not new. People and things are always coming up to me
from no where. It happened the other day. It’s always very brief. This one made me stop and
rewind…zip zu-uup.
I don’t remember what God and I were talking about at the time, or whether I was reading or
looking at the birds. I believe I was thinking about boundlessness. I recall looking at the oracle’s
roof line, then one of the trees in my backyard. Not the tree I saw in my mind, a much younger
tree. I re-wound the ‘tape.’ I saw in my mind a very old, rumpled tree, and saw the man even
clearer, he was breathing hard. I re-wound again, he looked. I re-wound again, I said hello. I re-
wound the tape again, he moved very slightly and said hello, very unclearly. I re-wound the tape
again, and asked him what was happening, and he began to tell me. I re-wound the tape again,
and he told me his name was ‘Delber,’ he couldn’t spell it. He thought I was God. We met, I
liked him, he taught me a great deal, none of it in words. All the words are mine all the thoughts
are his.
There are a myriad of things and non-things around us all the time. I ignore most of these,
whatever they are. Like in a library, you don’t just go after every book. Most of them (if there
are others), don’t introduce themselves—they have no idea where they are or what anything
really is, mostly they’re frightened, much more frightened of me than I am of them. Time passes
but not between us. They spend no time here, I have to rewind and rewind and rewind. It’s odd
that they are available fully, but only from that split second of ‘contact,’ if that’s what you want
to call it. One came all the way in the other day. That’s all I can say for sure, he paused in the
center hall, and then left. An hour later I read this on the internet, it described perfectly,
something I had no words for; it’s a great description of the white sound: Ezekiel 3:13. The noise
of the wings of the living creatures striking one against another, and the noise of the wheels following the living
creatures, and the noise of a great commotion.

The Book of Enoch, Chapter 14: 8-25 The Break-in:

... And the vision was shown to me thus: Behold, in the vision, clouds invited me and a mist
summoned me, and the course of the stars and the lightnings sped and hastened me, and the winds
in the vision caused me to fly and lifted me upward, and bore me into Heaven. And I went in till I
drew nigh to a wall which is built of crystals and surrounded by tongues of fire: and it began to
affright me. And I went into the tongues of fire and drew nigh to a large house which was built of
crystals: and the walls of the house were like a tessellated floor (made) of crystals, and its
groundwork was of crystal. Its ceiling was like the path of the stars and the lightnings, and
between them were fiery cherubim, and their heaven was (clear as) water. A flaming fire
surrounded the walls, and its portals blazed with fire. And I entered into that house, and it was hot
as fire and cold as ice: there were no delights of life therein: fear covered me, and trembling got
hold upon me. And as I quaked and trembled, I fell upon my face. And I beheld a vision, And lo!
there was a second house, greater than the former, and the entire portal stood open before me, and
it was built of flames of fire. And in every respect it so excelled in splendour and magnificence
and extent that I cannot describe to you its splendour and its extent. And its floor was of fire, and
above it were lightnings and the path of the stars, and its ceiling also was flaming fire. And I
looked and saw therein a lofty throne: its appearance was as crystal, and the wheels thereof as the
shining sun, and there was the vision of cherubim. And from underneath the throne came streams
of flaming fire so that I could not look thereon. And the Great Glory sat thereon, and His raiment
shone more brightly than the sun and was whiter than any snow. None of the angels could enter
and could behold His face by reason of the magnificence and glory and no flesh could behold
Him. The flaming fire was round about Him, and a great fire stood before Him, and none around
could draw nigh Him: ten thousand times ten thousand (stood) before Him, yet He needed no
counselor. And the most holy ones who were nigh to Him did not leave by night nor depart from
Him. And until then I had been prostrate on my face, trembling: and the Lord called me with His
own mouth, and said to me: ' Come hither, Enoch, and hear my word.' And one of the holy ones
came to me and waked me, and He made me rise up and approach the door: and I bowed my face
downwards.

June of 4, The Becoming

These are extraordinary times. We leave CDs laying around, as if they couldn’t be injured. We
lay around as if we could never love a man, without being injured. Never. Never. Billy
discovered that when he was tapped by God he became beautiful, and something went zip,
backward, and he became aligned to the task and the station from that point in time, probably
November or March 03-04, and that The Becoming started there and went in two directions
mostly backward, but of course, as time proceeds—apparently forward. He lived it that way. In
other words he walked right into it. An odd thing happened before he was tapped—people began
to open doors for him; little children; women; men; teens; a Japanese women of about 70 opened
the door for him once, and he did what he always did, he said, Thank you, and tried not to act
flabbergasted or taken by surprise. He stopped checking his gait, he walked fine. There was no
foot dragging, no paralyzed arm, he was fine, and Thanks to God, and medical science, he had
recovered fully, almost miraculously. There was absolutely no reason for people to open doors
for him, but they did, more than a year before he spoke to God about anything but the most trivial
complaints, subtle fishing trips, and shortest lists. Almost miraculously, because he was still far
beyond normal, way past ‘regular-guy,’ totally in the realm of the weird, strange, impossible,
unnecessarily unbelievable, and non-sequential. Life was new and better, and it kept getting
better to an absurd degree. He passed thru the endless mind altering coincidences—past the
hunches that panned out; he was amazed at how much he could accomplish without injury, injury
to pride, or hand, or others. Known for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, he was, and felt
suddenly protected. A lot of know-it-all questions didn’t deserve answers, they deserved
questions. He noted the time that he transcended petty labels. He was beyond all of them in a
day. One day. All of them. He jumped hurdles he wouldn’t’ve even approached before. He had
been an atheist for a while, then a pantheist, and now that he was married to God, in a sort of
highly ritualized civil ceremony, he was fully agnostic. God’s response to Billy’s questions:
Where’ve you been, what’ve you been doing?—always made him roll his eyes—“everything and
nothing.” Who were you with?—“everyone and no one.” Oh, sure… What’s the point in
believing you have a husband, or whatever the bounds of this are, somewhere out there, when you
have the marriage certificate to prove it? You either are or aren’t who you say you are. He
always says he’s been doing nothing…Please. Believing never made anything true. It’s nice, but
not necessary. A person would have a better chance of proving Billy was crazy, than of ever
proving what Billy knew to be true—even pregnant, Billy knew that.
He was ready to take on the world. Billy could do it anyway he liked. That was the
miracle…in this new role, he was allowed to enjoy it, something he had never really allowed
himself to do before. God encouraged it.
This was important stuff, and he didn’t want to leave a mess behind or make messes that he
couldn’t clean up, so he listened differently. He spoke more to people, and stood up to very few.
He was beginning to realize his power—changing people would be a mistake. The change has to
come within them, to yell at people over the phone and plead for them to make something useful
of their lives could change them…but only if he allowed them, encouraged them to change from
their end, would it have any permanence. The expression: give them enough rope and they’ll
hang themselves, is appropriate here, except that he was not in the rope business, the hanging
business, or the handing-out trade. He wasn’t Swedish Fish either—they made him sick.
Confronting people all day is like standing up to a barking dog. Dogs bark, Billy was not
about to bark back. Billy was much more likely to speak even more quietly. Then they would
have to bark softer to hear him, if they wanted to hear him—and if they didn’t, then it didn’t
matter and he was wasting his breath. Dogs bark to be heard by their masters to be barking. Billy
had at least some mastery over unbridled fear. He respects people, loves people, and if Billy
confronted every single dog seeking lasting change and elevated status he would be essentially
stopped. Billy has to walk—if only the perimeter of his prison yard.
He was a void that people began to look into from the surface. Like a pond. He was
beginning to be recognized, and it shocked and startled him. Then he began to get a big kick out
of it, in part because it left them dumb. They couldn’t say ‘Hey aren’t you God?’ Or ‘Didn’t I
see your picture in my Grandmother’s kitchen?’ ‘You look vaguely familiar, were you in my
dreams when I was growing up?’ They looked at him with open faces, great sturdy quizzical
looks, and he would invariably smile. No one looked put-off, embarrassed for staring, or sure
about anything. No one even seemed to know why they were staring. He checked his zipper, but
not in front of them. He wore sun glasses, but not inside, and it didn’t matter anyway, they stared
at proximity. His nearness, not his clearness. Billy enjoyed catching the look that they would
remember, but didn’t know they would, or ever could. It was a bit…unprecedented and it was
enlightening. He loved it. But he had a job to do. They would have the option of seeing all this
as a possibility. He didn’t have that freedom, yet he had new-found depth. And he loved it.
Billy got a big kick out of being recognized. That lasted about five months, then it began to
bother him. What did they see? What did they think they saw? What were they looking at? If
Billy were not who he was, what he was, then what on earth could they make out of this—of him.
What were they saying to themselves? What was this? Billy would never have guessed that he
would tire of the attention. It wasn’t a bother—it made no sense. These completely
uninterpretable looks, were all the same. It carried in its openness and willingness and closeness,
no awareness—how could it? The hour was so long away. Billy decided finally to ignore it, and
stop ‘gating’ it. It continues to this day.

He stopped seeing his shrinks (2). There was no sense in going and not telling them the truth.
Yet, what was this? It was not a religious conversion. Billy hadn’t changed in any way. He
abhorred claims of purity. He had nothing to be saved from. He ran to his new role. He did not
denounce his former life, instead his former life went zip, and became a life well suited to the
appointed task, the role, the J-O-B. He was part real and part symbolic. He would never be a
clone, he was more alive, more multifarious, more profane and unconventional than ever. Once
he finally got that he had the job, that it was his, that he couldn’t be fired, he was gonna kick
some ass (metaphorically speaking).

Imagine
Imagine all the people sharing all the world. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one—John Lennon. Imagine

Look at it as a possibility. Imagine Jesus returns, and he is rejected, unwelcomed by his own
church, imagine that they tried to kill (ban, ignore, expurgate, qualify, judge, re-pronounce,
distance, disappear) him—as he waited in the outer office area for 40 years for God, as tho he had
an appointment. And they said, why don’t you go in—knock. Billy got up, maybe to leave, or
maybe to stretch, and the door flew open.

A woman with kids in the car gave him angry looks. But he was turning right, and she was
following two fire trucks turning left, that Billy had yielded to. When he turned in front of her
you would have thought she was going to the fire, but there was no fire. The trucks were going
back to the station, Billy was just being polite, considerate, to the firemen. Perhaps the kids in the
car were insisting she follow the trucks. Angry women with children began surfacing. Some
were clearly angels, and they were not happy with his nonchalance. All was not well, in Upper-
Downe Town.
For one thing, there was nowhere to go to get away from the constant shrieking. The noise,
the sugar. The constant over-stimulation was making the children crazy, and crazy depressed—
overwrought. And not just children. The sound had been turned up, like they do when the
commercials come on, as tho no one notices. Suddenly the volume on your 300 dollar radio goes
wildly out of control, if it got softer you’d take it back to the shop but, of course, there are no fix-
it shops…Is that because nothing breaks, or because everything works the way it was designed to
work? In other words, How much longer are you going to take this? I have a 120 year old toilet
that needs one tiny valve, but it’s unfixable because someone has taken imagination and creativity
away from the plumbers. And replaced it with…you guessed it…dissatisfaction. Everyone
wants to be rich, and loud, and very very pleasing to the eye. Whose eye? Not mine.
It was clearly God’s world, but Billy was coming into his inheritance. He was enjoying the
build-up of pedestrian traffic along his street. Heads turned to look in his direction as he sat
reading or watching TV from his chair. When he looked at them, they looked away. He toyed
with the idea of re-painting the house, and decided against it.
He moved into the role as the facts of his creation moved back to his other beginning.
Billy remembers a story his mother told about the weather…she was a savant. She said, with
Clarke, there was a terrific heat wave, and with Claire a flood or something, and with Billy’s
birth, it was something else, perhaps lightening, he doesn’t know, and he can’t ask her now. His
dad said he had extremely long arms for a baby, his mom said the nurses couldn’t put him down.
He caused quite a commotion according to her. Maybe she said there was a flood.
Billy saw himself not as a fixer or destroyer, but more like…food; the kind of food that steals
your self from around the throat of your soul. Billy was, in his own opinion, what he had always
been, a nice guy with a funny job.

Billy Gives Birth

Billy woke up in pain. Before an hour had passed he was on the floor with the worst back
pain. Then he put some heat to his back. God was at his side, and no, Billy didn’t understand
this. Billy got in the tub and took a bath. He took the erbs he bought the previous day, and the
one that he hadn’t planned to buy.
Not long after taking the pill he became ill, his stomach hurt like crazy, and it was all he could
do to get out of bed. Billy’d been told a story, now he felt too sick to relay it.
I am your lover, and you are my biographer. They will just have to get over it. G
Well…why did you marry me? B
God didn’t say, ‘Because you insisted,’ instead, he said the truth, ‘So you wouldn’t get away.’
I’m in pain and you’re God. B
Sit here. G
Why me God? Billy’s eyes opened, fluttered, and drifted aimlessly toward the ceiling.
I didn’t come to you because you’re so sexy. G
Are you going to start that, now! B
I’m trying to tell you something. G
Go ahead then. B
I didn’t come because you’re a good typist, and smart, and nice, and trustworthy, and skillful,
and no boy scout. G
Oh, oh. Ouch! B
Drink some water. G
Forget it. B
I came to tell you what I told you after dessert. G
Well, you picked a fine time. B
Billy, it was the perfect time. G
You gave me too much to drink. B
I bought your favorite wine. G
It wasn’t my favorite until after you bought it. Ouch, damn it! I want to live in a neoclassic
center for creative arts near a sparkling clean river? Ow, ow. B
Not the one with the long impossible name. G
No spelling jokes, my back is Eakin. Ouch. B
I can’t believe you try to joke, at a time like this. G
God! I’m not having a baby, I hope you know. B
 It’s still the same as giving birth. G
The feeling in Billy’s stomach began to climb up his esophagus. The pinched nerve he knows
nothing about, is making all his insides feel horrible.
I’m not going any further until you tell me how to stop this. And then stop it. B
That makes no sense. G
Your fault again! B
Billy, I didn’t marry you because of your wit, your memory, your attention span, or your
inability slash unwillingness to edit. g
Now I’m getting mad, you married me to take dictation, that’s what you’re going to say isn’t
it? You’re beating around the bush, owww. B
God said, No, I married you because you’re my love. I don’t want another. G
Well. You talk a good game. My stomach or whatever that is, is really bothering me.
Then tell the story you told me over dessert. You like dessert. G
I like food, wine and cigarettes—when I’m smashed…again your fault. Who brought the
wine? B
Who has three month old cigarettes in his refrigerator. G
I’m in pain. I’m sorry you ever touched me. B
God said, I love you, very softly in Billy’s ear, and it sounded like a far-off bird chirping.
Okay, I’ll tell you a story. What do you want to hear. G
Tell me the story of how all the world’s churches die. That always relaxes me. B
Well, their hate extinguishes their light. G
And their fear…..B
Their fear of simple honesty, will make them strangers to strangers far away, to strangers in
nearby houses, to strangers in their own house, and to their very soul. G
Name some of the churches….. Billy’s cheeks begin to go pale, too weak to speak B
God sighs…Ashrams, Basilicas, Cathedrals, Dagoba, Enclaves, First Churches of Whatever,
Gurudwaras, Houses of Worship, Lamaseries, Meeting Houses, Missions, Mosques, Quartz
collections, Radio Ministries, Shaman Huts, Shrines, Synagogues, Tabernacles, Temples, 24 hour
Telethon Networks that you make me watch for…no reason…when doing good works is expec...
G
Because they each…..Billy tries to touch his lips, and misses. He is receding. B
They each say they are the one, The One and Only One. G
And….. Billy’s head moves dramatically—chin to chest. His lips form a curve. B
And they can’t apologize, because they can’t admit you have returned. G
Even….. Billy’s back is just about to spasm. He’s afraid he may just split in two. B
Even the Reincar`carnationists. G
And…..Ow! B
And then they all go to the seashore. G
Augh! You know, if you don’t want to tell the story, just say, “I don’t want to tell the story.”
I? What’s I? G
Look, I’m about to have your baby! Please, this is no time to be asking who you are! —Billy
turns his face skyward, and his body begins to go limp. Let’s not get all “caught-up!” in the
irreconcilable past Augh! See. Oh!, that hurt. I’m not creating you… I’m Ow! I’m creating our
child. Why does this hurt so much? Can I have some ice tea? B
Yes, lay down, be calm. G
I am laying down. B
You’re sitting up. G
I don’t see any ice tea. B

The pain Billy couldn’t figure out, began to subside. His muscles relaxed.
So. Billy says dreamily. Why did we swap?…That didn’t work too well did it? B
 This is hard to say, God said. I could be a little needy. G
Yes, I’ve noticed. You feel under-served. I can fix that, or maybe you mean something else.
I apologize for the pain I caused. G
Oh, my back goes out all the time. B
I know. G
That’s not what you meant? B
No. Not exactly. We swapped because that was our first fight. G
Oh, it was, wasn’t it? Sorry. I was in a lot of pain. Labor’s hard, not that you… B
Swapping doesn’t cause pain. G
Well. Arguing with you does? B
Well…this is what’s hard to say…Yes, it does. G
I just don’t have enough joint lubrication. Plus, I make love by kissing, arching my back in
unpredictable ways, and moving upon another. Into, around, for. What’s the preposition? Ouch,
see! B
You’re all over the place. G
If I argue with you, I’m suddenly in serious pain…and you think swapping is good,
because…..B
Well…you called me a .G
That’s not an insult. It was family name. B
The thing I loved most about you—hurt me. I didn’t think that would ever happen. G
I wanted to swap, so that…I wanted to let you see how I feel. G
Billy looked out at a car. He thought it was beautiful, and recalled that there were cars made
in the 50’s and early 60’s, a dozen or so, that could run on any combustible fuel.
I can’t drive your car, can I? B
Yes, of course you can. The thing is, you complain to the car, and the car doesn’t care. G
You think I argue with everyone. B
You would argue with yourself. G
Huh!! Billy says with rank ploy and indignation. B
My car responds two or three hours after I turn the wheel. G
What’s an hour? B
Exactly. An hour for you is less than a second to me. I’m very far away. G
So we spent about a fiftieth of a second making love, and now you think you own me.
Billy, how can I put this so you’ll understand. I realize we just slept together. That’s not
really sex, we don’t really have sex. The exchange we have together is wonderful, but I’m more
fluid than you are. You divide everything up. I’m not saying this because I’ve just had a huge
breakfast, and decided for some reason that now would be a good time to go on a hunger strike.
I’m saying I penetrated you years ago. G
Billy sat up with an I Knew It!, look on his face, and a pain in his lower back—
Giving birth, being ritually prepared for some feast, purging, swapping or whatever He calls it,
was hard on the back, so was cleaning out the gutters. But that’s what he gets for putting his
husband in charge of menial tasks.
Uugh! We’re done, I guess, and now you decide to tell me I’m argumentative, overly
compartmentalized, possibly divisive, probably slow, hard to move thru, and that I don’t have the
right kind of fluid? What are you saying? You don’t like sex with me? You don’t consider it
sex!! I’m carrying something of yours…God only knows what it is, and you wait till now to tell
me we measure time differently, and you were done years ago?!!
Billy was so upset. There was more to this swapping than he had anticipated. Billy’s idea of
sex had always been a kind of deep wet kissing. He didn’t have enough of what God had in
mind. Billy suddenly needed fluid, or needed to know what was in God’s mind (When he spoke
of this in the future, Billy always said: When I became the Risen Christ things were a lot
simpler….. He’d tell me what to do, and then I’d think about it).
 Uugh! Ow! He was getting tons, and God wasn’t getting much at all. Problems, problems,
problems. They’re practically unavoidable.

The next morning

Billy gave God a nicer tie to wear, by hanging it on the door knob, when he was bathing, and
then closing the door—to be playful.
When God came out of the bathroom, Billy asked him what He thought he should do.
Well, God said. Why don’t you put this here, that there, that and this over there, and these
together next to that, then he finished dressing and left.
Billy thought: God, I break my back over-reaching, and now he wants me to rearrange the
furniture just when I’m having issues with my feminine side. Billy stared out the window at a
small crowd of people and a minor traffic jam.
God came back in—Forgot my keys. G
The people who were milling about, started to move. Apparently their God never forgets
anything.
Well, I’m not rearranging anything. Maybe tomorrow. B
Fine. I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget. G
God made a few minor adjustments. There! G
Then he left again.
Oh, look! Now I have to clean up a mess. How come I always have to clean something up
when He’s around? Billy thought to himself.
He threw a towel over it, and made a cup of coffee. And called his chiropractor.
God came in again—My briefcase. G
Billy looked out the window. There were three old ladies looking for a ride back to Wyncote,
standing in his front yard—and he didn’t know how he knew that. Everyone else was just
walking away. God. That’s so like you, was all I could think to say…
Hey Bee. Looks good! G
Thanks Gee. What? B
Look. G
Billy looked at the arrangement, as if he saw it for the first time.
Oh! Well look at that. That’s great! It reminds me of something. B
God picked up his briefcase, smiled and leaned in to kiss Billy goodbye. Walked out the front
door: no mob, no clamoring crowds, no hoopdy flower showers, no one pelting him with
ridiculous questions. God had trouble starting the car, it wouldn’t turn over. That’s when the
three old ladies walked to the other side of the street. And you could have heard a pin drop. The
cameras whirred to a stop, and their auto-focus features seemed to automatically shut off. God
got sort of blurry.
The opinion was unanimous. He couldn’t really be God. God might have questionable taste
in HW (husband or wife) or pair bonds. After all, there’s no accounting for taste—but He’d have
a nicer car! God sat there smiling, adjusted the radio, and disappeared. Evaporated.
Billy looked at the new arrangement, and was frankly awed. It had been there all this time,
and something very far off in his head went ‘click,’ as tho something very big was happening
somewhere in the universe.

People who talk about ownership, act as if they’ve never stored anything in an attic. Things in
the attic deteriorate over time. It doesn’t mean you disparage them. It means you can’t use them,
but you can’t let go. Billy did as God had asked, and put the references to European royalty, or
18th century relatives in the attic with the other stuff.
They’re valuable. B
 They’re arcane. G
People will wonder why it’s missing. B
People won’t notice its absence. They’ll figure it’s family business. Antecedantry. G
Billy, kept this to himself: but he kind of liked the feeling of being owned. Obedient.
He kept that thought in the attic, and danced in the kitchen to the songs that played on the
radio; it made his back feel better: Heaven must have sent you; Dimelo-need to know; God’s
Property, We’ve got it goin’ on, mmm bop, and a dozen other dance songs, if you must know.
Billy looked out the window while God was at work. He saw three black teenage boys
walking slowly to school. It made him feel good. They looked…were so in tune, he felt safe. He
had a yard full of dandelions, and the symbolism was unmistakable: Deep and fragile roots;
dazzling beauty; survival; tenacity; scattering; freedom; the ability to get you high;
indestructibility; extreme versatility; adaptability and untapped usefulness. There was only one
desirable quality the dandelion had not mastered—They wouldn’t grow in rows. They had to be
everywhere.
The only yard that needs to be without dandelions is the golf course, and that’s because they
interfere with the predictability of the balls movement over uniform surfaces toward a hole. That
was about as much as Billy knew about golf. He had never played golf, the greens were so toxic
with chemicals, fertilizers, and underemployment it made him nauseous. Billy reasoned the best
players were either very lonely, or the boss of some big concern. Or both.
God told Billy, if he took Olive out for a walk before noon, to take an umbrella.
Common sense and Divine Understanding don’t go together, even for gay men who marry
God. It has to be one or the other.
Once something is put in motion, it cannot be interrupted, it has to be concluded. G
Billy had said, That’s interesting. What is God for? B
God was momentarily taken aback. You might as well ask what everything is for. G
Pause.
It’s got lots of uses, practical and otherwise. G
That’s when God apologized for the Thunderbolt, even tho it worked exactly as it was
designed to. No one thought Billy could hide his tiny capacity so well; no one thought he could
be so bird-like; no one ever plans for angels; no one ever sees angels. Angels can hide, show up,
pick up, drop, stun, steal, heal, raise, bury, light or extinguish anything. They’re the embodiment
of black & white: an aside: angels as friends, are best kept apart.
When Billy stepped off the Thunderbolt he found the world directionless. When Billy walked
away from the white sound—the doctors and tidal waves of rude importance, he found everything
had equal value, interest, moment and prospects for change. He found Everything had a center.

Billy couldn’t help but notice that God didn’t work right. He asked for the rain to stop and it
slowed. He asked for the sun, and he got one ray to land on his fingers. He asked for the
dictionary to open to the perfect word. Pear.
God explained that it was like telling a 9 year old boy not to make strange noises, or paying a
lot of money for a high clarity TV when all you have to do is put on your glasses. Or hitting
every button on the phone, just to realize the phone doesn’t know who you want to talk to. Oh.
Billy said.
God’s coming. Billy didn’t realize that when God left, there was only one place to go.

God is Coming
 In a different way. Many have known, know and always knew God, and speak with Him
regularly. They invite Him into their lives and He comes. Nothing will change. He is coming in
a different way, just the same.
Look at it this way: You know he has cleanliness issues, and that he can be plenty needy.
You know he has a wild sense of humor, and he can be severe. Science is about a hundred years
from discovering him. If they walk in on Him, and begin passing Him around like some hot
chunk of radium they will get badly burned. Very badly burned. Unless, of course, you turn into
Cyborgs in the next hundred years or so, a possibility which is unlikely in the extreme.
If He ever saw you up-close like I have, you would be gone gone gone. I’m here to warn you.
He is coming in a different way.
If I were you, I wouldn’t drop what I was doing and hide, but instead, do it better, and start
cleaning up—even if it isn’t your mess.
This is going to become a very adult world. You may want to hold off having kids just now.
It could get ugly. Look for yourself—Imagine if everyone in the world did what you are
planning, had planned, forgot to plan to do. And then did it.
You can shoot the messenger, metaphorically speaking, but you might want to get the entire
message first.
If He ever came here, and saw a five-year old, alone on a crowded street, dying. If He ever
really saw it, and felt it, and understood it the way I do, you would all be dead. This thing I found
is not a puppy love.
Billy flopped back and forth with abandon and sad caring. Will, was not what you would call
stable. Billy had seen an uncountable number of shrinks over the years. He was unable to tell
them he felt as tho he could fly off the world at any moment, for no reason, and especially when
he felt good. No psychiatrist had ever asked him if the world he was talking about had a name,
other than crazy. It did—Thunderbolt.
Billy’s life, almost from the very beginning, was symbolically readying him for this job-non-
job. Years of planning for no-event made meeting God very gentle, and as easy for Billy as a
Sunday in the park was, for everyone else. When Billy finally told the truth it didn’t set him free,
it anchored him in a way he never thought possible.
He was married about two weeks, and felt like someone had tied him to the sofa.

How God Works

Billy had to ‘die.’ There was no other way.
—he had to be ‘sacrificed’ as a child.
—it had to be that way.
—it could be no other way. happen
—everyone had to make huge sacrifices for this to work.
—no one could understand any part of it.
—Billy had to dream his world back into existence.
—he had to conquer death.
—it had to be symbolic and real. And so it was.

It was 1963. It was the year of death. His father was a brilliant man who doubted Billy could
be his own son. He did not believe other men felt his wife was off-limits.
He could not balance his two sons. One could do everything. The other nothing—and then
they would switch.
He thought if he were smarter he could figure this out. He graduated from an Ivy- League
college in three years, and he felt stupid, walking with an eight year old and a ten year old.
 He thought Billy might be retarded. He took his sons under his wing to an amusement park.
A man was estimating peoples’ weight and giving prizes if he was wrong. Billy walked away
with a cupie doll and a cane. The man thought his scale was broken, or his eyesight was failing.
His father proved that Billy was light as a feather. Billy proved he could hide this fact, or any
fact from anyone at any time if he wanted to. Clarke was furious that Billy could win a contest
by just standing still.
Immediately after proving that his son was practically weightless, Billy’s Dad decided to take
them all on the world’s largest wooden centrifugal force machine. The Thunderbolt. It was a big
rrr…amusement ride.
His dad estimated that there was not room enough in the car for the three of them, and so he
sat in front. Billy took off at the first curve. It was a sharp right.
Billy sat, just inside the little car’s scooped~out entrance with a seat belt that fit him like a
hula hoop. And the rest you know. Billy died and asked God for his life back. Wished his life
back, and got his life back. That was the beginning of God’s troubles.
Billy explained to God that if he flew off to Heaven his father would be destroyed and blame
himself until the day he died. Clarke would blame himself for wanting to push Billy out of the
car right before he left on his own. His mother would die of loneliness, and all that would be left
of Billy’s little family would be his five year old sister who knew practically nothing. God gave
in. It was the way Billy explained it to Him—That’s God’s story anyway.
God said, That’s your little family isn’t it. Billy said, Yes, and started to explain how he came
by such a collection. God interrupted, saying, Take care of them, and you can have anything you
want. Do the best you can. They need you.
People may not believe or understand. Some are bound to say that Billy made a deal with the
devil. Billy didn’t know much, he was eight, but he knew that only God can give you everything.
Then turn around and give it to you again. Twice.

Snake oil
I am American. We have a long history of induction and inclusion, we also have a history of
lying and making false claims.
The West was a disjointed group of territories, territories divided into sales regions canvassed
by more snake oil salesman than snakes. PT Barnum sold tickets to watch grass grow, and fed
bacon and sugar to the loneliest girl in town to keep his, ‘Fat Lady’ atrocious—because people
bought it. For a while. Attention spans were longer then.
Americans are pretty wild, they don’t really care for bullshit. They want results.
Philadelphians are about as American as you can get. There was a story circulating that they
booed the Pope when he came to town. The story was squelched, but I don’t doubt it.
Philadelphians don’t really care what everyone thinks about what we do. We’re part charlatan
and part Charlemagne. All that raucous give and take, all that grandiloquence —with a hand in
one pocket, and the other hand in yours, is just our way of saying Hello. We’re funny but nice,
peculiar but direct.
We take handouts and free lunches with a grain of salt; we even take friendship with a healthy
skepticism. Before you throw the blackguards out on-their-ear for trying to make an easy buck,
you have to ask yourself a couple questions: What are they for? What would we do without
them? Where does invention come from? Who will replace them, and What will the Chinese do
when they discover the cigarettes that ‘nice man’ sold them, cause cancer, and the new jobs at the
new factory are stultifying, and poisonous to every living thing, including the river?
Americans, as you well know, are likely to say, ‘of course it’s poisonous—it’s pesticide!
Look how big your tomatoes are!’ Now, that’s a tuh-mata! Knowwhatimean? They will call out
their lawyers, and turn the question on its head until it’s unrecognizable.
 These so-called jobs you’re sending oversees, the ones you loved to hate, the ones attached to
the sons of bitches you’re well rid of, are going to be the mess you will be cleaning up.
Clean up your messes. Don’t look to the Asians to do it, they have reputations of their own to
maintain.
You know what they say about youth in Asia, when they move, you move.

4-5-21 Harrowing
In the presence of God and with the approval of God, Billy realized he didn’t love God, he
loved everything. And that lasted almost an hour, then he apologized and they had what Billy
perceives as ‘make-up sex.’
God was everything, but Billy didn’t really care. It wasn’t that he didn’t care wholly, it was
that he didn’t notice it made any difference. He would stick with what he got. Thank you any
way.
God loves and lives in everyone, but Billy’s particular take on things was so implausible and
wildly unsuccessful…It made God stop and take a breath.
God, felt as if this were a first. He sought Billy’s approval and it came in exclamations and
absences when he didn’t know where Billy was.
God was not human, he was like a harmonica. Breathy, and fixed on one note, maybe two. If
he had shoes he would have dropped them. If he had feet he would have worn them out taking
and bringing. If he could have, he would have kept this to himself.
As Billy said: Once you go preposterous you don’t go back.
He watched Billy sleep, but now he wasn’t laughing. He was trying to synchronize so Billy
wouldn’t toss and turn. Billy put his hand out, touched the face of God and poked him in the
eye—Woke up apologizing to everything for nothing, then went back to sleep.
*
Billy blamed women for his un-changeability, his recourse to lying as a child, his greed, and
his propensity to be disappointed, utterly, at the first raindrop or the last. The sun would not
shine and the rain would not stop until he told the truth. His female side was more ruthless than
his real side, and then they swapped. He dualed up just like that.
God guaranteed forgiveness like he had no rent to pay, and no interest in property values. He
despised killing, like someone who never ate. He volunteered himself for a hunger strike but then
he didn’t remember lunch. God had become absurd, nearly useless, gravitational and whiny-
giggly—with a love for noodles, sour cream, and physics. My husband’s never paid rent—Oh,
Great!…“And I love him unceasingly.”
Billy thought he could refuse to carry God. He claimed not to have a mother, like so many
men. But he did. ‘They walk around as tho they never had a mother.’
God claims as he walks. That may be the major difference, right there. Then Billy realized he
was God. And he fell on his face with the very next step.
Billy never re-read his contract once he signed it.
Billy blamed men for cheating so easily. For making cheating so profitable. For making
cheating so easy to accomplish and so difficult to redress. The cheating that goes around, the
really complicated cheating—that cheating.
He blamed men for contracts with fine print, and ads with a hundred fonts. And bottles of
near-poison with so many different fonts you couldn’t count the ways they conceal the truth, let
alone the number of different sized, shaped and colored letters. “Look ma…they makin’ it red
now.” How stupid do they think we are?
 Consider: Don’t make the easy money so easy to make; make businessmen and
businesswomen work for it. They’ll be happier, you’ll be happier, the fish will be happier.
You’ll be able to breathe, and maybe someday you’ll be able to walk outside again with a light
heart, and not be afraid of your neighbor.
There are systems better than Capitalism, it’s too late now to be changing horses, but look at it
this way: Communism didn’t fall because it was immoral and wrong, it fell because they didn’t
know what money was for, so they tried to get rid of it; they didn’t know what greedy bosses
were for, so they tried to get rid of them; they didn’t know what unfair competitive advantage was
for, so they tried to get rid of it; they didn’t know what dissidents were for, so they tried to get rid
of them. Just because you don’t know what the spotted wooded owl is for, is not a good reason to
get rid of it. Just because you don’t know what poor people are for, or corrupt politicians are for,
is not a good reason to get rid of them. I don’t know what they’re for either, but I don’t know
what would replace them, it would prob`ly be even worse. If you destroy everything that you
don’t understand, it’s only a matter of time before you destroy yourself.
Make a system that rewards industriousness with success, conscientiousness with power,
protects fools from failure, and lets people try their hand at something new and different every
once in a while and you will have a system with dozens of pyramids, and a great man or woman
at the top of each. Some of the pyramids will appear to be upside down. They will be there to
destroy the right-side-up pyramids—to correct their shape. Everyone plays, everyone pays, it can
never be torn apart, and everyone finds happiness within. But there’s no time. Besides, I’m
trying to make a prison-break by slipping a condom on your cock or cervix—depending, and a
handcuff on your wrist. I have no time for anything else. It’s too late anyway.
I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I would have been here sooner except I was taking pills
to prevent me from turning into The Christ. That was a joke. They were selective reuptake
inhibitors. Also, approx. every fifth pyramid should be upside down.
I’ll be the drugs, I’ll even sell them, but you must work harder at reducing your dosage.
I’ll be the food, but you have to know when to move away from the table.
I’ll be the adult, but you have to stop fighting and start apologizing. Be respectful, kind.
I’ll be here, but don’t all call at once.
I’ll do everything I said I’d do and I’ll take no credit, I promise. I’ll even suspend the dimly
quixotic in mid-air for a time, but I can’t do it alone. You have to help. Sign here… Please.
Given name, nick name…if you want, and date it: Y•M•D, H:M:S

………………………………………………………………………………………………

There will be no debate. Not with me. Not now, maybe never. One more, two-thousand-year
debate is all you need. For one thing, I have no axe to grind, no wood to whittle; I’m water. I can
dissolve only you, and when I evaporate, I can’t be put back together. As they say: it’s not easy,
to be, me…but, whenever was it? What I’ve said is true, pick out the pieces you like, I really
don’t care. I’ll take no credit. If you think you understand, you’re way ahead of me. You knew I
was coming, here I am—here we go.
All I know, is, this will start with a nice time, like a show. Before we get down to business
we’re gonna have some fun. Just one admonition: everyone knows that only idiots fire loaded
guns in the air around innocent bystanders. If you must do this, please raise your gun, near as you
can, to 90 degrees, that way if anyone’s hit by stray bullets, it’ll be you. We’re about to have a
party…it’s been a long time...we need some fun, not blind hysteria—fun; not an alien invasion or
an Auto da fé—more like A day at the race/A night at the opera; not marked for life—fun. You
don’t have to start firing censers, hiring censors, applying sensors, making sense or any such
thing; it’s like a…
 Schadenfreude Sagen –—it’s a party, BYOC (bring your own contrasts)
There’s a bathroom on the right———John Fogerty, Creedance Clearwater Revival / Bad Moon Rising

There’s no comparable expression in English, and I don’t speak German, but as I understand
it, Schadenfreude Sagen refers to something said, that is incomplete. Yet it is said and done. It’s
metaphysical. The doing has nothing to do with it.
It is more than an expression. For example, delight at the down-fall of another, is a
comparable form. But this is ‘a time’ like the roaring twenties—it is a phase, it has to be passed
thru. Couple months. It’s like the Negative Confession that the ancient Egyptians held as the
prerequisite for passage into the next world—from their Book of the Dead.
The Negative Confession held that in the final judgment you would set aside time at the most
critical juncture of your life, or life to be, or in summary of what was your life, to let it be known
by all, what a big liar you are, and always were. A fiction. The way it really was, because that’s
the way you meant it to be, but you really did. A fool’s errand.
Again, This Time is not an Age. It is more like a saying. It means: to look upon the failures
of another with a mixture of malice and glee. A man wrote of having this feeling in 1936 when
he went to the Olympics in Berlin, and as a young boy, felt a great feeling of triumph at the
failures of the newly announced Master Race. Thousands cheered.
The acceptance of The Christ will be hard for many. Impossible for some—Horrible,
shocking and awful. The Christ doesn’t care how shocked you are. And he already knows how
judgmental you can be. Everyone gets their moment in the dock.
Some people may notice the ribald German double ‘S,’ and be overly concerned. This SS is
entirely different. The flip side: People will rant like Adolf, just to be laughed off stage. People
will cast aspersions, just to re-cast two weeks later. People will swear oaths and tear clothes, just
to get something a bit more up to date. People will pay others to fight the battle of Armageddon,
just to find they took the money and went to Vegas. People will sit down to write, just to find
they have nothing to say, yet. Stay steady.
In the classic constructs of fiction: a man walks thru a darkened tunnel on the way to the train
every day to get to his dreary job. When his life is turned around, he walks home one day from
work, and notices the sun illuminating the very walls of the tunnel; the contrast is drawn thusly.
It’s not a new place—it’s the very place. You see it the way it really is—It’s an opening, just like
you are.
Blame is no one’s. Apologies and returning stolen objects is all that’s required. If you think
you’re Belgium and you want the Congo back—forget it. If you think you’re China and you want
Taiwan or Palestine-Israel, same thing. Some hotels I know, won’t get their towels back. I’ve
put all my trinketsandsouvenirs to good use. I do have a ruby ring I need to return, everything
else is worthless. It’s simple. It can be okay. You will see immediately how different it is. This
is my SS, not my sister’s, not Hister’s.
Funny that no one noticed the look of relief the cameras captured as he absconded from the
Night Of The Long Knives. Just as no camera caught him slink-in the night before. In this game
everyone plays, everyone.

This time, it’s different, people will stand up in order to be seen. No one will be shot down;
many will be laughed at tho. Some will revile my SS as tho mine and his were the same. They’ll
stand up for ‘good.’ A lot of good your good has done. You stand on a precipice, with your
proverbial back to the wall. Many will stand in rising human waste, and simply raise their claim
to all that low-slung festooning purity. If you don’t stop, you will destroy yourself! I swear:
many will walk backward into darkness pointing at the light. Like that Kansas school board, it’s
not that they like the darkness, and they’re not trying to create an unreliable uneducated
underclass, it’s that that’s where their forebears saw the light. Also, it requires less school.
Funny—unless you’re the one about to trip.
When the teacher uses you to illustrate what not to do—and the class laughs—it can be very
hard. Just know, that everyone gets a turn. Everyone—even the shy kids learn.
You’ll forget the your saying while you’re saying it. It will stop making sense, and declaim
for you no awareness whatsoever. Conscript.
I don’t know what apoplectic calypso music you have in your head, but better you should
dance to this tune, my friend. My friend who thought choosing Christ at the last, would be easy.
It is. You were led astray. Follow your heart.
You will be surprised how petty, judgmental, and childish the professed righteous are. How
honest the gangsters can be. How fearless the children. How quiet the windbags. How spiritual
the addicted. How keen for a rest the unstoppable, and how profound, the superficial, turn out, to
be.
Follow your heart. The one that responds to a blinding light with fear; a gentle light with a
wish; and a promise of light with skepticism. Follow your real heart. I am not laughing. I’m not
doing anything, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m watching you.
I am who I say I am. Now it’s your turn. This might be fun, you never know.

I don’t come on chariots of fire.

I don’t light fires. I’m not on fire, nor am I so easily lit.
I am no saint. I am certainly not infallible, God is.
Let love overtake you, and forget all this business about the fire.
The people who don’t know if I’m from Heaven or hell, never will. They’ll never
accept me. I’ll never know what it feels like to bungee jump. Big deal.
There will be no great twisting of bed sheets, or hundreds of thousands of fitful nights.
Everyone will not be saved. And that’s that. When you’re finished you’re finished.
*
This is Heaven, how do you like it? This is where you go when you die. Did you think you could
have Heaven without reliving that first awkward date, the one when you got kissed? Did you
think God could make tenderness more tender than lying in bed with your friends, asleep, and
your doll baby or your puppy in your arms? Did you think Heaven would be strange and
unrecognizable? No, not hardly. Did you think they play harps? Is that what you like? Heaven
is not 93 million light-years away. it exists in the sixth dimension right here. And when you die
you go there by the grace of God. Who has all sorts of ideas, and a very raucous sense of humor.
As I understand it, after you die He wakes you up and makes mad passionate love to you, for
some people, that’s like hell, and for others it’s like Heaven.

Many felt that Billy used very big brushes, and very broad strokes, in asserting his judgment. H.
Billy used the smallest brushes God gave him. This is pointillism. This is Seurat. You have to
stand back to see the whole picture. O. The contrast is being drawn now. On one side of the
equation hate & death, on the other side love & life—choose. The longer you wait, the sharper
the contrast. But, making no decision is not just mindless, it’s formless, weightless, ungraspable,
and death-like.
Billy was not the first frustrated artist to try to take over the world—He was the last. We. He
was not the first middle child to cause trouble, he was the last. He was not the first King, to be
kinged, he was the last. Not the first baby boomer, the first prophet, martyr, or the first
unanswered call. In all his life, once he fully engaged, it was already done. I struggle for a
foothold in amongst the worry I disavow; the fear I laughed and coughed at; the monumental
attributes of certainty, confidence and conceit I ply. I lingered long enough to become something
other—Symbolic. Symbolic of the struggle to find a place to stand, a way to run, room to fly,
space to swim -—- without drowning. Life itself.
I believe talking thru the SS will be very hard for some—good! Some people need to be
offended. I believe also, speaking of the SA will be very hard for others, for a completely
different reason—good! I believe it’s good sometimes to be silent, thoughtful, reflective. For
me, I can’t discuss the manner in which either came to me, generally or in particular. I cannot
discuss how the work was done, as tho it were done. The time will come. The SS moves from
person to person to person, adopts any manner, and takes any form.

Oh, and that reminds me

Oh, and that reminds me, you prejudiced, homophobic, treacherous, suddenly politically-correct
pieces of this and that. Why, when all other immigrants come to this country, you make them
speak English. But when the Hispanic come, you say, “Oh, that’s okay, you don’t need to worry
about that. Just keep on speaking your own language. Whatever makes you happy.” knowing,
full well, everything worth knowing or thinking about is in English. What about stop signs? And
warning labels? And fine print? And everything else. What kind of a backwards how do you do
was that? At least the Germans that welcomed the Irish, split a couple rails over their heads, and
called them a name or two, but they didn’t let them go out into the street thinking they were the
shit!
And whose bright idea was it, not to quarantine Gay men in San Francisco, Haitians, and IV
drug users when HIV was still containable? It’s too late now. If you’re considering quarantining
Africa don’t bother, it will go respiratory, and then you’ll be sorry.
And whose bright idea was it to allow young kids and older biker dudes to ride motorcycles
without helmets? You hurt one group you hurt us all. You attempt to destroy one group you
destroy us all. You punish one group you punish us all. Us all, is you all. Us is everyone. Read
Dickens. The group is not a group, it is a symbolic desire to join with another. And how is
someone’s skull cracked wide open on my windshield an expression of personal liberty?
And if you don’t mind me getting too personal, or even if you do…whose bright idea was it to
put drug addicted women into the baby business, but not until all their other options were gone?!
What were you thinking…This’ll teach ‘em a lesson? Who?
And who thought it was a good idea to allow the sale of so-called insurance, to frightened
elderly people that won’t even buy them a box? What, while I’m on the subject please, may I
ask, does a dead body want with a box, to live in, that cost more than any piece of furniture they
ever had in their life? These are not rhetorical questions.
If the box is supposed to float to Heaven, doesn’t it need a sail, a propeller, or an airbag or
something? You can’t get there thru the expenditure of energy. I think it’s time to declare them
dead and send them on their way. What are you waiting for?

Kiss them goodbye.

Lift them from the ground,
dust them off and dispose of them properly.
We don’t need the ground, we need the dignity.

You gave black people the right to name their color, but not to transcend it, nice. That’s
mauve honey (pronounced: mow—as in, I mow my lawn— v)
You give people the right to live in ignorance, and the freedom to die a thousand deaths in
public. Your rights and reasons are trash. Your freedom’s a bad joke.
*
 I was coming home from Delaware, on a bright Sunday morning, and I judged the dead. I was
like a search-engine, or an old-time punch-card reader— entered a word and a list tumbled out,
it took ten minutes. I had help. It was a sunny day.

“Still dead”

I cannot yet judge the living, that’s next apparently. He says he’s planning to use my
equipment. My machinery, I’m nervous. He says it’s never been done before, but the likelihood
of a crash is miniscule. I stopped worrying a few weeks ago. Yeah, that worked.

You will see many strange things during the SS. You’ll see the non-religious fall on their
knees, as if they’d never seen The King and I. You’ll see the so-called Christian- right refuse to
bend, swearing vengeance like a raft of Imam, launching fatwahs on the lake of ‘Don’t You
Wish.’ You’ll see spirits rise that you deny. You’ll see the ignorant fearless, and the educated
counseled. You’ll see people walk that would never walk, and the handsome-valiant rest, as if
upon laurels, whatever that is. You’ll hear people say: Oh, my God, I always thought The Christ
was a self righteous son of a bitch—He’s beautiful! And, at the same time, you’ll hear people
say: This guy’s nothing but an ugly self-righteous SOB—The Christ is beautiful! And here I am,
come full circle. I’m average. Equable. I had help to understand.
You will see people spot ‘opportunities,’ that aren’t. You don’t understand how confused and
scared they are. They’ll see ‘profit,’ everywhere. Instant experts will gasp at all the possibilities.
Some will run as tho shot from a pistol, to double, triple and quadruple their kind. Let them go.
They’ll get about 50 meters away, and come back like children, made suddenly wise when they
realize they’ve gone off alone. They admire you enormously. They believe America’s full of
brave adventurers, which it is. You can become anything here. They will counsel the
‘opportunity’ to live in a ditch, on the outside, in the dark, with no dinner. The less you say the
better. They must think it thru. It’ll make it hard for some not too laugh, and for others not to
cry. If your hands shake, hold tighter. If that doesn’t work, put it on a pillow, and hold it at a
distance. It’s okay. You’re loved either way.
Men tend to cry while driving, women while shopping—I don’t know why. I cry both ways,
that’s how I know. Sometimes I just hold out 4 fingers, then 3-2-1. Then I speak. I laugh when
I’m by myself, or if I’m telling stories about myself. Just strikes me funny.

Trouble
I may get into trouble, but a funny thing happened a couple months ago. I took a bath and was
dressed in a towel. It was a very hot day—the eleventh I believe. The TV was on. I sat in front
of it, where I saw Nancy by a coffin. I was amazed, truly, at the depth of the love she had, and
that it was visible. To me anyway. Love is not visible unless something pulls you from the
pulpit, till you put the banner down. That was an aside.
Ronny came to me, as tho sitting on the bed, and looked around. We watched TV together as I
walked around the bedroom, and he tried to fixate on the screen. He understood everything, tho
he was as confused as I. He said he came to watch TV and he had places to go and people to see.
I wondered, did he know where he was. He did then.
He gave me the once-over, and became quiet and subdued. We watched the show and I
remember Peter saying something to the effect that they brought his body back to Washington
and put it on a catapult. Ronny and I laughed so hard. We both heard the same thing.
Apparently he meant Catafalque, which is that platform the coffin sits on when it’s In State.
Whether we heard him right or not, it was a very funny moment.
 Ronny was relaxed, and told me an amusing story, I can’t tell it like he did, but it was about
the funeral of a great Persian King:
God went to the funeral disguised as a mourner. The grief was real, and the crowd was
distraught, saying, ‘This King Was God.’ ‘He Was Our God’ ‘God on Earth.’ ‘He was
everything to us.’ Right at the height of the festivities, God reaches out and pulls the coffin over,
and the king rolls out onto the street, like a rug. Time stops. For a second, time just stopped.
Then they put him back in the box, and went on as if nothing had happened. God turns to an
immaculately dressed man and says, “See, that proves he was God. He stopped time.” The man
turns to God, and says, “You miss the point affendi, if he were God, he would have kept rolling.”
God loves the Arabs. They’re dreadfully misled, and lied to every day, but He loves them
greatly. Always has. Ronny was charming, a great big lovable lunk. Then we talked. It was
something inside me. There were no words. It took ten minutes.
I gave him due credit for trying to make English the national language, that wall, and then I
read him his sentence—all nine pages. Right in the middle, my left hand suddenly lifts up. I
wasn’t expecting that. It reached out compellingly toward the windows in my bedroom. I
couldn’t imagine what was happening. Then I realized that, that window has a south-southwest
exposure, and he waved to her, and then he touched her inside, and she felt it. We all felt it
together, and he kissed her goodbye, and he said something odd, I thought. I thought he was very
gallant, heroic.
He called her by name, but it wasn’t her name or any nickname that I had ever heard that he
used for his wife. It wasn’t ‘Mommy’ or ‘Nancy’ it was something else. I was amazed and
surprised, and didn’t know how that name got in my head, or how this happened. I wondered did
I hear it right, but I had. Ronny said he had to go off somewhere, but he had no where to go, and
then he was gone. He was sent adrift temporarily homeless. I read him his sentence, and I’ll read
you yours.

4-6-04 Driving down 611 on a Sunday night

Conceptually speaking, God is a big talker. He acquiesces quite a bit to me for cause,
however, he circumvents convention for no purpose whatsoever…case in point. An idea presents
itself, let’s just say fully formed, suddenly it’s your job to gather the parts to build this thing. It
exists totally complete already, in your head. As time seems to move, you get glimpses of
various parts of the idea, they all fit perfectly. Then you notice they may not be parts at all, but
merely pieces. The ‘car’ cannot fulfill its imagined purpose without wheels, that is, tires,
whatever. You see them, and it’s clear they’ll fit, and they are part of the picture without which
there is no movement. Then you happen to notice that they are pieces. Or perhaps, put more
simply, the part has pieces, therefore it is a group of pieces. The car did not require any of the
pieces, it was fully formed when you first saw it, you are just learning.
God is not an expression. The expression, ‘don’t mention it,’ has about fifty parts. Yet we
never find out what ‘it’ is. All we know is that we don’t need to say it. With all its parts it has
not one piece that does anything that language does. God’s the opposite of that. Many pieces no
parts.
This big talker is also, not like an elephant, where perspective shows you how it works,
moves, etc. An idea of God is fully formed, and more or less unfolds thru-out the day like a
prize. Whereas it has apparent parts it doesn’t really, it has pieces. It worked fine, four-thousand
years ago before it had tires. Fluorine has parts. Parts and pieces are essentially the same thing,
to the extent that you are aware of a difference there is one.
I think it’s like, if you said a week has seven pieces, well it does. But none of the pieces have
anything to do with anything. They don’t tell you how it works, you just happen to notice that as
you move along you see different things, patterns for example. They are not intrinsic parts of the
week. It has no moving parts, but you can’t help but notice it has pieces. Let’s just call today
Monday, and leave it at that.

I’ve gone back and forth with this a few times. Searching for purpose. As it gains momentum
it loses purpose, tho you seem to be heading toward purpose the whole time. Some big joke. The
challenge involves this aspect: There are no parts that in any way operate sequentially, it occupies
no available space, nor is it in, on, or above, like matter is. This thing I married, is substantial,
tho it doesn’t exist in time, or space. Even tho the first part can be held under consideration of the
second and third so-called parts, there is no juxtaposition, because it has no mass—it has no
beginning or end.
Like a huge audience, one thing and millions of things. If you’re in a position to see that it’s
like an audience—I’d just take what I got, and not try to put all the pieces togethe
It can be held as if it were in abeyance; it won’t fix anything; likes sex as much as I do; thinks
if the house were cleaner I wouldn’t complain about those microscopic bugs as much; thinks pain
is for me; and probably lives in another dimension alltogether.
He has many of the challenges you think you have. You can’t see all he does, cause he has
poor eyesight, poor hearing, and poor understanding—yours.
He loves embarrassing details, truth, and transcends merit as tho he had none—as I’ve already
noted, it shows up because it is not wholly formed. It needs something. To be. It likes to be
personalized, and talked to as if it were slightly reclined, and within reach. It’s like, in the Sistine
Chapel: really big, way up high, hard to touch, and layed back.

4-6-15 The God Dialogues

God, may I ask a question?
Yes my Son.
Said like that? I said.
Intrude, please. He said, calmly.
Don’t deal with me. My God!
Interrupt, please. God said.
You gave me homophobic parents, I said, finally able to breathe. For what purpose?
You quibble—this is now. Still. He said, in an instant. He added, 15 months later, when I was
ready: You can turn fear and hate, into misunderstanding and disappointment—Anger into a gate
you walk thru. If it smacks you on the ass it makes you laugh. You became much stronger than
conditional love—you cut your teeth on it, as they say.
Doubt, please.
You are fake! You are not parent! I rejoined stiffly and shoved my ‘hands’ in my ‘pockets.’
Nor…He questioned.
Nor present, I was forced to say, and then ran cold and silent, as was my way in those days.
There is no such thing as silence, when used like that—not with certain ‘people.’
Where was I on ‘Job Day…’ What is ‘job day.’ He said, almost smiling, thru my cold face, from
this side.
You stink, sometimes, I thought to say. I didn’t have to tell him job-day is when your father
comes to school in third grade, and talks to the class about what they do. Billy’s biological father
had died before ‘job day,’ and in those days mothers weren’t invited, so they skipped over Billy,
and no one asked what his dad did. He smoked, typed late into the night, and died. He was not a
fireman, except sometimes, in Clarke’s stories.
This is a perception—you have no feelings. You have no thoughts. They are have. You are, He
said.
I am? I said, and fell face-forward into the bed, and slept for the first time in a long time.
The same day, but later

Billy was having tremendous pain again.

He and God got up slowly, everything began to fall into place. The bathtub was a death trap. A
warm death trap. He stood up, sweating and dripping water. Thirsty.
No water…I’ll be fine. He waved God’s offer away, tho it didn’t look like God was going to get
any. I want to sleep.
Sleep! God said with surprise.
Just for a minute, if that’s okay. B
Your soaking wet and shivering. G
Just for a minute. What did you give me? I have such cramps. B
You won’t be able to spell it, and that will just upset you. G
Will not. Aughh! Billy said, when he tried to lay flat. B
Put you legs up, bend you r knees. G
Making me take dictation is getting me upset. Why don’t you work in a crouch, and I’ll watch. B
Yes Will. That would be nice. G
Ice tea! Billy almost shouted, with the pain. B
The pain got worse. He couldn’t even get out of his towel, and just lay in the bed. Billy handled
the pain the way he handles everything—effectively, efficiently and in his own way. Most of the
stuff Billy deals with is not even worth his watch—this was not one of those things. This was
not under-God, this was something else.
God was with him every second, but Billy noticed he got no ice tea.
I can’t believe you gave me Cayenne pepper. Was that supposed to start the contractions or
what? B
Help the pain. G
Ahhh! Help to give me pain or help it to go away? B
You and I are incredible, and you in all that pain, still trying to tell jokes. G
Billy makes a half smirk. It helps sometimes when the pain’s bad. B
God nods thru a long pause.
Give me a straight line. B
God draws an imaginary line in the air with Billy’s finger. G
Oww. You’re a strait man, give me a straight line. B
I never said I was strait. I’m ethereal. G
No. No. No. No Jack Benny jokes, you can’t hold the pause long enough. Ow! Oh! B
The pepper was for the bath water. G
Billy winces. He’s ironic as hell, yet no sense of timing.
I got 21,050 on the WAF-SATs, Billy said.
What’s a W.A.F.S.A.T., God said.
What? Another fucking S.A.T.? Ha. Owww. B
Hurry, ask me what’s the scale they use for the new WAF-SAT’s. B
What scale do they use. G
God! Augghh! Same as the old…one. B
Billy felt centimeters from death, his hand fell to his side, he looked pale. There was a tiny bead
of sweat on his brow. God didn’t know if he should wipe it off—He’d never seen one there
before. Billy turned his head dramatically to the side, expressionless, except for a particularly
effective delayed eye movement. His mouth closed; this looked like IT.
Before I die…in bed, he whispered. I would love…Billy tries to remember what he was just
about to ask for…To see our child, one time. Augghh! B
….Seems there’s this salesman…G
Four ice cubes and a straw! B
You’ve heard this one. G
I would like…besides respectful silence…before I die, to have, a glass, of cold, water. B
There’s no baby. G
Pause.
Does that mean I don’t get the water? B
We just swapped again is all. And you’re adjusting to the return. G
And you carried me to the bed. B
How’m I gonna do that! G
I thought I wasa having a con-sid-eration a consession a conversion? B
No. I think when we swapped, you might have over done it. G
You might have over done it. B
Isn’t that what I said. G
Augghh! Ouch! B
Now you can be my best friend, and I’ll beg you for sex. Ha ha…ha. G
Ha. This hurts. B
Pause
I guess laying around on clouds all day sort of softens one up. B
Billy, you’re Billy. I’m God. G
You’re always in direct opposition to what I’m trying to say. B
Come to bed while I finish this. B
That’s what you said the last three times. Then you put it away, forget where you put it, and it
gets all mixed up. G
Billy laid in bed by himself. God was delighted to be in Billy. Billy was about to give birth.
And God felt it was his job to distract Billy.
Uughh! Billy said, trying to adjust the pillows. If that’s a swap…I’m going to need more…B
Billy looked around, but there was no one, and no where to direct his comments…Coffee.
“…I guess…” He said to himself. How long am I going to be in this condition? B
One thousand. G
One thousand what? Weeks or months?
Days. G
God is still everywhere in everyone. Billy just gets bigger and bigger. Nothing changed.
You are empathizing in a very unusual way. G
Ouch. That’s the perfect position...You mean the spike in my finger, and the mark on my palm. B
Unusual. G
God told a story. They laughed. Billy reminded God of someone else.
I know you love everyone the same. B
Billy, I love you. I married you. You are my biographer, my essayist, my lover, you carry my
spirit. G
I’m asymmetrical. B
I’m asymmetrical. G
You don’t care how I look. G
You’re wild and avant-gard. B
You married me when you thought I might be your father. You didn’t care. G
The struggle in relationships is usually trying to find out what the relationship is. B
They are more complicated than ‘top seeks bottom.’ G
Yes, I know. B
I remember that look on your face. G
Huh. I know, I’ll never forget it. Tell the story from your point of view. I feel better. B
Okay Bebo. G
I love it when you call me Bebo. B
You got me drunk. And then you yelled out the window. Still blind! And I saw you sitting there
plain as day. You told me you were under-served and that I wasn’t, then you took my drink back.
Then, I forget. You said you had something important to say and was I listening. GB
No. You said you had something important to say and was I listening. B
And we had dessert. G
And you said I want to tell you a secret. B
And I put that in the work. B
And I didn’t object. G
You encouraged me. B
You explained things to me, and that was hysterical. G
And you said. When people are in the process of cleaning up, and making it a world for spiney
urchins, Appalachian Owls, Kodiak Pandas and all that. Something amazing will happen. B
Not amazing…Austrailiopithicene. G
That’s right, that’s right. B
Are you happy. G
Yes, profoundly. Happy. B
God I love your face up close like this. B
It isn’t too much. G
No. It takes time to focus is all. B
Oh, God! You have no legs!! Ha, Ha, Made you look. B
God smiled, and Billy didn’t have to push, or worry, or have pain. It was completely natural.
God didn’t have a son or a daughter, he had a lover. Who played up to God’s speed.
And then he had millions. Billy had millions.
Billy said, You would have made a great person. B
God said, So would you. G
Billy just let that one go. B

The End

The trap part of his conflict

Billy had, with help, created something, something like a fork, a fork in the road. It wasn’t
until he saw the man sitting in the chair cupping his head and crying into his eyes that Billy
realized what he had done.
Billy had been lazy and had grown tired of holding the Thunderbolt between his fingers for so
many years. He blamed God, and perhaps that’s why he was powerless to suffer. Billy’s idea of
suffering was falling in love only in months that ended in Y’s, or days that ended in sunsets.
He was not about to really suffer, and he wasn’t the only one who knew it. Billy had a few
gray hairs.

David had left him, Thank God. And Natalie, tho beautiful, was not really for him. She
flipped his world around the instant they met. But her guiltlessness offended him. She stuck to
her story—It never happened. He ended up leaving her too, Thank God.

He never asked the crying man his name, he was afraid of a return visit, and besides he’d
never fit in. What if Billy invited him over to meet some of his friends? Billy’s friends make
him laugh till he falls off his chair or goes into a coughing fit, and this guy’s eyes might pop out
and ruin the evening. Once your eyes pop out once, it could happen again, there’s no telling. It
wasn’t that, that kept him up at night, it was how he got in.

The trap was set many years ago thru circumstances that Billy, tho typical of him, didn’t
understand at the time. Billy was frequently on the rebound back in those days. He fell in love
easily and often. He found it difficult to fall off without bouncing, especially when you don’t
know what you’re falling off of, or why. When Billy didn’t get what he wanted he became a
martyr, and then almost instantly felt as tho he’d suffered enough—took no responsibility,
blamed them, and suffered until they left. They left none the worse for wear, and then went
crazy: Some women went crazy at the thought of leaving; many men made grandiose plans: One
decided to go to school to become a transplant surgeon. Billy believed, that what he really
wanted was to cut peoples’ hearts out, and get paid for it. But that’s a whole nuther story.
Lovers, friends, and people he barely knew, gave him remembrances of themselves, which he
collected, and hung up on nails like a gypsy might hang garlic. It kept no one away. When you
fall and bounce like Billy did, it sometimes looks like everyone and everything is falling all the
time. The idea was to keep them from falling again. To trunk the tale—Billy wanted what he
couldn’t have. Once, someone gave him a long flowered lay, like they give you when you get off
the plane in Hawaii, and then went home and caused a dreadful ruckus they were sure to regret,
and wound up in jail. It was yellow gold and white. Billy folded it so it wouldn’t touch the floor,
hung it by the back door, and then forgot about it. In time the marigolds withered, and became
what they were intended to be. Full of spirit.
The house was filled with mementos, kept to remind him of various aspects of life, love, and
grief. After all, love hurts. He forgot about this little reminder, and probably should never have
kept it; it had bad Juju, as many islanders, and tidy housewives could tell you. Having things like
that around collecting dust, and other bad spirits was probably not a good idea. It’s a centerpiece
of feng shui, that dead flowers interrupt the chi and the general flow of positive energy and
release—whatever. But, Billy saved everything, especially if it was given to him unsolicited or if
in some other way he didn’t have to return it. Plus, he liked a good story.

The man, who cried his eyes out, came in thru the back door. He must’ve passed the withered
crumbling lay, its force calmed him, consoled him, or infuriated him. Billy believes that symbols
have the power to effect people whether they realize it or not. Just because a man intends to do
something, doesn’t mean by any stretch of the imagination that it will actually happen. Most men
do what they’re permitted to do or what they’re told to do. Having bucked that trend, his whole
life, Billy can attest to the difficulty of it. If something didn’t come naturally to him, he’d never
be able to do it, not for a second.

With God’s help, Billy found himself living in a trap of good and evil. He was the only one
who knew which was which. Some of the symbols in his house were very positive, others not.
When David left him, for example, he placed a little ceramic elephant next to David’s picture on
the mantle, knowing it would take a long time, and a lot of pushing to move him out of his life.
Billy had always been a symbolic person.
As the story goes: when Billy was born the nurses went to weigh him, and when they put him
on the scale it didn’t move at all. They wrapped him in a blanket because he was shivering as
they tried to figure out what was wrong with the scale. He still weighed nothing, just the weight
of the wrapping. The nurse couldn’t figure it out, and just wrote down: 6 pounds 8 ounces,
because that’s how big he was.
 The retrieved memory of the flowered lay had changed Billy’s perception of the whole
encounter, perhaps this creation was a trap for evil and a marker for good—a fork in the road, or
just off the road, if you prefer.

Ida laughed, That’s what I been trying to tell you, he’s rude!
That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you; I’m a thief. I pass you in the woods, and at the fork in
the road I wait, and steal from you something so small you would hardly miss it, so insignificant
you’re not likely to even ask for it’s return. Besides, I don’t have it anymore. I split it. God has
one half, you the other. The more you look for it, the less likely you are to find it. I save these
things; they don’t mean anything to anyone but me. Mementos of a lifetime. Some good and
some bad. Many things we love are not good—they represent struggle.

The first thing he did was change his name.

I felt like I was preparing all morning. I wrote a letter that can’t be opened for 200 years.
I remembered a visitor I had. This wasn’t a feat of memory, it happened 12 hours ago.
He came into my house quietly, and said, You’re the New Jesus I hear.
He started off poorly I thought—everyone’s a critic.
My name is important, as is yours. May I make a suggestion?
No. I said.
He continued, You are not an editor.
I found him arrogant.
Look at all this! He said finally, as if he knew what everything was. Show me around, He
said. This is marvelous!
I began to explain the 20th century, and he used my Hebrew name in front of the TV, in order
to hear about the death of a president.
Some ‘people’ know everything, even tho they’ve been asleep most of the last century or so.
May I make one suggestion, he said. If you accept, I will help you with your, so-called…with
your problem.
Yes, I said.
Don’t tell them to use your name to identify their assassins.
I already got the mistaken identity speech. Thank you. We were not hitting it off. He claimed
to know everything about everything, but I could tell by the way I felt, that he was shocked by
21st century sexuality. Not to mention soap, violins, and windows. He was fascinated, and didn’t
leave my side. He wanted to make this deal.
No deal. I said. My name is for me to use as I see fit.
That’s my only criticism, he said. I began with that, because I know that is what you’re
listening for. I love you. He spoke slowly, his words wound down to excellence.
I took him in the kitchen, which blew his mind, and introduced him to Ah-lih-vah. I showed
him how I taught my dog to say his name, using bacon flavored mostly-meat treats. He was,
Jesus was, fascinated, and as I left him alone in the kitchen, he began asking Oliver a series of
questions to which the circus dog responded in typical fashion: his ears stuck out, and his head
tilted like an Episcopalian. Just because it can say its name, doesn’t mean it has anything to say.
I chuckled to myself, and went upstairs to start a bath. He came up a few minutes later, smiling
and brought a container of orange scented soap.
Here. You’re right, I don’t understand everything the way you do. Please forgive me, I am
sorry. J
Okay, no problem. (To many Americans, a show of genuine feeling is an attempt to solve a
problem.) I put the stopper in, turned the faucets on, and left the room.
Where are you going? He said. This water falls quickly.
 I’m doing two things at a time, I said, not wanting to shock him with the fact that I was doing
twelve things at a time, most of them automatically.
Oh, he said again, as if he knew everything.
He was in me, understanding thru me: the automaticity of thermostats, refrigerators, clocks,
and indoor plumbing. We walked down stairs. He looked at the picture of Ire, and I waved a
hand deprecatingly. Yes, that’s him. He hurried to catch up. I saw the picture as faded. He saw
the picture as extremely shiny. I looked thru the glass, and he, into it.
We were suddenly down stairs in front of the windows. A girl walked by, wearing a
multicolored tie-dyed clingy shirt—he walked me outside. We used my eyes to find out where
she lived. She was my neighbor’s neighbor, all grown-up since the last time I saw her. She had
passed that awkward stage in a matter of a few months. We looked at the world as if anew. He
loved the yard all dewy, with one four-foot tall orange flower, the first of the wild lilies.
Hemerocallis, he said.
She came back, moments later, walking from her house past my house again, delivering
something. It was covered up. He said, Hello.
She said, How are you?
He said that made the trip worthwhile.
I think he loves the sounds women make, or their care. He stopped bothering me, and we went
as one, inside. I felt the jostle of his fluid nature. It was recognizable, to me.
I turned on the computer, and he jumped to the keyboard with delight. He reviewed
everything in a few seconds, and said something to the effect that he wished he had had my
problems. I explained, that, much of the Work I had been given was not in English.
He said, almost whispering, Do you mean the English of today, or the English that people
speak on the islands not a thousand miles away, or the English of two hundred years ago, neither
of which you could understand either? It’s not any known language, he said.
The stuff I got from God is in God’s language, He told me. (…as if I didn’t know). J
Why don’t you highlight all the God-talk that’s untranslatable, and just hit delete? He said—
And did it for me, before I had a chance to ponder the problem.
Now I don’t have it! I said, happily miffed, shockingly pleased, and very glad to be off the
hook. Great! I think I love you, I said.
Have you ever thought of paper; I can show you how to make it? J
No thanks, I said. I printed it up already.
He laughed as tho I were joking.
No, I used the printer weeks ago. He about fell off the black swivel-chair, and spent the next
hour printing all kinds of things from the internet—like a kid—while I bathed.
Can I put you in charge of the commas? He asked.
I’ll just do everything, I said to myself, as I lay in the warm, soapy water.
Well, can I stay? He asked.
Ahh…yeah. Are you going to use all the paper? I asked
What’s this? He asked. Holding up a bottle of lemon cleanser.
Don’t drink it! It’s poison.
Aughh! He shouted, and dropped it into the tub. What’s it for?
I’ll get it. Here look, but don’t taste it, I warned.
I can’t read the writing… J
The smallest of the small print means it’s poison.
He looked at me in utter disbelief.
…How would a child know that? J
Oh, you have a lot to learn. You can sleep on the third floor. There’s a bath tub up there
too—I’ll show you how it works.
 I know how it works, he said. The gas furnace heats the water to about 120 degrees
Fahrenheit, the pressure sends it up the pipes, and it’s mixed with the cold water in accordance
with the set variance of the taps, like this. And he turned off the hot water.
I dunked my head under the soapy water, and blew bubbles out my nose. Very funny.
After I got out, he had a thousand questions about my artwork.
This one represents a dream. I showed him the dream bottle, and it’s contents. This one is
updated, personalized, Renoir. He thought that Renoir was amazing, of course. This one sparkles
in silver, to represent a memory. It dances, plays music, and laughs. B
Wow! He said, using my expressions, my hands, and my mind.
This one…I know, he said. This one is the most fascinating. It represents a gift to your muse.
That’s puzzling, He said.
Thank you. That’s what I thought. B
I mean, Jesus said, how he provides so much, and yet is so unaware.
I don’t understand it either, I said.
Can I meet them? J
They have all met you. Your name is stamped into them. But they would be too shocked to
meet you...like this I said, dodging an unwanted question from so deep within.
I thought you said your name was important to you?
There was another deep and long silence.
It’s what I tried to tell you. They will say your name when they die, as tho you were the
assassin. They will say your name with every wound and ricochet. You will be called away from
children to attend funerals of the stillborn. You have a lot to learn. Take it back. Don’t make
that offer. Your name is more valuable than mine at this point, Jesus! He said. My name has
become a tribute to human suffering beyond all bounds of common decency, leave it there. Just
trust me… leave it there. J
I didn’t have the heart to tell him only liars, thieves, and miscreants use that expression
anymore. Okay, I said. You win. How ‘bout we say, Don’t use the names, the real names, of
assassins for two-hundred years? B
Sounds about right, Jesus said. But you’re a little harsh. Who do you think attracts the
assassin, and with what? J

Are you going to use all the paper? B

The whole office was scripted with paper. Billy could have dried himself off with all the
blank cotton cardboard falling into his wake, and sliding under his feet.
No. Jesus said, hardly embarrassed at all.
Well look, you left big blank spots in the Work. It’s wastes paper. B
They represent words that aren’t comprehendible. J
And what? Are people expected to fill them in with pencil? B
What’s pencil? He said, and looked at the collection by the window sill. He was like a kid
when it came to windows.
I’m still drying off. I said perfunctorily, because he was drying off as well. You know…
scratch them in. B
They’ll do it anyway, he said.
That’s part of the so-called problem, as I see it, with all this…information. People want to fill
in the blanks themselves. A little fiction, and it all becomes fictional. B
Let them. He said, so softly, and with his concentration on a picture of me as a boy, I couldn’t
hear him.
So, give them blanks? I inquired.
Yes, Jeshua said. Whose life is it?
I’m not getting that, I said.
This goes thru their mind right? J
 Yes, I suppose, I said, not supposing.
Well? That’s their life. Hands, bare feet, crazy ideas, talking dogs, the lot of it. J
What bare feet? I asked.
How do you think we got out to see the maiden that walked by? Jeshua offered.
I don’t wear socks outside because they get wet, and it’s hard to pull them off. B
Such a lot of problems you have. How can you deal with them all? And what do socks have
to do with anything? Our quizzical expressions met our ideas—one going in, one coming out. I
was about to say, as I glared at Jeshua: I deal with them one at a time.
He said hello to the Otter, and stared in wonder.
I wonder about him too sometimes, I said.
We laughed—The same laugh.

Look, I said, just get some sheets and a couple blankets out of the storage room, and take any
bedroom up there. The front one is nicest.
I know, He said, as if he’d been there before. J
And I wasn’t asleep, Jeshua said, in a friendly folksy way, as tho we had somewhere along the
line, broken the ice.
Brat.
Brat.
Well what do you call it? I said.
I was coming back, as you are quite well aware…conflicted. I like… He said, as I showed
him the storage room that was also a hobby room. I like that you made the Second Coming, The
Becoming. J
That’s how it feels to me. How does it feel to you? B
We both stopped.
I didn’t know how he felt about anything, and he didn’t feel like I felt about anything. So we
paused in silence. And I couldn’t translate for a minute.
I’ve come back, He said. I have not become…I am. J
Yes, I know, I said. I translated that into English, and out of arrogance. I didn’t know how to
explain, or whether I should even try—that I lived in a time when if you thought you were Christ,
you were automatically crazy. We passed thru ‘crazy’ together. This things, this thing is, even
those things are hard to do by yourself.

Both Jeshua and Billy were ambivalent about saving Mankind. God listened to the discussion.
He didn’t know what He was hearing at first. Then He recognized the internal elemental
discussion that one man has within himself. God smiled, waited for His Son to agree with
himself, and tried not to laugh, as he looked off into the clouds that were floating by, and
wondered if it was going to rain.

Jeshua stood in the same body, breathing and wondering about time, culture, growth and pain.
Funny, he said. You’re right, there’s little point to conversation unless somebody’s right about
something. But what is status? And he smiled my smile. He had a natural acting ability. He was
naturalistic, and very accessible. Jesu, lovable Jesu.

The collective noun for a group of Hummingbirds is a Shimmer, a bunch of Crows is a

Murder. A Fall of Peacocks is two or more. Billy decided two Son’s of God are known as an
Allusion of Saviors. To the best of his knowledge this had never happened before. Tho it’s
possible it happened in the 1960’s. Billy never asked, explanations can be brutal.
Jesu picked up the blankets, because he had an illusion to create, a story to tell.
 And I do know how you feel, he said—I cannot think there are two of everything. A light, a
belief, here, beyond. I have a capacity which is untapped—so much love, you or no one could
ever carry… Yes, he said. I am conflicted too.
Oh, I know, I said. I decided instead of killing everyone, and scooping up remainders like at a
discount carpet mart, we could have ‘Schadenfreude Sagen.’
I know. I heard. That’s one reason I came back early. It’s much better, a big improvement
really. Making a fool out a fool, could be a very great thing. It’s visionary.
Thanks. I thought you’d think so, I said, and added in total silence, Not my idea.
He said, Yes, I know, and sat his quilt, and four pillows on the stairs leading up to the third
floor. You know, Beebop, anyone who thinks they can peddle selfishness, hate, and enforced
ignorance in the name of Jesus Jesus Jesus, deserves what they get. You’ve made it hard, and I’m
glad. For a fool to laugh at him or her self is a very great thing. It’s a kind of a rescue isn’t it?
Plus, a little fiction is all that’s required to get them off the hook—They Don’t Have To Believe!
This is full of wonder. Thank you…Now, let’s do this thing right—Do you have any iced
cream…oh, and whipped cream? J
What for? B
You like sitting down with a big bowl of buttered popcorn. I think I would like a big bowl of
fudge-rippled iced cream. J
Ice cream, I said.
Whatever. Do you want to say it or shall I? J
Go ahead. Wait, wait…grab the pillows. B
We ran down stairs to the big screen TV. We had popcorn, beer, and ice cream. I told him
beer and ice cream don’t mix, but it’s my stomach not his, so I just separated them by ten minutes
or so. He’s not indulgent by nature, and neither am I. So we lived a little.
Ready?
Ready.
Roll ‘em. J
Consider: put the piece that starts: Life Is Dangerous, called ‘You can’t have it both ways’ here.

Conflict, the foretelling. A Haiku

What’s the difference if you die now or 12,000 years from now. Life is growth and pain. Enjoy
your life, live, dream, love, laugh. Let that be your legacy. I’d save you from the horror of your
fear, but it’s too late. There’s nothing to be afraid of. The double edged nature of statements like
that must be hard—who ever heard of a sword that wasn’t. I would say to you, the same thing I
would say to the anti-Christ: Work on your legacy. But really, Work. The future lies open, and
dazzling, but the door swings this way.

4-7-09 ymd The Open-ended Becoming

A small flock of birds flew overhead, it was an uncountable number. There must have been
seven—an uncountable number when you’re talking about small black birds flying and cavorting
in the sky. All the world seems to be having fun.
The measure of a thing may not be its size or complexity. The answer to your question may
be simple, and yet uncountable, because it exists in a speculative elsewhere.
Symbols come to me, present in my mind, as tho in answer to a question I get immediately. I
had to learn this as if it were a conversation, otherwise it made me fearful, as tho a gathering
storm was about to move a mountain, or that I might hear what I didn’t want to hear.
 I learned to speak one word, one phrase, one expression at a time. I could only learn one or
two a day, at first, now I learn up to 60 a day. That’s an open-ended number, 60 is an example.
The symbols don’t seem to repeat anymore—but then, I get answers, and I ask other questions.
I don’t repeat the same thing over and over and over. I do get frightened sometimes, that’s why I
try to hear it as a conversation, otherwise it’s way too fast, and I can’t slow it down.

I enjoy the backyard on sunny days. A fly with a white band around its neck area allowed me
to touch its wing. Altho I can’t earnestly say I saw my finger touch it, I saw no space between
my finger and its wing. The insects, and birds don’t float around me as ‘Disney’ as you might
think. They are oblivious to me. I have opinions, they have senses, which take the place of such
said similar things. The fly with the white collar came back, and was petted several times, for no
reason, just communing with nature. I am learning to talk. Flies and birds are pushing back as
my mind, like air, expands.
Lord of the flies. God is saying things that are being heard by many. The same thing is being
heard in many ways. Who’s jealous now?
I don’t believe God kills for retribution. I don’t believe God kills at all—he’s against it. Isn’t
that odd. I have opinions and senses at odds with each other. It’s no wonder I applaud the
spider’s web. I believe in the free pass, the escape, and the invisible reflection.

God Forbid
I know that I’ve given you a single answer. I also know you won’t accept it. Things accede,
they build upon themselves up to a point you can’t access. Life is beyond you.
The only way to be sure you won’t destroy all human life on this planet, for all of recordable
time, with your nuclear weapons, is to find a way to implant a variety of human DNA prototypes
into a cockroach’s DNA. Then when the cockroach, which will probably be the only creature,
living today, large enough and impenetrable enough to survive a nuclear winter, gets to a
predetermined size, the human DNA will be turned on, and begin replicating inside the creature.
I figure that it could be safe to be human in two or three hundred thousand years, and
evolutionarily speaking, considering poor diet, and lack of sun, the roach might then be about
three or four feet long. That could trigger a change in its exoskeleton, and that new requirement
could lead to specialization in calcium absorption capability. The presence of certain assistive
enzymes in the roach could be your trigger mechanism. You work out the details—That alone
could take about a hundred years.
Of course, when roaches start giving birth to humans they may just eat them—you. Who
knows what they’ll think you are, or what they’ll think you’re good for. Details, details, details.
You’ll figure it out.
Now, of course, the roach DNA thing is a bit absurd—for one thing, it wouldn’t prevent the
deaths of trillions of hypothetically unborn people, not to mention things—Animal things, Plant
things, and other hypothetical things.
Not that you care about things, but if you all die you couldn’t play with your guns any more,
or aimlessly threaten others with nuclear annihilation. Let me ask you this: If you had guns in the
house, and there were children around, would you lock them up, and find a way to make them
harmless even if they were found, or would you just leave everything wide open?
To be blunt, You have a snowball’s chance in hell of survival. But look at it this way: the
amusement you’ve provided untold billions of people, not to mention trillions and trillions of
other life forms, makes it worth while in a way. And in the blaming process… I mean in the long
run, you can always go back where you came from and prepare for a 2nd opportunity. I have lots
of ideas you can work on silently in the back with the others.
 If you want something to continue, take it for granted. If you want to prevent something from
happening, prepare the hell out of it. Seriously… Prepare.
When the bombs go off, it’s too late to prepare. Forget the basement, you’re not a cockroach.
Go to the TV, and find out where the cloud is, and which way it’s drifting. Tell everyone you
know. Don’t think yourself wise or prudent, by just taking your friends and family. You’ll be
inbred within three generations. You need everyone you can get: Doctors, Plumbers, Farmers,
Engineers, fast-talking Salesmen, thick-waisted Trash Collectors, Teachers, Shrinks, the
Chronically Unemployable, and then you might survive. The wider the genetic pool the better.
Take a couple chimps with you too, they started this thing, they might as well suffer thru the end
with you. Don’t forget to take a Priest-Preacher-Rabbi-Imam-Shaman-or-Lama; you’ll need
someone to blame. Take one of those crank-to-power, short wave radios, whatever they’re called,
that might be useful.
Also, there’s very little point to taking any food or water. If food is not abundant, doesn’t
grow naturally, and there isn’t already plenty of water, you’ve gone to the wrong place. You’ll
only prolong your agony. Also, bows and arrows are ten times better than guns. By the time they
(neighboring tribe) discover they don’t know how to manufacture bullets, you’ll have become
proficient in using and making your own scary weapons.
You may die not understanding—Follow me thru the woods, you can still get lost. This is
difficult to say: When you write your own essay, enclose some of your DNA, fingernail
clippings, or whatever they say to do. In the future, which is unknowable, they might need it.
DNA changes over time, as you know. It may make people very weak, and it may be
unreplicable. Have faith that they will not turn you into slaves: lifters and carriers, but real
people. I think that’d be Good…Not Heaven, Heaven’s still far away.

Delbert
It is true that I know so little. Perhaps some can take my little and make from it a lot.—Paul Gaugin

Delbert came to me, as tho pure idea. Not mine, however. Not pulled from or distilled from
my own mind.
He poured it like water. That much is true—Thru t h e hole in my head, and that’s when I saw
him, as he trickled over my electrical burr, and came out thru my mouth, which are my hands.
I speak to Delbert from the time he first came. From the inkling that he was, at the tree.
I can’t see him because his skin is long buried, and therefore non reflective. I can’t hear him,
because his vocal chords are closed to currents of air.
One day I was walking Verylo, and I thought of being wronged. I felt cut-down. I thought
about Delbert, and how my problems don’t compare. That was all. Then I was home, and I
thought, isn’t it interesting to have met someone like Delbert in the backyard. And what is he? I
solved his problem in two seconds, and I wished him well.
Delbert came to me then. He wasn’t gone, and I wondered why. He was still where I had first
seen him. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t invited him inside. That was a faux pas.
Delbert watched TV with me, totally transfixed. He understood as much about TV as I did.
Then an odd thing happened. An old Technicolor film from the 1950’s came on. It was a tear-
jerker called, All Mine to Give. I paid no attention to it until Delbert’s running commentary
made it impossible not to. I was doing The Work, as I sometimes did with the TV on. He saw it
thru my eyes but not my opinions. He cried all the way thru it. I only cried at the end. He
screamed when I explained diphtheria. He told me he played the fiddle, and then his name came
up. One of the characters was named Dr. Delbert. I remember thinking, what a strange
coincidence that is. Delbert has never told me his name was Delbert, he always said Delber. He
is perhaps the finest man I have ever encountered, but his English is uncorrectable.
 We watched in silence. He loved the colors, and said he had never seen such red. Delbert
empathized so totally with the characters he didn’t notice they were white. He understood how
they felt about being in America, tho his experience was totally different. He made me watch it.
He was so strong, and thoughtful, so gentle, so humble, and so noble, I was nearly as mesmerized
with him as he was with the movie.
He tried to tell me what happened to him. I can’t say I understood it all. I had to rewind him
so many times, and so much was lost in translating 18th century slavery to 21st century servitude I
was frankly lost.
He thought I was God. I tried not to laugh. He said I was close enough, and could he stay
anyway. I said Yes. Delbert is not a nuisance, tho he’s close. He’s dead. He is not too much
trouble nor has he ever bothered me. He’s dead. He is in another form of some sort. He does not
exist outside of my experience of him. When I’m tired of him he is tired also. He’s dead. We
don’t argue; we are not friends; we are in complete sympathy; and we don’t understand each
other—because he’s dead. He has been dead for over a hundred years. I think about him like I
think about Napoleon. A done deal.
He has a personality only because it takes so little to have one. I love him because he asked
me if he could stay. I don’t know why he doesn’t leave. I don’t ask him to because I have no
reason to. He doesn’t go to Heaven because I believe he doesn’t feel he deserves it. Or maybe he
likes me. Who knows. He doesn’t exist in my imagination, but I would go there first if I ever
needed to find him.

Heaven Is In Your Eyes

I have no intention of bringing you any Peace. That is a residual effect. Further, you are about as
interested in Peace and Freedom as a fly is in nectar. Personal Freedom and Peace of mind, well
that’s different.

You say: My Freedom Yes. My life, Yes, I’m all for that. Freedom is like other people’s lives—
it can come and go. When it’s yours, suddenly it’s time to fight. I would fight for life, I have. I
would fight for the idea of life, but life is not an idea, even mine is only part idea. Life is a little
bit like a wasp. It’s going to sting you eventually.
Heaven is in your eyes.

Freedom needs to be gotten rid of, but not altogether, not altogether eliminated. When you
discover what it’s good for. You may want to cultivate it.
Peace of mind is delusional, almost all the time. Soldiers frequently die with peace of mind. The
peace of mind of being right—being right is death. Symbolic of death.
There is no death, but what you bring to it.

If your idea, the one you got ‘from God,’ requires power and struggle to preserve. It is worthless.
An idea from God, is God, and is, like a flower bud—emblematic of the plant. It doesn’t need
your help to open, just a little water, if that.
Heaven is in your eyes. You don’t have to be so sanctimonious about it.

When people walk into Heaven, they turn to the right. It is a tradition of sorts.
It’s funny to watch, and many laugh.
There is no right in Heaven—tho many think there is, no one thinks there ought to be.
I am not here to eliminate war. Right now, I am here to turn the page. ((((put at bottom of page
please))))
My opinions of Peace, Freedom and Right, may be colored by the fact that I never had any. I got
it from inside. With no outward sign. It was not visible or seen. Not provable or apparent. Not
measurable or independent. No one would ever agree, but they didn’t live my life. They didn’t
go this way. They say, Oh, if you had it—it would show.
If you had it, it would show. I’m not like you. Thank God. I’ll just walk around Thanks.
If I’m ‘easy,’ it is an illusion. I’m not easy at all. I was born this way, because I’d know the truth
from here, and not fear telling the truth from here.
The least among you. How many times have you heard it? How many times did it strike a
chord? How many times? And now you tell me, what?

Luck is outcome.
The ending is meant to make all that came before, beautiful.

I have not come to close your factories, tho they will. I have not come to change your industry.
For every factory you close, your own industry will open four-fold. It’s what you want. The
things you want, you can make better than any machine. Except DVDs, and those little tiny parts
that I could never in a million years keep track of.
Guns don’t do what you want them to.
Cars don’t take you where you want to go.
Pictures don’t preserve your memories, except your memory of pictures.

The bee kept missing the trumpet shaped flower. Time and time again, she would land on top of
the flower, and wandered around like an old man smoothing a tablecloth. When I looked closely
she was piercing the outside of the flower, to get the nectar, instead of walking around the
stamens inside. A nearly imperceptible hole was made, and the plants, in time, seeded with great
perfusion, but how? I don’t think she helped at all.

4-7-01 ymd The Future he rejects

Thru some heedless odd quirk, one day Billy walked into the future. It was the future that
cannot stand, not because it cannot be, it certainly could. It was, however, like a Mimosa Tree, it
will get but so high, and then fall apart, decompensate. The less said the better. It’s gone.

APM
This was an impermanent situation in a nearly-permanent circumstance.
Billy loved the smell of Mimosa flowers. He was caught, that is, a thought got caught-up in
him once, when a young boy. He and his friends spent their summer in a Mimosa tree. A rare,
older one. They spent days contemplating, and speculating in the balefully brown branches of a
prehistoric tree, like monkeys—sometimes climbing just to climb. Away from their history I
think.
From then on, Mimosa flowers smelled like summer to him. The tree, in which Billy toils,
drops many seeds, and Billy would love nothing more from life than to spread these seeds all over
his town, and the surrounds.
Knowing impermanence from the branches, makes one want to make life even less permanent.
It’s natural, that’s why Billy spreads impermanence. Not to promote it, or conquer it, but to share
it. This is a really good time to realize that nothing lasts forever.
 Sharing is like walking forward without moving your feet. Cartoony, like when the trees and
lawns move past the animated figure, and we suppose that she’s walking.
He searched, and found in God three things, besides everything: agreement, protection, and
messages to deliver. This is the all there is to interaction, as any teenager could tell ya.
Words cannot change a circumstance, the humour that the conceit generates is what can
change a circumstance.

With so many wandering aimlessly around, he wondered why he was so conflicted about life
or death. This was going to take some thought, and some care.

Billy’s faith in his fellow man was about to be tested. Unable to put words in anyone’s mouth,
censored, in fact by his own rebound, hindered by the fall-out from a billion conversations. He
just stood up.

Have they learned to listen for right? Can they recognize his state of mind? The faithful
leading the faithless nowhere, with no time left to quibble. God was right, he should have spoken
to the quibblers first. So many to reject, so little time.

5-3-18 Slave
A man came to me—a sincere man. I believe in the sanctity of life, he said. I respect life, yet,
I’ve made no sacrifices to help anyone. I have done only the things that were expected, or that
would make me look good. Have I failed?
Yes.
I’m a kind man. I respect my fellow men and women. I have made every effort to see that I
don’t become a burden to them, or the world, for my own sake—that my life will, in time, make
room for life. Have I done the right thing?
No.
You say a thing and walk away. You walk with ease, with your narrow view. You’ve made
every effort to stay out of the fray. You have chosen a bad time for that. Life is growth and
pain. Sacrifices and suffering are unavoidable, yet you seem to have managed quite well. You
make practically no sacrifices, and you refuse to suffer. You want it all tied together neatly, and
that’s where you dropped the ball. It is your honesty that will save you. You have taken what
can only be described as God’s will out of the equation. That’s okay, there was a time when a
heart defect was untreatable, and children had to squat—that time has passed. This is a new time.
You take upon yourself the responsibility for preserving and protecting life, but not all life. Your
decisions are based on fractions. You don’t realize you’ve loaded every problem with your own
wish for it to be more, larger, longer, greater, more meaningful, prettier and all that stuff—for the
sum of human forms.
Life is not short. You are challenged.
Quantity is practically nothing. The less you have the more you make of it.
Quality comes from the inside. Stop looking at every step for the pay-off. Stop trying to squeeze
more life out of life as if it were a tube. You must look deeper, past this stuff that leads you to
ever after always be the one to gain. You must, or all will be lost. I never said life was growth
and gain, you did. All will not be saved. All cannot be saved. Respect all life. You can’t avoid
being a burden someday—you’re already a burden!
Make room for life while you’re living. There will come a time when that makes no sense. But
life needs Help now. Your help. There will come a time, I believe, when you can ‘spread out,’
without destroying everyone and everything. There will come a time when you’re not ‘pushing
yourself out.’ That time is coming; the harmony you seek is coming, one way, or the other.
There will come a time when life does not depend on you to Let It Be.

If a woman walks absently from this to that, dropping babies here and there, a kind man would
pick them up and care for them as he should do—being careful to see she makes no profit. A
wise man would stop the woman, and explain in excruciating detail how living may have its
residual effects, but life is not a waste product.
If you’re going to play God, that is a critical distinction. Being is everything—Of course, you
have to let go, of course you do. Have faith.

Much can be excused in the pursuit of life, especially life for another. Much can be forgiven if it
is in the pursuit of liberty, especially liberty for another. Likewise the pursuit of happiness.
Embrace. Let go. It too is part of your grasping, taking, holding, keeping, and oh so cunning
nature.
*
In a book I keep, it says: This speaks for me. No more than 16 days if there’s a question of brain
death. No more than16 months if there’s a chance of a full recovery. then you have to let me
go—home. I can’t be a slave to your machine. My book is my book. It may not be your book. It
may not say what your book says. Mine says: Ciao Babeni.

You’re making a huge mistake by involving doctors, lawyers and politicians in this realm. These
three are particularly irresponsible. They are very likely to wait for the second, and in some cases
the first check to bounce, and then say, Ya know…death with dignity—that’s not a bad idea.
Listen, even a full recovery is what I say it is. It’s my body.

Human sexuality, HS, comes in a myriad of forms and categories. Just looking at preferences,
approaches, degrees of openness, and the perceived limits of rationalization, there’re about 36
categories right there. Add to this, relationships, assuming, for example, that not all women are
the same, and you have at least 1,127 more. I’m a subset of a subset of a subset, and I am by no
means alone. Many times I look at love, and I look at relationships I know. They love each
other. They’re beyond sex, essentially. Their loving holds within it, a sort of constant un-
doing—A fearless caring. Sometimes it holds resentment, which always builds, breaks-off and
builds again. Take all the kinds of HS you think possible, double it (just because you don’t know,
what you don’t wanna know). That’s a tiny drop in the bucket, in comparison to the various
nature of love. That’s doing. Love is being. I put this here, because you’re a slave to it. Or may
someday be. You’re its slave when that thing makes you run, and you have no choice.
Billy could not speak into people as God had done. He could only speak to people. It was,
however, a residual effect of The Becoming, that he spoke from Being. You might say, it was his
allowance. He was not clear. He was crystal-clear.

Save the children

People are only interested in three things: Things which are edible, fun, or have saved
someone recently. Many people are starving. Many of those people are children. Many of those
children are being used by their parents to get more food from you. People have always used
their children as social security. This is not as complicated as it appears: if you were born in a
desert or a sewer, and all your life you scratched out an existence, someday you could be old
enough to have a child of your own. You don’t have any of the means to take care of a child.
You may not know that, but it makes no difference—it is always the case that the less you have
the more you make of it. Sharing love, sharing sex, sharing a child is beautiful. That will never
change. However, linking sex, torture and children is not permissible. If you have a baby in a
sewer, or on a dung heap, you are guilty of unconscionable depravity and abuse (there’s no such
thing as accidental torture).
They will say I am thoughtless. In this upside-down world, you will see many strange things,
stranger, and ever after, more strange, than you, can possibly, believe.
Many people have their children in a place I wouldn’t even take a dump. And that’s the truth.
Sex and starvation are sometimes inextricably linked—this is one of those times. The only
difference is that now you can see the big picture, that’s a big change. The rules of the
community have always been the rules of the ameba, keep going until something stops you. We
don’t have a reproductive imperative, because we can THINK.
I have heard about your plans to save these children, it makes me shudder.
Do this: Go to the men with condoms. Offer them condoms, not water, not water purification,
not protein, carbohydrates, shelter or shade. Don’t taunt them with seeds, or cell phones. This is
not tough love—Nothing grows there, but death. It will be many years before anything grows
there, but only if children don’t. They will be outraged, mortified, humiliated, and absolutely
aghast, that the rich would offer the poor condoms.
I know you can understand: If they don’t establish the sure and certain connection between sex
and starvation first, all your food and technology will go to making more children. You’d feel so
much better if you could just give them soup & crackers, and leave the birth control lecture for
another day, I know…who wouldn’t? It would feel so good to just fix their problem. When you
help them live. When you give. I don’t care how you feel. They don’t care how you feel. Your
ignorance will keep them starving, growing larger in number, starving more, growing larger, and
then starving more. These are not ignorant peasants, they understand perfectly—they have no
choice! Take the babies aside, and explain this to the elders first. If you have to, find a safe spot,
and post a sign: Keep Out! Adults Are Talking. The spirit of death is rising. It feeds on children.
Don’t feed it, and it will go away. This will work, not because it’s the word of God, not because
it’s dawn on the last day, and not because you’re so afraid it won’t, This will work because it
has. Your unknowable future is vast. I’m still in charge of the words. Explanations must be
thorough, truthful, but also, understandable.
There is no more spirit of death (if there ever was one). You’re about to reach several places
from which you cannot pass—all at the same time. Hi. Let’s talk.

Ф What did I tell you before about picking on your sister? If you want to throw that, throw it
at me. And I’ll tell you something…you better not miss. You’re going to stop fighting, and
you’re going to apologize, and you’re going to clean up your mess. Or I’m going to start
counting to ten. One. Ф

In some places drums do the talking, in other places magical birds make men magically dance.
There are places where the one who talks is the one who hides the most, and others, where it
depends if you’re in the tent or out. Where you come from, the rich and pretty do the talking.
Take a drum or two with you, and don’t be afraid of the magic. Oh, and you can leave all the
crazy beliefs behind, but don’t forget to take some faith.
Look at them as selfish, thoughtless, and abusive. If you can’t see it, take a step back.
If a parent abuses their own child you must take the child away—it’s not ethical to give the
child a cookie, an ice cube, or a bandaid, and then send them home, still bruised. Neither is it
ethical to keep your mouth shut for fear of what he might do to prove ‘he knows what abuse is!’
The question: If this, what more? Is un answer able. Let it go.
 If you throw a trillion dollars at the problem, that is not the tiniest bit of a drop in the bucket.
There is not enough money in all the world to solve this for them. Explain it. Explain it so they
can understand. And while you’re at it, explain it to yourselves.
One more thought. If you take the child away, don’t give the parents anything in payment. If
you give them twenty drops of water, they’ll go into the paper cup business.
As much as I would love to be the one to deliver the speech about rampant immoral sexual
excess, unrestrained in purpose—to all the ‘heterosexuals’ of this world—all six billion
6,000,000,000 of them, I won’t. That’s a promise. We all have feelings. And. We’ve had
enough of that bullshit. Besides, that’s a little over the top even for me. It wouldn’t be a bad
idea, however, to send someone to Africa to explain to the Africans that men don’t own women,
nor do parents own their children. That in fact, people can’t own people. Somehow they missed
that lesson. Others did too. Question: who to send? Next question: if you had six kids, and one
was suicidal. When would you give up? This is my offer: for every solution, I give away a free
condom. Gay people understand.

4-7-11 the time came when

The time came when I didn’t need to ask questions, the flood of words became stilled. I had
the answer, before the question, or let us say, just for those who love to quibble, at the same time
as the question. The truth is the former, but no one would ever believe it.
The questions I had then, and had thru-out my life were based on the mis-reading of the
symbols in the first place. With the reading of the symbols, there was great clarity. I was not
better, less gay, more handsome, more religious, or more reasoned in my manner. Why would I
ever choose your path? Look where it’s led. I didn’t gain what you might expect thru The
Becoming process, it was, as the rest of my life had been—mostly visual. I ‘saw’ things
differently.

God speaks to me thru my mind, not into it as if he had vocal chords. I have felt like giving
up. I am going to stand firm. If everyone leaves, if a slow hell awaits, I am going to continue. In
the end, I have to do all I can do.
I will not take it back—will not…won’t. He can be destructive. The song lyric, ‘They’ll take
your soul if you let them oh, but don’t you let them,’ has played quite a few times lately. If. I
think if it’s harmful to your soul, to give when you must take, you cannot apologize, you must
forgive them and leave. I don’t know, I just don’t know.

4-8-21 Living the Life

A man came to me and told me his daughter was kidnapped, and can I please help. I told him
to call the police. How could I tell him God will protect her; and not to worry. How could I say I
know because He protects me—I’m in prison. How could I tell him God is inside of her, and will
protect her from horror and torment. How can I say I know it for a fact, when my life is comedic
fiction. How could I tell him not to pay the ransom—to sacrifice his daughter, the love of his life,
for my daughter, everyone’s daughter? I have no daughter, no family, and very few friends. I am
in prison for telling the truth—so why would I start lying now—but that’s what they all say.
 I can’t even tell him I’ll pray for her, because I don’t pray like everyone else, I rarely, if ever,
say please, I only say Thank you. Not the Thank-you-in-advance for the buttered toast and the
winning number. But, Thank you for bread, refrigerators, thoughts, the appreciation of the way
the light falls on the sink. For being able. This. Really, This.
If he said: I talk a good game, but when the chips are down I’m useless. I would have to tell
him I know nothing about his love for his child. I have to look inside myself to know what to do
almost all the time. I would never make him put everything on the line for another, or for a better
world. He must look inside himself, and take his own path, pray his own way, make his own
decisions. I can’t ask him to throw away his one chance of happiness. I can’t steer his life, or
point the way—I’m in prison.
I cannot be a river. I can’t find a true course for someone else. He or she must be free to
make tragic personal mistakes as well as take brave leaps of faith. I know about tragic loss, and
trying to do the right thing and failing. This would probably not be the right time to mention it,
but I have failed at everything, even this. The dry-run—a bust. My experience of loss can never
be his—or his mine. The purpose I see in my life cannot just suddenly become his—because now
would be a good time.
I know he would put himself in her shoes, but he can’t see that she might understand better
than he, that clarity exists beyond fear, and that her life may mean nothing one minute, and
everything the next. That her sacrifice, however small, might mean everything to God, and that
her dad might someday understand that she understood what was happening, even tho she wasn’t
sure, and had no choice…That she can think beyond herself in a time of crisis, even if it changes
nothing. She may realize before it’s too late, the best times in life were when she showed how
much she could love another.
How can I tell him in his grief and pain that I don’t perform miracles—God does. How could
I tell him God is the God of the living and the dead—Is that supposed to be a comfort? How
could I tell him I know all this for certain when everyone knows I’m crazy. If he asked me how I
know for sure, how could I tell him, I see miracles all the time—when I know describing one,
would be like describing one raindrop. He’s bound to say, ‘That’s nothing…it’s not even enough
to get me wet.’ Yes, I know, but it’s raining. It’s raining Wonder.
How could I tell him the hardest things, the greatest things you do in life are not done because
you believe. In fact, you can’t believe you ever did them. But you did.
How could I tell him about Delbert? How could I tell him I know for certain God exists for a
thousand personal reasons, and because he gave me a 190 year old ex-slave, who asked to be my
chauffeur for free, shows up when he wants to, was probably color blind in an earlier life. And I
think his first name is James, but I’m not sure.
What if he said, You say to the world, the population, must decrease. Then you say to my
face, You hope my daughter lives.
How could I get into a religious discussion with him when I’m not religious, don’t go to
church; and refuse to go anywhere I’m not welcome. And have had long discussions with God
about everything, including the name of our baby. I might as well tell him to go home and start
asking God some of these questions. Because that’s what I’d do.

I did ask Delbert if James was his first name, and he said, and I quote, “It might as well be,
Miss Daisy, that’s what everybody round here call me.” He does love the movies. I think he
thinks they’re real. He is a better driver than I am, but I still have to watch the road. Oh, and I
wanted to call The Work: 200 weeks at the top of the New York Times Best Seller List®, but God
had other ideas—needless to say.

4-7-13 People just don’t come back

 People cannot come back, do not come back, are not able to come back, turn around, and walk
the Earth again. But there he is. He cannot be, and yet he is.
The story is backward; you enter now with the burdens as tho you were born with them. I’m
telling the story, God finally says. This is the end. Welcome, and know I am not watching you,
you have arrived. Once and for all—fully formed. As tho done.

Prime Mover
Our enjoyment of beauty is not based upon any measure of intellectual clarity. Instead, it is based upon
our imaginations being engaged by the qualities of obscurity and suggestiveness—Edmund Burke
First cause
Plato therefore and his followers laid it down (said) that the intellectual soul is not united with the body as
form with matter, but only as the mover is with the moved, saying that the soul is in the body as a sailor
in his boat: thus the union of soul and body would be virtual contact only…But as such contact does not
produce absolute oneness, this statement leads to the awkward consequence that man is not absolutely
one, nor absolutely a being at all, but is a being only accidentally. To escape this conclusion, Plato (said)
that man is not a compound of soul and body, but that the soul using the body is man. –Edmund Burke

4-6-30 The Front Lawn After The Becoming

Many believed Billy would bring Peace and that the last Hajj would bring an end to stone
throwing, but it was not to be. He would not pay the price of Baptism. He refused. They said
there was no price. They said everything here is free. They refused to tell the truth.

All the signs were clear, agreement everywhere; Billy was, as he had always been—not as he had
supposed growing up, The Archetypal American—he was symbolic of the human soul. The one
he could not name, but he believed was called the self.

The black crows had risen, the snakes had winged across the sky, the red heifer, the white
buffalo, the kissing of the dolphin, the bee of indecision in his rightful place, the Dao sign written
indelibly upon Billy’s body by God. The scars, the wounds, the cuts—All of it, all the way back
to his birth, and then forward to this very moment then back. The anti-Christ faltering—winged
and tony angels hovering at the threshold of revelation, all of it. All in about two years. Since
about the time people began opening doors for him, since before the accident, Since before his
father’s family came over from England, since ever.

The Angels of allowance

Let me tell you something about angels: Angels without wings, have wings they don’t know
they have. Listen, angels aren’t that bright, without their wings I mean.
Many people tried to help, but it wasn’t a help to open doors for me, it doesn’t widen my way.
It was confusing and distracting. I prefer to be treated as a real person when I am one, and when
I’m symbolic you can’t touch me anyway. Distractions are everywhere, they come and go. I
think to tell the truth about them, and move-on is better than trying to see around them. In other
words, for me…take a piece from their work, and make it mine—like a memory, a memento, a
souvenir, or a bite of a donut, then move on to the thing that you were in the middle of doing. To
pretend that you’re not influenced seems foolish, and to see life as if it were one big distraction is
foolish also. Life is, I believe, a form of being, and Being is everything.
In Heaven I am

In Heaven, many thought property values would skyrocket, angels particularly thought that.
Heaven was a buzz—a beehive of activity. All were waiting for the ‘nice people’ to show up.
Billy became less than popular when he plunked Earth down in the middle of Heaven—as they
saw it. Property had no value. Suddenly. Free Friday was an unknown, vastly misunderstood
holiday.

I am limited in what I can say about Heaven, not because I’m not allowed, but because I am
limited.

This One This Time

This one was not going to walk around kissing babies or trekking from village to village
helter-skelter-donkey style, looking for prostitutes or all of that, or any of that.

This time he scattered a pinecone, and as he took it apart, he considered time, events, their
forward and backward nature. A man stood in front of his house, amid many, all shapes and
sizes, most fat.
“Kiss my child…so at least he should know the word No,” a woman said. The short legged
man was angry about a stock split, or a meatball sandwich he was going to not-have either—if he
didn’t get his way with the world, and it ended before his mutual funds matured. He swore an
oath, which made him breathless. He lifted a rock, for crushing purposes—one of the 92 kilo
circadian quartz outlining Billy’s property so oddly, as tho it were a parenthetical statement
uniting everything and everything else. [ everything -]— else ]
He, the man, held it up, and Billy said the first thing he was not directed to say, urged to say,
yes, taught to say. Most definitely—people tried to teach him to say, but Billy had up till now
refused to say.

We were now off the books, and Billy took a breath, and said the first words after The
Becoming; the first words after The Completion; the first words across the agreement:

“Get off my lawn.”

Go home. Do the next thing on your list. If you’re at your wits end...just, be kind to someone.
If you absolutely can’t do your job and be kind—You need to start looking for another job. If the
only possible way to do your job, and be kind in the doing, to be kind to another—would require
some form of sabotage, you need a new job. If you can’t locate the golden rule in the middle of
the book your writing, just treat people as tho' you understood them. Pretend you know what
respect is. Teach your own children ‘No.’ Read something to them. If you think for one minute
they’ll strap themselves to a yoke, so you can live large, you’ve got to be kidding. If you think
big happy families is the answer to growing the world economy, well good luck. Eternity is
closer than you think.

Billy looked around, and the street was decorated for Christmas, yet it was June 30 (4-6-30-
22:53). Fireworks went off. People did double-takes when they saw him, and had for five weeks
or so. Young men played their best games—showed off around him. People were happy and
relieved, for no reason, that he was here.
They didn’t know him, nor could they believe the few who did. He was not nothing. He was
not universally loved. He was not remarkable, funny or happy. He was not fascinating, or good,
fair or just. He was, well, Impossible to comprehend, so they didn’t.
He Was He Threw

He was always on time. He was everything. And he was deadly accurate.

He threw the first ball at exactly 10:54 Pm (22:54), in the dark. It was a strike. The moon was
nearly full—we were not off the books. This was something new. Heaven was here, and far
away, and quite pissy about the whole thing. If Billy gave a crap, he never would have suited up.
He wasn’t what you would call the most caring person in the world. He was back. He was
becoming, something, time, cannot erase, as the song goes.

The Seed The World

The seed, the pinecone, he had scattered, the one he held in his hand, was unidirectional, unlike
time. He was not stopped. Nothing stopped him. He was united, unfettered by convention, but
you already knew that. He was The Great Undoing.

The world’s longest explanation, five words: You Are The Only One. The one delivered for
about eight hours—finally Billy got it. The Job was his. He was ‘the only one’ who could do
this, the one who has failed at everything, but when he stepped into Heaven, he ran into God, and
all the doors flew open.
10-06-04 Suddenly
Billy was not God. He was as profound.
He was not the devil, who is essentially dead.
Billy is a third thing—floored.
Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Needless to say.
Billy had the work in his head. It checked out fine. Like a file, a rasp, dropped into water, it fell
straight, fast, and left no mark even tho’ it’s nearly impossible to hold without scraping yourself.
The truth takes no time, and doesn’t need to be complicated, Thank God.
Billy took Over, his forks, a ruler, 3 magnifiers, a magnet, and something he used as a child—a
turntable…sat in his favorite chair, and began to think—All the while d r a w i n g. He had
sat a pot of water to boil, and forgot about it. Billy learned to say his name, and the dog to say
his, before the water evaporated. The marks left in the bottom of the pot, as the last of the water
faded away, looked so odd—they caught Billy’s eye. In salt, it looked like a picture. A picture of
what had just happened. He kept it.
Billy set to work. Began to empty his mind on paper, ancient paper. He’s not afraid of his own
thoughts, they are in Attic, just like the paper—ancient. Nothing lasts.
He had it in his hands as he walked down the white staircase. It was done.
Then he took Diaspora for a walk. Myths exploded. Joott.

4-7-20 BEING: In my back yard

Set thy heart upon its work, but never upon its reward—of Hindu origin

Being the only Son of the living God was not always great. I loved walking around, and
everyone was so nice. Hundreds of people recognized me, I got a kick out of that. Their
expression was always the same, hard to interpret, like seeing a movie star, except this one had
never been in anything. People were open and very truly themselves. It was a learning
experience.
I trusted that this would not be like any of those other projects, like when I had to make that
dismally slow race car out of wood or clay or whatever it was that slowed it down.

I realized immediately that I was crazy and that, with the possible exception of ranting to myself
in the street, I fit the bill. Son of God and crazy. But…I really am the Son of God —He said so.
It was not possible that I was the only one who knew he was The Son of God, and also knew that
he was not crazy, but who’s gonna buy that? “What I need’s a sharp agent, and a smart lawyer, if
I can find one.”

Most of the time, I just exuded love, and thoughtfully obliterated feelings. I was having a hard
time concentrating and it looked like the house would never get painted. Just as well, I had this
idea of painting it red. The whole thing was dumbfounding, I must confess. Why would God
choose someone so impossibly shy, with a thready hold on sanity to begin with, and then hoist
him into this position…where he could very well be hurt, and dismissed as another crazy person.
If I cared what they thought, I could be in serious trouble. Wouldn’t it be just my luck, find out I
was The Son of God this whole time, and then go crazy at the last minute, because all of a sudden
I cared. Ironic.

I had, and have, absolutely no difficulty holding this secret. In fact I am not-bursting to tell
people that I am now married, and took my husband’s last name. I am also having no-difficulty
not-explaining our confusing relationship: father, lover, friend, pen pal, creator of the universe,
confidante, husband, bride groom. My first husband was a complete mess. I miss his simplicity
tho…if that’s what you want to call it.

If my new husband-thing weren’t such a fast talker, and would stop using my vocabulary, and my
own understanding of science, I could learn a lot more facts, and secrets to wow people at parties.
But, as it was starting to look, to me, from here, there weren’t going to be too many parties where
a declaration of being God, or having God come inside him, or being The Son of God returned,
by some miracle, would even raise an eyebrow.
Asylum living was home-base for this home run. Well, I have to accept the fact that that could
happen—leaving Him, is out of the question. It’d be like throwing away a winning lottery ticket
because there were too many zeros in the disclaimer on the reverse side. And what would I say to
the panoply…Don’t worry, I already have a house in Heaven? I like my life? How weak would
that sound? The truth enobles so few, it’s almost useless.

I had my memories, and a firm grip on reality—That’s what the memories were of. God was so
completely lacking a conspiratorial edge, I saw forgetfulness lurking behind every sign. They
say: if you can’t turn it off and on, then you have no control; but He does love to rattle my
cage…‘Mighty big dinosaur they found in Argentina the other day.’ Yes, amazing, I’ll be right
back…come here Olvidar. We’ll be right back…Hold that thought.

He’s not human, and He says He won’t leave me, but He also says the money’s bound to corrupt
me. And I know He has cleanliness issues—so what can you make of that? I’ve no idea. I am
beyond trust; I’m beyond hope; I dwell in pure faith. Then He implies I’m the only one who
understands Him; I don’t know what to say; I love Him; He makes me laugh; and I’ve seen that
movie a thousand times. Sitting in my backyard, I heard some one in the practice field behind
my house pray to God-in-Heaven, to make them ‘safe!’ Why didn’t they just bribe the umpire
before the game started? Safe! What’s that?
As I sat in my backyard, I heard that familiar sound. It reminded me of a dozen small towns
where kids get together to play semi-organized sports. Clarke and I were thrown out of at least
two Charlestowns that had that same sound. Suddenly for no reason I couldn’t remember the
name of the town I lived in. As was typical of the time, and still today, I would lift my head up,
doubtless, with a quizzical expression, and before I could change it, the answer came. Someone
yelled “Ay-upp!” Hey you’re up!
Well, that’s as good a name as any, tho it would make more sense to call it Airsupp. But what
does sense have to do with the name of a town?

I think a nervous breakdown is symbolic of entering onto a new stage, or needing help.
I already told my shrinks I talk to God, and he talks back. They said that was interesting.

Posed, poised, poison, or TMI?

More than ever before, in these days, you must be able to tell Truth from lies. You are ass holes
who claim never to have touched your ass. The powerful cannot help. The internet will bring the
unexpected result. All is input. The Information Age offers little. When big profits are a stake,
they tell you what you want to hear.

Billy walks around

Mastery over the world is a very small thing. Pure fantasy. Counter factual. Grand children that
love you. A claim. Can you help but follow your nose?

Even the most truly lactose-intolerant-wheat allergic, know that serving cheese and crackers has
nothing to do with cheese or crackers, but is a directive—sit here.
If you’re giving a party you set things up. A table, chairs, and a reason for sitting.

Now, how much horror will your laziness allow? The more you try to hide, the more you will be
seen. Some things that look like tricks are really thoughtful exercises in educational furtherance.

All I can say is this is more fun than Christmas, and I’m loving everyday. So if I start washing
my underwear in puddles, know that I’m having a conversation with God in my head.
I took a walk and realized: You don’t want Freedom or Peace, those are personal issues. You
want to be right. You think that is a public issue.
I wouldn’t end war, there are too many crazy people out there. Besides, what can I take away that
you wouldn’t miss? Sometimes when I feel uninhibited like this, I feel like stealing. I don’t
know why. God and I are in discussions about that.

I have no time for politics or promoters, power brokers or struggling. I never had freedom, peace
or a clear feeling that I was right about anything. Except now, but I’m crazy, so you can’t go by
me. I never wanted anything but an Honorarium from Dartmouth: Prince of All Eternity. All this
un-provable power is absurd even to me. I’m too gentle to be violent, that is, my violence is so
gentle, it hardly leaves a mark.

Listen, Heaven and Earth are together, things are changing already, and I love you, even tho you
are deeply flawed and bewildered. I couldn’t trust anybody either when I was 100% human. Sex
and money are issues, but I’ve been married before. He thinks money will corrupt me, he’s right
of course, and sex is great, but he comes in about 5 seconds. I can’t apologize for or about all the
horrible things you are likely to do with the fact of my appearance. You knew I was coming, now
I’m here. Here we go. No apology, but I will forgive you for the big mess you have to clean up.
Please don’t start. I don’t need any 500 year debate. Where were you in 1990 when I was so
lost? Where were you in 1990 when I couldn’t get a date? Where were you? Don’t come to me
now, with all your luggage packed; It’s too late. I wasn’t planning to come back at all.

I would love to just run on and on, but I’m in prison, and my letters have to be brief, and not
reflective of the crime I was put in here for. The more I disclose—the more I whisper thru the
bars—the longer my sentence, or so I’m told. I’m here to turn the page for you. ((((please put at
the bottom of a page))))

God just informed me that prisoners cannot benefit monetarily from their crime. He’s like a
frigging lawyer sometimes. I swear. I can see why so many people go crazy in His presence, He
doesn’t speak English, or any language I ever heard, it’s pure thought, and He uses every part of
you, like, like an influx of gallons of highly oxygenated blood. There’s no force behind it, but
you may decide in a moment of ecstasy, to turn it up to maximum flow, which is way too much—
needless to say. I’m glad I married him. He would be impossible to tone-down otherwise.

I’ve decided to stay 48-49 forever. He’s smiling. He sang ‘You are my special angel’ this
morning—He can be very sweet. He seems to know when I’m feeling down, you know…stung.

Manipulating people is fun, but everyone is so dead-set against the truth, I have to preserve my
energy for what looks like a long sentence. Oh, I never wrote that part about the speaker as
prisoner. Well later. I’m going to make a list of all the things I’ll do or undo, when I get out.

Did I ever tell you, He let me hear birdsong in English once…it was a riot. Almost all of it was
one word, ‘easy.’ Said with all different inflections and nuance of meaning:
A crow flew over my head looked down at me and said, ‘Easy,’ as in: “Don’t get up and do
anything… ‘easy’… take it ‘easy,’ you may break a sweat, and you wouldn’t want that.” Another
bird, a prospective lover for a little cardinal girl, said to her, when he was rejected, ‘easy,’ as in:
“You are just an easy piece,” you know, too available…easy.
A blue jay was attacked for stealing eggs and was screaming ‘easy,’ as in: “take it easy that
hurts.” I heard a few bird slurs: Thief! Pretender! Mountebank! Interloper!, but most of it came
out: ‘easy.’
The cardinal did a flutter dance, and he said to the object of his desire, “This is how you stand,
and this is where I come in. See…‘easy.’” Some big romantic!
If a bird were dying, would some other bird say: “Take it ‘easy’, it’s alright, there’s nothing to it.
Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you…Go ahead, go with God?”
Some thing’s look easy, and even sound easy, but that doesn’t mean they are easy.

The only difference between me and a psychotic, is that it’s un-provable. Everything about me is
un-provable.

4-10-07 Walk Away

You have to learn to walk away
When they call you names—walk away
When they throw stones—walk away
When they do that Voodoo that they do so well—walk away
When they lie cheat steal misrepresent and stop at nothing—walk away
When they threaten bribe and try to trick you—walk away
When they cut you off at the knees—walk away
When they shoot at you—walk away (if you run, it makes it more fun)
When they say they have something just for you—walk away
When they put their own children out as bait—walk away
When you’ve done all that you can do, and they say it’s not enough—walk away
You can’t save everybody.

4-8-12 Figurative insatiable and stung

The position of the Christ is figurative, symbolic, fiction-like. It is also an answerable position. I
have told you the rules already.
Systems keep the world alive, they also fall into corruption. Except one. Life and death.
If the system of Life and Death would ever be taken over by one of its principles, all would die.

Communism died from deep flaws and giddy corruption. Capitalism is floundering under quotas
and bills—both, all systems, require dignity. And none get any.

Dignity is internal, it walks with you or not. It requires no food, amasses no fortune, it can laugh
at itself. It walks stride for stride with you. I was sad, but held my head up.

The covey of bakers, and the allusion of Saviors could not get together. One made bread, the
other Peace. One fed families, the other divided them.

Every pyramid must last, even pyramidal systems—that’s their purpose. The togetherness of men
and women requires many small pyramids. Allow one to get to the top and you will have a great
man or woman. Many great men and women make what is called a bunch. The funnel—the
upside-down pyramid—that knows what the other ones are for, has the ability to turn them out.
A system that needs work—building re-building, and all the while unbreakable.

The position of the Christ is in his eyes—in his face. If you must lie to his face, this face, then
just say, We were in your area, helping a neighbor, and we were wondering if you needed help.
People do this all the time. If you can’t tell the truth about your cost or profit or who you are—he
won’t buy. The position is, as it is for everyone, a position of withdrawal.

The Lion of governance does not exist. The union of governors is known as a Deer. It’s at the
mercy of the quick. It knows and appreciates everything. Its job is to protect the group, the clan,
and the family rules. My job is to protect the individual from the group, the clan, and the family
rules. That’s why personal privacy, personal property, and all sorts of personal protections are
going away—they don’t directly support the group. And that’s why I’m bringing ‘em back.

I was taking a bath the other day. Someone burst-in with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of
film. It occurred to me as I ran, towel-in-hand, that now would be a good time to break the back
of those who defend the right of the group over the person, because the day will come when they
begin to consolidate, and they may, one day, turn on you. To run around and say: I’m
independent. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. This is Earth honey, sometimes you’re gonna
have to take the bus that only gets you half-way there.

When did a door ever keep anyone at it? When did a life ever circle itself? I am, because I say I
am. Same for you. Light may come in degrees, especially if you attempt to describe it. Darkness
defies description, and has no degrees.
You may have noticed I change no rules, disavow no laws. I am an anarchist of love, not
procreation. An anarchist who loves the quiet, and peace your vagary allows. I respect you. You
want to create, and you are left to procreate. Fill spaces in behind me. See my exit as consensual.
I love you, but all you see is lust. Is there something seriously wrong with you?

The evaporati, will evaporate. In a way I feel bad too. The future cannot accommodate all. It’s
already all. The future’s an unknowable book that’s already written.

Remember: Heaven by faith not by indestined promises. Promises are easily broken.

Like a child—expect nothing, preconceive nothing, see everything.

Strong faith, and strong belief can make miracles appear where there is nothing but God at play.
Making the performance easy, makes magic indistinguishable from miracles. I am not here to
ease your mind Sho-shin, I am after bigger game.

The work was translated once when it was given to me.

It was translated again, by me, into English.
It is translated a third time by you.
It cannot suffer a fourth, taken-down translation—it would be deadly to the reader. You’ve been
warned.

Africa dead? The Devil on Horseback?

A land that believes in destroying the unlovable, will eventually destroy all—and then itself. Any who go
there to help —go with love. Love is courage. Love is knowing you may never return.

Don’t blame me. Where were you in 1990 when I needed a friend? Where were you in 1990
when I was so lost? Where were you when I turned in bed, ate alone, paid the price for even
more sins I did not commit. The pills I took, kept me alive. They didn’t keep me from you. Or
keep me from turning into Christ. You were nowhere to be found, and now as far as I’m
concerned it’s you who are late.

Instead of translating the work, just read it to them—as is—most of them know English anyway.
If you must translate it, translate it from the original without writing it down. Many people can
translate on the fly, writing it down is writing it down—don’t do it. I’m working on a children’s
book, it’s called When Johnny Falls Down, it’s about a kid who falls down, and no one wants to
pick him up. The ancient instinct among bi-peds is to help each other up, when they fall, because
bipedalism leads directly to falling. But that instinct is apparently going away, slowly. People
tend to look off, or walk around. I want children to know they are not bad for walking away.
They are not bad when they learn from their parents, and the adults in their life, the ones they see
everyday. I want it put squarely on you. After all, it is a children’s book.

If they cannot understand, and they want to have thousands of children in These Great and Last
Days. Knowing they will inherit nothing but pain and ruin, don’t pretend to hate their children.
Don’t punish the children for their foolish adults, it’s not their fault. Love them as if they were
your own. Deprive them of nothing. Feed them. Educate them. Don’t make promises of all the
things that they’re going to get. They may not.
I know you for the hideous treatment you can give, without a thought as to consequence. I’d
never hold you down with, what’s that funny expression? ‘The soft bigotry of low expectations?’
I know just how high you can go. I forgive you, and I appreciate you.

In a way, I sort of feel sorry for you. It’s the middle of the summer, you don’t even want to think
about a new school year, and you just found out you got the gay teacher. Of course, your options
were extremely limited…it could have been a lot worse.

‫۝‬

Carry moonbeams home in a jar, and be better off than you are, or would you rather be a pig?
How’d ja like to swing on a star. The outside surface was explored from one perspective like a
moviola, Bing was in song. He makes it look so effortless. If it’s a game, Billy says it’s a
game—it’s just that simple. No one called him Harry. See, simple.
My boy, they never see it coming, never knew what hit ‘em. Or would you rather be a whale. A
whale is an animal, a spout for a nose, he blows it everywhere he goes. How’d ja like to swing
on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar, or be better off than you are…
Bing? They don’t notice do they?
No. They never check their pockets, none of them, not one, no one.
Billy smiled, Still don’t.
Middle child?
Middle child.
He leans-in to tell Billy something: “I couldn’t give it back if I wanted to.” He winks.
Billy said, Thanks.
Bing went immediately for his pockets, but it was too late.
Da da dee dah da da dee dahhh, ba ba ba bah buh buba buhh.

4-7-23 The Judgment

“I thought you said she was dead? That was her sister, the wicked witch of the East; this is the wicked witch of the West…She’s worse
than the other one was.” Billie Burke- via screenplay by Noel Langley et al- via L. Frank Baum, author, The Wizard of OZ 1939

It was the middle of the summer for Billy as well. God was settling down, Billy had grown quite
a bit since their marriage in April or the beginning of May—he had the date on the certificate.
Anyway, he had come, they had come, a long way in a short time and God was really beginning
to trust him, tho they still argued about Billy’s friends. God had known them longer than Billy,
but Billy still felt he had to explain them.

At the end of July, towards the ‘end’ of the discussion, God said…
Oh Billy, they would never do that, they will love you more than ever—you ‘freed them.’ That’s
what they’ll say. G
God, they hate the truth…they just hate it. B
The phone rang. Billy was obedient, having learned his lesson twelve times. He told them what
God said to tell them.
Billy lost them in 8 minutes, between 11:54 and 12:02pm. All of them, the strait, the gay, the
undecided, the entire lot. The men and women who knew him better than anyone. All but one.
The Judgment begun there among his small circle of friends, began to roll, gathering strength,
occasionally joining other waves, growing slowly.
God tousled Billy’s hair. I’m sorry, God said. But…How. Why, Billy. You know them, please
tell me why. Why. They have no hard truths. They love each other, and they love you. What’s
the problem. G
There was silence, and hurt rejection, which turned into stiff rejection before God could stop it.
Billy was quiet for a long time.
Out of control ego, deadly silence I guess, Billy finally said. Deceit, deception…lies upon lies
upon lies. I think perhaps I spoke somehow to their worst fear, each afraid of …I don’t even
know what. B
God just sat there in the bed, and tried not to stare off.
The truth has been used against them, Billy continued…They have developed strategies over the
years, they’re like me, I really do understand them. Billy felt like crying, but his lip barely
quivered. Strategies that…each one more useful, more efficient, more reliable than truth. Just…
B
Billy, I’m so sorry—You had to know. G
How do you mean? Billy asked, finding God’s lack of stressed syllables difficult to interpret.
BG
God smiled, turned to Billy, and said very quietly. What you say goes. You know them. They’re
you. I will do what you tell me to do… be wise…please…I know you know best…It has to be
this way. They are the world to you…do it now…show them the way…if they follow, their
saved. The rest… well…it’s up to you. G

It was as if Billy hadn’t heard Him, and gainfully tried to carry on the conversation he had
planned: I guess I should say something, about them. I would never betray them, yet when they
left, a thin white veil fell like a drop, on Act One. I had planned to acquaint them with small
truths, my own, and theirs to me. And then in Act Two, I would encourage them to tell each
other the truth for practice, with the caution not to tell just everyone. Act Three, I would tell them
about difficult truths, who I am, and let them know that they are not to believe it, it is after all
only partially real. I never got past the first eight minutes. Now I see everything as tho thru a
veil. I am, Thanks to you, and modern psychiatry, able to see thru it…God, I know you don’t
understand, but that’s friendship! Sometimes looking out for another is looking the other way.
To fix them is to defend them, regardless. To ignore their blind spot(s), to fill in their silences
with kindness and understanding on faith, as if it were there. B
But, God said. G
To choose not to see their deceitfulness as malice. To let them hurt you because they have been
hurt. To laugh, to make them feel good. To practice with each other ‘being the real you,’ in a
safe place. To turn it into humor…B
Well, they’re not your friends, God said, to fill in the silence that over-came his son. G
You don’t understand, they are my friends. We accept each others’ faults. B
They don’t love you, God said.
No, not like you do—that’s true, Billy said, and began to breath more steadily after a while. B
They fired you, God said. They were everything to you. G
Billy smiled, and tried to laugh at what he didn’t understand.
Yes, they fired me. It was the best job in the world. B
I’m sorry it couldn’t last forever, God said. Gb
Well, Billy said, and looked at God with an ever-broadening smile. Nothing lasts forever.
Billy wiped away a tear just in time for the next one to fall. I wanted them to go where I’m
going, you know… with me. Bg
Maybe they will. God said. They don’t know what they’ve done. And He smiled back at Billy.
Billy, he continued, On The Last Day, Man will still be holding back love, to teach someone a
lesson. You can’t save everyone. Gb
Billy knew that was the truth. But he didn’t care.
It took him a minute. He looked at God, and said, To save the world and lose my best
friends…what’s the point of that? If I could only take a few people with me, I would take them—
they’re such a mess. They’re the best of the best and…they…are so confused. B
They refuse to go. God said. G
They’ll tell the truth if I have to kick them from here to the nearest pay toilet! They think, I
suppose, that they’ll have to change. Well, I’d pay to see that! You’d think I was asking them to
braid each other’s hair, or wash each other’s feet! I didn’t choose them to change them~ they suit
me! You’d think I was asking them to be as big a Dolly Parton fan as you are (God is). I love
them, their flaws amuse me, and make me love them even more. One good swift kick in the ass
oughta just about do it… B
But…God started to say.
God, I’m not going without them. That is my decision. B

Get rid of the ones who hate, and the ones who want to do nothing but ‘good,’ even if they have
to destroy everything in their path to do it—bye. Look at the ‘good’ you do as if everyone did
that, and you’ll see it for what it is. Take the ones who pray in church, all day, for people who
look different to drop dead—bye. Leave me the messed up ones in the muddle, did I say that, I
meant middle, the ones who love the wrong people, and can’t decide who to hate, so they don’t
hate anyone. They’re my favorites. I don’t give a shit if they believe in me, or believe I’ve got a
gopher in my pocket. They can’t forgive, because they have issues. I don’t care. If they’re not
going, I’m not going. See ya! B
I didn’t say anything. God said.
Billy restarted the discussion with a look of petulance.
God just looked straight ahead: Doesn’t it bother you, they can’t tell the truth. He said.
Nope, Billy said. And take those snooty upper-class compartments too…and toss ‘em. B
They don’t even recognize how much you care. God said. They think your admonition to tell the
truth was some kind of punishment.
So? Billy rejoined with a very satisfied look. Sometimes I say the love word too much.
So?…they take it for granted. I got it. Check! B
God looked over his shoulder as if Billy were asking for the check, then realized he meant that on
his list of failures, that’s number 18.
All those immaculately steamed, pressed and pointed reputations, nix’em. B
I was never a great respecter of position. God said, hoping to get the edge–up on his Son, and get
a word in. He smiled at Billy, and blinked.
You’re mistaken Mister, Billy said to God, if you think they can’t tell the truth. How do you
think I know their hearts? They tell me everything.
And then ignore you—abandon you. They say, Oh, well… I guess we never really knew him.
God said.
Give the man a cigar! Billy countered. I tell them the truth all the time, and you know… it makes
me a little invisible to them. They see me with, ‘crystal clarity.’ B
You’re making that up, God intoned, almost like a song.
But that’s Okay. They love me, they just don’t understand me. Plus, to tell the truth, it makes me
a little unique, to be the only one telling the truth. B
Well Hallelujah! You finally said it. You feel special. God said.
Billy looked roundly at Him, and felt, as tho he’d been spotted for a liar, and a possible thief, but
said nothing.
A little special. God said smugly, as tho he could read his Son’s mind. You’re out to here, with
my, our creation, allegorical baby reference thing. G
Your point is…Billy said.
You’re not like them at all. They’re afraid to tell the truth, because they are afraid to die, and it
also happens they’re afraid to live…in fact they will do practically anything, follow practically
anyone, and believe practically anything, no matter how absurd…They would follow the devil
into his cave. G
Not any more, Billy said wisely, and touched the device on his wrist.
So…so…you forgive them ahead of time. They mess up, leave everything in a shambles, and
you forgive them because you ‘know’ that when they get to Heaven they’ll straighten up? G
Not going. Billy said.
What!? God almost yelled.
The teaming huddled wretched refuse from the teaming massive shore. B
These filthy…p…people have to clean themselves up. I’m not going to let …incomprehensible
hordes into Heaven. G
Not going. B
I am not going to take back everything that I’ve said to hundreds of relatively sincere people who
may have misunderstood my priorities slightly. G
Oh well, Billy said, solidifying his argument into the fewest possible words. B
God fumed, quietly. They’re greedy. He said.
Know it, Billy said.
They think only of themselves. G
Check…number 4, it’s on the list. B
They hate themselves. God said.
Plus they’re filthy, Billy said sarcastically.
So great. We’ll just let everyone in! God declared.
Don’t get hysterical, I fixed it, Billy said.
Fixed it, you! G
Yes, if they’re selfish they won’t even see it. B
What. G
Heaven, the sixth dimension, the provenance of ideas. B
But they’ll be in the middle of it. G
Yes they’ll be all over, touching things, but they won’t know what’s what. B
And so…G
And so, they won’t steal anything, because they won’t recognize the value of anything. B
So just let everyone in on faith that deep-down they’re good! Wh…We might not be able to dig
that deep! G
Look, the nature of the dimensions will protect us. Them! from us. What are you afraid of? B
I’m not afraid of anything. G
So let them in, if they walk away or wander off unsupervised who cares? B
There was a great silence, not unlike the darkness that was in the white sound; The wine’s “soil.”
The terrior, as the French say.
Let me ask you this…Is Mankind basically good or not? B
Cut-throats, most of them. G
Well, keep the cut throats out. I agree with that. Put them in jail. Hell with ‘em. B
Oh! Good idea. God said, with more than a hint of His own sarcasm. Why didn’t I think of
that…No grievous wanton murder! He proclaims, and grandly gestures His arm in a wide sweep
across the sky. G
Don’t go pulling fruit off the tree for no reason! God makes an even grander gesture.
16 is the age of schism! [unintelligible internal mumbling] They’ll still get dates! G
Billy pauses, being unfamiliar with the crazy side of his roommate, and occasional companion.
God was very angry. Billy knew, only, because he recognized ‘holding back.’ Why didn’t you
come up with a mechanism to weed them out? Billy asked, without a hint of feigned naïveté.
Mechanisms taken over. God mumbled, this time purposely softer. G
What? Billy said, slightly perturbed he had to interrupt his own internal conversation and self-
assessment to hear what God was saying: ‘How do you think it’s going, pretty good, how do you
think it’s going, pretty good. Good.’ B
The mechanisms were taken-over by greedy motherfuckers. God said calmly.
God!! I never heard you swear before. Or even say one unkind thing, ever—about anyone. B
I will be heard over the din. Look, resources get low or appear to, someone gets a bright idea,
and everyone panics. Suddenly it’s every man, woman and child for themselves. G
Sort of a universal truth among living organisms. Billy offers.
Yes, God said, sort of what you said. I guess the planet’s finite after all. G
And what? Billy inquires, might I ask, did you think was going to happen when there were no
more fish, plants, or animals to eat? B
Well, that’s why I’m so glad to see you after so long. How’s everything. Where’s that lovely
dog, Clover…Overthere…what’s his name. I sure do miss him. What would you say to a big
museum-style house overlooking a newly refurbished sort of lake, near a kind of a waterfall?
God asked, with a huge grin, and added, We could string lights… G
Well, why didn’t you warn people about the day when all the resources become exhausted,
instead of encouraging wild sex, and limitless procreation? B
I tried to, but they couldn’t understand. What with all the shouting and backslapping. G
But now they are able to? B
Yes, God looked relieved. I guess they are. I love them. There sure are a lot of them. G He
pulls back the curtain without using his hand, which he doesn’t have, and looked out. They’re
sort of ready to panic. God said, with absolutely no emotion. G
And no one has to die? Billy said, and tried not to make it sound like a question. B
Of course not. For every one killed, three more will spring up. G
So people don’t need to make up phoney excuses to kill each other? B
Right. You got it. They just have to see a plain simple truth, that’s all. G
Well… tell them that. I’m sure they’ll understand, coming from you. B
Yes, that’s true they would, especially if they saw it all around them. There’s just one problem. G
What’s that? B
That new religion. G
You mean no-religion, what’s wrong with that? B
No, not that one, the other one. G
Feng Shui? B
No, the other one. G
Post-modern ethical relativism. B
No. G
Well, not secular humanism? B
That’s not a religion. That’s a step. A step up, if you have sense, a step down if you have
Awareness. And Feng Shui’s not a religion. For you, it’s an exercise in humility. G
Thanks…Capitalism? B
Yes. G
Well what’s wrong with that one, now!?! B
Taken over by greedy…base people. G
How could that happen!? B
I don’t know. I think Mankind is flawed, somehow. G
But, are you sure? Everything seems to be going so well. Food for everyone; leisure time
galore; plenty of things to do; places to go; interesting educational activities; freedom of
thought…to a large extent.…Freedom of music, and religion, sort of, kinda. Freedom to make
newspaper; freedom to complain about internet porn; freedom to accumulate and go crazy
even…if you want to. B
Yes I know, but it’s not sustainable. G
What do you mean? B
It’s predicated on the notion that you can increase production every year. G
That doesn’t seem that hard. B
Well, it’s not, in theory, but you can’t do it so fast. You can’t double the population every 40
years, and save nothing for a rainy day. You can’t have everyone spending all their time making
crap that falls apart before it can ever produce value. G
Not getting you. B
Well anyway, that’s the problem in a nutshell. The people that hear me, and can understand me,
can’t think linearly. God almost whispered in order to be heard above the ‘racket.’ G
Not getting that, Billy said, shaking his head slightly, as if that might improve the signal.
You can’t drive, for example. G
Oh, here we go! Why do you bring that up all the time! I never could, and now…I’ve got other
more important things on my mind. And plus, I’m looking thru a veil of, God only knows what!
Besides, you talk to me while I’m driving! B
You can’t think linearly. You can barely write a check. You’re in receptive-mode only.
Not hearing you. B
You have almost no executive function. G
Billy, dazed and confused, felt very hansom and, more than anything, wanted to sit down in front
of a mirror, to check his expression.
You haven’t had a thought in about seven weeks. G

…..Billy stared at God and was about to laugh…but thought better of it.
He repeated: you haven’t had a thought in about seven weeks. You have united with what was
outside of yourself, in favor of that thing or those things. All of them God—disambiguous,
unarguementary—together forming a clarity of mind, free from distraction, growing to a state
approaching infinite purity. You only see that you are being hit with symbols then almost
immediately hit by the real thing. It’s almost like these things have reversed there normal order
of appearance, this loop pattern is the pattern of the universe, always going in the same direction
You can see it plainly and you can see that it is you that is turned.
@@@@@
@@@@@
a @@@@
@ a @@@
@@ a a a

You have been like an adolescent, scarfing up everything he could get his or her hands on—
sleeping 14, sometimes 4 hours a day, growing by leaps and bounds. Billy, you are the ultimate
late-bloomer. I don’t know for sure if you’ve aged or regressed, but you are now about 16 years
old.
In the time that you live, if a man of 16 takes away the ‘self’ of thousands of people –he must
go to a juvenile detention facility, for a period of indeterminate length, and there disposed, until
no longer a threat to the right-thinking community.

No laws will be trespassed, no rules abridged. The Undoing is not a force. It’s more like a
story that makes no sense until read from the end, which is to say, with the end in mind. Stories
only get told from beginning to end when you write a letter…and even then…
…..Staring at God, and was about to laugh…but thought better of it, but wasn’t sure. He wasn’t
sure he could see it so clearly.
Well, anyway, God said, that’s why I’m so glad to have my Son back, again. Still. Here. In this
life. Back where he belongs…Not dead, alive in both forms. Can I kiss you? G
Not so fast. Billy held up one finger. In other words, no one is going to see the truth: it will
either be a practical, sensible matter, devoid of real feeling or it will be symbolic and spiritual, or
what I like to call actually real. B
Yes. That was very succinct. G
Enough…enough. How long do I have? B
125. G
Don’t say any more. In summary: I was wandering around beyond my physical body, beyond my
self, and I stumbled into you, and I haven’t lost my mind. B
No, you are completely sane…Well…you lost your mind, and you saw there was a world beyond.
G
And I didn’t go crazy. How about that! B
Well… G
Well what? B
Well, you did go crazy, but you didn’t notice. G
Oh, that can’t be good. B
Don’t worry about it. You’re fine…Billy you’re fine. G
Not getting you. B
Billy, this doesn’t happen but once in a few hundred years. G
Oh, nice save…So I’m one in a million? B
No, actually more like one in 20 billion. G
Wow! B
Yeah, don’t let’s focus on the numbers. G
I thought it was odd that I was having trouble sequencing and…and…B
Prioritizing. God offered. G
Yes. Setting priorities is hard, because you don’t necessarily know what to do next. B
That’s right, but I’m so glad you’re not upset. This has all been a bit of a shock. G
I felt like strangling the dog for getting in the trash. B
Oh, well let’s feed him. I’m glad you reminded me….Overdue…come here. G

God was very nice about the whole thing. And took his time to explain in detail the
incomprehensible. I thought I was tired but I wasn’t. So I wrote down exactly what He said.

Expressions requiring translation are interpretive,

‘wish you were here,’ for example—see below
It was a list: there is no Mirage, no Ferraj, no Ida, no Consuelo, The Calderon doesn’t exist, no
Isaac, no Otter, and no Natalie. It is all symbolic of Heaven where everything is wonderful, and
everything loves you, and says so. It is the trip you never packed for. It comes in two sizes—
here and non existent.
1) No hateful people.
2) No one who is so ‘good’ they can’t see the destruction in their wake. That is known as
grievous wanton murder, and is very hard to get past, on your way to Heaven. It muddies the
waters.
3) You must be clean, we are not arguing about clean—I’m clean. I have filthy thoughts, a
beautiful imagination, and I see what I see. Thank you very much.
4) Simple people, not perfect people. If you sit on your hands, prayer-like for a lifetime, no
way. If your days are behind you, and everything you have, you took from someone else, your
days are at an end my friend. You’re history. To try, is to frequently fail. Only failure can polish
you. Helping is noble. Do the best you can.
5) You must be able to tell the truth, and have a familiarity with its waves. Kindness above
all. You don’t have to swim in it.
God was very patient and spoke clearly for once; He said I was very obedient. I had been hoping
any lessons in obedience would be over a couple bottles of wine, and a little local flora. God
understood my hopes and fears and didn’t tread too heavily. I wrote down what he said, and in
talking my way thru it, I found I had written what I said. He began again contemplatively:
The ones who go to Heaven do not know who they are. Many do not care.
The ones who do not go. Do not, because they cannot move. They want to be right, not [
unknown word] and that immobilizes them.
The truth is not that they deserve it, they may.
The truth is they were there, and threw it away.

I asked about Delbert, who had left, despite his protestations to stay. He was equivocal: Delbert
was either a tailing of the soul as it is made, a prementor[ing] from the future of myself, or he was
a prayer from himself that was spent or left behind in my yard. I have no idea, but I think Delbert
was a tailing. A Haint. As I found out later, Delbert helped me drive on long trips.

I put Heaven and Earth together so you can see it for yourself.
I lift you up to see it [unknown ungrammatical expression]—if you will let me.
I can’t [unknown word or just a space] until you stop digging.
If you can balance these sins on a plate, you may proceed—some will serve, some will be served.

The genius (translating now), the genius of God is the depth of his love and patience. Since
you are bound to ask at some point…The problem with cannibalism (which is the direction
you’re heading), other than the death of the soul, not to mention the self—is the loss of Heaven,
and of course elevated cholesterol levels, increased morbidity and mortality from heart disease,
cancer, strokes, and infections from untreated bites.
The men in the funny hats are the least of your problems. Wild, wanton, unchecked,
promiscuous procreation always leads to aggression, violence, starvation and cannibalism. Look
at it this way. You had a nice time. It was a fun party, but now you have to stop bingeing.
Everything that tastes like chicken is not necessarily chicken. Put you finger down your throat.
Or ask someone to help you.
God had 168 Trillion other things to do, but stayed with me and helped me correct the spelling
of the words that I didn’t know. And, didn’t say anything else about priority setting. He asked
me to separate laughter and tears. Just read slower.

1000000000+1000000000+1000000000+10000000000+10000000000+1000000000+100

Billy’s mother was a Savant (dates-weather-clothing worn), Billy was not. A Savant ‘just
knows what they know.’ Billy was a Seeker. Billy’s father was brilliant, as was his sister, Claire,
and his brother Clarke. Billy was not. A Seeker raised by a Savant is unheard of, practically. A
Seeker is even more rare than a Savant. One you are born, the other you become. To be a 16
year old Seeker, for example, the probability, roughly 10:1 At 39, the chance that you will still be
a Seeker (after 23 years), is approximately 84 million:1. A forty year old Seeker raised by a
Savant is impossible, has never happened, and cannot be. Until now.
To add things up as if they might never have happened, really makes no sense, and you…that
is I, end up with a number like 840 billion to one chance of my existence. I believe that it was a
1:1 chance. Seeking God doesn’t mean you’re going to find God. Trying to seek God is a waste
of time, and adds up to trying: 1) He’s everywhere. 2) You can’t walk a straight line to God I
don’t care what you say. 3) Trying’s next to nothing. When you finally meet Him, all the
thousand things you’ve done, zip, line up. The more truth you tell about them, the sharper and
straighter and wider the line. I examine the line. I know where I am, and I won’t stay curious
forever, but it is an amazingly straight line. I examine things, but that’s me. It almost looks like I
couldn’t have fallen off.
Another way to look at it: Imagine you’re a big thief, I don’t mean stolen drink umbrellas, a
real thief. Not all politicians are thieves but you happen to be both. You’re older now, and you
feel bad. You stole $75,000 from an orphanage once, they never noticed, but they fell on hard
times. Out of all the others, it was the one thing that made you what you can’t believe you
became. You ask me, I tell you. “Give the money back.” That’s impossible, and you’re ready to
walk away (to disappear me). But you think, and you begin to add it up: 1) No one ever found
God thru etiquette, listening real hard, or doing only things He loves—you’re not that kinda box
of chocolates. 2) You’re much more likely to walk a straight line to God after you find him. He’s
not walking, you are. 3) The line from where you were to where you wanna be, grows clear by
telling the truth. 4) You very much want to be where you want to be—not here. You add it all up
and you get your solution: You begin to tell the truth. You’re widely praised, and you begin to
see the line. You went from being a well-healed, respected member of the community to being a
self-satisfied, well-healed, respected member of the… Oops, you forgot to give the money back.
75,000 ain’t gonna get it now. Sorry—too late. You’re gonna put on your sneakers and go down
there. You’re gonna get you a job. You’re gonna leave your wing-tips at home because it’s not
that kinda job. You’re not gonna cook books or build a pulpit. You found the way and, zip,
you’re still an ass. You’re gonna mow lawns, fix roofs, or wash dishes. You’re gonna learn
orphan-speak, an you’re gonna work your way in from the outfield, until you become a coach,
because that’s the only thing you’re good at. Passing money around’s useless for what you’re
after. You may be dying, but your not dead yet. If your wife hates you for embarrassing her, tell
her to go fuck-off. Listen, I never said this’d be pretty.
ς
Billy could talk to God. He knew all along he couldn’t profit from this, and, that— among
other things—kept him out of churches. It was what God called the gift of knowing. Billy could
think about one thing for weeks at a time and neither notice or care that the solution was
completely missing. He enjoyed amusing God. They laughed together. God thinks sex has
nothing to do with anything—it is symbolic of seeking. Some people look in the same place over
and over. Sport is symbolic of polishing. A sneeze, symbolic of truth-telling. If you rise above
your fear of being last, you will find sport will make you heroic—gallant. (By the way, the weak
legacy of sport, if you don’t shape-up, will be to learn not to come in last, and that’s it. Cheat.)
Billy knew enough to keep certain things to himself.
The sun will burn up in a billion years. That isn’t a problem until there’s a solution.

As a Seeker, Billy goes where the knowledge pours forth, and he waits. In order to wait, he
thinks. If he does not think, he cannot stay. So he stays, and he waits for the particular
knowledge to come to him. When it has come, he recognizes it because it is not about his
thinking, it’s about his knowing.
In this world most winners are simply cheaters. Someone gets a dumb idea about taking
enhancers or turning over-night profits. Overnight Profits is not a business, by the way, but,
everyone has to follow suite. Follow or end up lost. Last is not lost, in this upside-down world.
Not hardly.

If you gave Billy the job of packing boxes with seven items, you would swear he was your
best worker—he would look exactly like ‘the best worker’ caught at a moment of rest, in-between
boxes. It would only be after ten minutes of close critical scrutiny that you might notice he
looked like someone who didn’t know one item from another. And you still wouldn’t get it. He
could only pack the boxes properly when you knew what he was doing.
The gift of knowing, is knowing what the knower knows—almost always nothing.
 Billy grappled with his fictional nature as tho it were a problem. But, he knew enough to keep
certain things to himself.

While Billy was becoming, not Billy, the people in the neighborhood and its surrounds were
running around looking for a blind, possibly deaf, albino, autistic kid, named Stuart, Tom, or Phil,
who was probably a liar, somewhere between 15 and 50, understated in dress, and probably
everything else, who might pick up anything left unattended. For fun, people tried to guess the
New Jesus’ name: Rinaldo Tintin, Jude Stuart, Jim Jones, Well Yavgruen, Tracey Lord, Randy
Wainwright, Homer Wellman, Meison Sebastion, Houston Canby, Clarence Barnes, Herman
McConnell, among many others. The big money was on Peter Woodhouse, for some unknown
reason. Billy put five dollars on Walker J. Hawkins, just because he liked the name. It was
decided by many that Billy was first generation Australian American Albino, and spoke with a
lisp, or a stutter. Billy was neither Austrailian, albino, autistic, impeded, or a liar. The only thing
he picked up, besides flower sa-seeds, pinecones, and informa-mation, was a minor cold which
followed a bout of sneezing. Hand me ah… a… wait…no, it’s gone. Billy loved being Billy so
much, he knew he’d miss it if it ever ended. It felt so good to be fictional. Billy could fly, alas,
only in his dreams—even fiction has its limits. Awake.

He graduated college in ’02, but he was not 24, nor was he all that interested in education, he
did it for credit, and the hell of it. He went to .EDU for laughs. All was well. They thought he
was crazy but, of course, that was an old personal theme of his.
Everything was fine until they tried to teach him Christian Philosophy, and he almost went
ballistic. His teacher was appalled—Billy looked over the materials, and saw that many of the
authors referenced themselves as the authoritative source. And finally, he asked the million
dollar question: Why hasn’t this been updated in 2000 years? The answer was sad and pathetic:
They killed, silenced, inpeded, indangered, banned, anyone who brought news down from the
mountain; they only approved in old news. They had cemented themselves in, as tho nothing
changes, in, mind you, a world that constantly changes. In fact, in the apology process, which is
dismally slow, and unbelievably behind—turns out it wasn’t in till 1996 that they apologized in
treating Galileo like shit.
His cold was apparently a head cold—everything was ‘in.’

Three stars
The Real Jesus lounged around, and was full of ideas; he liked to sprawl on the couch in the
middle room, while Billy worked. He watched TV and became progressively more panicked.
Billy turned the VCR on, and popped in a tape of The TV Club. RJ watched a woman apply
makeup to 23 women. He loved it, and like Billy, he found something in purposeful massaging
very relaxing. Billy hid the credit card, because it was a ‘shopping show.’ Billy knew That RJ,
would never use someone else’s money without permission, but the boundary between his self,
and my self, was beginning to blur slightly.
Call her. I really would like to meet her, RJ said.
No. That’s ridiculous. She’s in a whole different bis`ness. You just can’t understand.
He asked me one day, what snake oil was, and I told him.
Where did you hear about that? I asked.
You said it under your breath. He said, as if there were distance, or vibrating columns of air
between us.
Oh, of course, the history of America includes many charlatans, scoundrels and wags, who
lied, cheated, misrepresented, and outright stole their way West. They played an important part
in the American story. Folklore generates tales of lively, if slightly slippery rascals, but the truth
is they were not only colorful, they stunk.
When you say the world will not be so forgiving, what do you mean? The relaxing Jesus
asked.
RJ, I mean that we’re being painted by the same brush. The world thinks that all Americans
are fast-talking rogues, and rip-off artists looking for easy money. Who don’t care how they get
it, or who they have to step on or over. I enjoy their patter, but I’m no salesman, and definitely
no easy mark. We will all suffer if we don’t warn the world off of these people. Back in the day,
Americans used tar and feathers. I would recommend a version of that: white-glue and glitter—in
the hair. It will be harmless, and visible, or visible by its absence. Hair.
***
Expressions with no comparable English words: they want to be right, not [ready, as tho you were
in flight, half-out the door from being chased] and that immobilizes them.

I lift you up to see it [torn, emotionally, as a lover or the one being left –about to be torn]—if you
will let me.

I can’t [no word in English, or any other language, it is like ‘dying to Be’] until you stop digging.

The unintelligible internal mumbling: 16 is the age of schism! [before the age of 16, sex is off
limits, years. After the age of 16, abortion is off limits, weeks. And tell women to stand up to
men. Tell them to mind their own business. (You’ll)] They’ll still get dates!

When a man makes love to a woman she may say, ‘Hold me.’ The man grips her from inside,
that’s not necessarily what she means, all to often she lets the misunderstanding go. She wants to
be held from the outside, and not controlled from the inside. Easy mistake.

Nice guys finish last

That’s a joke right? Who says they finish at all? Remember: lawyers work for Justice,
doctors Wonderland, bankers and businessmn—Faithful service. Your work is boundless. If
everyone did what you did, have done, are doing—Imagine where we’d be? How long do you
think the world, all this, this thing, this lifetime, would last? If you roll around like a can, how
long? Your life is like a sky rocket. Spelling its way across the sky. What will it say? The
question is, what will it say, not when will it say it.
Doing the right thing is easy. Just imagine that the person you are playing with, working with,
stealing from, selling to, looking for, laughing at, holding up, pushing down, talking about,
rejecting, and being around, is you—because they are.
Imagine that when you get to Heaven all those moments you ‘live’ in, tho wonderful, you
don’t recognize—you didn’t catch them, snatch them, or make-off with them. They seem new.
They were given to you—shared. They are not recognized, are not recognizable, because they’ve
grown. Expanded. Beyond all recognition. Beyond belief. Become. Not a second ‘life’—
eternity. There is only one Heaven, not billions. Just as all eternity is all. One and all. It may
take about ten minutes to begin and end, it does, but that’s how you count. The eternity that lays
wait, lasts and lasts. Eternity lasts.
Much speculation is given to the entrance, and that’s fine. It’s a nice entrance. Some people
might see it as a spinning entrance like a revolving door, but it’s they who are spinning. Some
might see it as lofty, high minded, or kind of unfinished. Some might see it in the wink of an eye,
blip.
Besides

Heaven is unmovable. Like Muhammed’s mountain. It cannot be taken away, bit by bit or all
at once. Can’t be made small, excised, or denied. It exists whether you believe in it or not. It’s
there, and there it will stay. You must go to it. It cannot come to you. It’s kind of big. Like a
ripple in a very big puddle.
You have sunk so low you can’t get up without help.
Your problem is very simple. It’s orchestral—-made simple. Made simple.
You are tuning up. And can be fixed with the wave of a hand. Tap tap tap.
Your world is the world. They are the same. Your awareness so small.
I dropped one plate. It broke. As I picked it up, a glass dropped. It fell into a thousand
quarter-square-cubist parts.
Remember
I too, am fed-up with the search for, camping-out for, waiting for, the symphony for the Messiah.
I too, wondered how long the wait for this beautiful life to begin.
I am unbelievable even to myself. To you too it would be a very strange and funny thing.
One minute God, the next, myself—--and disappointed. The simple caveman is forever, well,
gone. You are yourself by comparison, look around. This is this. I move, I am.
Here
I am not discussing this with you. Human trust is squalor. And I ask, how long does human trust
last? A bend in the road? Three stars? An eclipse? Something came in front of—---where you
were focused. That long, is not long. Trust is this high to nutin’. It’s rarely even useful, when
you trust, sometimes you’re better-off they don’t know.
If you think you’re not in trouble. I’m so sorry to tell you, you are. I’ve had it. You, all of you,
have gone too far—that includes the ones who should have known better.

The next day

Billy was working, RJ was engrossed in TV, since, even tho he could read now, he couldn’t turn
pages—he was un-transubstantiated.
Hey! RJ shouted.
Working! Billy replied from the middle room.

How Can Mankind Get to Heaven

Billy chewed his finger. Heaven is in God’s eyes. To see Him you must be undistracted by
the horrors of your selfishness. It seemed obvious to Billy this meant: do less-selfish things, but
some people thought the comment was wanting clarity.
RJ closed the door, or perhaps it was the wind.
For Him to see you, you must be beautiful.
The ‘wind’ blew against the door like an ear.
Internally beautiful, clean. Billy listened for the door, and loudly gargled the last bit of coffee
he had been saving.
And the ‘door’ went totally silent.
You cannot profit from your relationship with Him while you ‘spend’ your life in service.
That presumes you know what he wants, and you don’t.
God loves Kindness.
 If you are this close to Heaven, and you still can’t get there. You might as well perish in a
fire—fire takes your breath away, long before you feel the heat. It’s not such a bad way to go; it
warns you of its coming; it gives you chances to tell the truth, if only to your panicking heart,
‘relax’ you might say.
Billy heard a thump at the door. He gestured the word relax with his right arm, bending and
extending his hand forward as he took a breath in thru his nose then slowly out thru his mouth.
That would be your last self-deception—that you can ever really call the shots, and say how you
will end up. If these are The Last Days…and they are. Jump!
Heaven is so close you can’t walk. There’s nothing to do and now here to go.
Crash! RJ fell backward and landed on the lamp stand and scared Dover. There’s a spider in
here, He said. Where’s that magnif…the…the…that glass flake?

Billy realized, silently to himself that the things he blames on others, and the things he takes
credit for in himself, even the ones he cannot get free of, are gone when all is said and done.
Hold onto the pain as long as you can, the things He does to you, are for you.

Sorry, RJ says, I’ll clean that up. I just skinned my knee is all. Sit Dover, sit. You’re right
about spiders having symbols written into them. Can I keep this magnifying glass?

Billy continued as if in a trance: If I left you now, and then you discovered the truth of who I
am; you might never forgive yourself. Remember, if you can’t forgive yourself, no one else can
do it for you. I forgive you. Your crimes lift me up, like waves. I’ve always loved bad boys.
I’ve always been impenetrable. And Yes, it makes them crazy.

That’s the story of the plunge; that’s the roadblock. That’s all of it.
I am cold and lonely. I can’t stand here in my boots forever, waving-you to follow the detour.
There are plenty of signs. Follow them. Look…there’s no reason to ask what happened, just
keep going—the road you were on is closed.

Billy saw a piece of paper slide under the door, and without looking up, said: I don’t bother
you when you’re at a critical juncture—I wait until the commercials!
RJ mumbled—‘They’re the best part.’ He said to Overall: ‘They are the bestest part. He does
na not understand.’ The dog tilted his head as if he were trying to comprehend baby-talk. RJ said
what I say: He’s the best of all good boys. “He does na not know.”
Can you please pay attention while I’m saving the world if that’s not too much to ask?
RJ said to Oliver in his arms: Daddy says you crazy of all the mostest insane of all the doggies
and he says shut up, for is this is shut up time…Shofer just blinked.
I looked up when he came in the room, his left eye was huge, behind the convex lens, and he
smiled. He’s such a child. Wouldn’t it be funny if he went home with skinned knees and a
present. He walked in a circle. Rivolve, followed close behind wagging his tail—and out the
room they went. Leaving a note on the top of the printer.

The note read: The list of things that will prevent you from seeing Heaven and *getting there*:
Grievous wanton murder.
Acts of unforgivable violence.
Profits gained from lying, cheating, stealing, threats, bribes, and other tricks such as
misrepresentation. Also known as fakery.
Avoidance of the human suffering that is all around you, stupor, in other words.
Standing in the way of people so they can’t see past you.
Not making amends for self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and intolerance .
 I put the last one in for you. RJ said, thru the now closed door.
Who does he think I am. I said, to myself without hardly moving my lips.
Turn it over, He said.
“Why don’t you just come in?” I said, for no reason.
I don’t want to bother you. And then He mumbled, ‘While you’re Undoing.’
I turned the paper over, and mumbled ‘Prince of Peace,’ as I read in His own hand, very
scribbled with stars: You cannot be denied *admittance* for protecting *yourself.*
*And, * Overcharging for goods and services is a given, not a *sin.*
He made me add that… He’s such a Jew. I leaned over as if I were going to close the door,
and I saw him strutting around by the window in the new vest I bought.
What are you doing in that, while I’m working myself into a frazzle for all Mankind?
Nothing, do you like it? He asked. Augh, You have it on all wrong, I sighed.
What’s wrong with it? It came with a likeness. He said, and showed me the picture on the
front of the box.
That looks ridiculous on you, I said.
I think it’s beautiful. Additionally, if you wear it, people will think you’re demonstrating
uncommonly good sense. Yet it moves so well. He said this, and turned.
He was a very handsome man.
I have no intention of wearing it.
You must! He said.
Jeshua, the bullet-proof vest is not for me. I got it because I thought it would be prudent.
Then I realized that the more impenetrable the body armor—the sharper the bullets. It’s a
ridiculous game that will only escalate. I just don’t want to start.
He thought about it for a minute, and said: I’d wear it if I were you.
I told him, You’re the only protection I need.
He looked at me, and said. You don’t really care what happens to me do you?
I stared at him. He was wearing a dark blue bullet-proof vest over his bunchy robes. I
didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have to say anything because he already knew what was in my
heart, my mind, because he lived there too. And I just started to laugh. Then he looked at
himself in the mirror.
I said, The vest goes under the clothes. He started to laugh. We laughed together.
If I do that, he said, I’ll get holes in my robes won’t I?
You’re not supposed to let on, that you know people want to murder you. It kills the illusion
of serenity, inner peace, and divine understanding. Our one thought collided: ‘Why would God
pick Him?’ He didn’t know how he knew mine; I didn’t know how I saw His. We laughed till
my sides hurt. Finally I had to close the door and get back to work …And take the dog with you!
Keep going, keep going, keep going.
You could see he would be great with children, he loved being with Overlay. He taught him to
spin, without even giving him a treat.

This is divine protection not a target.

It’s an illusion. Everyone sees a circle, some see it growing, some moving. When I see it, I see
The Everything that’s in front of, and behind the circle. As if I were the circle.

The next day

RJ was still easily distracted, and he wasn’t allowed to answer the front door anymore, or sit
in the car by Himself. He tried to explain salesmanship to a twenty-year-old kid from Nairobi
making his way thru the neighborhood on his way to college. And I don’t want to talk about the
car problem. Why can’t he just sit there?
 Can’t get any work done! I finally had to say. He wandered around and drank tea, and made
comments about how many flavors were in one cup.
Sit here, I said, and then put in the tape I’d made of women being groomed. He relaxed right
away, but wouldn’t let me turn the sound off.
What is snake oil? he asked.
I began again, one of my abbreviated American history lessons.
No, I mean what is it? He asked earnestly.
Snake-oil doesn’t exist.
Oh, I thought it was oil from a snake.
Please…! I said. Can you see I’m working? Your job is to allow the openness of your spirit
to dwell— I have to do everything. And get the light out of my eyes, can you?
He turned to watch the TV and didn’t give me a second thought. He looked bored, relaxed,
but bored. I’m thinking about getting a tattoo, he said.
We’ll talk about it when you’re transubstantiated. (Where’s he think they’re gonna put it?
And how’d he find my tattoo tape?)

He said ‘That’s amazing’ once too often, and I just had to say it… Of course you think it’s
amazing, you were born in the year nothing!
He looked at me for a time, then burst out laughing. So were you, he said. We laughed at our
predicament. He rolled his eyes like I do. He could do imitations. He liked to sleep with the
blankets around his ears, and he tripped over the dog a lot. He loved to laugh, and he loved to
have people massage his head and neck, seek~and find the knots in his shoulders, down his back,
thru his legs, and into his feet. He had chronic back pain—we had a lot in common. I’d lived
with cats, so I never trip over Ole’ Ivy.
After the laughing subsided, I said, ‘Good,’ I was waiting for something to happen. I have to
show you something very sad.
Now’s as good a time as any, he said.
There’s never a good time for bad news, I said:
The desert you lived in was not an oasis with lots of adjoining acreage to allow for good views
of the sunset. It was always just a desert—look!
“People were starving for answers because they were starving.” Then Billy showed Jeshua
The News From Jerusalem, channels 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 26, 47, 66, 67, 77, 78, 95, 103, 105, 116,
165, 329, 343, 350, 378, and 439.
What’s that? He asked, after a while of flipping around.
Your birthplace, Billy said.
No!
Yes. A parking lot with alot of stones. It’s a pigsty run by the pigs—no trees.
I thought they called it ‘Jerusalem’ as an expression of hope, like wishful thinking...
Promotion…You know, pretending.
It’s a hole. What was it like before? Billy asked, because he really didn’t know.
What was it like! RJ said, and grabbed his head. Incredibly beautiful!! and he cried.
I sat, and let his spirit roll over me.
Why do you think we stayed? He said incredulously.
Why do you think we wanted it and talked of nothing else, it was Freedom. It wasn’t a desert,
it was like a flower. Not a lone flower in the desert. If it was a desert, it was only apparent when
we were wanting water…thirsty.
He was a wonderful speaker, I was thrilled by his quiet voice.
It was like a flower on a vine.
Why do you think we gave up our lives for it?
Why do you think we gave up everything—living the way everyone else did?
Why do you think no one...Nothing, could prevent us from claiming it?
 It was our birthright; it was who we were.
It was our land, like your feelings are your land.
They’re not whims, notions—just to stand out, just to be different. Freedom is not just a crazy
idea, it’s a place. And it existed. It was our identity, our very soul.
You can never change your name, no matter what anyone calls you, your name is your name!
My name is…then he said his name in Aramaic. Billy had never heard it before, it was in a
movie he never saw, would never be able to see, in a language he never heard, in a place he could
never visit. It was dead to him. A bunch of bricks. It was one big empty lot…to him (Let others
stomp the grapes or mount the olives or whatever it is they think’ll get this party started. RJ
showed me how it goes. How to make the wine flow).
There is never a good time to say these things.
The real man said his name, and cried. I sat on the floor with him. I figured if he could sit
without a butt, I could sit without a chair.
Know, that happiness and sadness go together. It’s because I love you, that I wanted you to
see it the way I see it. I will never go there, unless God asks me to.
*
♫ Baby, now that I’ve found you, I can’t let you go. I build my world around you, baby even
though, you don’t need me, you don’t need me ♫ The Foundations 1967 (Macauley & MacLeod)

When your mind reels, it’s time to go to work

When you’re choked up, it’s time to speak
If you wait for your eyes to turn your head or your hands to itch, nothing’ll get done
If you wait for the right words, well, now you’re talking, just don’t wait too long Jump!

RJ was great with the TV and the VCR. While I worked, he recorded God only knows what. He
came running into my consciousness once, and said, Here!
What’s that? I asked.
Come listen to this, you haven’t heard it, it’s new!
I was half expecting Kate Smith’s version of God Bless America, but he could look so
disappointed, I just had to do what he asked, or die of guilt and shame. I could tell he’d been
crying, so I figured it’s probably one of those World War II documentaries, or some other horror.
He read my mind, since he was already in it, and said, Don’t prejudge…just listen. Then he
played a country music video about a truck that breaks down, and the truck is a metaphor for
everything. I was going to ask him to play it backward, but I decided against it.
There! He said when it was over, and we wiped a tear from our, apparently, excruciatingly
sensitive eyes.
There, where? I said.
There, just like that…say it’s a breakdown, the car just broke down—now they have to walk,
to their…senses, their happiness, their desired life…best…fate…pre-reckoning. His voice trailed
off like a truck. He could see I was not impressed, and down-shifted from high exhilaration to
non-elation. What? He asked, You have no room for my ideas? RJ could have gotten thrown
out of day-care for having droopy drawers. He was ‘get out’ waiting-to-happen, like I was ‘we’re
sorry’ waiting-to-happen. Our themes collided, and I gave in:
That’s wonderful! I really like it. Funny thing is, I was just thinking that I was like a flagman
at a washed-out bridge or something, with a flashlight and a road-closed sign, waving people past,
trying to get them to take a detour, but they kept rolling down their windows and asking me
stupid questions in the rain.
RJ looked at me blankly, as tho he didn’t understand what I was doing with my time, but
wasn’t prepared to ask any questions Himself.
 So… I said: R…I can’t say the road’s washed out, and your truck broke down. I mean, you
understand…then I’d have to push, a truck in the mud…to…the detour place.
Well, RJ said, after a minute. Go with this, and he handed me the tape.
You just like the girl, I said.
Really…what’s wrong with it? He asked.
People have been saying the same thing about extending consciousness, and finding love for
centuries. One song won’t do it. Johnny B would have done it walking down Penny Lane if it
could be done that way. It’s one thing at a time, not one thing.
He scratched his head.
Preemptively, I said, look! I appreciate your help, really I love you for it, but they need more
than an excuse to turn around.
Oh, okay, he said softly, and I grabbed the tape out of his hands, so I wouldn’t have to watch
him walk away holding it.
Let me see that! I said, practically out loud. He turned around and gave me the tape. I held it
up as if for inspection, opened the window on the side, and touched the magnetic tape. You
know…I think you have something here.
Really? He said with joy and energy, and that sudden funny smile of his. He was moving,
almost spinning in time. So I was also.
Yes, Thank you so much, I’ll include this. Now go turn all the lights on. He loved to turn
lights on, so I kind of lied, and told him it was a tradition in my house to turn all the lights on at
eight o’clock (20:00) and then turn them off as necessary one by one. He hadn’t grown up with
lights, electricity, running water, winding staircases or refrigerator doors that turned the light on
for you, and he found it fascinating. When he was happy, it was very contagious. Everytime I
went to the kitchen I heard the refrigerator running—he kept opening and closing the door. When
he was seen-rejected, ah…you couldn’t look away, you couldn’t look askance. It was hard to
move.
He came back a few minutes later and said, I’m sorry. You can undo this if you want.
Well, of course, after he said that. I just said, Uh, oh, umm…I want to keep it.
He pointed a finger at me and said ‘uh,’ means you are really thinking about something, and
‘umm’ means you have a lot more to say, I heard that on the channel changer today. Bet you
didn’t know that?
When he was happy, it was almost impossible not to be. I think that kept him going.
You’re starting to talk like me. Go. Be off. Your camel is without.
He rolled his eyes, and said: I know more than you th-think I do.
I know, I know, I said and went back to work. “Everyone knows more than I think they do.”
It’s one of my themes, don’t start.
There was a rumble of thunder just then, and He said, Who’s they?

RJ?…
What? He answered.
What made you come back now?
He turned and stared at me. I was just going to ask you the same thing, he said.
…Loneliness I guess.
I guess.

They say, and it’s true, You have to go thru hell before you get to Heaven. But not every time.
I’m asking you to jump to Heaven. It is not a daunting leap. It’s not Butch Cassidy and the Sun
Dance Kid. You leap across one small fear at a time. By taking the first leap, all the small
thoughtless acts are traced over, as if by pencil, and you can hold it up like any tracing; and
compared to the fear they generate, they cancel each other out.
 Listen, uninteresting truths, and petty fears won’t ever stop you. You will stop you. Just jump.
Look…I stole, I lied, I lifted skirts/shirts, and Christ taught my dog to dance.

Can I call you what the Spanish call you, Hey Suess?
Sure, JC said, Why do you ask?
I would just feel more comfortable. In English-speaking countries, people don’t name their
children after you. I don’t know why, and Billy holds up his hand, adding perfunctorily—Don’t
ask!
I go by many many names, He said
Me too, I said
I have to ask this, I said, unsure if I were me or not.
Can I hold up my hand? (As in making a stop gesture) He asked.
Yes, of course. No still means no.
Is that the question? He said, and blinked twice.
No. Do you consider yourself a Christian? I asked.
No.
Why did you say that so casually? I asked.
I know what you’re going to ask before you ask it, since I’m in you. And I am you, and I
think from with-in your vocabulary of thought, and I don’t have a head cold, and please note, I
did not laugh…But you have to be kidding…If I showed up in a so-called Christian church, I’d be
pilloried, or whatever they do now, the moment I opened my mouth. They would hustle me out
of there if I told them who I was, in about ten seconds. I would be tied up and thrown in a padded
cell or threatened with disturbing the peace, incarcerated where rape is not only common, but
encouraged, and used to control behavior. Reward and punishment. Threats and bribes, tried and
true. Trial and…trial and…trial. I would be at the very least, drugged into near unconsciousness,
given electric shocks, hounded by talk therapists until I recanted. If I swore on a Bible that I
wasn’t crazy, they might give me chemicals to make me crazy—there are enough around—
Mercury, for example. I’d be assigned a lawyer to protect my rights, which means the right to
give him or her all my money, credibility, and time. Assaulted by doctors to pronounce me ill,
regardless of how I felt. Between the doctors and lawyers, I would soon run out of money to pay
the never ending onslaught of taxes.
Since I wouldn’t be able to work, and am not disabled, I couldn’t pay the tax on property, the
tax on breathing in a locale, the tax on living within a jurisdiction, a borough, a township, a
county, within a school district, within a state, within a country. I would have no income, so
they’d tax any gifts, or what money might be left to me. I would certainly be charged with tax
evasion for not paying my retirement tax, the tax on spending money for necessities or saving
money for a rainy day. I would be out on the street before the first raindrop fell, out among the
outcasts, and the most violent of the most violent, long before they could spend their ill-gotten
gains. No, he said. I’d be lucky to get two words out. Then I would be killed, silenced, or it
would suddenly be forced-debate time, which is the same thing. I only know two words of
debate: No, Later, Discuss—And Leviticus 19:19…I almost told him that was four things—he
was on a roll.
“Statements of profound transcendent understanding, feel clean. It feels like you just took a
bath. They seem to require a statement about purity…like, ‘Don’t wear cotton-polyester blends.’
Law givers, which is what they were, rarely betray how they think or feel. Thoughts are often
blank walls, and feelings tend to be chaotic.”
I knew it! You’ve been taking baths behind my back. Last month’s water bill was sky high!
Jeshua said: Beginning writers should avoid clichés like the plague. (God laughed)
…How come he doesn’t have to reference all the material he steals? God just smiled.
To go to a Mosque and tell them who I am, would be a hoot. I wouldn’t make it to the door.
For one thing, I don’t know the prayers. I don’t do anything the same way twice, so I would be
spotted as an infidel before the second verse. Allah Akbar, God is Great or God only is Great or
There is no God, but God. I’m not sure which is which. God is all.
I began to add my story to his: I don’t even know the prayers in the myopic church my parents
took me to as a child. I pray my own way. Thank you God for everything—it’s redundant, but
like I say, my prayers are my business. What is current for me one minute may not be current the
next. Just like with an actual conscious living thing.
I was never baptized except by the rain, but that was free, of course, and I don’t believe in the
authority of churches, and that makes me a bastard, which pretty well frees me to say whatever I
feel like saying. My baptism would have to be in the church of my adult-choosing, and it would
also end all this cant about the wages of sin, and the price of water. Sin doesn’t kill, any more
than guns kill. It’s the bullets stupid! Everybody dies. Come on…standing porter at the gates of
hell, threatening with one fist while hiding bribes in the other. Threats and bribes. Tried and
true. Why don’t they just set an example, well, I don’t mean landing in prison, of course…you
know, set an example for others by being true to themselves. Or…what about the ever popular,
lessons in educational furtherance. You know, set an example for others by being true to
yourself. As they say, things are not always what they seem.

No, he continued. More Himself than ever, I am neither Christian nor Muslim nor Jew nor
any other religion. Stand up in church…! I wouldn’t get four words out, or even make it back to
my seat!
I have heard, tho I do not believe, since lies and liars abound in such expanding numbers, that
in many Mosques, guns and bombs are stored so that they can be used with impunity, since a
counter-assault on a house of God would be tantamount to Holy War. Whether that is true or not,
doesn’t matter, you have reached a place beyond which, you cannot proceed.
Listen, I tell the truth and that is not one way. I can tell the truth a thousand ways—any way I
choose.
My collar was too tight and needed adjusting, He adjusted it, as He continued unabated.
Plus these ‘religious’ are very violent. Violent in their actions, violent in their speech, violent
in their death-wish to all who oppose them. Of course, I oppose them… Is there a word for
violently perfect…or perfectly violent?
Billy looked it up on the so-called Internet, in the self-proclaimed Information Age.
No, not really, he said.
When JC was upset, there was no sense in trying to sleep. He was me, I was him, and my part
of me was tired. The only comment Billy had, was that taxation is essential to the running of a
free state, however, Billy wanted a say in identifying his tax rate, the rate, if he understood the tax
laws, and in comparison to other ‘persons.’ His state senator, well known for his sexual
inclinations, excesses, and eight children, didn’t believe Billy had any rights that ‘normal’ people
have, except for one—you got it—the right to be taxed. Billy was somewhere between three
fifths and two thirds of a person. On the inside he was at least two people, one symbolic, one
real, and one as yet un- known. RS’s absolutely against the use of four (or 12) letter expletives—
he doesn’t mind doing it—just talking about it. He’s a huge hypocrite. He’s about to change.
Watch!
God tells me I’m eternal, and if he says, Don’t do that. I don’t. I’m still allowed my pet
projects. Let me mention another: He knows every Bible verse that concerns money, gain or
abundance. He implies to the poor and superstitious of this world: that if they give him 2 dollars,
God will give them 4…God’s not your piggy-bank Benny. Give the money back Benny. Put
your money where your mouth is Ben. You’re off track. And… I like the palate project—do
more of that. I’ll fix your speech, and you’ll fix their mouths. That’s the extent of our
partnership. You may refuse—without penalty. But if I hafta hear, one more time, how God’s
interested in your finances, I’m gonna have a cow.
 Billy didn’t realize Jesu understood that His self-expression was limited by Billy’s
understanding—that he did not ‘exist’ outside of me. I thought with all this cathartic truth-telling
He wouldn’t notice. He noticed. He found it thrilling and joyful and not the least limiting, tho I
suspect it was a little like playing a concerto on a concertina.
No, I am neither Christian or Muslim or any other religion, He said. None would have me.
You have reached the last stop, the accounting, the outcome, the dénouement. From here on,
it’s down hill and down hill fast. I have one life-theme I forgot to mention, I don’t like long
goodbyes. There are one or two other things I have yet to mention, but I’m locked up. Not in
your prison or asylum or whatever you want to call it. I am in Galileo’s prison.

An Element of Doubt is Critical -Karl Popper

I think you want to ask me something. People ask God for things all the time, Jeshua said.
Then added, I’m not God. J
Billy’s lips moved just after his spiritual equal, his symbolic self, moved His. It was as tho
Billy were practicing a new language, and then heard his own, and was still making the
exaggerated movements. Billy liked the way Jeshua said it.
It is in every conversation. There is always something one wants, there is always a reference
to the unknown Everything that we live in, that lives in us. J
Yes, I know. B
People want something. J
Yes, I suppose. B
Well, like you, for example. You came to God at what, 8, with a miniature roller coaster stuck
to your pincers—you wanted something. J
I wanted Him to take it off. B
You wanted Him to know, you knew where He lived, and that you had a wild imagination, and
a fierce grip—a love for repeating, and a mute quality, which is always charming in a child. J
Billy could almost see it, as if it happened yesterday: swinging…the clouds, getting down, and
holding out his hand…and then back to swinging again.
I got my fierce grip from my mother. B
Jeshua smiled. Billy, the point of conversation is to come with something you call truth and
stack it up next to someone else’s stuff. Your plane or train or whatever that thing was, was not
stackable. J
I just wanted it off. B
If you wanted it off, you could have just dropped it. J
Now you tell me. BJ
…Jeshua said, You wanted God to come home with you, and make it all better. You have an
issue with immortality, and death is everywhere.
Billy has a glass of water in his hand, then to his lips, then balanced on the seat next to him.
You’re bound to spill some. J
I like what you said, but I can’t drop the ‘i’ Issue. B
Guess not, you can’t even say it. J
I want to live forever, what’s wrong with that? B
Nothing, but the way you want to do it would be boring. J
(you are going to ½ 2 take something with you undone, incomplete)
Boring. Billy repeats with absolutely no emphasis.
No surprises. J
No surprises, Billy repeats.
I want. J
I want, Billy repeats.
 I want you to. J
I want you to, Billy said.
I want you to show me the hypnosis trick.
I want you to show me the hypnosis trick, Billy said.
Jeshua lifted one finger and said, see this?
Billy said, Yes.
Watch! ‘sense,’ and Jesu moved his finger in front of his face to the right.
Watching it with his eyes, Billy followed, as tho he were separate from the action, and not the
cause of it all.
Jesu then moved his finger slowly to the left, and when he reached the edge of their visual
field, he said ‘Awareness.’
Billy followed~ because he was the doer, and the one being done to, oddly enough he was
unconscious. Jesu went back and forth, sense-Awareness-sense-Awareness-Sense-Awareness…
Now you know everything, and when you wake up, I’ll be gone. The crown of thorns is none of
your business~n~then he was gone. He never apologized for thinking Billy was arrogant. Billy
felt so happy he thought he should have missed him more. It was a completed circle. That
night

4-8-20 A Short Forever

The next morning, Billy was about to take Ore out—got his leash, put it on. Then he got an
idea. The dog waited patiently. Billy put the walk on hold. For ten minutes.

Forever known as the World’s Hope.

North America, is like the half crazy woman of a certain age. Who spends her children’s
inheritance on a hundred-thousand dollar security system, and a hundred-thousand dollar face-lift,
tummy-tuck and butt-up, whatever—the works.
Her security system wouldn’t keep anyone from walking right up to her front door. The
frightening boob-job would.

Forever known as the Land of Love.

Africa, is like the intoxicated drummer, who sells trinkets from the string adorning the side of
his lucky drum, * to men who believe that sex with virgins can cure almost anything. And
women who believe you must keep the drummer happy. Or he’ll tell everyone you’re a virgin, or
not, witchever would be worse.
In Love Land, the head believes it should be wrapped in porous old cloth—wrong head, wrong
wrap. The feet believe they have diamonds on the soles of their shoes—except they have no
shoes, and the diamonds are uncut—a bloody mess.

Forever known, to the English, as the Palace of Heaven.

Asia, owns the roof of Heaven. Below, it is the woman’s job to sweep the floor.
They are like the young woman who screws while she sweeps. The baby is born absently, in
the middle of a very small, very clean circle. The palace is very large but it doesn’t take two
billion women to sweep it.

Forever known as the Power and the Glory.

Europe, is like the wealthy virgin. He feels it is his job to pronounce the fitness of all the
women he meets. He says of the African women—too dark. The Middle Eastern women—too
shrill. The South American women—too short. The West Asian women—too red. The East
Asian women—too yellow. The Women of the higher latitudes—spit when they talk. The
women of the lower latitudes—look pregnant when they’re not. The girls from the Island
Colonies—mouthy.
Forever the connoisseur. Always thinking like a virgin.

Forever known as La Tierra De La Paz (the Land of Peace).

South America, is like a wheel—recently invented to help them carry all their worldly goods
round and round.
They can’t move north; they would be killed. They can’t move south; they would freeze.
They can’t move east; because of the desert winds. They can’t move west because of all the
sweeping. So they carry everything around and around and around.

Forever known as the Gentle Giant.

Oceania, is like the baby in a very large family. He happens to have a speech impediment.
You are so afraid that he’ll start talking in public, you finish every sentence for him, and agree
with every comment that he makes. So no one will laugh.
He is so kind, so sweet, and so over-protected, you fear if he ever starts talking, someone is
bound to tell him he sounds like a fool.

There. The stage is set. Kindness or Understanding. Hope or Truth. Love or Death. Peace
or Fear. Heaven or Hell. The Power and The Glory forever and ever, or Never. Amen.
There-in lies oceans of doubt. Locked, practically, in floes of rock and fog. Greeting few if
any with the ice of reason, or the clouds of understanding—everything comes from an idea.
The judgment is an ever-expanding declaration. It moves individually and globally, like a
wave. You will eventually have to meet it head-on. Then Ore and I took our walk.
This world cannot stand. It’s too human: The ones who are scared to death, hold a knife to
their own throats; The virgins think they can hold on if they hold off; The ones who stick to the
circle see no motion in their movement; The ones who hold Heaven up believe that it can never
fall; The riders see the reins they hold taking them where they want to go; The dying think that it
is those around them that are dying; And the ignored- overprotected see enormous gain in speech
that brings so much relief. The quibblers point out that I missed the ice continent, which is
continent only because it hasn’t starting melting yet. You’re made fools by what you say, not out
of what you don’t say. Try shutting-up while I’m talking.

True Prophesy
True prophesy is not possible. It’s outside your nature. If I say die; you spring to life. If I
say, when I go, you go; I may live forever. If I say your Grandchildren’s Grandchildren will be
cannibals; You will make a liar of me, just to prove me wrong.
You are like the Monkey who shakes the fruit from the tree to torment the Tapir. The
impossible irony of it is, that you are the Monkey, and we all are the Tapir.
You have done it to yourself.

The conflagration will hit maximum intensity in only a few years. No one will know what
they’re fighting about. But no one knows now. The theory that the side with the most people
when it’s over will win, is completely wrong. The winner will be the side with the least number,
in the largest genetic pool. It is counter intuitive. This destructive force will be the last ethno-
theo-genetico mind-sweeping event there will ever be—anywhere. It will leave nothing and no
one standing. You cannot fight your own urges. And that’s the truth. If you thought I was going
to lie, go find another Messenger.
 I find only one thing humorous. The boy who took so long to grow-up, has to be the adult...a
child will lead…perhaps. You’ve thrown so many away, but you can’t throw me away. I was
always protected, from every avenue, in every quarter, on every block, even among foriners I
found friends. I find only one thing curious, after 2000 years, The Christ came back 20 years
older, probably means nothing. This is my time. Without me, you will all be ‘dead.’ Look at it
this way: The one billion who are gay, like me; the one billion or so, who are gay in spirit, like
me; the one or two hundred million who have the gall to love without sanctuary or excuse, like
me; the three or four hundred million who would do the right thing, just because they can see it,
like me, will be able to help—take the pressure off. This isn’t a Saturday afternoon outing, let
them. Let them be. Let them help. Encourage them to. They are from Eternity. They love what
they love; they love who they love, and they just don’t care what you think. I encourage them,
and so would you if you could see the abomination you are about to create. The only one I’m
outing is myself, and I have so much help, love, and support that it’s Pure Joy. If there were ever,
in all of human history, a time to buck a trend, ignore a convention, or refuse to stand on inane
and thoughtless principles: This is it. You’ll need all the help you can get—in the very near
future. You’ll need great teachers, creative minds, and people fearless with the truth. Without
them you’ll be as gone as the brutes. That’s why they’re here. May you live…..Be. But know,
without them, there’s no possibility of survival. None. Let me add: without women’s rights
toward equality, nothing, none of it, will get off the ground. I too, hid my heart, as if it weren’t
connected to everything else I see, which is me.

God says : Respect—show it to him, and while you’re at it, show some respect for yourselves.
Peace—make it. Make it now, or this may be the shortest forever on r e c o r d. Pay
attention to the Truth I’ve given him. Turn from your senselessness.
Your Self—give it to him or it will be taken from you.
Allow him to do as I have asked, and stop judging yourself right, and oh-so-correct. He has told
you, and now I am telling you. It is his machinery that will be used to judge Mankind. The so-
called Human Race. Consider yourself lucky. He doesn’t lie. He has failed at everything, but
not in everything. God, that is truly All, is in him. He that could not change was, even so,
polished, and made brighter by you, for you, and under you. Yet he still loves you. It’s one of
life’s bitter ironies; most of the horrors of this world are driven by identity lost to the disparity
between desire and pleasure, one they love, one they hate. Homophobes tend to be homosexual.
Billy sees the truth from its many perspectives as tho he has lived within it; sees its facets; like
windows; a hundred; a thousand; all pointing toward; making clear; and clearer yet—the Truth.
A crystal within a crystal within a crystal. I gave him almost no power. He shone, and I picked
him up.

Your Dreams
Just like the ocean under the moon it’s the same steel ‘motion that I get from you—Give me your heart make it real or let’s forget about it.
Smooth/Carlos Santana

Your little dreams are not little to me. I wait, because I understand. Take any part of this.
Any part. And hold it as a target. I am nothing. I never was anything. No one hit me because I
never learned to fight. I was invincible, in a manner of speaking. And I’ve been sailing for years
 Billy sought what other men
wanted. He became mute. When he was a child,
he became deaf. Billy’s father took him to the back of the kitchen
where it was quiet, to test him, to see improvement. To drop pins. Oddly enough, there was a
Mynah bird in a cage on the counter in the back. He was deaf for a time, and as he got over that,
he became more and more mute. Billy was not in Time. Period.

Mike
When Billy was eight, he had a friend. This friend he knew since the day he arrived in Point
Spread. Back in those days people didn’t move around so much. Billy made friends with the
new kid, and they walked home together many times. Billy showed him the best way to jump
puddles, and they talked about how sometimes it rains too much. They ended up with muddy
shoes, that’s all. Billy new that Mike was so new, he new nothing, but who cares? Mike missed
some place no one ever heard of. Billy made Touch-Down Point seem more interesting than it
really was. One of the puddles was four-meters easy. They jumped it.
One day there was a fight, and Billy got pushed. Mike was there, but he had his own friends
now, because it was two years later. Billy was about ten then, and he was no longer deaf or
anything. Or anything but stupid. Mike stepped-in to take a turn at beating up on Billy. Billy
swung Mike around like a toad, jumped on top of him, and pinned him to the ground in no time.
Mike never said anything. Twenty eight years later, Billy realized he could never have beaten
Mike up. Mike was ten times stronger, ten times faster, and ten times the scrapper Billy was. He
walked away from the fight, and no one wanted to fight with Billy anymore, “He beat-up Mike.”
I understand it because I move. He made me me.
Billy walked different after that. Mike re-introduced Billy to his ten year old classmates,
stronger, and more formidable than ever. Thanks. Mike helped him more than anyone could ever
know. Billy gave him this - - years later. Mike helped him to his feet. Billy’s neighborhood
was full of men, boys, girls and women, who Billy couldn’t ever have become Billy without.
And if you’re missing the point: many discounted him, that he loved.

Later, before he took a drink

The greatest men came to his door seeking all kinds of things, dreadnoughts, skyscrapers,
bridges—as tho he were a steel factory, a smelter or very entertaining. I wish I were stronger
smarter and linked in that special way to that special place too. It’s not that I’m not linked it’s
that it’s not special. If you want to be stronger, exercise. If you want to be smarter, read more. If
you want a link-up, get married. If you want to be rich, get a job and work at it, and toward it, 24
hours a day. If you want to be strikingly beautiful, know your audience. If you want to be
protected, wear a steel helmet and stay indoors. To be interesting be interested. I’m like a rabbit,
when I die I’ll pass to the great beyond, and I won’t notice any difference between this life and
the so-called after life.
It is not being a rabbit that’s makes me special, it’s knowing that I’m a rabbit. A very strong,
very wary, very fast rabbit. Able to leap your nonsense in a single bound.

Billy wanted sex because he was a man. He loved, because he didn’t care. The more they
wanted more, the more he wanted less. He kissed them, he cooked eggs for some.
What he wanted was not his tongue in unfamiliar territory. He was a man, he wanted
permission. He wanted to give permission to men who needed permission. He gave only one
thing. The greatly unexpected. He loved the giving. They loved that he loved it. Billy was born
this way. Men are all born this way to some extent, but you knew he was going to say that.
…He can’t take his eyes off you because he’s just crazy. Billy drank a bottle of wine and
then went thru the house turning out all the lights that were left on for him, took the
erbs and whatnots he was given, to prevent hangovers, and went to sleep. He
didn’t miss RJ, he slept fine, and dreamed a little dream, or two or three.
I dreamed I was handed a rose bud—it opened slowly. If I had
known what it was, I could say it never changed—but I didn’t
know what it was, or what it did, and to me it seemed to
expand and change every day. It seems so hard to
believe I haven’t had sex in five months.

4-7-25 The Walking Brain

The walking brain doesn’t know it’s sitting in a car with the world streaming by.
The walking brain sees danger, and can sense the floor like a footpath, the pedal like a root, in an
instant the turn, the dash, the jump. 90 miles an hour. I can run from you because I’m walking.
You think you’re sitting quietly at home, the ride is over, and the car is parked, but you’re still
walking. You think you can get up any time, and walk away, you think you can turn on a dime.
You have a walking brain. Made to walk. Always seeking the advantage it affords you. Its
advantage has left you seeing over the tops of heads.
Home is right around the corner.
You are walking all the time—you have a walking brain.
Sit for a second, and you’ll see, you can’t sit.
The world isn’t moving, why does it appear to be.
Are you looking for something.
Someplace you need to be.
I think you walk to live.
Are your dreams done/about laying down. No, of course not.
You are always walking in your dreams. Funny, you have a walking brain.
I’d like to walk with you, slow down, for a second. Turn to the side. That’s what I thought.
You never stop. You can’t. Neither can I.

Being some people…

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation—Oscar Wilde

Some people say I’m crazy. You know, some people thought Christ, was crazy, Muhammed,
politically incorrect, and all the rest. Odd. Mad.

You can’t change the world—flip everything upside down on a whim, without knowing a
thing or two—I don’t care who you are.
I find this as confusing as you do. Yeah, I really do. So. It happened. I held on to my
surfboard, and it zipped backward, and now I’m out at sea. As far as clear explanations —that’s
about as clear as it’s going to get.

Billy wrote: Did you think I was going to come back on a donkey? He scrunched the paper
into a ball, threw it over his shoulder and it landed in the waste paper basket. Did you think I was
going to go from town to town soliciting funds for a revival? He balled that up as well, tossed it
over his shoulder, and it landed on top of the other one. Did you think I would say I’m coming
back and then forget? Same thing, that landed on the others like a suddenly dismounted
horseman. Did you think that I would produce a television show called, Look Out He’s Back? Or
cancel your ticket without telling you?
Everyone is some where, I’m here. Scrunch. Billy felt strange, and rubbed his head; a light
shone upon him, it was the TV, it had turned itself on. Billy took a long nap; the set turned itself
off; it was programmed to go on and off. Billy woke up in a world completely without
governance, and felt right at home.
I said I was coming back. You knew I was coming. Here I am. Here we go.

Prison
It is from Being, that Heaven springs. It is from Being like you, that I became like me. Being
is everything. Being is one thing in many forms. This form can move with you. If you needed
help to understand, I would help you. But I’m in jail.
Galileo’s prison is for people who tell the truth about the moon being round—about
relationships, and their plans for escape. About falsehood, and misunderstandings based on
human failings—our lot. I am about to mark you down, I am about to move you toward the curb.
I am not in charge, and the world will go on just fine without me, if you call this fine.
I don’t make the rules; I don’t run the store, and just so you understand very clearly, I am
judging you, by the yardstick you used to judge me. And I don’t mean by how different you are
from me, I mean how cruel and selfish you are toward every living thing. Especially things you
know nothing about. May God help you.

People never grow sick of asking me why I’m in prison, yet prisoners rarely ask that of other
prisoners. It’s a funny thing—they’re always right.
It’s dull, how the greedy guess greed. The ignorant guess ignorance.
You are in prison for lying? Yes. You’re in prison for spilling seeds? Yes. Stealing? Yes.
Vanity? I guess. Depression? Well. For not talking to God when he was talking to you? Huh?
For being inarticulate and not caring? Whatever. For being in contempt? Yes. Turns out
disrespect is a crime, but only sometimes… If it ever came to following the rules God gave him,
or the rules of the System of Human Injustice and Theocracy, Billy had no choice—he was less
than three fifths human. Billy laughed at idiocy—what was he supposed to do?
Many people thought telling the truth, and being right were the same thing, but if you aren’t
thinking clearly, how could they be? (Anyway, another reason I’m in prison.)
“For being depraved and perverse!” A young woman said, as if in a fit. Billy winked and said,
Yes, and then opened his mouth as if he were about to eat grapes. The ‘baby,’ the woman
thought she was carrying, was not a baby, it was a hydatiform mole, Billy didn’t know that—how
could he? She blamed Billy for killing her unborn child. It ruined her life. She never got over it,
and she never forgave herself. She degenerated into a living breathing accusation. Her judgment
was turned in on itself, and tho it was hers—did not include her.
Billy didn’t smile at her grief, her misfortune or her tragic conclusions. He smiled because her
question was funny. Why do they all think they know why I’m in prison?
Murder? Yes, I have so little time to explain, but yes…I have walked away from people who
were dying. So have you. Also have you cut people off mid-stream. So have you negotiated a
settlement, and then absented yourself. So have you ignored, divided, subsumed, relegated, made
motions meant to eliminate—so have you divorced yourself from the reality of the so-called
situation—Have torn your clothes that in the tearing you saw yourself and said, No, it is you I
abstain. Ever? No never? I wish I could take such a narrow view of this life. But I can’t—it
lasts forever. Forever.
 Billy could identify three places where you would always find a flutter of small birds within
his exercise yard. One was in a hedge on SX Ave. One was in a tree on High,
and one was very nearby, but he never knew why—there was no food there. And then he looked
more closely. There were thorns there.
@

For being the anti-Christ? If you’re asking, Have I ever gotten in my own way? Yes, now you
must move on, or you will be moved. I don’t get in my own way anymore.
Fear. Yes. To shame someone. And on and on and on. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And finally
Yes. All the things that you are in prison for, I am myself in prison for. How is it you’re always
right? And how is it you keep asking?
There is always one who comes late: For calling God a bastard, a short man with a stubby
cigar said. Yes, rise up, Billy said. The man moved his shoulders, and stared at Billy
indignantly. He appeared to be upset; he said nothing; he just stared; and shifted his weight as if
he were sitting in a chair and couldn’t touch the floor.
The man was about to tell Billy what he thought of his hastily made judgments. He took a
deep breath, and rocked on his heels, Billy watched him and said, Yes, that’s right.
Billy understood that all authority comes from God, including the authority to compare one
man, or woman, to another, and make it stick. Rise above this. The best Billy could do was be a
mirror. He wondered if that was not the best anyone could do. Some mirrors are crystal clear
and some are not. Golden mirrors might be perfect, but you can’t see shit.
The man took a puff from his cigar, blew it in Billy’s face and walked away. When he
approached, he was 155 cm tall, and when he left he was 157. Two centimeters, not much, but
everyone noticed.

I would like to say I was prepared for the day when the whole adventure turned into nothing
more than a man going crazy from grief, loneliness, and that dreadful response to threat, that
refuses to be named. A
One day I was walking Ollie, and I saw a butterfly caught in a spider’s silk suspended about
15 feet over my head. I don’t know what directed my attention to it, except that the butterfly was
pure black, and had wings fully open. I memorized the spot, and walked under it, as though I
were walking under a banner with a slogan or shibboleth I didn’t understand, or necessarily agree
with.
I continued my walk and wondered if a relationship with God was not something like a
friendship with someone who can’t be quiet. I loved all the symbolism but this may have been
one black-winged creature too many.
Anyway, I picked up a small stick that I could use to toss in the air to coax the strand of silk
down for closer inspection. The dog and my walk, led me around a corner away from the tree in
question, and the whole time I was extremely preoccupied. When I got back to the spot, I was
flabbergasted to see that the butterfly was more than 30 feet above my head and that the insect
was very much alive. Trapped, but alive and flapping. It took a day of thinking to come to the
conclusion that, that is very much what this relationship is like. It’s as if I am walking 15 feet
above the ground, everything looks different—closer, as tho I were floating, with a knowing that
leads to a sense of proximity.
I’m crazy. It feels great. It feels natural. I believe Christ was the same kind of crazy.
Thinking in a tune, harmonizing with everything around him as if it were a melody. As tho it
were predictable which unfortunately, I don’t think it is, tho in every other way it seems to
resemble instant prediction. Very strange, Penny lane is in my ears and in my eyes.
I think God has a sense of humor, and you need not take it all so seriously. When I feel the
baby kick I’m going to check-myself-in, promise.
 He says I have the job, in other words I own it, and I can take it with me, or drop it, it is not
center stage so much as center of the world. Neither here nor there. Perhaps that’s why everyone
sees me as they themselves are. The way a piece of paper folded in two, forms a kind of mirror,
and I, in it’s crease (not in hand—the most cherished position), am so easily seen from both ends.
He also says I can stop worrying. Meaning?
One more thing; this relationship cannot be passed down, inherited or transferred, it does not
come from being preposterous, it comes from being tapped (grace) and then your life just
suddenly lines up and you say ah ha! The thing that you have, (which is really not yours, and
does not belong to you) to pass along is a knowing so deep and timeless it requires faith, it
doesn’t create faith. If I said, Go be outlandish, you would do the same thing over and over
again. It’s not about doing, or doing one thing to its quiddity—that follows naturally.
You may notice in the future, that sound I refer to when all you hear is…eeeeeeee
“everything’s fine, you have plenty of time, whatever will be will be, there’s no reason to worry,
be happy, there are no stupid questions, come on in, make yourself at home, that’s the way it
goes, is there anything I can do for you, I don’t make the rules, well, you know…it is what it is
(but what is it). That’s just business, life goes on, I agree, that’s life in the big city, little white
lie, gotta break some eggs, bigger’s better, that’s the way the ball bounces, let your mind become
one with the universe. Relax.”
It, that, the white sound, is repeated over and over, in my opinion, not because people listen so
slowly, but because they are listening so hard.

Consider: 2,000 words a day is a little too fast

Billy loved talking to God; he learned a few new words everyday. When they spoke, it was
like being in the language, in God, one of the symbols—a little bit like being played. This was a
simple natural language, it made sense and it brought clarity. Billy felt that he was able to learn
about twenty new words a day, then 25, then 30. That’s how it went. How else could it go?
Talking to God was like being in Heaven. He learned 40 new words a day by holding off 3,000
others. To learn this language he had to first learn his own. The translation exists in that.
Language. God’s not unclear, I am. Words are.
Billy wanted to learn this symbolic language. He kept waiting for the symbols to repeat. One
day he said half-out-loud, ‘If these symbols repeat it’s news to me.’ And then there was a flash.
And things began to turn, Billy’s world began to turn, slowly at first, then faster.

I hid behind fiction because I made statues cry. People went mad from parlor magic. I stole
them blind, and they never once checked their pockets. They still don’t.
I was the little boy who went fishing for the first time, rowed a boat for the first time, and
landed a fish without putting one oar or one hook clearly in the water.
I was the one who stole from the reeling welterweight—the angry man who believes his fists
can locate the truth in a person, and I was the one he couldn’t touch, no matter how hard he tried.
I hid behind fiction because no one would ever believe the truth. I was born this way.
God came to me at six, and at eight, I went to him with something stuck on my hand.
God fell down, doors flew open; and I walked away with everything. I guess I knocked the
‘wind’ out of Him.
He survived, and he said to the eight year-old future-Messiah, once he was able to talk…Your
poor father, what must he think. You are a handful my son. You’re a handful. Then he scratched
his head and said, I would protect the world from you if I could. God help them. Aside: There’s
no such thing as a future messiah. I became when I became, it went backward from there—
making all things clear—the future’s unknown.
And then when I was nine or ten…I decided to seek God.
 That was about 40 years ago, and now I want you to hold on tight, because we’re going for a
little ride—you and me. This time, all the way. Don’t close your eyes.
Yes, I’m the one who stole 125 dollars, five dollars at a time, from the only ‘Grandfather’ I
had who spoke English, who thought he was my great uncle, who couldn’t believe I gave
everyone the wrong change—because he didn’t understand that one number was pretty much like
every other number—to me, give or take. I gave the money back over 5 weeks, 5, 5-dollar bills at
a time. I figured that sounded about right.
And before he died, he was hurt that I didn’t take the entire 888-kilogram cash register as a
memento of my days in the Book Store.
I was the one you saw wandering Einstein-Princeton-like, in a daze, because certain people
who shall remain nameless can’t tell a story, and don’t know when to shut up.
I’m the one who stole something from you—and you still haven’t noticed. I might apologize
some day, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. XLA

Being the Son of God was not burdensome, tho Billy could see how it could be challenging,
and upsetting. One day Billy took two seconds too long to swipe his cash card while he was
bagging his own groceries, and as he walked from the store to his car muttering, he thought,
‘Jesus! these people would even look at God like he was crazy, what’s the big problem?’ When
Billy saw his car it looked oddly real. He was in God.
When he went crazy, he suddenly became an expert on craziness. He decided there were three
kinds of crazy: People who had an intrinsic brain problem, and needed care; people who were
pretending to be crazy, and were very dangerous and annoying alternately; and the third kind of
crazy, the childlike crazy, that God protects. Billy was, oddly enough the first and third kind: He
needed to be cared for by strong, no-nonsense, slightly threatening, strapping young men in order
to prevent him from pretending he was something he was not. Otherwise, there could be trouble.
God agreed—Billy could be all three kinds of crazy, and thought that anyone who got in his
way would end up being very sorry.
It was Billy who decided that while holding contradictory thoughts was interesting, it didn’t
entitle him to be the only Son of God. God felt differently, but understood how Billy would want
brothers and sisters, so he gave in.
You may have as many as you want. Let it be.
Almost instantly, there was a shortage of robes, not to mention queen-size sheets and
tablecloths. Everyone wanted to be, and therefore became, the sons and daughters of the Living
God.
Billy became something he never imagined he’d be—the person everyone turns to, to see how
to dress. He wore jeans, black mostly, and silk or silk-like shirts.
“First thing,” he told his followers. Besides starting a dialogue with you-know-who—abandon
your reputation, otherwise people might think you’re crazy.
The Religious Movement o The first new religious movement of the 21st century was
founded.
Unfortunately, one night in 12, their founder drank two small bottles of wine, slipped on a
banana peel, and fell down the back stairs to his death. Three of his helpers tried to revive him,
but he passed away with a smile on his face just the same. Many said it was either a suicide, or
God had finally managed to kill him as he had obviously intended, so many years before. And
that ended that. And that’s why, the SAEEOG, The Sons And Everyone Else Of God, seems like
a junket-for-a-ride today.
Billy went for his last walk with Sherpa, (The dog’s registered name). From here on out, the
dog would walk him. He passed a church sign that read: Warning, exposure to the son can
prevent burning, and then later he passed another church, and heard the preacher yell, “If you
don’t worship him, there is something wrong with you.” He had not heard what preceded that
statement or what followed it, hopefully it was a joke He just kept walking. He thought: They
couldn’t be that horrible, wicked, and threatening, but they could. Billy would never join. As
intense as it is, God’s love will not burn you, that’s just preachers trying to make hay.
Billy heard the preachers: TV, radio, film, paper, this one and that. They’re too smooth. They
act like experts, they act like they’ve been polished—some have, many haven’t—they all look the
other way. They look at each other to see how to act right—and then they don’t do it. RJ loved
to watch them. He told me he liked White, Murray, and some other one. They weren’t any
better, that I could tell, but he loved the woman’s energy, and the man knew his name. It’s not a
contest. His love is enormous. The idea’s this: destroy the rotten part—evaporate it, and the rest
will come seamlessly together. Know, the rotten wedge isn’t made of rotten people; it’s made of
good people who do rotten things. But the rotten slice doesn’t move all over the place, it doesn’t
move at all. Jeshua said, The man who thinks the blind beetle in his backyard is worthless, is a
fool.
In these days, the preachers that will last, the ones left standing when this is over, will tell their
parishioners how much money they took in last month, every month—Each month they will add
up, without depreciating, the money and convertible assets they took-in for that month, and report
that figure. The ones who tell the most truth, and make the least money will ‘survive.’ It has to
be that way. You must pay penance, isn’t that what you teach? You suspend me, I suspend you.
It’ll give you time to think. You may be shocked, I hope you are. Wouldn’t it be funny if the
ones startled awake, stayed awake longest, got it together first, and learned how to gently wake
the others. I wish the brothers to drink and be merry. This is, after all a time of great joy. The
sisters I wish to be happier. Upon you rests the fate of the world, and everything, as it ever was.
Those who hid behind me are about to be exposed. I warn you, because you’re not all the same.
Christ’s return will still your panicking heart. This is not a time of grave doubts and just
desserts, but a time of great joy not just for the undeserving or the simple minded but also for
those who reserve their joy, and pull their wonder back, away from the window every time.
These are The Beautiful Days.
One more thing: (to the perpetually ‘greased-up’) It makes no difference whether you hire an
outside accounting firm or do it yourself, but know: hiring people to prove you’re not a bunch of
liars is bound to get more and more expensive—and then prohibitively so.

The End

The 23rd Tuesday in Six

I’m Spartacus…I’m Spartacus…I’m Spartacus—Spartacus/1960/Stanley Kubrick/Antony Mann/Kirk
Douglas/Dalton Trumbo/ Howard Fast. Sometimes I went to Heaven just to get out of Dodge—im

Billy was able to spend more and more time in Heaven every day. He learned, because he
already knew, that there was no way to accurately measure this time, or the time away, from
Earth. It was about 5 hours a day. Give or take.
One day he was washing dishes in God’s kitchen, and he saw, out the window, a commotion
down the road (Ignore Billy’s Pennsylvania-Dutch background).
God, what’s all that then?
What.
That.
That.
Yes.
This.
 Yes.
Nothing.
There were a dozen or so people gathered in a cluster in the middle of the intersection.
God, maybe someone got run over. B
I doubt it. G
Well, you never know. B
Billy, there is no pain, no death, no fear, no hate, no anger, no blame here. People don’t have
to be careful crossing the street. G
God was obliquely referring to the difficulty Billy had, navigating intersections. Billy could
time street-lights to the millisecond, he could infer the speed of approaching cars within micro-
kilometers per-hour, he could spot a distracted driver from nine decameters away, and he
naturally sought safety. That wasn’t the problem, the problem was, he had to try to re-learn what
it meant to ‘be careful,’ every-time he got back from Heaven.
Well there’s something going on. B
Go over there, and find out what that’s all about. G
Why me? B
Maybe there’s a problem. G
A what? B
I think it might interest you. G
I’ll just do everything. B
Billy walked down the hill, and found a growing crowd of people gathered around a can of
fruit cocktail in heavy syrup standing on end, in the middle of the road without a label.
Now, what do we do? One man said.
Where did this come from? said another.
What do you think it is?
What could it be?
Look, it has a dent in it.
Who left this here?
It looks like a can.
Billy looked from face to face to face, took a sip from the cup of coffee he brought with him,
and said, It is a can.
Yes, well could you please take it away, a woman said. It obviously doesn’t belong here. She
glared at Billy and emphasized ‘obviously.’
Many were still less than ecstatic at the ‘new arrivals,’ also known as ‘them.’
Billy said, It’s a can of fruit cocktail or something. What’s the problem?
Or something? Someone said. (another reason I’m in prison)
They all stared at Billy as if he were God’s less than authoritative live-in-lover, and general all
around mysterious relationship.
In Heaven I’m his Son, on Earth I’m his lover, what’s so complicated about that, Billy thought
to himself. Then it reversed.
Billy stood by the can, and 20 or so people stared at it.
Billy looked at them, and thought: This may not be what it seems. He considered going to
God and asking him what he should do. But it was a can.
The crowd grew.
Well, Billy said, let’s get a can-opener.
What? Someone said.
What’d he say? Someone added.
No one moved.
What did Lord All Mighty say? A man with a beard interjected.
I don’t accept that nick name, Billy shot back sharply.
The crowd reacted to this comment with raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, and bows.
 Wat-he-say?
What’d he say?
What? No, what’d he say? I didn’t hear what he said.
You, Deafo, get me a can-opener……Please. B
The man walked off. A whispering campaign began: He’s cranky and bossy, ignorant and
disrespectful. And sarcastic.
Billy heard what they said, and said nothing.
Fruit cocktail? one young woman said, and smiled.
Maybe. B
You don’t know? Someone said.
Maybe it’s a can of worms. B
Billy knew a symbol when he saw one. And heard, felt, read, was hand delivered, and open to
one. I’ll be right back. B

God was standing at His front door.

Well, how’s it going. G
Are they crazy? Am I in crazy people heaven? B
Billy ther’s only one.
God was starting to talk more and more like he was from just outside of Philadelphia.
Billy, every so often they get confused and scared, you know…curious. Heaven is without
fear, and no one brings their confusion with them except some do. G
I’m not going to put that in the story, it makes you look…a little…lame. B
I always just fix these things for them. G
How often does this happen? B
Not often. G
How do you fix it? B
I would have just thrown it away. ‘Joott,’ God says, and makes the universal sign for a three
point shot (just one of those things). G
God, crazy Heaven is very lovely, Thanks for having me over, I’m going home now and take a
high colonic. B
Billy, for them this is a problem. They are the ever after always blameless. G
And then I think I’ll lay down in a dark room with ear plugs, and pretend to feel good.
Billy sense-Awareness is not really a choice—it’s one or the other then the other. G
Huh? B
Don’t play the trick memory game with me, Thank you very much. You can’t always choose
between sense and Awareness, but you can always tell which one you’ve chosen.
Then I’ll take something to settle my stomach, like strychnine. B
Billy, death cannot save you. Understanding cannot save you. This is it. G
That’s what they say on the other side. B
This is. G
Billy said, after a minute: I’m not going to run around cleaning up Heaven all day, while you
make everyone blameless…I’ll just go and explain this to them. B
Good idea. Go ahead. G
Billy got back. A huge crowd of people who wanted to see Billy do something, parted as he
approached. There was a can opener next to the can. A few people had gone home to get their
fishing rods, expecting worms.
Billy opened the can. It was fruit cocktail in light syrup. As he lifted the can to his lips a man
said, Christ! That could be full of Botulism!
What do you care, I can’t be injured here, and you’re already dead? B
Oh, they said, and the crowd grew quiet—they almost forgot.
 Billy couldn’t help but roll his eyes. God was right, they were funny on both sides of the aisle.
He drank directly from the can, then put it back in the middle of the road with a straw in it, and
walked off.
They said: God…he shows up, acts like this is nothing, offers worms to fishermen, gives us an
old can of mixed fruit, takes the best part, and then leaves one straw so we can have what’s left.
Billy heard what they said.
Oh, Christ, here he comes. Billy walks into the crowd and says: Everything here is perfect,
even if you don’t understand it. I could explain everything, but then you wouldn’t have anything
to look forward to, or appreciate the flavor of—You have no one to blame but me, for forcing you
to share, one at a time. For not being able to remember the insecurities of childhood. For
eliminating hunger, fear, dis ease, hatred, contagion, scarcity, self loathing, boredom, grief,
torment, denial…and all that humiliation that comes from sharing thru the same straw.
When I was a kid…people killed people for any reason at all, anything plausible: cruelty,
hate, jealousy, coldness, fear, greed, sexual desire, retribution, talking out of turn…you name it!
Destruction reigned!
Where I just came from they still have a million ways of torturing each other, thousands of
ways of maiming, or enslaving each other, and at least 47 ways of killing each other. Destruction
still reigns! Death was approaching madness levels. This is nothing. Nothing! It’s fruit in bite-
size pieces. There is nothing to fear. It’s a can if it’s six cans! It’s a can if you can’t see it as a
can…why won’t you listen? It’s a can!
There was a small parting in the crowd, from just general shifting around. A little girl stood
crying.
What’s wrong little girl? B
She stared at her feet.
Billy knelt down to her level. He put his left elbow by his left knee, his right hand on his right
knee, and one foot behind the other.
That man is scaring me.
Who sweetheart? Billy said.
She looked up into Billy’s eyes and said, Oh…you.
Uh…I’m sorry. B
Billy stood up.
Spin me.
What honey? B
Spin me around.
If I spin you around, will you stop crying? B
Yes.
No deal. I like you just the way you are, and he kissed her.
Spin me.
What a sweet little girl…Billy said, to no one in particular. Where’s your mommy?
I have four mommies.
Many in the crowd were duly (suitably) impressed at such an enterprising little girl.
Billy suddenly remembered where he was. He blinked once, and stared straight ahead.
Well…where’s the nearest one?
Billy, and some in the crowd laughed.
Billy smiled, and it was time to go. He raised his hand—We’ll meet again. Billy smiled
quietly inside. Thank you, goodbye, and he left.

There are no words to describe Heaven, not for any reason but this: there are no words. There-
in lies Heaven. Huge, unknowable, unchangeable, and really great.
 When Billy got back up the hill God said, Do you realize how fast fear-anger, blame,
boredom, hatred and envy could spread thru Heaven. It would be like a massive plague. That’s
why I minimize it.
…So you would have just taken the can away?
Billy, it’s easier than going thru all that. That was one of the shortest, most painful
explanations I’ve ever seen. G
What about the straw part? B
That was okay. But Billy, that’s you. G
God took Billy by the shoulder and they walked in the house. He said: You should have been
here the time the sacrificial goat got run over by the ox cart, and broke it’s leg.
What did you do? B
I told them an imperfect sacrifice was just fine, Thank you. Then I splinted its leg and let it
out back…I don’t really eat goat. G
So you pretty much do whatever you want to do? B
Pretty much, I’m God.
So…B
Well, Billy, stories that begin: When I was a kid… G
No, I mean about the straw. B
Well Billy, not everyone wants to suck grapes thru a straw. G
Billy laughed. Okay I’ll change it. B
No—don’t bother. A lot of the things people think need-changing—don’t. G
You could have put a long handled spoon in the can tho. G
I wish I’d thought of it. B
Billy, if I wanted perfection I would have gotten perfection. I need you. You are to me, the
one thing that’s not one thing, but more like a million things (you’re hard wired). There are
thousands of perfect people, more perfect than—and ever after without a doubt, more, and better
perfect-people than you, make no mistake. And they hold no sway with you, and you don’t
care—you never did. You don’t even like tall tan chesty blondes all that much, and that makes
you nearly invincible to all that prattle. G
Listen, they’ll figure it out. This is Heaven, if I get it, they’ll get it. G
If we had had iced tea for breakfast like I wanted, I probly would have gone with the spoon
idea. B
Yeah, probably. As long as you say Heaven is indescribable I don’t care how you describe it G
Skip over the other part. B ((in the ‘other part’ Billy had said: I din’t know we had long-
handled spoons, God said: Billy, we have practically everything. Billy said: practically? God
said…))
Okay. As far as I’m concerned, when you’re here, Heaven has everything. G
Billy looked out the window for a minute, then said, Thanks. B
God was right, Billy never cared much for perfect people, he saw them walking so confidently
to their perfect cars with their perfect teeth and their perfect shoes, driving to their perfect jobs
where they made uninteresting things look interesting, inedible things look edible, everything
look like great fun—especially to children, and claimed that new and better toxins can save you
from…this, that, and the other thing. They sold imaginary rope— ——if there’s a flood you can
climb up, a fire you can climb down, in a wind storm or raging sea you’ll have something to hold
on to; one size fits all; it can kill your foes, keep your friends safe and by your side, entertain your
children, protect your privacy, and if you get bored you can smoke it—it’s decorative, and believe
it or not, “There’s a prize entwined.” They sold the formula for Happiness—and therein lies the
fiction.
*
There is so little sense in the world, it equals Awareness exactly——and now it doesn’t.
 5-1-22 03:00 very little fiction in the fiction
Johnny Cash

They have always sold the formula for happiness, there’s nothing different about that. Pretty
clothes nice smile, large features where they’re supposed to be large, and small features etc. etc.
etc. There has never been a formula—more’s the pity. As a child I wished the same wish that
every child wishes, and still now, today I wish it were true—that all things that taste bad are bad.
Alas, it cannot be. We are not fruit flies and elk. As hard as we try, we are not born knowing,
like octopi or millipedes. It is our ghastly nature that we swim upstream in all probability,
because someone told us to, by telling us not to. Yet we change so fast it can be hard to arrive at
a conclusion about anything. Ha. Human nature is a marvelous thing. It is, in my opinion
device-like. Its wheels operate concentrically, its cogs mesh naturally, and it does nothing that
couldn’t be done twice as well with an old fashioned conspiracy. Nothing dictates reason. I
mention all this because it looms large in your future. Selling this formula. I don’t know why.
As I see it…as we begin to move toward sense, we begin by holding tight to the ‘wheel.’ And at
the first curve, just like a seven-year old we swerve wildly. They, that ubiquitous haze, will say,
“All roads have turns,” and they’ll land in the ditch. The other haze will say, “Down with
curves,” and they will move past it quite nicely. All that said, their anti-curve rhetoric will not
help them the next time—it’s a track.
You can’t believe all the time—even I can’t. Perspective changes so satisfactorily when you
take a step back, once or twice. You can’t avoid all the horrible things coming down the pike by
buying the first thing they start selling. People must sell, and people must be sold—but not
everyone, and not all the time. I can’t sell, for the same reason I can’t participate in a liturgy. I
can’t keep a straight face. All the outward signs of participatory acceptance are mere silent
ascent—purposely unexplorable. Safe.
Look, life’s a conversation, and everything’s wonderful and all that, but I was born in the best
place, at the best time, to the brightest people, in a time of peace, prosperity, happiness, and
relative freedom greater than has ever been seen before on the face of the Earth. Surrounded by
comfort, kindness, advantage, potential, opportunity, wonders, and more time and love than you
could shake a stick at. I fell in love with everything and everyone all the time, all day every day,
but only noticed during the down times when I only fell in love six of seven times a month—so
what the hell do I know about your suffering? Hey, I was planning to stay a kid forever—and
look where it got me. Alone on a surfboard, bobbing up and down on a dark blue, very sunny
day, married to the man of my dreams, who has some idea about flipping everything upside down
so I can get a good ride, and I don’t have the nerve to tell him I’ve never surfed before. He thinks
that’s funny. This may be loaves and fishes time, but what the hell do I know about portion
control?! I’m on an enormous surfboard I can’t possibly control, in hundred meter swells! I was
born in the middle of this ocean, and I still can’t tell you what all this water means. He says all I
have to do is hold on. Please... I once broke my foot walking across a room. This is like trust.
Really really really big trust. If I had a pen I’d write that down… He says when you’re done
your done. What?? When you say it, you are.
I started singing bye bye Miss American pie, thinking this might be the day that I die. I just put
my toes in the water, first my right big toe, and then all the toes on my left foot. Now they’re all
back on the board dripping. There are really only two messages in The Work. Most of it’s a
map. He’s here, with me; your Grandchildren’s Grandchildren are going to be very scary; and,
and, and…That was just a little swell. See, now I’m getting all keyed-up…..And don’t buy the
formula—it’s a fake. Whoa! That was close. Billy tucked the map into his togs. What’s the
point of telling you where to go if I don’t tell you how to get there? This is the thing…I told you
about The Becoming, minute by minute, not just because I was living it, and not because you can
follow—you can’t. This is your time, that was mine. I may be the first one who suited up, but
I’m not the only one on this ocean. It happens this way to everyone. There you are—not lost, not
exactly. And all of a sudden you notice people around you, seem higher, then you notice you’re
higher. You haven’t changed and the water’s still blue (ish). Some people notice before others,
and they say, “Ooohh.” It’s a very big wave, but you think you’re sitting at home, bored. It gets
bigger, real big. You think that’s mildly interesting, and you almost feel lifted. Then you look
and see the beach, so small, so far away, and so far down there. This wave’s about to crash.
“This is a wave!” Maybe that’s your last thought, maybe it’s not. “Aaahh.” No one dies, death
died—nothing happens, you haven’t changed—If the wave cleaned you, how come your house is
still a mess? I recommend getting on board —a board…you know what I mean…I have a big
board! And yes, I always wanted to be able to say that—hop on now—because that was nothing.
This is everything—Hang on!
Θ
What was I talking about? Oh, the reason I call this fiction, is is because, as any eleven year
old knows, if you have a collection of quarters—maybe a thousand, but you also have four Krona,
three Buffalo-head nickels, and two Liberty silver dollars, you now have a coin collection. No
one of any age would give up his or her silver dollars because they ‘demean’ the quarters. The
reason for looking at your life as tho it were fiction, is that, besides the fact that it is, is, you can’t
see the fiction until you have an end…even a plausible one. If you look back you’ll see
predictive qualities. Call it prophesy, that’s what you see….from the turning around. You’re an
island unto yourself. Start there. Then you notice other islands nearby. You’re part of an
archipelago. Just that suddenly, you’ve suddenly become archipeligaminous. Welcome to my
world. Turn around.

5-1-22 later
Billy explained lost and trapped, to God, once too often. God began to see a side of his protégé
which delighted him, and began to move him in a way he’d never moved: Billy was accusing
someone he never met and didn’t know, of something he couldn’t describe.
God said, I’m sorry. Alright.
What was the theme. Up. G
Billy looked up.
Where have you been? B
Packing theme. G
Was it something I said? B
I’m not angry. G
God, I’m real. B
I’m not angry. G
Yes you are. B
Billy. This is what, injustice. G
Yes God. You can’t comprehend that. B
Jesus, Up! You are a pain. G
Okay. I got it. I created Delbert’s personhood didn’t I? B
No Up. I didn’t create your personhood…you’re not Delbert to me. G
I want you to be, this way. G
Billy closed his eyes as if something was going to happen.
God laughed. When I see you, I’ll smile. Billy, open your eyes. G
Billy smiled. He stood with his hands at his side his thumb and forefinger touching each other in
each hand; he lifted his hands involuntarily in a relaxed and natural manner; then opened his
hands as in an offer, as giving is, as a gift is, the way a gift without words or worldly composition
might be. It was a simple gesture, it was new, it was real, it was quick, it clicked, everyone
understood it. Instantly.
Open your eyes. G
Billy smiled.
I have told you four thousand times I love you, and will never leave you. G
I’m needy, Billy says.
Billy, we are one, in the sense that we will always be one. I am not divisible, I am Everything.
He snapped his fingers. G
Billy opened his eyes. I have eyes. B
Yes I know. Thank you for opening them. How in the world can you hear me. G
I saw this happening years ago…our meeting. B
Yes. I know, you were born weighing nothing. G
Yes, you’ve heard that one. B
Okay, I love you. Packing…go. G
My first theme was: What would a person take with them if they were planning a trip. They
knew only, that they couldn’t pack money, material possessions. But they didn’t know where
they were going, or what they would need. They’d take what they have relied upon in life—that
would be the only logical thing. If you take your pretence of perfection and free-wheeling
intimidation, you would tire of that game by day three. False-faced undermining skullduggery to
inform your ride—to get you there, would doubtless leave you with no past-time, no hobbies, and
little else. The things you have really relied on are mo`re you (God stuttered and it was incredibly
compelling). Youtare a being doing having here and now phenomenon e`ven more than you
know. For everyone it’s a form of ((((Fa`ith)))). G
How do you know? B
Okay, day 3000.
Yes. G
Oh, I see (even tho you’re talking over yourself). B
No, Billy, no you don’t see. To you, that seems like a short amount of time. It comes, not from
its antithesis; it comes from the symbolism that you can know things that, yet unknowable,
unfathomable and unchangeable, are. You became part symbolic, and part real, for a reason. It’s
the secret of the universe. G

Heart
God is generous in speech, stutters, is needy, has cleanliness issues, the most terrific sense of humor, a highly symbolic
quality to his presence, and like a shocking event——the repercussions can be felt for a very long time afterwords.

When I was a child, besides GO, I played another game, it was called Heart. I named it. Clarke
and I lived in bunk beds all our lives, until my father died. We would pull the bed half a meter
away from the wall, and push the mattresses we slept on, back against it. Then we would get up
on Clarke’s bed and have a contest. The one would try to move the other to the flap, from there
he was sure to fall. The thing was not to fall, to disallow movement thru the fall. This could be
done by wrapping yourself in blankets and thereby making yourself so thick that you couldn’t
pass. Or to simply pass unwrapped, quickly. Eventually, one would move thru the flap and fall.
The thing was: the victor on the top bunk would suddenly be all alone, and would inevitably jump
thru the magnificent space, thru invisibility, so as not to be alone, and to become more one. The
game was played only with close friends, but when one was victorious, it became too close. And
there you’d be, wrapped in blankets, pillows, anything you could find, but now you had passed to
the lower bunk, mine, and soon, if you weren’t careful, to the floor, everyone upon you. No
breath, no ability to breathe. The things you had enwrapped for protection were now confining.
The space, so limited. The more friends, the worse it became. I learned claustrophobia from
Heart. It could become too much, too quickly. And if others had never played the game, they
might not understand, that they had to move fast, once they decided to join. The game actually
moved anger, into invisibility. Clarke and Claire survived, as did I. Heart was wonderful,
horrible, and enlightening, all at the same time.

5-1-23 Marijuana 12:20

What a wretched lot of old shriveled creatures we shall be, by and by. Never mind. The uglier we get in the eyes of others, the
lovelier we shall be to each other. That has always been my firm faith about friendship—Marie Dressler, actress/comedian

God enjoyed The Work. He was egging me on. He knew how funny life is. He knows better
than I. His ideas existed long before you ever showed up—before the moon, before the stars, a
long long time ago. I believe, but do not know, he can’t speak directly about anything or to
anyone. If he came directly, you would have to be dead. It would all have to be done, that’s the
kind of fiction he is. He is the kind of fiction that cannot be changed. That wants nothing. That
is read, said, and done at the very beginning. Almost as tho it exists disquietly, in a friendly
mind. A mind speaking and ready to speak. He ties it all together like a drop of water, in a
waterfall—both visible, at the same time—a seen-from-every-angle thing, that does not change,
but seems to change everyday—as tho it grows somehow. Perhaps it grows toward an end—tidy,
no doubt.
You may say you don’t want to know the end. I say that all the time—I’d rather be surprised.
I was upset when they gave away the ending to Titanic. Odd, that he’d give me this j-o-b. I don’t
care that much about the things you think are so important. It’s funny, I was just thinking, The
Work is very much like when I was playing ‘Go’ on the swings in Point Spread. The day we first
met. He encourages me to keep going, go look closer go back look again let it loose fly stay open
to it keep going deeper more. I stopped, got off, held out my hand. Then went back to what I’d
been doing before.

*
I…understand every word…swirling past…vast, hidden blanket-nebuli of doubt. Fear in silent
measured rivulets. How can I, in all this time awake, from the inside into a Saint Petersburg of
riches, all damning. All very high on a hill, yellow, out of reach, and so far away.
I can’t make use of everything. I have never felt so small. As if, and I know it can’t be, but,
guilt, doubt, the awful necessities of living and breathing can cut me down like a scythe.
I am not guilty, I have tried.
I doubt the friend who comes and goes.
I worry about hurting someone somehow in some horrible way. As you and I—invoke the
counter intuitive law of unintended consequences.
I have faith you could read thru.
If life were not a whole lot better than a rollercoaster I would never have come back.
I don’t ask for the cup to be removed, I ask for strength. Doubtless another array.
Tell me something Lord. B
You are down. Trouble. So funny for you to be testing the waters. G
I stick out in Heaven like a sore thumb. B
And you know why. And you know from some internal clock that was wound some time ago,
by someone, somehow, it’s your Heaven.
But, it runs so far behind. It isn’t even modern time, is it? Is it? Tell me the truth. Billy takes
a long drag. B
So this is what you do when I’m moving mountains for you. G
I have done, and would do anything to enable you to walk into my life every day. B
I see. G
 I don’t say ‘anything’ lightly. B
Billy, Heaven is not an ancient place, it is far far from that. The people you have met, are
well, Billy, pure. You might as well know. They are the very beginning of light. Not light. The
very first mark of notation. They are to this reality a ‘line-up.’ They are the done deal. The
haves. Billy, The Said. The before and after. G
I was so glad I had that hoagie in the fridge. It’s not all the time I have so many of my favorite
things around me. Maybe if I jam my head in the freezer I can stop thinking these thoughts about
how much I hate the pure and wholesome, and just enjoy the nite. B
Billy. I didn’t say the holier than ever self-rghteous pure. But the real deal. G
Thank God and modern food preservation, for cheese, mayonnaise, and French bread.
Yes. Billy. G
Are you wining and dining me? B
Love is so separable for you—can’t help mixing it up and experimenting, can you. G
No, I asked are you wining and dining me? (another reason I’m in prison)
No, I want you to appreciate yourself. You are my Son, that’s enough. G
That’s a very nice… B
The way I appreciate you. G
You snuck it in under the wire…but it still counts. B
Why the sadness. G
I didn’t become an actor because of all the rejection…that’s kind of funny. B
Ha. G
I’m a lot stronger than I used to be. B
Ever were. I’ll stand here all day. But you would be the first to warm the car up for me when
it’s time to go. Don’t ever forget I know you, I know where you live. What’s so nice is that you
know where I live. G
I’ll be over after the news. B
Good night, be careful, don’t stay up too late, I love you…for being you. And don’t start any
fires in the fireplace. G
God, are we doing this right? B
That wasn’t your first question was it.
No…are we doing this on my time or your time? B
God smiled, We’re doing this on my dime.
Billy never asked again. He was saying all. All. One day the Son is All.
The question became, When are we going to get there? When are we going to leave?
Billy you’re so far from where you’ve been. G
Just ask me. G
Are you a crazy wish? B
I love you, goodnight. G
Billy, go to sleep. I want to say something over you. G
Billy fell instantly into a deep sleep.
It is that you are here. Walk in everything. They will see it, and not recognize it…then in
time they will begin to get it. You don’t have to be so afraid. I love you.

Floating and Gathering

Billy they are the first notation. G
They appear to float don’t they? I was reminded when I saw a pool of water with balloons and
inner tubes. They appeared to float on air. B
 Billy your mother was a savant, as if the clothing people wore was worn ‘yesterday.’ Clarke,
and Claire—brilliant. You didn’t get any of those gifts. You were born directly in the middle of
great gifts, none of which were yours, and you began. G
What? I began what? B
To gather, He said. Paused, turned and went to the window—Look! Even as I speak you are
naming, re-naming and reconciling one to another. Your beloved anti-Christ cannot have the last
word. Couldn’t then, can’t now. You took them. G
I? B
Yes, I. Necessity dictates. G
Why do you put those things together? B
When you go back and forth between Heaven and Earth, you’ve begun landing on your feet,
I’ve noticed that. G
God was still facing the window.
Yes, the more I practice, the better I get, I suppose. B
The more you what. G
Practice. B
What’s that. G
Practice? B
Oh, the repeating. G
God was still facing the window, featureless—essentially.
How could you not know what practicing is? B
What is it. G
Billy looked at God, looking out the window, felt as tho he might be floating. Billy laid his
hand on the onyx table. It looked sturdy. That is, it was black, smooth, cool to the touch, and full
of morning things. It felt sturdy. Billy, even Billy couldn’t explain practicing to God—and
wasn’t about to try.

Annoble
“I hate doctors”—Katherine Hepburn—Eugene O’Neill—Long Day’s Journey into Night—

As fearful as slow motion. A harmonica whaled. He’s down an can’t get up.
Up, repeats the sax. The weight of the world is closing in, coming down, falling before facts. It
happened. Suddenly unfunny. I was there. It was hard to measure, but very big.

God’s control is in any sequence you may so require. Self control is not fiction. You must allow
that you are true to your themes, the appreciation for the very moment, and your dream teachers,
who help you think. You must be true, current and coherent, it works either way. I spent so
much time fighting other people’s fiction, you’d think I would just leave it alone. But how could
I? You’d think I’d know when to say, Stop. Hey look at what you got so far, great story, great.
He turned the world around. With an odd host of tools, devices, oh, what are they called? Plot
devices, Particulate matter, People: Ideas, Facts, Fiction.

Hidden

I lost something once. I looked everywhere. I lost one thing. While I was looking, I found
hundreds of things. What I was looking for, I’ll never recall, Heaven knows what that was.
Some things are hard to find. Some impossible.
I transcend limitations by looking.
 Some may say I discovered everything. That’s not true. Entropy. I didn’t find what I wasn’t
looking for. That made it very easy for me to walk from blade to blade. I achieved perspective at
the same time I was captured, captivated by something so unexpected. Oh.
It is true there was an occurrence, but it took no time. I deliberate because I like to.
Again, the problem with cannibalism, is, as I see it, the complete breakdown of society,
occurs, all at once, not like from a disgruntled fault, as tho you have just gone too far, but from
the absolute middle, outward like spikes. When society breaks down there won’t be any one or
any thing to support its return. More people, will be a double-edged sword. All you need is love.
Stay steady. You are from the stars. As time seems to go, about 125 years. Not 125 years of
hell—decision-making. You know… climbing in the boat. If you think that people throw
caution to the wind as they climb aboard, you know nothing about rescuing. This is a time for
caution. But not for me.
Women will be forced into the baby business, and that will be that—next stop Eerie. You’re
going in completely the wrong direction. Y
Allow them. They will become large in your mind—like Julius Caesar. Go center to the path.
They will die.

5-1-26-15:44 year month day hour minute

To die
To having been.
To raise a bar and raise a stake and raise Awareness is now I believe, the highest priority.
To live
To squander an opportunity, a chance, a gift, a sequence that has been the mode that one has lived
for, is untrue to the self that has always known he or she was secondary.
I am I, because I lived, once.
I am I, because I loved so luckily.
I am I, because there was no one who could do what I did.
I am I, because I lived once not so well, but with a distinction beyond pretense.
I am I, because I say I am. I love not so wisely but so well.
If I could recant, you know I would
If I could proceed forever forward as if into my life I would still be here.

If I could I would move you upon you yourself and measure every instance in your favor.
If I could I would stop the forces that move in you, for they move all of you.
If I could I would stop, I swear I would, but I can’t. It is already done.
There is but the humanity of bareness to go thru.

You say it can’t be done, I know.

You say it’s not a reality, but you’re blind.
You say that there is an effect in time, and there isn’t.
You say I am that I am forever lost, and you aren’t.
You say I have no food, and I say you are food, because you nurture yourself, as always.
Forever.

5-1-28

God says we know what we are, and what we may be. We’re going out tomorrow night,
dancing.
 You will die if all the preparing I have done is for not. You will live if I try to forget you. But
how could I?

5-1-31 Dreams I never had

Well, I had a dream last nite, and you were in it. B
Fascinating, so you decided that would be a good time to answer the phone. G
Yes, the thing about this dream was it was so real. B
And then you became disappointed at watching their disappointment, so you went shopping for a
smile. G
Then the U.N. called and offered me a job. A million dollars a week, to answer phones three
days a month. B
You could get paid $8,000,000 for calling in sick, if you planned it right. G
If I got the flu I could clean up. Sinecure. Ah…ah…exalted. I speak truth, I also sneeze to the
truth sometimes. B
Yes. Good morning, UN JESUS here. God said, doing a fairly good imitation of His Son.
You are ruining every punch line. I don’t talk over you. B
I know all 200 dreams you had last nite. They are little more than a series of very short, very
one-sided negotiation sessions, and you always walk away with all the marbles. G
How is it when I start to tell my dreams we’re short on time. But when you want me…tell your
dream…
Okay, okay. One time you can have the last word, go. G
I am cautiously optimistic. If you can dream in your sleep, you can work while you’re awake.
Ready, get set…start. Billy tapped his fingers in concesssion. Now go. B
What’s fascinating to me is not your dreams, it’s that you do it constantly. G
You’re like a gigantic mood stabilizer. B
Juh! G

16 reasons sixteen reasons I don’t feel lighter

I too was lost, and now I’m found. I too have wished upon a star. I too found happiness on
Christmas mornings, Saturday afternoons and Friday nights. I too want only what I don’t have. I
too wonder what the point is. He loves me, and I do believe Him, but he won’t even let me tell
my dreams, it’s all the time, Good morning, I love you, and then I say, Thank-you good morning
I love you. If I forget to say it, he’ll say it to me before 11:12. I can’t spend eternity like this.
Tomorrow I’m going to tell my dreams first, and then do the good mornings. Sure, I lost a
breaking despair the size of Pittsburgh, but I was just getting used to it. Oh, here he comes.
God told Billy the secret of the universe the way a father might tell his son, about the important
things in life: True love is a rescue.

You have been rescued millions upon millions of times.

Being resembles dreaming

There was an unusual incident today as I was walking Over. I ‘saw’ the black butterfly again. I
wondered did it have iridescent markings on the other side. I didn’t want to walk under it; I
didn’t know what it meant, if it was good or bad, if it was lucky or unlucky. My superstitions
sometimes get the better of me. So I walked under it and I stayed curious, wanting to fish it down
toward study. Maybe it was multicolored; maybe it would make a great keepsake. When I came
to re-examine this, I found that it was very much alive, and struggling to free itself. I threw the
stick twice, then felt stupid. It is not my job to rescue every trapped insect, or to determine the
nature, symbolic or otherwise, of every thing that rolls or flies or hovers around me. Every flash
of light. Every dogged presence. Every single imprint. A moment or two after coming to that
obvious conclusion, I picked a piece of ornamental grass, green with white stripes. It, like most
grasses had a grain, and I could see the insect that might land on it could only go one way—away.
One way: struggle, wonder; learn, discover; explore, live. Many things are built to show the way.
One way. From the root, the heart of the plant out. Odd. I don’t pretend to know what it means.
(Sneeze).
Symbols are everywhere, it’s a little like talking to everything or talking to someone who
cannot stop. I only worked a little today. I think taking care is harder than I expected. I
have to let the thing with my friends work itself out. It’s not in my hands. I may have forced it,
but I didn’t create it. Being this close to God is a full time job, I’m not kidding.
It’s like the way Huck Finn grabbed the mercury loaves as they came for him down the
Mississippi. He ate them with delight, imagined their origin, and realized he was out of bounds.
Exactly backward. I thought when I picked it up the other day, that I had read the Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, I hadn’t. It’s not that I don’t know myself what I’ve done, and what I’ve only
told people I’ve done. It is hard to explane; I am a constant surprise to myself. The glaring flaw
in Mr. Clemens’ work is simple to cerreck, instead of ‘nigger,’ change the word to ‘man.’ At the
time, black men, women and children were treated like they were all men. As if all cats were
female, and all dogs male. Contextual confusion would be eliminated in so far as when a black
was with a man, he was a man. And when a white was lookin’ fer a man, he found one. I’m not
aligning myself with the armies of revisionist jackals found in such shadowy numbers today; but,
Look: ther’s no sense in destroying all your art, just cause it makes you sick to look at it. Re-
color it—when you know the artist would. That’s what he was after in the first place: subtle
shades Complementary Colors, and lots of historical innuendos erased by childlike thinking.

Justice out of order

Let’s just say a rich Hollywood producer with some creative vision, decides to glorify a
horrific murder, and decides to make a movie, you know, a killing in the market.
Personally, I’m not interested in glorifying murder and mayhem. My passion is in life, real
life, love, reining-in destructive forces, identifying the foolish authority of louts, weeding out
corruption, that kind of thing. Watching a disturbing two-hour murder is not of any interest to
me. Besides, people will just say—‘Well it’s not me being killed.’
But the question, the one you provoked is: isn’t it a story about how everyone is murdered for
the love that we all have, and then forgiven for murder?
Let’s just say he’s ignorant of who may be watching their television set, when those little
promos for his movie flash on the screen—he is free to misunderstand. How could he possibly
know I was watching? How could he know how it feels to be mythical and ridiculous at the same
time? I was Becoming, suddenly the question became: which one?
He’s free to provoke controversy—I like controversy. I like free speech and creativity in all
its facets, and settings. Anytime anywhere. But, turn about’s fair play.
Listen, without the pursuit of happiness, I could never be. Without the four freedoms, there
would never have been a Becoming. Without freedom of expression, everyone begins to look
alike, and I would be long dead. Make no mistake, without the separation of church and state:
freedom of, and freedom from religion, you have forced away any possibility of progress or
understanding. I know this because I lived it, and am living it.
Forcing people to agree, creates a waste product that, every so often, must be removed, gotten
rid of, expunged. Ironically enough, it cannot be forcibly removed. But that should be painfully
obvious.
The producer has stepped over a line he could not possibly see, and yet, he’s stepped over the
line. He has glorified murder, and glorified me at the same time. In the same way. And that’s a
problem.
Let’s say this man is very wealthy. He decides to have 5 or 8 children, after all, he can afford
them, he’s rich. He can raise them to be wise, educate them in tolerance, and teach them right
from wrong. Having a big family is his passion. Unfortunately he can’t feed or clothe his
children, the world has to. If everyone did as he has done, follow their dream—what success
means to them—the world would be dead in very short order.
You can’t quadruple the world’s population to satisfy your personal great glory, no matter how
well intentioned. You are a destructive force, a lethal weapon. If you move cagily thru life,
sowing destruction, you’ve set yourself up for criticism. I can’t stop you—it’s too late anyway.
Are you sure you know what you’re doing?
If you tell me food comes from grocery stores, electricity from outlets, and clothes come from
God. I’ll have to assume you’re a pastor of some kind who doesn’t want to admit, that the one
who buys the clothes picks the tune. Dum dum dum dum dumm.
I ask more than putting your money where your mouth is. Are you making a mess for the
world to clean up, or just me? Well, guess what? Guess who’s going to clean up?
Let’s just say his depiction of the murder may be totally inaccurate. For argument’s sake, let’s
say all the depictions were inaccurate. The man may have had, how can I put this…bodyguards,
protectors that come out of the woodwork, if you know what I mean, as I have always had.
Perhaps a thing that brings so much Awareness, can’t always make sense. While you search for
one, the other eludes you. Perhaps you got it all wrong.

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Different subject: Let’s say you are an actor, and you’re hired to play a happy consumer, your
name in the commercial is supposed to be ‘Happy husband.’ You find the motivation, get in the
moment, and act like the useless, poorly made product is great, even tho, by the nature of its
manufacturing, it’s deadly and debilitating to the men, women, and children who live near the
factory. That is not acting, that is cheap, deceitful, misrepresentation. That was not a
performance, and you get no applause.
Let’s say you’re a crime investigator. All your jobs just show-up on your desk. None of your
jobs come to you randomly. You are accused of picking on certain groups over others, certain
businesses over other businesses. You may be accused of acting, not on behalf of justice but for
some other reason. We all have our little pet projects.
May I suggest when you’re bored, get yourself a random number generator, and put
everyone’s name in it. Once a year or so, investigate someone at random. It will make you look
impartial. It will teach you law, and the difference between personal civil rights, human rights,
and criminal rights—except everyone is a criminal.
It will show you that crime is what you believe about a person’s likely allegiances.
If you just sit in your office, and wait for someone to complain, you will never get ahead of the
game.
Probable cause could be: that almost everything’s a crime. Almost everything is a crime so
that targets can be established and changed at whim.
 Change of subject: I have an old marijuana cigarette (15 years old) that fell apart because I
din’t wrap it very tight and it gave me headaches. Anyway, now it’s in pieces. I’m sure if you
look, you can find a few scraps of it under the kitchen sink where I keep all the toxic chemicals
manufactured in New Jersey under no supervision whatsoever. If I ever decided to sell this
house, you could get me on conspiracy (with the real-estate agent) to traffic in drugs. That’s one
year per fragment right, or one week per milligram? Or does it depend, or does the offense
become whatever you can make out of it? The same rules must apply to everyone, or you’ll
never get ahead of the game.
Let’s say you work in the complaint department of a big store. Everyone complains about a
certain product, because it’s unsafe and badly made. You tell the bosses. They make more
money selling the poorly manufactured product—about 15 cents more. You discover that you
handle unfounded complaints. Your job is to placate the customer, that’s all. If no one complains
anymore, you’re out of a job.
More law gives more people more to complain about.
Grounds for complaint, and willingness to apply justice must equate, or you will never get
ahead of the game.
Everything is grounds for complaint, so that justice can be muted by the powerful. It is not
complicated, it is purposely confounding.

I did not say justice—human justice is, or should be dispensed randomly. I am saying it is
dispensed very specifically, and you are not aware that there’s a random quality to it.
I dispense justice. Let’s just say it’s my new job. The biggest criminals, the biggest offenders,
the most dangerous exterminators and enslavers, don’t come to me in order of most egregious
wrongdoer first, and then the next slightly less horrendous one, down to the least destructive to
society. They seem to show up on my desk randomly, with all the truly horrific criminals
exempt, and well insulated. I can’t even get their names. It’s as if they change their names, and
go by a dozen aliases. When you touch them they grow a hundred legs.
“Who, was around when this happened?” I might ask someone, and they say, “All’s I know’s
his name is Lefty.” I ask them their own name, and they can’t remember. So I go after
pickpockets with arthritic fingers and deep psychological wounds, because they’re easy to catch,
and even easier to convict. I’m getting ready to nab a few big fish real soon though.
They’re going to think I’m being horribly unfair. Their lawyers are really going to get upset at
my tactics. I’ll just walk up to them, and ask them their name. They’ll hide like roaches, and
change their name so fast it’ll make you giggle.
I think anybody should be able to go up to a public factory, a plant that publicly disperses it’s
by-products, into the public air, and public water, and ask who they are, who do they think they
are, what exactly are they doing, and exactly what do they think they’re doing. I’d go after their
assets, not their name. Their name’s no asset, believe me.
If it turns out, there’s no one in charge, that would be very odd. Without anyone in charge, it
would have to be considered completely out of control, like a rogue elephant.
Did you ever see the movie where Dumbo’s mother went mad, and was locked-up for the rest
of the movie? It was a shame, a horrible mistake, and Dumbo was very sad. They couldn’t make
her understand, and she was only protecting her baby.

My favorite subject: Take the Philadelphia Mob, for example. Everyone knows who they are,
except the newspapers and the justice system. The Justice System is trying with all their might,
night and day, to figure out the money trail, because they think that might be the key to stopping
all them murderous rampages and throats bein` cut. But they just can’t figure out where they hide
duh loot.
They can’t tell what businesses they own, or who helps them, or who does their banking for
them, or anything, it’s a huge mystery. You talk about complicated!
 Like Swiss bank accounts. No one even knows the names of the banks or what other holdings
they have, or who supports them, its extremely complicated. It’s unfair to even ask. They’re so
old, and been in business so long they probably don’t know what they own, or who’s who. A
bunch of nice old men. It’s unfair to put them on the spot. Right?
I mean ‘fi want to steal from my neighbor, and hide what I stole, that’s my business. Right?
‘Fi want to run a racket, and wreak devastation, what’s it to you?
I mean, ‘fi want to threaten him, that’s just me talkin.’ Don’t mean nuthin.’ Right?
If he should die, people die. Right?
If I commit a crime, that’s between him and me. Right?
There’s no way you should even ask to see what I’m hiding. It’s not fair.
Plus you don’t know who I am, where I live, what I have, what it’s for, what I do, where I go,
who lives, who dies, what I know, who I know, who helps me, what they want, what I do, where
I’m going, where I’ve been, where you’re going or when.

Problem is, all the money in the world is useless. It can only really buy one thing, justice.
Except that’s not really Justice.
I would love to tell you more, but I’m in prison. I’m not perfect. I come from a long line of
failed artists. I have failed at everything. Even this.
I have a lot of names too, I even have a fictitious name: Immanuel Divine Savior. im.
I wanted to change my name to: ‘Liz Taylor’s son by Cary Grant,’ but the court said No.

Since it was Wednesday, and my first real day on the job I decided to go talk to the people in
charge. My car’s not working too well, so I hailed a police car, and asked the officer to drive me
to Washington. He was shocked at first, and asked me where I lived. I told him. It turns out he’d
been posted outside for the last three weeks. Small world.
Never seen anyone come or go, he said.
No. Well, it’s a symbolic prison…just me really.
I was wearing my disgruntled chimney-sweep outfit, with the orange rope that has the huge
hook. A symbol of release. It catches their interest, and just as quickly releases.
He wasn’t doing anything. It was his day off. We drove to Washington. He said he’d never
spoken to anyone like me before, and was I crazy. I told him I was, and tried to answer all his
questions, but there were a lot of them, and he seemed kind of shy about himself, so we traveled
mostly in silence, since I don’t do interviews.
He asked me why I don’t do interviews, and I said, they’re against my re…… capacity to
progress thru life. Just real conversations. Me in the back of the car trying to get all the soot off
my face. That was a close one—I don’t think he heard me.
We drove up to the Big Judiciary Building, where I asked him to wait. I knocked on the door
of the public relations office just inside the front door.
Hello, I would like to register a formal accusation of offense.
What’s that?
I would like to obtain some justice.
So would I honey.
They always call me honey. There was a hierarchical office-politics chart on the wall, and
honey was at the very bottom. I looked around. There was a built-in records cabinet that took up
half the room. It held a shifarobe of paper, destitute of expedience, shiftless.
I would like a Register of Complaint form, I said.
What?
Oh, you know, I want to name names.
Who are you?
I gave her an alias, and my real name, and let her pick one.
 She gave me a form to complain about Justice Department personnel, which was the closest
thing she had, and I wrote in Westinghouse.
What is this? And you didn’t date it.
I’m always amazed how quickly a bureaucrat can find fault with a form.
Oh, it’s the 25th of August isn’t it?
You tell me, she said.
I thought that was an odd response.
Okay, now Mr. Jones, under ID number, you scribbled: ‘for gross misconduct,’ and then I see
you wrote: ‘polluting the rivers and oceans, the air, and decimating lands in 13 countries, 24 tidal
basins, then a long line, and at least two arrows pointing to…and she turned the paper
sideways…reeking havoc among the populace and fomenting economic slavery in six foreighn
countries, profiteering, racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder’….you spelled foreign
wrong. There’s no ‘H.’
O, I said.
Well, what do I do with this? She asked.
Aren’t you going to file it, or send it into the system with all the others.
What others?
All the other complaints against huge destructive forces, that corrupt the innocent, and stand
for pure evil, and senseless mocking death. Oh, you know, the thing that guy stood in front
of…that big rolling machine thing. You know, on the street that one time.
The Chinese tank?
Yes, the tank. Let’s don’t go get world politics involved in this. Call it Grim Death.
She paused to stare at me, and to make a clicking sound with her tongue.
I should save this. There are no others, yours is the first, she said.
The first what?
The first complaint about large military industrial commercial giants destroying the Earth’s
inhabitable surface and wildlife. Flora and fauna.
No! I couldn’t be the first. Are you sure? What about the Berrigan Brothers?
She stared blankly, and handed the paper back so I could write in that last part about flora and
fauna. And ‘selling nuclear bombs to crazy people.’
This is too much for the one form—just put one thing down, she implored, and tried to hand it
back to me.
And I don’t think you mean Westinghouse, she said definitively.
Well, what’s ther name? I said, betraying my just-north-of-Philadelphia roots.
I don’t know. A company that size has hundreds of subsidiaries all over the world.
Well, I said, Just put down whoever is the biggest polluter, and I gave her my serious look.
I have no idea who the world’s largest polluter is. She said, and put the form back in my face.
Well, I said, Then I’ll leave it blank, and we can fill it in later. I scribbled in General Electric
& Exxon Mobile, eventho she told me not to scribble.
Okay. She said, and sighed very deeply at my wild guess. Thank you so much for coming,
and sharing your ideas with us…now you have a nice day.
Is that it?
Yes, and I mean it…I want you to take the rest of the day off.
I would, except today’s my first day on the job.
Well, wow, that’s very interesting, and you decided to start here. What do you do?
I work on pet projects. Like Justice, Respect for all life, and random acts of...
Pet products, that is fascinating. My cat, Woebegone, goes thru two or three cat nip…
Pet projects. You know, things that you move other things out of the way for. Special stuff.
You know, ‘I can’t get it outa my head’ kinda things. I decided against singing the song for her.
Actually, I wanted to see just what goes. Where’s the man in charge?
Who would that be? She asked.
 Well, who’s in charge?
Sir, do you have any idea how labyrinthine the system is? I have 45 bosses in my sector alone.
And none of them do anything.
I’m sure it’s very very complicated.
Well, you’re not even close.
Well, thanks Miss……Valenti. I would like you to direct me to the person in charge.
There is no one person in charge of the entire Justice System of the United States, there’s no
one that stupid.
Oh. I said, blushing. I was about to take over that, and a whole lot more.
It would be impossible!
My red ears perked up. Are you saying the system is so complicated you’ve decided to put no
one in charge? Maybe there’s a small nameless group listed somewhere around here?
Look, I appreciate your interest, but I have work to do, Mr. Jones.
So do I. I got up to leave.
Well it’s very simple…she started to say.
When it became apparent I didn’t know where the door to her office was, or how to get out,
she said: Come here. Look out there. She pulls up the shade, and points to the Capitol, way off
in the distance. Look, they sleep with them, and she points to a large office building near
downtown. And they sleep with them, pointing to the Pentagon and the Executive Offices of the
White House. And they sleep with them, and they’re in bed with them, them, and all of them.
She pointed chaotically at the schematic of Washington that must have been in her head. They
just do…each other…favors all day.
Well, I said, How do you prevent large corporations or huge countries from running rough-
shod over the world, and all the people, and everyone’s future?
Oh, I don’t know.
And no one’s in charge? I said, after thinking a minute.
No, not really. No one you can talk to, if that’s what you mean.
Yes, someone to talk to about the future. I sat down by the water cooler, and it burped. I
thought: This is like what happened to Dumbo’s mother, that got her so upset.
No… She glanced at my form. Why did you sign it SOS?
Oh, sometimes I write things that I don’t even realize I’ve written. That probably stands for
‘Snow-balls-chance-in-hell Of Survival.’ It’s like an inside joke. You know like, ‘Don’t worry,
what’s done is done.’
Whatever! She decided to herself. I don’t think it’s a crime to pollute, or sell nuclear
weapons anyway, Mr. Jones.
How can it not be?
I really don’t know.
Well, can I sue the chemical industry for developing toxins so deadly that several whole
species die every week? That suit’d be worth eleven or twelve million…“easy!”
I never heard of that, she said.
Let me ask: who’s in charge of protecting the environment?
Oh, that I do know, she said. Sleepy Time Gal.
Who’s Sleepy Time Gal?
Well, just between you and a rock, she sleeps with anyone. When she’s not asleep.
M’s. Valenti, can we get back to business for a minute please.
Anyone would think you were my boss, she said. I have a lunch-break coming up, and Shirley
will help you…if there’s anything further.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was in charge now. Can we just arrest murderous criminal-
types like the heads of state of these countries? I wrote down the names of as many countries as I
could think of, that God had mentioned as responsible for the proliferation of destruction, hatred,
fear, and the continued parasitic degradation of its lands and inhabitants.
 Thanks. She said. This is going to be a big help…It’s like a big conspiracy isn’t it?
It sure looks like one, but I wouldn’t want to be accused of being a conspiracy nut.
Did you ever see that movie about the conspiracy guy? She asked. I love him.
Yes, I did see the movie. Conspiracy guy is a nut, and then he gets the girl, and when he does,
we find he’s not a nut after all. And there was a car chase, and he was redeemed by the love of a
pretty woman. I liked it. It tried to be a little different…sort of.
She looked at me, expecting a fuller review.
Well…so now that you’ve been on the job one day, what do you think of it?
It’s like pushing an elephant and an oil tanker up a hill.
Well, I think that’s close. Would you like some coffee?
No, no thanks. It makes me jittery if I drink it after 11 am.
Interesting, really. Me too.
I have an idea, perhaps we should randomly target the innocent, I said.
Well, that’s interesting. Do you have a big family?
Instead of punishing people who cause the problem, we just randomly target innocent people.
That’s not what the Justice Department is for. Or would it be anything the Justice Department
would be interested in I’m sure. Good day.
What is it for? I said, interrupting.
The DOJ? Punishing the guilty and protecting the public.
The JD is about justice tho, right?
Surely, she said, and walked out the room.
I felt as tho I were drowning—tied in wet sheets.
I think to turn the system around we should pick one man, and turn his world upside down.
That sounds grossly unfair, she said, and came back in the room.
Well that’s what I mean, it’s symbolic of the problem.
Just then, officer Birnbaum came in, and Miss Valenti was very happy to see him.
I turned to them as they huddled near the coffee maker, and said in my ‘in charge’
voice…Ironic, a police officer helps turn the wheels of justice around by assisting my prison
break, doesn’t ask any questions, or record any responses that anyone would be the least bit
interested in. And the only form I had to fill out was one that no lawyer would even bother
reading.
Interesting, she said.
M’s Valenti, who benefits from the…system?
Everyone, she said.
Okay, good answer. Who gets the money?
What money? She said.
Bad answer, I said. The most money.
She looked at officer Birnbaum. He tapped his foot against the water filtering machine, Da
Dah Dahh Duhmmm: da da de da, da duh…It reminded me of American in Paris—until it
burped.
“The lawyers!” They exclaimed in unison, and then we all laughed at my obviousness.
Your idea of picking a man or woman at random and nailing them, sounds better already.
Maybe you could get a lawyer once in a while.
Oh, lawyers would be exempt, I told her.
What?! That’s not fair, she scowled, and insisted that officer Birnbaum scowl too.
No, this is symbolic of the prob l e m . S y m b o l i c. Work with me here. Money is more
important to how justice works than the Rules of Evidence, Habeas Corpus, or the Bill of Rights
all put together, and yet it’s completely without governance. Let the lawyers decide the
percentages. The money.
Birnbaum laughed, and practically fell on Valenti. That’s absurd! Pick their own salary, are
you nuts?! An expression passed between them.
 Let them pick it. Now, before economic pressures destroy your future—all of it.
I didn’t know how to say goodbye to the secretary, slash receptionist, slash triage nurse, or for
that matter, to my driver, who’d take me back to a prison he’d never know.

Thanks. You have a great day Lily. She didn’t realize, that she’d never told me her name. I
have to go with the policeman now, but I just want you to know how much I appreciate your time
and your trouble…interrupting lunch and all…..She smiled, and I gave her a hug—It’s not my
signature—it’s that thing, more like an ‘X’ that I make—like so many X’s. You’re okay, I
whispered. Goodbye. “Come on Birnbaum, let’s book.”
We walked out of there like two janitors who purposely forgot their mops, and now had the
morning off. I was very proud to be in their company; as un-knowing as they were, it meant
more to me, to be treated as a ‘wanted man,’ ‘a regular nut,’ than either of them would ever
know. I took over justice, just like that. Not from the top. That’s of no consequence. I took
from the bottom tier the withal that allows them to press forward with me. As far as I was
concerned, that was the only way to go. The top men are never going to be caught…not here.
You live in an upside-down world. But yes, in time, make no mistake—they’re gonna miss the
end of the movie. The day I know their names is that day. It is the one thing they must give
before anything can happen. Ironic. The only thing they have, is not only the least valuable—but
also the most damning.
………………………………………………………………………………………………
Slow fade back to original subject: Yes, very interesting system you have here, we need a new
name. It seems the more innocent a man is; and the harder he tries to do the right thing; and the
more he tries to tell the truth; and the further he sticks his neck out to reveal ultimate truth; the
worse things become; and the more offensive he is to the very element of society that he is trying
to protect, honor and encourage—because he just doesn’t understand. Perhaps justice is illusory.
I don’t know anymore.
Justice and mercy is not a disfigured man without a face. I have a face. You have been
dancing and dancing and dancing around me for some time now. Be not afraid. Justice and
mercy will follow you all the days of your life as promised, but be careful you don’t force me to
hold you to a higher standard. I know what you want. I know what you mean. I don’t need to
see all your baby pictures. I’ve been watching you. I don’t miss much. Stop by. Sit. Relax.
We’ll have a nosh. I have one question, which is not a question, Havoc. Voices organized in
chaos.
When all the symbols are ‘gone’ they’re but buttered up—hurricaned, fallen on their faces.
So still buttered, you need only flip ‘em over, or wait for the hurricane’s eye.
Eventually, the murky inequity of Justice-bound will begin to be seen in this vast dark ocean
of profound personal loss as if a demon’d got lost. Then all eyes will turn toward those great
mechanical fires that run things. The slower you move, the deeper your dive.

Your town
Love is older than your town. Love is older than Dinosaurs; it’s about as old as clams.
Your town was built for you by others; it can be taken away; you inherited them.
When people say, This is my town, they mean they are from there, it is not their town. The
roads were not all built for them. The trees are not there for them to climb on. The town is there
to be preserved, protected, and allowed to grow and develop into a pleasant supportive place to
live. It is society. If the society breaks down their town is gone; it becomes a place to say you
escaped from. Historically, civilization has always been a refuge; it doesn’t, as many have
observed, have a thin veneer; it’s mostly made of air.
 When No stops meaning No, society breaks down, and it will fall on you. And you’ll be lucky
to escape ‘your town.’ Rules and laws don’t make a society—they define it.
If the law is: Don’t kill someone unless they try to kill you first—well, that explains it.

Love comes from saying yes to life, to society, and to the your parent(s).

When you grow up, you realize all the town is not yours. All the streets are not for you. You
have to know the street signs; that No means no; you must learn to take No for an answer. As an
adult you must look for No, sometimes. When a man has a desire for young girls, for example—a
perfectly normal male response to beauty, availability and sweet attachment. He must look to
himself, inside of himself, and he must look for No. Outside also, in attitude, facial expression,
emotional vocabulary, and ability to say no.
A child raised by caring parent(s) is taught not to say No to them. A thoughtful parent has to
teach all the different kinds of No. They all mean No. What makes one No, different from
another is not how it’s said, or how it’s heard, but where it comes from, a hurting place or a safe
and secure place. A child needs the security to know that No always means no.
You must know that No comes in other forms, and if you don’t know this, society will fall on
you.
The shape of a child is not accommodating—it says No. A child’s sweetness is theirs and they
are whole, separate, meaningful individuals. They can say No, it is never their job to please you,
or pretend that they like you. Children have no jobs, not really. There vocation is to enjoy life,
and gather up as much as they can as fast as they can. To make a game out of everything, so they
can see it clearly.
If you don’t look for No, you will see what you want to see. It’s not counter-productive to
search for No, to look critically for it. Everything is not what it seems. You cannot, for example,
see the world thru another person’s eyes. It’s their world also. Same world different perspective.
Theirs.
All the world is not for you. Pain is for you, pain is to make you stronger, better, more able to
see, more ready to live your own life, and put things and people where they belong. In
perspective—Yours. Back off sometimes, you’ll be glad you did. If they were you, and they
might be, you have just saved them. You know, because I just told you, things are not what they
seem.
Many, have to let the crushing weight of life’s last chances and totally un-graspable
impermanence inform them. Just back up. Tell others to back off.
Many parts are off limits, there are just things that you can’t know, like what a child knows,
what a child may be thinking, and how they see and feel about things. You may have been a
child once, but you can’t remember.
Many people are too young to be parents; they are hurt children themselves, who tried to say
No, and ended up pretending they liked someone they didn’t really like very much, in a situation
where they wish now they had said No, or that someone had heard it, or even once ever just
looked for it. What they thought was the way things were supposed to be, was really arranged
that way to make a town, with them in it. No means no.
Is it possible you can’t remember because you thought everything was exactly the way it was
supposed to be, and that no one had to put it together.
Is it possible you can’t remember when you stopped thinking you control everything. That
you are not God.
Is it possible you thought everything was just there for you as if by magic, and that nothing
could hurt for more than a few seconds. That’s the impermanence of childhood—nothing lasts
forever except childhood—to a child.
 A child doesn’t know that nothing lasts. An old woman knows that nothing lasts. Now you
know that nothing lasts. You do. You last. What seems to be there to explore was put there.
What supports your growth and pain came too. Don’t screw with it.

I have a gold (plated) tuning-fork, a special present. Not a toy. If I tap it on a surface, it
makes a sound like a bee. King. If you respond favorably when I bring it to your ear, I know
you’re interested, if you swat at it, I know you’re not. I am not trying to demagnetize the world, I
am listening for No. Otherwise it’s Yes. A bee doesn’t get from every flower what he came to
get. That’s how queer I am. Plenty.

4-8-31 The Haiku of Symbols

The Haiku of Symbols…The Symbols Stay
The symbols of your life pass right before your eyes, and right by your ear. They are important
for how they make you feel. They are like your name…it is not your name—it can never be you.
The way you feel passes seamlessly, evaporates into the next way you feel. Just like that. It can
never stay. The most important thing in the world comes and goes. Reputation is everything—
until you realize it precedes you. You can’t bend anything to represent the you that you are…not
even light.

The Third and Final Man

The third and final man came into Billy’s house. This one had a very large gun. The door
burst open, he looked at Billy, then he began to slow down. He wore protective lenses, and a
mask. Billy looked at the gun, and he saw a thing, a round thing hanging from the gun, that
looked like a jar of honey screwed into its base. Billy knew nothing about guns. The man took
aim.
Billy told him the story of The Two People. They loved each other, but they couldn’t
understand each other because they spoke two different languages. It was funny but not until
Billy laughed, and it ended sadly. Billy had rehearsed this story, and as many times as he did, he
still teared up. The man just stared. Transcending meaning.
Billy smiled, and he said quietly, Of all the places…you came here with an impure heart. The
silence that was returned was known to Billy and Billy only. You’ll drop, he said, Like a leaf,
and you will fall slowly like you are held in that. And he may have pointed or perhaps he didn’t
have to, but he was referring to the jar of honey. And when you get to the bottom you won’t be
able to move, and you, and your kind will be forever crushed. The man stood still. Billy said,
Why would you kill the one who loves you?
The gun was held perfectly still, with the precision of a marksman. Billy stood opposite him
and said, “Allow me to move.” The man looked surprised, and nodded several times. Billy
moved to the corner of the darkened room before the dark blue walls, where he was clearly
visible. The symbolism as well—the fight of your life. There came a yell that began in the man’s
lungs, and resonated from his mouth. He fell to his knees slowly, in front of Billy, and he
screamed of inner-strength in turmoil. The cry continued to end the man’s life long after his
lungs were emptied. They couldn’t be filled.
Billy got up and left the room, he knew already what would happen—he had been told as he
told the man.
When they came for the body they asked Billy one question, and Billy answered it. The mask
came off in Billy’s house. He asked for it not to be removed, because he knew he didn’t know
this man. They collected all the evidence he dropped, did every test they could think of to find
out how or why he died. His face was the color of the thing wrapped and hanging from the
bottom of the gun. He died because he didn’t breath, and that was all they knew, but they didn’t
know why. Billy wondered how the third man could think, that of all the people in the world, he
would be the one unable to hear Billy speak, when Billy has yet to speak. No, he said. Those ear
plugs aren’t mine.
Death, so they say, comes in a form that knows you.

Haiku: There is no Way

Dignity and love cannot live in the same house together—Ovid

There is no way to describe this, it’s like someone insults you, and then rubs your back. It is un-
explainable. It is one of those things. God talks to me, I am not afraid to talk to him...He’s
shown me a couple things that I already knew...He shows it to me, and then leaves. I knew, I
knew it...And now it’s gone. Weep not for the…the…the memory.

Your purpose is to love, and you’re here Being. How, may I ask…How many times do I have to
say the same thing? You spend and spill, and for nothing…stop, think.
Be yourself, please, I love you. I am stronger, stronger than you are, by ten. Stand up, face. This
stop, stops you. You are like my friend’s son. And in that way I love you. In all your life,
kindness is without. Same as everybody—but I love you. And I would stay. But in a word, I’m
gone.

Haiku: An ass who also happens to know you

I love you and I’m queer—that’s not true.
I love you, but I’m queer—that’s insulting.
I love you even tho I’m queer—that’s an evolving statement, which changes, and requires
understanding.
I love you because I’m queer—that’s true. Everything is connected, doesn’t change, and can’t
evolve— What would it evolve into? Everything And More! The truth is, you’d have to be very
queer indeed, to love Mankind right now: destruction, deceit, the dissemination of hatred, et al.
As best I can, I’ll take your understanding, and broaden it —bring it alive, so you can see, we
are—we all are. Your life is not this and this and this and that—labeled, like Helen Keller’s side
yard. One thing causes another, not because it always and inevitably does—but because it has. If
you love only self—you’re done.
The past is the past. The present is nothing, and the future’s unknowable. It’s always been that
way. Everything’s connected, and gives cause. It creates it.
Have you ever felt this way without feeling the way you felt just before? Of course not.
Everything’s connected right before you notice it is, and right after you notice it was.
In the future they will see the tapes we’ve made of news shows, sickening documentaries,
movies, newspapers, magazines commercials, books, radio. And they’ll see all of this as if it
were an instrument of some kind to cause The Christ to appear. It doesn’t work that way. It
never works that way. Sarin bombs, attacks on infrastructure were not meant to bring strong and
steady people forward. They were meant to kill the weak and innocent. Out of great tragedy
many are made stronger—suffering is essential to acquiring strength. It also happens to be
unavoidable. History will bring connection as if it all makes sense. I was there, and I’m telling
you, sense had nothing to do with it! It’s like your new 3,000 dollar suit—of course it’s going to
fit! How? they’ll ask, could a fluid-man, alone in an empty world not-find the way out? In the
future, people might think I was just bold & brazen enough to scare sense into the slow and
superstitious. And I’m telling you, sense had nothing to do with it—an also ran! I was enjoying
my life; I saw no connection. We all saw outcome at a great distance. No one saw outcome as a
series of outcomes. I had set about to write my fiction, like so many others. Horrible things kept
happening. You don’t understand, and I’m glad you don’t. They won’t believe Mankind could
have been so bereft, so stupid, so absent understanding. I wasn’t brought to life, I was already
alive.
I was offered this job! I could shout that from the intersection of Airsupp & Attic where the
trolleys run, till I’m hoarse! And all that’d ever do is tie-up traffic; but it’s nevertheless true.

4-9-14 A Long Cold Lonely Winter

A three hundred and forty pound woman (155kg.) sat on the curb in front of my house waving a banner that detailed, practically, all
my vices, as if she were in a position to know. And Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. As if she were ingratiating herself to the man who stood right
behind her. I wonder why the addicted can’t see their addictions. Her’s was Judgementalism. You couldn’t say Religiosity—What
Religion is that? Yet, there she sat. proclaiming her virtue, and a blessed release from addiction, and also, nothing to no one—
people around just passed her by.

They come to my door with what can only be described as a proposal. God has a plan for my
life, so they say. I’ve heard. He wants me to clean the vestibule, stop leaving the mail on the
floor, pick up my underwear, and paint the porch when I have a few minutes.
These people believe that because they can read God’s word, it logically follows that they can
read his mind. I doubt it. You will never grasp His mind. I have trouble enough translating,
Good morning dear, into English. I didn’t marry him because I was afraid to say No, I married
him because I love him, and it was my idea in the first place, not his. Beginning a marriage, of
any sort, with a threat of retribution, idle or otherwise, can spell doom to love and trust.
Look. You cannot tie his hands or train him. He wants, as if wanting could ever apply, for
you to be free to make tragic personal mistakes on the one hand, and on the other hand, to live in
obeisance in the world that he made possible, physical and good. It will never be your world, tho
you must live as tho it is. Like the soul.

All of a sudden, there are experts everywhere. Tell me this, then, expert: The long awaited
and feared, third world war just started. How-come no one has yet noticed? The controversy
about when it started will go on and on. All fingers point, will point, have pointed, not to now.
They will point to the recent past. You have one chance to stop it. There’s a lot of finger
pointing, death, and nauseating political maneuvering ahead. I call it wedging & hedging, the
fourth reason the Information Age will be a bust:
Get people to agree with you by giving them one thing to agree with you about, and then
welcoming them home suddenly, as in creating a wedge issue, or wedging your foot in the door.
Hedging: taking two positions so you can limit your risk of being wrong—a quibbler……You
can do to the ‘terrorists,’ what the church does, has done, still does to me: pretend to ignore what
I do, and try, all the while, to destroy me by turning me into a clone—or simply encourage me to
take my own life. Why don’t you can begin treating people with respect, and allow them to make
their own tragic personal mistakes.
1) You must declare Hussein Abdo, the unwitting hero who ended the conflict in the Middle
East. Tell the truth about how he ended it, anything you discover in the process —tell that too. It
will fit. 2) Ignore the terrorists, find them, and deliver them to justice. 3) Treat each other with
respect, and at the same time, allow them to teach what they will, of the art of living well. 4)
Thinking for yourself is not a dangerous occupation. It is a joy, a wellspring of happiness.
What you teach you live, what you’ve taught you learn. Teach hate, be my guest. Do the right
thing, jump, otherwise it’s going to be a long cold lonely winter.
 I was handing out gold stars to children, and one of them said: I think this is dumb. I ignored
him, and he said, when he got up to the front of the line: I think you’re dumb.
Oh, don’t worry what children say, they’re only repeating what they hear others say.
Is that supposed to be some sort of help? Please go sit over there. And He did.

Ignore them, prepare to die. Bring them to justice and love, even as they try to bring you to
justice and destruction. They cannot comprehend. They are the mindless hate, and madness of
the human heart. They cannot be destroyed. They fear justice more than anything. They will
hide under rocks and suddenly become useful, even as you have hidden your heart. What they
are for is to open your mind to a kind of returning. Mine.

You have other more serious problems, however.

The Chinese have dammed up their river of fortune, even as they seek it.
Africa dying.
The Tigers
The Islands
The Forest
The Prions
The Viruses
The Heat
The Money
The Xenophobia (fear of the unexpected, foreign guest-friend visit)
The dead body in your living room
The fact that you can’t see past your own nose, the turmoil within—stuff like that.
History says: what starts in Africa ends up in India, then China, Europe, and then the Americas.
That was then. Now the winds move directly over Africa, across the Bonnie Ocean to knock on
the door of your sunny shore—you’re about to reap the whirlwind.
The track of Ivan is of note. I thought it symbolic. He struck you on the chin, then he kept
reeling, and striking out, backing up, changing moods. Then in his terrible Tirade, like a two-
year old, he went back to do it again. And he did. I thought it ironic that he missed me
completely. I didn’t even get wet. It’s raining wonder.

4-9-19 In the Outer Office Area

In the outer-office area, Billy began studying the concept that you could be lost and trapped,
suddenly the door opened, and Billy knocked against it—with his head. It opened slowly and
creaked, as if it hadn’t been opened in a very long time. He looked around, and knew where he
was, immediately; he must have been sitting there, this whole time, inches away from what he
sought.
There was a neon sign almost at eye level, tho indecipherable. He walked in, forgetting to close
the door, and walked around the sign. From the other side it read ‘God’s Waiting Room,’ and
there was an arrow. He must have come in the back way. Typical, he thought to himself, and
walked in the opposite direction just to get the lay of the land.

Ironic, practically the day after going thru all that hell with Natalie and David, not to mention the
inexplicable Fa, Billy should decide he was now about the work of discovering if it was possible
to be lost and trapped— because he liked the title, it intrigued him, it made him want to keep it,
explore it, stick with it and see what he could make of it. Divine it, as if it were water.
He alternately decided, you certainly could be, and that you couldn’t be—unless certain criteria
were met.

Then the very next day, he realized if a certain set of circumstances prevailed, and a situation
developed in a completely natural way it was not only possible, it was incredibly possible, even
inevitable. That was when he heard the sound.

Not a voice, other than his own, a sound. His fiction began to unravel in his fictional head.
Themes began to emerge that had nothing to do—and everything to do—with Everything.

He decided to learn the rules of fiction, but he had just stepped out of his own fiction, in order to
learn them. He was bored the very same day within a few hours, and went back to doing what he
was going to do anyway. He found everything very encouraging.

It went like this: if a man or woman were sitting in a room at dusk, and as it became increasingly
darker, he or she wouldn’t be able to see, and then eventually he might fall asleep. He would not
wake up lost—even though it was pitch black, and he couldn’t see where he was. He would
assume he was in the room he fell asleep in. It wouldn’t be until he started moving around, that
perhaps he would take a wrong turn, and instead of walking to the stairs he would walk into the
wall—he would then be lost, if only briefly.

If a man walked into the woods, and became lost, and then sat down and fell asleep. He would
awake, and assume he was still lost because that’s where he was before he fell asleep. He
wouldn’t really be lost until he began to walk around, and the unfamiliarity did not let up, abate.

So, Billy thought, based on his own experience, and these imagined experiences, you can’t be lost
until you try to find your way—back to somewhere familiar.

If this hypothetical person, awoke trapped, and couldn’t move, and he awoke in the place where
he fell asleep lost, then he definitely could be lost and trapped.

The work was going well, and it was right about then, on day two, that God stopped by. A door,
next to where Billy had been sitting for 40 years, because it seemed the most likely place to see
God, opened, and Billy walked in—neither lost nor trapped.

He met God. God asked if he wasn’t doing anything…and Billy stared at Him. God tried again,
and asked if Billy was busy at the moment, or otherwise occupied. Billy had decided at age
eleven or so, to spend his life seeking God, so he said, No, not really.

Knowing it was God, from the few words God had spoken, here and there, over the years, and
considering the fact that it was a theme of his to get a great offer right in the middle of doing
something else that he was also interested in, he decided to put the novel Lost and Trapped in
America—the story of the Beaver, on hold for the time being, and see what this guy had to say.

It wasn’t going to be about Beavers, the main character was called ‘the Beaver,’ like a nickname.
It was metaphorical. And loaded with potential.

While God was talking a blue streak, Billy got to thinking: Perhaps this character, who was
trapped, would have to be trapped by someone, in some thing, rather than by circumstances—it
might be more accessible to the reader. That some one, would have to know where the trap was,
after all, he set it. That’s when it got confusing.
So many people have never been lost, don’t routinely get lost, feel lost, or comprehend what
being lost is all about, that it would take a lot of explaining. Billy could explain dope to dopers
but so few wanted to listen. That was another problem. So Billy decided to explain quickly and
then move on—to another explanation, and just go from explanation to explanation. Billy liked a
good story, but for his money…well, you know.

God said, the whole project was fascinating, and couldn’t he use some help. Billy just stared at
God, and said—not really sure what the question was—“Sure…Thanks.”

Billy didn’t have to explain the story to God, since God was already in Billy’s head, and in all his
many vocabularies, but he did anyway. God became even more fascinated. He didn’t know
where he was, for a minute.

Billy began: if there’s a trap and someone or, let’s say, some thing set it (in case he changes his
mind about blaming impetuous circumstances or importuous fate), and ‘the Beaver’ gets caught,
the Beaver would know where he, the Beaver, is, because he would assume he was caught in a
trap in the same familiar area he was in before he got trapped. Now the question becomes, maybe
the trapper forgot where he put the trap and that’s how ‘the Beaver’ got lost and trapped.

God tried to talk thru Billy’s own conversation, and decided instead, to talk thru Billy’s
politeness, general agreeableness, and sense of humor. Billy found God to be amazingly
intuitive, thoughtful and—just—had the most impeccable comic timing of anyone he’d ever met.
Like when a trash bag splits just as the guy goes to lift it; now it’s his problem.

God explained the rules of fiction, as if it were an Ironic series of contrasting developments,
mitigated by opposing forces governed only by the symbols without—the personal symbols and
themes a person is free to recognize, evade or ignore. Everything is not in conflict, except that
everyone doesn’t feel the same way about everything, and visa versa.
You will not get out of the woods by telling the truth about the trees. They are every where. And
that’s all there is to say. When you learn to accept, that the truth is almost always a shock to the
system—you’ll see. They will begin to look familiar, you will find direction, a place for camp or
a way out. Words are part of a machine. Pieces of a dream -scape. Language is designed to find
God. The weakest bonds hold everything together.
Billy was happy
God had found someone so absurd—they didn’t realize they were writing their own story. And
zip it fit. He was The Only One, clearly. No one had ever come in the back way unannounced.
No one had ever opened the great vault, tho thousands of millions had tried. Billy walked by it,
and the door flew open. When he met God, God met him. It sounds too simple, too wonderful to
be true.
*
Billy realized being fictitious, living in fiction while working on fiction—enabled him to do
difficult things with ease. Life without ease, Billy mused, now that’s lost and trapped.

It was right about then, that God sat down, and started working on the ring, and found himself
falling hard for this one. God would bend over backward for this one. This one could have had
anything, and all he took were two chocolates. He ate them and threw the platinum wrappers
away. God moved two English pounds of platinum to ward the loss. To amend. Then stuck him
in a fictional prison Billy thought he could’ve done without.
I have great faith in you. In this ‘Age of Want.’ I believe you can overcome your addictions, by
adjusting your dosages, and tell the truth about it—with abandon.

One line of coke not six.

One child to share, not sixteen.
God will not kill you for killing yourself on your six-thousand-calorie diet.
You had faith in me (Please try to understand, one child raised by 16 would be great).
I have great faith in you—that you will be delivered. The anti-Christ is here, speaks tens of
languages, and can’t say ‘condom’ in any of them. He will soon be gone, you don’t have to kill
him, you don’t know what he’s for. The devil and the anti-Christ are not the same. The devil and
all his demons have been destroyed. The anti-Christ still alive—tho faltering, hasn’t fallen. He is
the sacrifice who doesn’t know he is a sacrifice. It must be this way. I am sorry to see him go.
He tried, he failed. I know how that feels.
Billy was unhappy to cause unwitting sacrifice. It has to be this way. To the anti-Christ:
You are the one that says people die. Then you say God killed them for their failings.
You think you discovered Him—so now you can speak for Him.
You believe the truth does not change and, of course, it changes—once said.
You did not invent Him.
In your petty arguments over nothing—if God is not Everything, then he is Everything Else—and
just leave it at that. I’m not climbing into your arguments either.
Many artists and many great works are gone. See.

Born in a house of brilliant minds, Billy had the least brilliant. He learned to manage them before
he learned to talk. Why is light hot? Why is some light hotter than others? How many ways can
it be divided? Why might you want to proceed with some big piece missing? He learned, that the
way to handle the onslaught of great minds is to stump them. It slows them down, and turns
some, in on themselves. Ask questions they can’t answer. Why are artificial sweeteners so
toxic? Why can people, dogs, and some cats, get used to almost anything, but other animals
can’t, and just die?
Billy was far more likely to ‘survive’ his incarceration than you are to ‘survive’ yours.

Prions and Martyrs

Bodies have practical uses, obviously. Dead bodies as well. Once you pass out of this
Egyptian phase you will see it more clearly.
My body, this body, for example—I can’t tolerate the notion of being stuffed and stuck in a
tight box under six feet of dirt. Forget it. I’m too claustrophobic. It makes me ill just to think
about it. I’ll take cremation, any day. Well, not any day—three days after I die—I like the
symbolism. Spreading out so far and wide—
Burning billions of bodies is impractical. God suggests returning them to the land.
Specifically, returning each to the land, those people, they themselves would prefer, in a manner
that would be useful to the flora and fauna that grow there. Ground-up.
Some people may wish to return to the sea, and that’s fine, provided you don’t just dump their
body over the side, only to have it wash up on a beach in the Bahamas three weeks later. Putting
your problems in someone else’s backyard is never an adequate solution. Problems aren’t
problems until a solution is within reach.
…
…... God’s on a tear this morning…I tried to get a cup of coffee into him, but the plastic glass
he likes, leaks, and I couldn’t find any tape. Now he’s upset. He says the fact that the sun is
going to burn up in a couple billion years is not a problem, when a solution is within reach, then it
will become a problem… …... Here we go… …... drink this…
…...
Secondly or thirdly, you have a problem regarding prions and martyrs. Tilling bodies that are
loaded with prion disease into the soil is not such a good idea, because you effectively put it into
the food chain… …...Talk slower.
Likewise, processing them and putting them in the ocean is fine since that’s where prions
came from. But in the ocean they never did what they do on land, so that has theoretical
implications. And there is always the question of saturation or critical mass.
Burning them is also a problem since prions can withstand temperatures of 1472 F.
God suggests either the desert where sand can, over time, splice them into un-re-formable
fragments. Or using the cement sarcophagi that you thought would make such nice launches for
your mummification projects, perhaps, could be good places to house these bodies… …...He refuses
to drink any coffee, and when I gave him a handful of dandelion pills he gave me a withering
look—
The other issue is martyrdom. After you bring human justice down upon them: Either sixty or
however-many concurrent life sentences, or summary execution with uneventful lethal morphine
overdoses, you have another problem. Once you pack the fertilizer-like remains in a bag, so they
can do some good somewhere. The question is where to put them. Returning them to the land
and people that they demeaned, seems fair. Since they usually do hideous things (not all
martyrs—<^ : ) in the name of someone else, obviously not wanting to use their own
name……Billy, stop doodling.
Or conversely, refusing to take sensible action in the name of someone else, which is the same
thing……...I tried to unplug the computer, but he has such a jumble of electrical cords down here
I’m afraid of electrocution—
The martyr should be divided. Half to the people they wronged by destroying their children or
trying to destroy them. And the other half to the people they wronged by trying to demean them.
Now, obviously, you can’t split a bag of fertilizer. And, of course, frequently there are so
many interested parties that making fifty or sixty bags of fertilizer from one body, is also a
practical consideration… …...God was scratching his head, so I held a straw to his mouth and he took
a sip. I swear he’s practically useless before his morning coffee… …... God, what if you made
seventy-five little bags with the remains, and saved some just in case the mother of a slain six-
year old wanted a bag to plant under an arbor, so she could grow grapes, and make Molotov
cocktails—
God suggests packing the ashes, after burning them at a very high temperature, because they
are as likely as not, to be full of prion disease themselves. Not to mention syphilis, polio,
hepatitis, herpes, HSVI, II, III, tapeworms, cholera, diphtheria, pertussis, small pox, fungus XI,
HIV, TB, malaria, Marburg, the new one (chimera), or any one of a thousand other opportunistic
organisms which thrive on human frailty—pack them in firecrackers; and then shoot them off,
towards the end of June, like you do now.
…
…...Truthfully, I’m glad the coffee leaked all over the stove. He’s right—to just put an end to
martyrs by proclaiming them dead, hunting them down and ignoring them, is probably not going
to work. Making daylight-firecrackers that do no harm, and no good…that just go streaking thru
the air, and end in a powdery puff of smoke, sounds like a much better idea. He’s usually right
about things like this. He’s so symbolic and so practical. I’m just glad I could help… …... More
coffee dear? See, a little tape, and a straw. It’s not complicated—
 4-9-24 I am here to Appreciate you
I refuse to walk for you, to speak for you, to strike for you, to kill for you, to die for you or fear
for you. You’ve come down on the side of ignorance, and against teaching; the side of decades-
long torture, and against the quick dispatch; the side of boiling hate, and against simple love; in
favor of private abuse so long as it gains-you public applause.
For criminality, and against freedom.
For covering up, covering over, blocking and breaking your word, and against truth, honesty,
justice, and honor.
For threatening, bribing, and mocking-assassination, and against human rights, choice, and
inclusion into adulthood.
For waste, and against life.
For superstition, and against science.
For violence, and against a nice, long, healthy explanation.
For money and promises, and against loss.
You have taken the side of mean taxes, over love of life, and shear enjoyment.
You can’t possibly ask me to join you now. You have come down on the wrong side of nearly
everything. You have come down on the wrong side of me. Greedy bastards.

You’re against healing, but you don’t think you’re sick.

You’re against freedom, because that’s the way you like it.
You’re against human rights, animal rights, species rights, the right to life if you can’t use it, and
sex—but you’re impotent! Your own personal eco-system’s a frozen-over, dead zone—So what
the hell do you care how hot it gets?
You’re against truth, it changes, and you don’t like that.
You’re against apologizing, well duh! That’s a big surprise.
You’re against showing respect to anyone not exactly like you, but you wear a mask.
You’re against peace, because you haven’t won yet—Ass!
You’re against criminals—they must’ve done something.
You’re against enjoying life, but you’re so miserable it’s numbing.
You’re against change, feeling, creating, thinking, expressing, or helping others. B…but.

Liberation is in the soul, me. Symbolically in me.

I am here to appreciate you. I have.
I am not here to spin you around or endlessly repeat what I’ve already said. It’s too late.
I am here to turn you upside-down, and say goodbye. Oh, and show you the way out.

Heartbreak
The men and women in the world so lost and disheartened, seek solace at the same tree trunk
that their mother’s mother’s mother sought hers, but the tree is long gone, and the trunk is but a
mound of dirt. Many live in pits of despair. Veritable fly traps.
They may have lived too long in poverty of spirit, to recognize what they’re doing.
They may not appreciate the good things in life, because they have always seen them as
belongings. Easily torn, poverty-ridden.
Men and women, who are really boys and girls, that subject their children to this
unconscionable cruelty—The misery, the hunger, the tears and terror of life, and nothing more.
They that know, should know, that torture of a child, even their own, can not be.
 To bring upon the world such hate for one’s own offspring, is only a fragment of what you
bring upon the child. The child who did not ask to be born. And must bear the scars of want, and
wanton violence, all of his or her life. Everyday.
There’s no such thing as thoughtless torture, there are but base and ravaged structures in which
people once lived. Poverty is morphing, jumping form, and growing hungrier.
The hope you stand before, provides no shade. The abomination that causes desolation is of
your womb, your own making. Silence your fears and pray you may walk away from more of the
same; more death; more horror; more upon more upon even more, forever.

WWIII
Long awaited. Enough said.
Fear not. Pay attention.

Make virtue of necessity.

The chance of survival is infinitesimal.
It is this small: Ý. More to the point, it is also this small:

A man with poison gas canisters moves in next door, across the hall. You didn’t move your
family out, because he would kill you before you could get one box packed. He wants to use
your children as a shield. Either way you die. You don’t have to be so quick to die. It will be.
Think of someone other than yourself, this may be you golden opportunity; you’re going to die
anyway. Everybody dies. You have a few choices:
1) Pretend to ignore the situation.
2) Get hyper-religious. Just ‘check-out.’
3) Set-off the poison canisters while they’re in his room, warn everyone ahead of time,
except him.
4) Leave at night with your kids, your clothes, and all the cash you can find, and take your
chances.
5) Help him stay hidden.

if he hits his target he will get more deadly poison.

if he hits his target but doesn’t get any news coverage, he will get more deadly poison.
if he misses his target he will get more deadly poison.
if he misses his target on purpose he will be killed.
if he looks around, he’s a gonner.

Plan Ahead
It must be clearly understood that not everyone can make their own security arrangements.
Write their own fiction, or make the supreme sacrifice—Just because now seems like a good
time. For one thing, there is no time.
The reason you don’t just call the police—You haven’t even considered it—is because you
know that they can’t protect you from retribution. In fact how could they? That’s not even their
job. Besides, resources are limited everywhere. If you heard me say it’s tough all over, I never
said it. If this were the Wild West, the Sheriff could appoint deputies, charge a posse, and we
could round ‘em up. Regrettably, it’s not the Wild West. It is much much worse.
The War Lord in your sector capitalizes handily on the enormous surplus of fear, and the
untapped market for hate. You are lucky to have him. At least that’s what you tell yourself. If
your choices become: 1) get more cops, or 2) give the ones you have, better weapons. And then
suddenly you find that you’re changing the name from ‘cops’ to Law Enforcement Entities, don’t
say I didn’t warn you. You are in for a very tedious time. They will heighten the conflict and
sharpen the contrast—you will be consumed. Good luck!—those are the rules of fiction!

Many have been secretly hoping—for some time now—that some prophet somewhere, would
somehow be right about something. But it was starting to look, more and more, like that would
never happen. Unless they were all right about Everything.

If Babylon must be sacrificed, so be it. The objections I have, also impel me. As I have said,
where I am from, destruction reigns. They are not, and never will be able to divest self-interest.
It is, and always has been beyond them. Ask the Jews. The nature of things changes, but people
change with unbolting. Many things will happen along the way to Heaven.
You have the despot you deserve. That’s not your problem. Your problem is that he must pick
fights with your neighbors to stay on top—and you let him. You are a fool. You’re a fool to
keep him, a fool to pay him off, and a fool to follow him.

Sometimes on my return I sort of bounce to a stop

Everyone has issues. They can be overcome. I do not believe everything. I believe in the
Everything that is everything. I believe that God speaks thru you to you. I believe God is in two
places at the same time. I believe he is in the construct you use to know where in the universe
you are—as an afterthought. He’s also beside you. As close as if he were under your left
collarbone. He is thin, flat, square, purple, and stamp-like. And when you die you’ll be ‘post
marked’ and you’ll go to the great lost-letter department in the sky, for ‘sorting.’ I believe in love
and justice, except they’re the same, and you’re blind—justice isn’t revenge—you’ll never get-
back what you’ve lost. Never. Never.
I believe if you try to speak directly for God, you have left out at least two steps. Two critical
steps. If you try to ‘stamp’ others with your imprimatur. They will be forgiven, much sooner
than you. I am going to try again: If you try to shove your particular ontological form down my
throat one more time. If you try to light me up once again. If you try to steal the soul in me, thru
your ignorance once more. It will be your last. The Work, as I have said, is a translation—
already. Technically, a translation of a translation. Everyone will not be able to understand it,
everyone will not buy it. The last thing my first Father said to me before he died was: ‘Yes, you
got it! That’s it.’

Many have waited to see the mountain. Many will hold others back for gain. This mountain
is different, it moves, and it can lift you up. You can’t stop this one, even if you really really
believe you can.
This is why I like the idea of Schadenfreude Sagen. I’ve told the truth, now it’s your turn.
You can’t destroy a symbol with hate, I am more alive than I’ve ever been, and you are fast
approaching a horrible death. The ones who try to kill me will die my death, just as before. Tell
me how much you hate me. Tell the truth. You have nothing to lose. Start here. Start now, and
tell the truth. You weren’t too keen on those candy-ass sweet-sister saviors before, and you aren’t
too keen on ‘em now.
As I see it, false prophets could be a real problem. Not because they don’t light the way, the
darkness on the edge of the path actually lights the path—in a way. The problem is that their long
held, oft-delivered message of reckless, thoughtless, mindless, wanton, indiscriminant
procreation, and greedily hideous, sexual self-promotion, and aggrandizement is growing
tiresome, and makes them long for just plain money & power.
 I fear that when I say 125 years, they’ll think that that’s a long time. Their path is so well lit,
because they lit it, and they keep lighting it, every day, all day, all night, continually, and when
the light looks like it’s going out, they light it again.
How can I offer condoms when you come to me for bread?
How can I say, Stop offering bread in my name, until you hear what I have said? You may
think I’ve come to feed you. I have not. I have come to turn you gently upside down—to
‘transgress’ your world. In a word: to re-boot it.
If you can’t deny yourself, out of plain selfishness, for The Greater Good—even if you were
born nearly perfect—then your divine nature is just a story you tell; you’ve rejected the greatest
gift there is, and it’s time to go.

Is it the height of irony or the height of bad taste to tell you now, what I think you already
know? That the Earth cannot support a billion people, let alone seven or eight; especially, 113
kg., sugar addicted, consumer driven, gas guzzling, medically managed, force fed, long lived,
fertility enhanced, egocentric, economically enterprising, ethically challenged, environmentally
unsafe, self serving, fantasy prone, diet averse, already out the paddock, throttle open love
machines, running full speed ahead, waiting to be stopped. Now that you think you know how
children should be raised, it would be an affront to have any, and you’re afraid to, because the
world can’t feed them, and doesn’t care how happy you are, or how much love you think you
have. Sorry, but there really is no good time to bring bad news. You’re about to give birth to the
abomination. The most beautiful thing in the world is the love you have for each other—and it’s
going to kill you. If you don’t stop making it manifest. It is, this day, very close to its beginning.
*
There are more ways to love than are apparent.
My love for you, for example. Long standing, unprovable, torturously defiant. You give me
much more than I give you. You touch when I need it, you back off when I need it. I feel you are
like my-very-own mysterious relationship. And I love you even when you drive me crazy.
Huh…interesting.

4-10-23
If you suppose people will line up in front of your makeshift, Albert Schweitzerian
dispensaries, where men of conscience or women who are frequently ‘raped,’ and fearful of
giving birth to their own children—the people native to the areas being destroyed by their own
wanton, unrestrained, sexual excesses, tipped, as these places thru-out the world, are, so
precariously on the verge of annihilation for what can only be described as the oppressive
overcrowding, and hellish elbowing for juxtaposition of various natural forces, namely:
starvation, disease, death, deprivation, pollution from their own waste products, pestilence, fear,
horror, hopelessness, helplessness, enslavement in systems of gross depravity, profound
suffering, unconscionable violence, murder, and, of course, eventually cannibalism
then…Breathe.
If you think they will come in the front door of your clinic, boys and girls, men and women,
and walk out the back door, smiling, with a lollipop in one hand, rubbing a tiny shiny scar with
the other, you are very much mistaken, and’re bound to be disappointed.
It must not only be voluntary, it must be temporary, i.e., condoms, birth control pills, RU486,
RU487, 88, and all those other numbers and patches you have up your sleeve, including
Levonorgestrel, plus that stuff you slide under the skin, and of course, abstinence in its many
forms.
If sterilization (it) were ever permanent or forced, it would surely fail, and fail miserably. It
would cause huge baby factories to sprout up everywhere, making the nazi baby factories of the
1930’s and 40’s look like the raising of the spring lambs. Listen, you can sterilize every stupid
person you can find—but look who’s looking.
If you think coercive or covert mass-sterilization programs aimed at Africa, Asia, and South
America, sounds like a really good idea, or whatever happened to applied genocide? Well, I’m
not surprised—that’s the nazi in you. Even in their hay-day nazi’s never killed more than 50,000
a week. You’d have to kill ten times that many, and they wouldn’t be poor defenseless peasants
either—not hardly. Where was I? Oh, yeah…
I would go even further by saying, if someone insisted that the state sterilize them (the
individual), they must run a gauntlet and prove to the satisfaction of a review board, that this is a
decision made freely, fully, and with an understanding as to consequence, and even then the
procedure must be reversible. People must be free to make tragic personal mistakes. Your
natural desire to wreak havoc must be secondary. And with regard to all these rapes, and rape
fantasies: I’m shocked, shocked! I had no idea this was going on here!!! Ever heard of DNA
testing?
Whereas violent sexual assault is a serious matter, a truly horrendous act, worthy of tough and
unfailing consequences—unreported, uncorroborated, unsubstantial claims of victimization that
only lead to misplaced sympathy for the mother, and ongoing victimization, abuse, neglect,
condemnation, and endangerment for her innocent child, is what’s known as a ‘shrewd career
move.’ My sympathies lie with the unborn child, who did not ask to be born to parents who
disavow any and all responsibility for her, or him.
In many parts of the world, women have no rights over their own bodies anyway, making rape
technically impossible, and, at the same time, totally unavoidable. This world is completely
upside-down.
The outcome is fixed—already written. You’re dead. The way you proceed is what matters, it
must be, show evidence of, and display an understanding of a genuine regard for life—all life
...…
…See, this is what happens when you marry a lawyer who thinks he’s God—you start to talk
like one. I knew I should have stayed in counseling. Something told me to get out of counseling,
and start living—I should have gotten a second opinion.
Of course that doesn’t make sense…to stop counseling right before you get married to God—
two or three weeks after you find out you’re his only begotten Son. So go figure.
I had a feeling something like this would happen if I refused to go to church, because their idle
threats made no sense, and tried to seek God on my own, and just ‘wing it.’ I guess I just gotta be
me, I don’t really know anymore.
Be careful who you marry, that’s all I can say. Now, I’m not saying I regret it—not for a
second—I’d marry him tomorrow. But it’s a little like riding a roller coaster one-handed… …... I’m
not staying up too late…Too late for what?… …... He’s like this constantly.

4-9-25 Be Careful
Be careful. My mother’s admonition as I set out for school, or to go out and play, was always
the same, ‘Be careful.’ I became, as they say in the Bible (see I have done some research),
careful.
It should be understood, the word ‘careful’ in the time the Bible was written, means ‘anxious’
today. And that is what I became.

The poverty of scarcity and the poverty of freedom will leave you breathless. Surrounded by a
horrific paucity, in a time of great wealth—among others. You may begin to organize games of
sport around orgies of exchange, stop. Think.
What I do, I don’t ask you to do. What I do, you cannot do, and I can’t do what you can do.
Look closer—snap out of it. If you put yourself in your own sympathy prison, we’ll break the
bank on the very first transaction. Usher in your own Age of Sense, and you’ll see what I mean.
It’ll barely make it out of the box, and it will become something else—Awareness. I tried, we all
tried. Yes, we ran the numbers. No, I had help….sense came in second, every time—an also-ran.
I don’t know why; God explained it, but I really don’t get it. He thinks he’s God. I think
sense….has a residual nature. I guess I could have lied about it (as if my encouragement could
always bring in the right horse), and you wouldn’t have to worry. Sense never won, not once. It
was never even close. I learned the value of telling the truth from my parents, and kindness,
thoughtfulness, faith, responsibility, humor, caring, respect, love and all the rest of it. I never
went to church—I never learned those things there. I’ve seen those that have—it looks like a crap
shoot to me. Some lie their asses off to score one point, others understand the game. I don’t get
it.
*
Love, with abandon, but not so hard you become handicapped. Space things out. I leave the
details to you. You could try making a commitment to someone as if you cared.
God said to me, separate laughter from tears. Personally, I like the emotions together; I think
they flow naturally together. That’s me. Happy then unhappy. Up then down. It runs at a
gallop. Read slower.
You may want to institute free Friday before you legalize drugs. That’s up to you. You may
want to sit, and watch the SS for a while before you do anything. I think you’ll enjoy it—because
they’re comical. You’re comical. They’re brutal with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but
the truth so help me God. They couldn’t hurt a fly.
Free Friday may become vastly misunderstood. I know. These are very ancient times, and
you’re at the edge of darkness Carol Anne.

Free Friday
You own a store. It has an inventory. It’s Friday, and you decide finally, to stay open. This is
a self-correcting mechanism. A family comes and takes everything by the handfuls. You did’t
get their right name; sorry…I didn’t catch your name. Gulp? You see them open a store of their
own with your merchandise. When Friday comes, they’re closed.
You learn, they learn. People stop moving around so much. They light upon a town like
vultures or pensioners. As they stay, they continue to learn. They trust; they develop mistrust;
they hate themselves for ruining everyone’s good time, and yet they don’t leave. Why? Free is
free. Education has costs.

I lose my shirt on Friday. I had faith, but I had to close—for years.

I had to close. Every Friday.
I came to find I could stay open. They came to find they liked me, trusted me and patronized
me. They learned to adjust their addictions to fit their fortunes. They stopped gathering five
weeks worth of toilet paper, and twenty three years worth of paperclips.
They came forward out of cynical bemusement to shop at my, our, your store. As greedy and
mean, as sour and bitter, and as soft and sweet and as shy as you please. Freedom tastes funny to
people so long denied—it feels like a clean-get-away—it makes the hungry heart happy. And
you giggle while you hoard. Then the happiness begins to beat on its own. You can live for a
week on one good meal served in a nice restaurant if you have to. You don’t need to steal a
week’s worth of expensive heart medicine if someone opens their heart to you every once in a
while—you can get by with much less. You are like a lesson waiting to happen. Give your right
name. Stand up. Have faith. You will see who is big, who is small, and everything in-between.
It is not your turn to play God. You are a store owner, you have an inventory, you have your
favorites, and you have a mind.
When you finally learn to breathe free, you will find your store can stay open almost all the
time.
It corrects self…and you find you are really running a very little store. Full of wonderful
things that people want, and things you didn’t know you had. If you’re a prostitute, free Friday is
not one long uninterrupted rape, if you give of your self you may find you have more to give than
you thought you had.
Start slow: ‘Be careful,’ as my mother used to say. Try a card table, full of cheap crap. Start
with that.

Ф I wish you to learn to protect your self enough, but not too much. And to come straight
home after school, because I love you, and I miss you even tho I can’t be with you all the time. Ф

Greed will knock you down with its senselessness everytime.

Your store will open and close like a blinking eye. I’ve been a puppet-a-poet-a pauper-a
plumber-a prince and a king. I’ve been up and down and over and out, but I know one thing.
No, you can’t tell the truth absolutely, it changes too quickly.
I did my signature-step when I sang, ‘each time I find myself flat on my face,’ then I reach
forward extending my left hand to the audience, like this.
No, you can’t give without a thought as to what you’re getting in return, you would suffocate.
You need to stay in the game. Be gallant. Stay strong. Pass it from one to another. ‘I just pick
myself up and get back in the race,’ and I let my hand quaver a little for dramatic effect as it
catches the light. They love it when I do that, it drives them crazy. It looks like I’m going to pick
them all up. ‘That’s life.’ That’s how that goes.
Billy goes from normal to crazy and back again. The same way he goes from Earth to Heaven
and back. It comes from paying no attention to what an expectation might be. In other words, he
leaves when he leaves. It’s very simple. When Billy met ‘crazy’ coming down the white stairs,
he looked up. Crazy stared very hard at him. Billy tilted his head. Crazy fixed him in its gaze—
Then backed up and got out the house in one leap.

4-6-10 Walking the dog

A little boy graduated from the third grade. He ran to his father’s car, parked just across from
the school, in a kind of cap and gown. His father sat silently in the front seat with the door open.
The boy stopped short of the car, and his father closed the door without turning to even look at his
son. His mother said, Go ahead you can get in. Billy felt sad. The man didn’t seem to care, the
boy looked hurt. The tension Billy felt, must have been long-standing. The silence spoke gloom
to Billy. He imagined their unhappy life together—fights, shouting, resentments, infidelity. A
litany of self-hating reasons for hating each other.
The father started up the car, as Billy and Or-Live approached. The dog lifted his leg as the
huge car pulled away from the curb. Billy noticed that all four passengers were equally spaced,
and that the license plate read, ‘DEAF DAD.’ Billy smiled.
Given time, some things explain themselves.

4-9-27 A Man is Born Free and Counts

"Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains." "We are born weak, we need strength;
helpless we need aid; foolish we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we
need when we come to man’s estate, is the gift of education." –Jean Jacques Rousseau

I was born symbolically on Rousseau’s birthday, the man who gave birth to The
Enlightenment. I am going to do this thing. I am going to lift you up. Look at it this way: you
are challenged, you’ve been lied to. There is no point to education unless you teach people to
think for themselves. I quote: my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none, I can read the writing
on the wall.
I can read the writing because it’s at eye level, and I can speak to God because I was deaf
once, and learned to read lips, from the corners. I learned from the corners of my life, how to turn
around. I am going to turn you around now. I speak Symbol, or what ever the hell the name of
this language is. Sign. Chrome.
No, you don’t own me, I’m not one of your little toys. Born born born birth born birthday
birth.

Consider my Becoming as a gigantic sign. Not a thing in itself, just a sign about something:
No one is gay, that is a metaphor for the craziness mankind has brought on himself.
No one sucks anyone off, that is symbolic of your tendency toward self-destruction.
No cum ever accompanied your curiosity, that is emblematic of your distaste for complex
riddles.
No one ever fell in love unexpectedly, or waited as long as I have.
I’m willing to respect you incrementally, if you’ll do the same.

If you want a new religion—forget it, you have too many as it is. If you insist, call this one
mine and call yourselves Billians. For the thing you are, you will never be again. And the thing
you are about to become will fit you like a glove. You will become one, or you will die a
thousand deaths. It has to be this way, yet it changes nothing.
I don’t think religion is a joke. I don’t think you’re a joke. I think when you organize
everyone else’s thoughts you make some huge presumptions. You plasticize them, model-them,
after yourself. You can’t clone me, tho God knows you can clone yourselves, you’ve been doing
it for thousands of years. Trying to.
Look, I am not anti clone, I’m anti current. The current sweeps everything away. Time. Play
for time.
You dream your lives away, wish them away, time-clock by time-clock, throw them away,
hoping for things you think you’re supposed to want, but don’t.
So quick to join the mob, or fight the white whale. That’s all. You don’t have to choose sides
every second of the day, choose the third choice. Choose Everything or as some might say,
Everything else.
I’m not anti this and pro that. My last lover was a Jew, it didn’t make me anti Jewish. I’ve
always had a thing for Jewish men. And Poles, Asians, Czech, Irish, Italian, English, German,
Cherokee, Peruvian, Georgian, Canadian, Caribbean, Egyptian, others. He took a new job—
doesn’t make me anti job, fact is, I wasn’t even curious enough to check out his new place. I’m
not in favor of curiosity, I’m not against it. I think some things are interesting and some things
aren’t. He was—his place wasn’t. It was 3 hours away.

I am not anti heterosexual, even though they have made a horrible mess of things, and brought
all of humankind and life on Earth, to within inches of the brink.
Like Delbert, I always thought the free, were more free—they aren’t. They don’t arrive, they
keep running the gauntlet like everyone else. They are not free to make the right choice; they’re
free to do what the others do. That’s their group. They are not.
 They are not They. Some are, some aren’t. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell Delbert: A
man who is free, is free to try to kill you. You are free, you did not become free the moment you
decided to kill him, and then lose your freedom the moment you raised your hand. You don’t
stand in the middle of a anti-pro paradox. I’m the only one absurd enough to pull that off.
You’re an amateur! He never hangs around long enough for the explanation to penetrate, the
second I look elsewhere for a more inspired understanding—he’s gone.
Now my chauffeur wants to sit in the back, and stare at all the red lights. If I’d ever paid him
anything, he would’ve seen the last of it. He doesn’t realize how ridiculous he is! I love that
stupid Haint.
He can join me, but there’s nothing to join, you don’t just become free by crossing Baltimore
Pike or some imaginary border. You claim it. You transcend petty labels. You keep walking,
because you have a walking brain. You get up off your fat ass and think for yourself. You’re the
one who wanted a ride, I gave you the keys—now drive.
All of a sudden he joins me, and we sit in the driver’s seat and he drives—First red light, I’m
getting in the back.
You were born weak and you grew—look at it that way. Mark your steps that way. I was
there, now I’m here.
These great gangs don’t exist. They are apocryphal, mythical, theoretical, academic,
speculative, fictional, made up, imaginary, illusory, pure fantasy: Meer names (as in meerkats),
mordant—like certain dyes. They stain as well as color. I am unstained, that doesn’t make me
part of any great white beast.
‘They’ are empty handed. Real, only as long as they agree with each other, and to the extent
that they do.
Evidence suggests that they have a million feet (this mysterious allegorical throb). But they
can’t move one millimeter in any single direction, because all of them together can’t make up one
single mind. To step forward is, for them, like the heart stepping out away from the body: “I’ll be
right back.” But, you know…no more throb… no more life. You can’t just go back.
Further, they don’t know where their going because they don’t know where they’ve been. The
people that could have told them, that could tell you, have been telling you and telling you and
telling you, but they’re dead, and now you think you’re free to speak for them—just as you
thought that’s what words were for. But they are not for you—they activate the mind and
describe the soul.

And with a handful of my own blood, and the coagulated blood of an innocent man, I will go, if
asked, on a Hajj, and put an end to throwing stones.
Ancient symbols must be completed in very specific ways:
Invited in a particular way, by a particular person.
Innocent, in a particular way, of a particular crime.

5-9-14 In a hurry
It’s like this: It was a hot Tuesday in September, the mosquitoes were horrendous, and I was
bitten several times behind the knees, so I spent the rest of the day indoors. That was the night I
gave all the power to the individual. It took a little over an hour. It wasn’t as hard as it sounds. I
took it from the group.
None of the world’s churches were the least bit interested in helping me or saving Mankind, just
selling tickets, so I dismissed them. Their patrons were standing in ankle deep mud, in the rain
with a mountain of organic material poised. If you need an authority, in order to get married,
you’d be better off getting the captain of the USS, Now You See It, Now You
The great huge mob of gangsters that paw thru the alleys of Europe, over the ruts of Asia, the
porous scenic trails of Africa, the country roads, and shining paths of the Americas had a serious
dilemma…No, not Australian/Oceanic inclusion—Me. I was in the way.
The Swiss planned it, and gave the hit to the Philadelphia mob. The Philly mob, shot one of its
own once, 13 times in the head and chest, and missed hitting any vital organs. They were
working on a fool-proof plan—got into a disagreement, killed ½ their number, then gave the
27,000 dollars back, and told the Swiss to go fuck themselves——I love those stupid jerks. If it
were ever up to me, I’d lighten their sentence. They’re so stupid. I can’t stay and chat, but I do
have to tell this one more story about the Philly mob: Many, make a so-called comfortable living,
from scams and rackets at various New Jersey shore resorts. The mob takes its piece of the action
from the weather-dependent, in-and-out weekend trade. Once, they tried to put a hit on a Philly,
TV Weatherman because he was forecasting too many rainy weekends. They eventually just told
him to shut-up if he knows what’s good for him. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! He was the Weatherman!
Anyway…
Taking power from puny politicians, fearless leaders, and the weely tough wulers was like falling
off a saddle—Ahhh. That ass’s got no backbone!

The para military outfits needed marching orders; the banks needed a lot of really quiet printing
presses; the manufacturing sector was re-tooling; the chemical companies were going back to
formula; and sexual stereotypes were mostly bottoms looking for tops. They were glad I showed
up. All of them were glad I showed up. I gathered power by realizing they had none, plus I’m
not always a top. Power comes from a willingness to tell the truth. Not everyone wants to
express their power the same way.
The professors, scholars, and bursars couldn’t understand why anyone would want a go to
Airsupp to learn English, let alone everyone. The news media had given up credibility, which
was it’s only source of power, to the tabloids, years ago.
When I walked in, the helm was empty, the wheel was just spinning and spinning, so I grabbed it.
Taking power is easy, if you wanna know. Replacing a species—very hard—every other creature
gets reassigned, and the ones that are closed to changing, jump.
I still like to test the men from the press, just to see if they were getting the hang of this ‘quote
thing:’ “I have given all the power to all the individual people, thru-out the entire world—That’s
you.” “New Jesus: ‘Still grooving on those sixty’s hits.’”
People liked having power over their own lives, so much so, they were willing to work together
to keep it—as expected. It may be interesting for people now, or people in the distant
unknowable future to know, that on that day my skin was excrutiatingly sensitive. I felt like
jumping out of it. God was not home yet, and it was 1:11, according to my red-lit digital clock
when I started, and 2:22 when I was done. My clock was set ten minutes ahead. It began at
01:01 am, and when I asked for silence, the street became quiet: the wailing women and
screaming children were silent; the men stopped firing guns in mid air; kids stopped playing with
fireworks, the sirens stopped. The church bell rang once at 2 O’clock. I know that’s not possible,
but it did. I asked for 8 hours of silence; I slept to the sound of crickets, and worried about how
the birds will abate the mosquitoes. My stomach bothered me, so I took calcium carbonate, and
an H2 blocker. The moon had been halved, and slid by un-noticed. When God showed up, He
asked how it was going. I said it was done. He smiled, Good. We slept. That’s how it was—
that’s marriage.

4-9-30 Move on
May I make a suggestion. Consider: Instead of looking at this as tho I am doing you a favor,
look upon it as a possibility.
Imagine if Christ returned, and wasn’t welcomed in his own church. In fact, as a child he was
abruptly thrown out; as a young man they wanted him dead, they preferred him dead.
Imagine if he had waited outside God’s office for 40 years—waiting. As tho he had an
appointment. As people passed, they thought, but didn’t say—Why don’t you just go in, or
knock or something?
Imagine if He were crushed by this, and after 40 years he stood up to leave, or perhaps to
stretch—and the door flew open. And God recognized him right away, eventho He thought later
he might be the thief. Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was highly symbolic, and
didn’t really need you as much as you think.
Imagine if he came back somehow, and now he knew what he came back for. And this time he
wasn’t going to leave without it.
Mysteries abound. I cannot do what Fa can do. I cannot think like Ida thinks. I cannot say what
Mark says. I master the house four times just to warm up. You can’t do, think or say, what I can,
you don’t even know what I’m warming up for.
Imagine if Christ was not that good at taking dictation, and had almost no sense of propriety. At
the end he had a lot of half-ended sentences, and things that made no sense and were not even
English. He printed them up and then he burned them. Then he destroyed his computer, in the
front yard, in the dark, on a Friday, where there is a scorched mark on the Earth.
Imagine if Christ had no sense of direction. Wouldn’t it be funny if the one you followed knew
intuitively there was no where to go? Wouldn’t it be funny if he found you because he thought
you were everywhere? Wouldn’t it be funny if he found himself right in the very middle,
because every place looked the same to him, because he was born that way? What if none of his
injuries ever touched him, changed him, or moved him in any way? Wouldn’t it be funny if he
knew how strange and extraordinary he was, and had a hard time believing it too?

Educational Furtherance
The war lord in my sector. Is an interesting case in point. I want him gone, but I
don’t know who or what will take his place. I am, on the one hand inclined to keep him.
However, it has come to my attention he must go. Threats and bribes won’t work. If you show
him beautiful pictures of his life growing up—before everything got so off-track, and suggest
things can be like that forever if he will tell the truth…it won’t work…he thinks he is telling the
truth. He has become unfamiliar with truth, that’s the whole problem. Besides, that’s a veiled
threat. Bribes won’t work because he just takes them.
I suggest a lesson, or exercise, in educational furtherance. I offer this only as an example.
Yes, I do talk like that.
One of the most frightening things in the world is silent attention, it drives people crazy, it
makes them extraordinarily angry and introspective, if that’s possible. Greeting a war lord with
silence is of course not a great idea, especially if he knows what you’re doing. Having already
been un-vexed by your silence, and being attuned to ignoring you, one gasps at the nearly un-
limited possibility of fun.
Greetings can be deadly, in many sinister and untold ways. So use a form of silence, one that
is protective. If you are required to applaud him, applaud in a rhythm like a back beat, like a bass
drum. That change in rhythm can be heard very easily, and the drum beat sound can be
frightening. It can’t be covered up easily, it can’t be covered up, for instance, with a contrapuntal
drum-beat sound—that would only add to it.
Once you are satisfied he has heard the drum beat of his demise, what do you tell him? You
can’t tell him to leave, for the same reason you can’t greet him with dead silence. He could turn
on you, and then you’d be the dead one. The thing to do, is further his education. My war lord is
a very nice guy. Underneath. That’s the problem, how to get underneath.
 If the expression of loyalty becomes: We love you, we don’t care what cretins think. That is
what you say. All you say. Add to it nothing. Nothing. It is not a lie, it is a lesson in
educational furtherance. It is the kind of silence that only the guilty can hear. You say along
with everyone: We love you, we don’t care what cretins think.
Within a week the by-words will change, to something like: He is our leader, we need him,
there are none to replace him. Then you change from ‘cretins think’ to: He is our leader, we need
him, there are none to replace him. Say just that. Add nothing. It is not true, of course, it is a
lesson. Do not add, that I will replace him, because I’m in prison. Say what they say. He has all
the guns, and everything else you fear the most, right?
He will not know who is telling the truth. He will not know if the people that started it were
sincere or not. He will not even know who started it. It is like silence to him. The more he
listens the less he hears. Panic can ensue. The people who benefit most by supporting him will
change their words. Just say the same thing they say. If they suddenly shut up—suddenly shut
up. If they say: We just love him and we are free to say anything else we want. Just say that.
Say what they say. You won’t become a target. Lessons in furtherance that deprive you of life,
liberty, or the pursuit of private tragic mistakes, is itself a mistake. And won’t make you happy.
You may decide to express your self. That’s really up to you. Unfortunately you may find
yourself resorting to threats and bribes. This works much better, because silence from a large
crowd is intensely frightening. It will drive him into his head. If that’s where fear lives, you will
see it immediately. If that’s where hate lives, you will see that immediately. You will see what
lives in his head. You may be surprised. Be prepared.
He may not know what to do, and he may tell you so. Telling the truth is the whole thing.
The whole thing is to tell the truth. The truth is chaos. I don’t know how to respond to the truth
some times. You said this—now you say that. Which is which? Don’t all of a sudden come to
me all changed, with favors in you nap-sack. I want to hear all the embarrassing details. I was
there and now I’m over here with you. And…..

On the other side they know, but never say: “That, done in love prevails.” No, it’s not
English. No human heart has ever been made governable. True governance comes from
within—anything else is just pushing the blood around.

4-9-28 After a drink or two—the work was done

When he woke up, he had a tattoo of sorts. On his left arm was written, in four lines:

It passed so fast
He sat and thought.
He concluded he had not
sat long enough

The ‘t’s lined-up with his bracelet. His soul showed. He forgot what he meant, and what had
passed. It was a thought. It was written as 2-3-1.
He found in his sleep a note on his arm that read: He sat and thought – He concluded he had not-
sat long enough, and to this he puzzled. Then he remembered he had had a thought, but it fled so
fast he had not been able to write it down. So he wrote on top of it: It passed so fast.

That was so like his life

And that was all. It was done.
In the ‘mortuary,’ they washed his arm, and no one ever saw the pain of the pen. The blue magic
marker. He marked his life as best he could, and he wanted to die just that way. But they washed
it off, they washed it away, and he went to God clean. And he never came back. God knew
better than to pat him on the head. And said, when he ‘arrived.’ You have done a great thing my
Son, here’s the key. You can come with me now, or you can stay. It’s up to you.
I said I would do this thing, and I will.

The End

4-9-28 The work to me

The work was translated once, when it was given to me in symbols.
It was translated again, by me, into English.
It was translated a third time into fiction—you’d never believe the Truth.
It is translated a fourth time by you, here.
It cannot suffer a fifth translation—any unauthorized written translations will have no authority,
and can be deadly—you have been warned.
I am giving you all the ammunition you want, and more than you need. I am encouraging you to
take things out of context, purposely misunderstand, argue, refuse, rearrange, ignore, doubt,
quibble, scorn, and build an airtight case against every single word,because I know you will, and
there’s no way to stop you, but to encourage you to. And you still think I’m the perverse one.
The fact is: The ones who would destroy me, are only building me up; those who attempt to dilute
my message, don’t realize I’m water; and the fault finders are having a fucking field day.
Everyone has their own idea of fun. Your chance of survival is so small, it’d be hard to make it
any smaller. Come on people now.
Oh, almost forgot…The Truth: I quit work in January to write a book, met God in April, fell in
love, He gave me a rose (bud), washed about four dishes, got married, destroyed the devil, I think
I’m pregnant, and I’ve no idea where he goes in the morning. He takes me to the most amazing
places, spoils me constantly, and I’ve never been happier in all my life. Wish you were here. PS:
no ring yet.

Once upon a midnight d’eary -John Popper/Blues Traveler/Run-around

Billy tried to go to church. His parents took him to the big Presbyterian Church in the
center of Point Spread when he was a boy. He wasn’t allowed to stay. They threw him out
of church time after time after time. They made him go to Sunday School. Across the street,
around the corner, in a basement. Billy was a child, and they were all children, but Billy was
deadly. He could identify seven ant hills in his yard, and if any displeased him, they would
be utterly destroyed—for the reason that they displeased him. Billy had killed three
archbishops, two deacons, 7 popes, 123 linen wrapped babies, and 66 soldiers at-attention
just the other day, because he told them to stand at-ease. He once built them a swimming
pool to see how they liked being thrown into cold water when they had no insulation—they
didn’t. The Sunday School teacher tried to make Billy believe what they believed, to do
things the way they did them, to behave like they behaved. They insisted he change. He
couldn’t. He wouldn’t. It reminded him now, of how he felt when he broke his leg, in the
snow, on a slope.
 Billy couldn’t go to church because there was something wrong with using coercive force
against children, except he didn’t know what, “and so on and so forth,” as his Grandmother used
to say, just to wrap things up. They woke him up early to tell him he had to do what they said, or
he’d be dead forever—when he was dead, that is. Really stuck. And it hurt like hell forever.
Now, William, you have to put your hands together like this. No, like this. Billy was Billy and
he didn’t do what his own father said, he certainly wasn’t going to do what these jerks said. At
first he hated being called William, but after four or five Sundays ruined with: William, don’t you
know what repeat means? William, follow along. William…will yum, wake up, you’re the last
one on the Ark again, he was very happy they didn’t use his real name; he was starting to hate
William too. He never went back. It was a lost cause. And when he grew up, he realized how
mistaken they were, how wrong, how misled, beaten, forced, humored, coddled, swayed, spun-
around they were, into thinking what they thought. How trimmed their wings! Billy’s Dad knew,
what Billy couldn’t have known: that it was only within the last century or so, that blind
obedience to church authority wasn’t punished with death or dismemberment. As a child, he
liked the idea of doing what everyone else was doing—until it was stupid, then he couldn’t move.
The cold changes everything when you land in its whiteness.
It was an icy day. Everyone came around and tried to get him to stand up. He wouldn’t even
try. He knew he couldn’t. He lay on the slope, one ski was over there, and one ski was under
him. The bone fragments were rubbing and clicking in a way only his brain could hear. It kept
him down. It told him not to get up. He lay on the icy slope, all fifteen-years of him. The pain
was not that bad. –--Then try to stand—--You won’t even try. They thought he was a wimp, a
chicken, a coward, a malingerer: deflecting an embarrassing development thru the instantaneous
creation of drama—a goof. Lying on his back in the snow without a care in the world. If the
Catholic Church ever starts doing anything right, everyone will follow them—that’s not true of
the Presbyterians.
Other skiers flew by him, so close he became frightened—he would have to get off the slope.
They were trying to help him; to show him; to push him out of the ‘nest.’ He still wouldn’t
move. A man finally came to help him. Billy just sat. He couldn’t answer the question, Why he
wouldn’t try. The man whose name Billy still remembers, thirty years later, picked him up
properly, and put him on a sled with no pain and no trouble—confirming what the small crowd
already knew. He had been showing off for his girlfriend. When they discovered his leg was
nearly shattered, it didn’t make them feel any better. It was useless information, delivered too
late.

4-5-17year-month-day
God explained it to Billy this way:
You were never hungry. You rarely ate. You became expert at hiding food.
If you ate as you were told, you became sick. People couldn’t stop looking at you, and touching
you. You were never injured.
You totaled six cars, you picked fights with bullies. They rescued you. You were so small. You
became as horrible as you could. Not very.
Angels fluttered around you like locusts. You kept finding love. Everyone changes around you.
Everyone sees you differently. People go crazy when they leave you.
You reject being different. You embrace being special. Then you switch.

The only time you went to church and enjoyed it, was when they weren’t having services.
You reject being special because you have the power to give God’s love to everyone.
And because everyone is not special.
You can do with a word or a thought what great men, honest men, thoughtful, caring, kind men
and women, could never do. You do it because you feel like it.
You go and change human nature right before it was going to change anyway.
You love certainty.
You take all and none of the credit.
You have no trouble doing that. No one gives you any, anyway.
They don’t even come looking.
They know you are here already. They can feel it.
You are so far beyond their comprehension it is not possible to ‘out’ you until you die-
decide-dies-decides-dies. Or can’t be found.
You go on and on as if you will never stop.
You get all the money. You put it in a friend’s account.
He doesn’t know he has it. He thinks he knows everything, but he doesn’t even know the account
number. He doesn’t like to even think about money. He’s going to be surprised.
He is like you, he turns the pages, and everyone thinks he’s reading.
You can only die symbolically. That is not a guess, a wish, a promise or a prophesy.
It is a fact, and it is done already. You have made it true for everyone.
Once I got in your head, I got stuck somehow. I couldn’t get out if I wanted to.
What were we talking about.
God’s not the best story teller in the world, but he can sink an island, so I listen.
I tell my friends I didn’t do the work, because I didn’t, and they know me. They know I couldn’t
have.
I tell others that it was given to me—thru me, because that’s the truth, that’s how it felt. It’s the
only thing that makes sense.
God tends to tell stories all at once, and then leaves out the ending.

Africa dead?
Don’t blame me. Would you blame the garbage man for all the dumps in this world? That’s
rhetorical. Where were you in 1990 when I needed a friend? Where were you in 1990 when I
was so lost? Where were you when I turned in bed, ate alone, paid bills? The pills that I took
kept me alive. They did not keep me from you. You were nowhere to be found, and now, as far
as I’m concerned it’s you who are late.

4-10-01 It was a cold October morning

It was a cold October morning. Very early, Billy went to Heaven to see God. Heaven was warm,
God was eager to see him.
Is that it. God said.
Yes. Billy put a stack of papers down on a filing cabinet by God’s desk.
Beulah walked in, looked at God, and said good morning to Billy.
I’ll get you a box for that, she said, and walked to the supply room in the back.
I am so proud of you my Son. G
God… it’s…its…it is…just become so hard to finish…I really need help, I touch it…I’m afraid
to touch it. I don’t understand. B
Well, Billy, the nearer your destination the more…
Please, call me by my real name.
Well. You have grown. G
Have I?
Yes, you have. G
Tell me God, who wrote this, because I was having an argument with myself off and on the last
two or three days. I, think it is so like me and yet, I know I didn’t… because I couldn’t have.
Did I write this? Or did you?
im, slow down for two seconds. What have you said.
I said …that…I said I felt as tho you spoke thru me to me, and, that this was the translation job I
was born to do…and then I know that the hand of God…your hand is all…I can’t even speak…
again…I think my brain was repolarized from being stuck in the MRI too long—I think I was
fried instead of slow baked.
Yes, you know as much about cooking as you do about magnetic resonance imaging,
my Son.
Why do you keep saying that?
What my Son. My Son.
What father talks like that? B
I guess it’s my issue. G
I guess it is. B
I guess if I can’t call you by your real name, I have to call you something. Yes.
Beulah walks in with a box that has metal reinforced sides. She looks at God.
Here. I think this will do nicely. She emphasizes nicely, and puts the box down. BB
God and his Son, stare at her.
She begins to pick up the pile of paper.
Thank you Beulah, that’s just fine. G
I’m not going to mess with it. I was just going to put it in the box. BB
Fine, Thank you, Beulah. You are a wonder. G
I’ll just go stand in the other room like a cartouche. BB
There was a great deal of tension in the room, Billy felt it, Beulah felt it, and God sighed.

God, a couple questions. B

Shoot. G
Am I Christ? B
You are. G
You said people don’t return. B
They don’t. Juh…Billy, they can’t. The Christ cannot be born—he must Become. It is just like
being born tho. G
I’m no child. Please don’t treat me like a child. And God, that’s my question. How can I be
your child? You already had a son. He died. Now you say I’m your middle child. B
I never said you were my middle child. And they look at the paper pile as it begins to lean toward
the box, ever so slightly. GB
Jeshua died, of course. Everybody dies, but he’s not dead. G
Thanks for clearing that up. Jeshua came to see me. He was very kind and all that, but he thinks
he knows everything, and he’s a pain in the ass. Most of his suggestions were off the wall, well,
under the door. Can I be frank? B
Frank, Jesse, you can call yourself Khubla Khan for all I care, you are still my Son.
Billy began to cough an early morning smoker’s-cough.
You’re not smoking, are you. God said.
You see! Why do you ask me that? You know as well as I do that I can’t smoke anymore. Are
you inside of me or not??? B
Yes, I am. I’m inside everyone. I’m inside of the words they speak. G
Then why do you ask me stupid questions? B
You personified me so that we could talk. It doesn’t make me a person. G
Oh, here we go! Just when you think God knows his place…nerves give, and one stands in a
circle…I know, Billy stands up, and tugs at his hair and his chin and his cheek. B
Maybe…don’t say stupid questions; what if I had feelings. G
I have asked a million stupid questions and I have a retarded left arm. If I want to say stupid and
retarded I guess I know what I’m talking about. B
Okay, okay. I’m so glad we could have this little talk. G
This is become so complicated. Look! B
The pile of paper is leaning more than ever toward the box, like a stack of dishes in a Warner
Brother’s cartoon.
And that rule. Billy says.
What rule. G
The rule that I can’t mention any proper names less than 100 years old, without special clearance.
That leaves me with Bing Crosby, Greta Garbo, and a handful of Europeans I never heard of, and
Ghandi. I don’t even know, can I mention Ghandi? B
Yes, of course, he was born in 1869 October 2nd. G
Tomorrow’s his birthday. That’s amazing. B
What’s with all the birthday crap, S`tu. If you’re going to start with: Ghandi was a Libra like
your mother, and therefore da dat da dat da dah. G
I like the symbolism. S
That’s not symbolism, it’s coincidence. Today can be your birthday. You are born symbolically
as well as physically. G
I know. J
Why do you say ‘I know,’ and then go on as if you don’t. G
I …don’t know…Billy sits down with a thump, and the pile of paper on the filing cabinet begins
to rock slightly.
You are all over the place this morning aren’t you. G
I’m upset…who wouldn’t be!? Their father, who they weren’t that closed to, dies, and then you
take his place at 40! I’m a thirteen-year-old orphan! B
Oh, here we go with the numbers. I said your birthday can be the day you become yourself. I
didn’t say you get magically younger by some mysterious process of numerical inversion. G
Okay. B
How much coffee have you had. G
See! You know how much I had because you woke-up with me at 04:40 and now its 06:21 and
today’s October first and I am on my first cup, which I’m going to finish right now, if you’ll let
go of my arm. B
Hold it..…stop! You have asked me a series of questions like we’re on the deck of the Titanic,
and you suddenly need to know the Catechism. Am I being interviewed. I don’t say I know who
wrote that, but I have to ask you, are you doing me now. Is this my turn. Or is this a real
conversation. I will not be done. Not by you, by your smart ass hair-cut; that red nightshirt that
looks so just-fucked sexy; that Aunt Jean of yours, who, by the way is a real handful; or any other
sum or substance you want to bring into my office. G
Billy stares at God inside of himself, inside his office on the second floor of his house, with a cup
of coffee at his side, and an expression on his face. And he sees it all from God’s perspective.
The work that Billy and God together did, and piled up, begins to topple over—in all the
excitement. Beulah stands at the open door, and stares, about to walk in, not wanting to interrupt
this family thing, whatever it is. The pile, moved by the gravity of fiction, begins to slide.
God snaps his fingers, and the pile jumps like a deck of cards into the box, the lid jumps up and
lands upside down on the box and slides down slowly over it, covering the nine centimeters of
work, turning it into a recognizable form. One corner of one small piece of paper can be seen
hanging out from the bottom, moved there by the fiction of the current of the escaping air.
Billy takes a drink of coffee—room temperature. Oh. He says.
Oh. Oh indeed. G
Beulah turns to go back to her desk.
Beulah Bondi is not your secretary! B
Of course she is, God says.
You have no more need for a secretary than I have need of a scale model of the Lusitania built in
whenever, according to whoever. B
Calm down. G
I am calm. B
I was talking to Beulah. G
Hey, she says as she walks back in the room with one hand up, I was just going to pretend to take
dictation, but since the two of you seem to have the whole world in your hands, I think I’ll just go
smoke pot in the Pontiac—Bye. And she puts a dictation pad and a pen on the desk and walks
out. BB
Well, Thank you. God calls after her, and then adds, to Billy. She’s very sensitive. G
Sensitive! She’s departed, passed on, left the mortal coil! She’s demised! Gone to meet her
paper! She’s an ex-secretary! If you hadn’t dressed her up in fox fur, or whatever the
…pause…(Billy wishes he could stay Billy, and maybe just do this forever and ever).
That’s how much you know. Billy, I can’t do everything myself. She’s a big help. G
She works for you? B
She likes it. She wants to. G
In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never seen her do a single thing that I’d call work! B
Your world, like everyone’s, is run by rules based on the knowledge, and the light they bring into
their own consciousness. Your rules are my rules. Or, if you prefer, my rules are your rules. I
run the show. He sighs, and mumbles under his breath, Öâ|uuÄxÜá…I like the show. You are
amusing. It is fun. Now, thanks to you, Beulah is going to be useless the rest of the day…but I
have a feeling she’ll calm down. G
High and Mighty, no one likes to be made insignificant, or treated like they can’t contribute,
don’t exist, or have no feelings. See. G
But? B
We’ll just start over. Today’s your Mother’s birthday, I realize that. I also realize, like everyone,
she only had one. A symbolic birthday is not a real birthday. She’s not 21. And she’s not dead.
She’s here with me. G
I had a tear that was just holding off.
Sometimes I don’t know where to start with you. Look, that is not the Bible, that is an essay. I
wrote it. You said it right. Are you happy. You were right. You wrote it under an impulse…
ME, an impulse that’s like an idea, but more than an idea, and you read the impulse like a
telegrapher reads Morse Code. I don’t know how. But you did, and you translated it into
English, because it has the same structure as English. In fact, it has everything English has except
the words. English is made up of at least 77 other languages—but the whole thing is made up.
You had to be born here, you had to be unable to go to church, you had to have a fluid sexuality,
and a self that was unknowable………………..…………...
There was a sound like a deep inhalation……………………………………………...
You are a pain in the ass like Christ!
You are irreverent like Christ.
You are unorthodox, like Christ.
You walk like Christ.
You talk like Christ.
You are shy and diffident, like Christ.
You are slow to anger, like Christ.
You say very little, like Christ.
You are more venomous than a Cobra, and symbolic of a Glacier, like Christ.
You are too honest, and candid! Like Christ.
You are lazy and hopelessly disorganized, like Christ.
You think your dreams are fascinating, like Christ.
You have the same themes as Christ. The same sense of humor. The same eyes.
You could take advantage of a hurricane, like Christ.
You are one sad, sorry, opportunist waiting-to-happen, like Christ.
You get everyone to work for you, like Christ.
You are feisty, sexy, impatient, and impossible to bed, like Christ.
Billy hears the click of a nearby door.
You do whatever the fuck you feel like doing, like Christ.
You are obedient, like Christ, and you can ‘see me’, like Christ!
…And you love too much, like Christ.
You are as unpredictable as the devil himself…as he found out, and God laughs…Like Christ.
You are Christ! The Risen Christ. Damn it! I don’t care what they say! G
You were born on His Birthday! And God slams a presumptive hand on the desk, and the room
shakes. Ass! G
I knew it! I knew I could make you say it. B
I’m exhausted. G
I could dance till Christmas. B
Say, till dawn. G
*

Billy, how did you know Christ could neither read nor write. G
It was considered optional. B
God stood back away from Billy, and his head rose up. Billy was afraid he might spit fire. He
was afraid God didn’t understand, so he began the shortest explanation in history: Once you
glimpse the eternal, once you see connection as tho it were a relationship, and you’re in it, you
want very little. There becomes very little need for self-acquisition. The acquiring of things,
amassing, adding…
God interrupted this implausible defense, and said: Billy, you look at things as if the background
were just incidental, secondary, as if you were looking at the world in order. Nothing in the
universe has such a narrow view of things as a man. Nothing. You even have a word for that. G
Silence.
What is it? Billy asked, trying not to drool.
Silence. G
It sounded like God said, Silence. He’s so deep he’s almost opaque (an aside). There was
silence. God knew what Billy knew: That he was born wanting nothing… im, you could of read
the phone book to ‘em. I almost thought you were gonna, and it wouldn’t have made any
difference to anyone’s understanding. They get you. You understand The Christ. Because you
are the Christ—When did you realize there’s no job. G
About a year after I took it. B
More like two. G
Billy began tapping his toes, drumming the desk, then snapping his fingers: Trailers for sale or
rent. Roooms to let for fifty cents: No pool, no pez, no pets. I ain’t got no… B
What are you doing. G
Vamping. I lost my place…Talk for a minute. I’ll be right back. Billy left singing. B
God smiled softly…was proud of Billy…heard him digging around in the next room in a box he
considers a file, which isn’t anything like a file but just a box of paper— — completely
disorganized unless you consider piling things in layers, organization. G
Two hour of pushin’ broom buys an eiight by twellve four-bit room… sing out Louise! B God
held back a laugh, unsuccessfully. A tear fell down his left cheek. God thought his Son was
really fine…even tho, if he cleaned more he’d have a much easier time of it, and less trouble,
but… He couldn’t love him more. And there was no one like him. He was very glad he had
him… Okay! I won’t correct your every response! God called out.
Oh, good. That didn’t take long; here it is. This part’s like a covenant. Here, read it. B
im, if that’s what you want to be called—See! You Are The Christ. You’re the unbreakable
bond. There is no other. When you leave, I wait to see what you’ll bring. G
Billy stared at God, scratched his neck, blinked: “I was just teasing.” But God signed.
im, you’re the only one in the world for whom this is not a job. For you this is fun. G
Billy stared. Who? Whom? Wada ya mean? Me? B
You’re Christ ! G
Billy thought about this for just over 4 weeks, and thru almost 20 bottles of wine, and finally,
wearing an undershirt he’d washed with un-like colors, said: What do you do when you’re not
being so deep and fascinating?
God laughed, and gave me a kiss. I could of died right then. It was so great.

A woman runs past the open door that adjoins God’s office to Beulah’s.
Oh, Oh. JH
Who’s that! B
Who’s who. G
The woman jumps, grabs something off Beulah’s desk, and tries to scurry out of sight.
That’s Josephine Hull! And Billy points directly at her. B
Oh! Help! That man! He’s following me! Then she mugs horror, hokum, and contempt, all at
the same time. Billy grabs the arms of his chair as she takes-off with her purse—the thing she
picked up from the desk—and runs out of the office like a rabbit, with. JH
What’s she doing here? B
Why must you know everything all at once. Forget about it. Leave it between us. G
I’ve seen her before…She’s nothing but trouble! B
Don’t be so absurd. She’s a lovely woman. Now, where were we… Oh, speaking of
dancing…tomorrow’s Ghandi’s birthday, we’re having a party, want to come? G
I think that’s the first question you ever asked me that was actually a question. B
Well, I’m so happy you’re happy. Have I helped you figure this out. G
Yes. You did The Work thru me…I thought so. B

Yes. You have no older brother. You have no younger sister. You have no family of any kind;
that’s all fiction. You are completely alone. You can’t walk on water because you wear socks.
You can’t threaten—you’re gay. If I led a Cobra, I could only lead him so far. You can’t come
as a bolt of lightening, because you feel you’ve already done that (as you have). Your parents
were taken away so you could grow. You are preposterous and unable to change. I took away
your friends, not because they can’t tell the truth, eventho they can’t, and not because I’m
jealous, tho I am.
I took them away because the world is crazy. The world’s insane. Mankind is barking mad. I
cannot protect everyone that loves you—that’s everyone, but quibblers, of course. And I can’t
protect everyone you love—that is everyone.
If you had a friend left; a lover, other than me; a husband, other than me; a father, other than
me; a wife; a mother; a child; a friend, they would be killed by the world. Their heads would be
cut off on the Evening News. I am frightened for the world. I am not frightened for you, you’re
protected. I am more frightened for them if they ever anger you. If they killed Verily…What’s
his name. G
Oliver. B
Oliver. They would drop into hell, like snow into rain, and I would lose them all, all of them, and
you know it. They would all be killed. Dead before they could be saved. And no one could stop
it. That’s why I had to take everything away. I’m sorry. I had to move all the breakables.
They’re nuts…..My Son’s gay, he likes it. Big deal! What’s it to you?
When has it ever been up to you, what I can or cannot do!
I know…you would destroy everything you know for every option you obvi… G
(obviate: to prevent by making unnecessary) Like you, God recedes when he recedes.
*

Chapter 11 (this is a small chapter, because it’s shorthand)

He turns toward the window on the world and says: Your problem is not too much love or love
that you don’t cotton-to. Or love that expresses desire. Or love you don’t consider love, because
it’s not, that is…not always. Or the fear that all fears are really one fear, and no one starts
counting until they have a few, of anything. Hate is your problem. I would think that would be
obvious. It will keep you Earth-bound, living in squalor. Pure, self-serving, stranded, squalor.
You can always say No. That doesn’t mean I need your permission to speak. Rise up. G
*
Billy added: If my dog is killed, I will survive, you will survive, Everything will survive. I have
come to terms with the insanity I see everyday. Verily understands animal behavior better than I
do anyway. If I’m killed, I will be many times stronger, and you will walk backward into
darkness. I have turned you around. But I’ve not shown you the way. I’ve only alluded to it.
You may be left to figure this out by yourself. Comma comma comma

God.
Yes. G
Was Beulah upset about something before I came in?
Yes, she’s upset about the devil. G
He used to bring her chocolates, and I think she misses him. G
And I’m not hopelessly disorganized…look at that. Billy says, pointing to the work all neatly
boxed.
Yes, God says. Nothing is hopeless. G
And I’m not as promiscuous as Christ. B
I never said you were. G
Oh. B
What was that piece of paper—sticking out of the box doing? B
What paper. G
That paper, Billy says, and turns the box, unnecessarily, so God can see it.
Nothing, just a small piece of a piece of paper that doesn’t fit. G
Let me see, then Billy goes to lift the lid and can’t.
Trouble. God asks, and walks over to the filing cabinet.
Billy makes a face, grits his teeth, and tries to lift the cardboard lid so he can pull out the piece of
paper.
That’s stuck, God says.
Yes. Then Billy wraps his arms around the box, and tries to lift the cover. B
Good and stuck, God says.
Billy looks at Him and makes a face, that for all the world looks like he’s struggling to lift the lid.
Billy doesn’t struggle, but he can do a pretty good imitation.
Maybe if you try gently and slowly to lift it to your consciousness, the resistance of the air will be
overcome, allowing you to raise it. G
Billy tried, and it began to move. God put his hand on the top of the box. Why do you want to
do that. G
I want to see the piece of paper that doesn’t fit in the recognizable container. B
You want to fix it, don’t you. You want to make it better. G
I just want to see it. B
Well, it’s right there. G
Answer for Everything, I want to examine it, Billy says. As if God were a child.
Well sure, let’s try to get it all to fit. G
I think if you lift it up, I can slide it out. B
Okay, that’s a good idea. I’m so glad you came in today. G
In where? B
Here. G
Yes, this has been fun. Are you lifting? B
Yes. G
What if you stop making that face, and lift it from the inside, Billy said.
Oh, that might work. G
Might work? I’ll just do everything. B
Fine, okay, I’m inside. Ready. G
Yes, I’m ready. B
Wait a minute, God says. If I lift from the inside, I’m pushing down on the paper your trying to
pull out.
You’re…Your point is. Billy said, without going up at the end of his sentence.
I say we leave it. G
Why? It probably doesn’t belong. Maybe it’s a sign. What if it doesn’t agree or contradicts
something? B
It could completely ruin the whole piece—all I’ve worked for. You’ve worked for. B
Well, so what. G
So what!?? B
Nothing’s perfect. Stop worrying. G
Beulah enters the front office carrying a donut box, and walks around her desk. The phone rings.
Hello God…I mean, God’s office. BB
See. Now she’ll want to make coffee, and I’ll be eating donuts, fresh from the bakery all day.
She bought about a dozen, judging by the way she walked with that box. Stay and help me eat
donuts. G
Beulah, please make a pot of coffee, blank is staying for a while. G
I’m on a reduced carbohydrate diet. B
You’ll stay, you’ll eat. They’re as crazy as a buckle of armadillos on a cliff. Don’t worry,
they’re not going anywhere. Sit. Relax. Enjoy! G

See. Some days are just like that. You thought you’d spend an hour talking to God, over a cup of
coffee, and now you have to eat four or five donuts. Don’t worry about the odd piece that sticks
out here or there. That’s just the way it goes. That’s life. B

Billy took Loafer for a walk, and on Windy Street, he passed a house with its door wide open. It
was quite an odd sight, even for Airsupp. It looked like a house on a house. You couldn’t tell
which house was larger. All you could tell for sure was that one house was higher than the other,
built upon the other—it looked metaphorical. No one around, and dozens of little amber lights
strung thru the bushes on either side of the front door, amazingly bright, considering it was ten in
the morning on a cloudless sunny day. They were probably getting things ready for a party.
Someday, he said to himself. Someday, people will keep their doors open if they want to, and
turn Christmas lights on in the middle of the day if they feel like it. Someday.

4-10-02 Delbert part three

I was soaking in the tub and suddenly Delbert. I looked around quickly, and there was only one
thing red in the entire bathroom, I wanted to take the opportunity to establish once and for all this
idea that I just have to understand because it is driving me crazy— like a poppy seed. Come here.
Hah. Delbert said.
Thank God and the competitive soap industry, for bubbles. That was me talking to me.
Thank God for you. D
So… look there—from my point of view…M
Hi boss. It’s so nice to see you. Why am I here? D
Red. Delbert—explain…go. M
I just got here. D
Start explaining. M
Once again I was jumping right into the middle, so I backed off.
Time flew past. Delbert could eat up time, like a thousand baby-diapers.
Okay, look, that toothbrush, it’s red. From my point of view it’s almost bullet shaped.
Got it. D
Well it’s RED!
You never said that toothbrush. I thought you meant only the red. D
Only the red? And not the toothbrush it was on? Delbert was from the 19th century and had
probably never seen a tooth brush.
I never saw red like wham! Red! Never. D
Why do you keep saying that? M.
Delbert understood my quagmire better than I, and in a n instant.
I am implicit within you. D
You’re what? M
I saw that show on the Bohm experiment too. D
You were outside in the back yard. M
There is no back yard. D
There certainly is. M
Look God, or whatever you are. In the world I am in, nothing is explicit—all is mixed, and only
erupts to the surface as a one-time-thing—whole—and none-like-it-anywhere. Thus YOU. In
your world. D
I looked in the mirror as he spoke. I rescue this guy from I don’t know what, teach him or try to
teach him how to say his own name, and now he’s explaining stuff to me, explaining stuff to me!
Is this one of those long explanations? I’m going Dancing with God. M
He cancelled, and you know it. Anyway, this is a short explanation. D
Great! Just great! Red is not red, except to me. M
God, , in your, this world, everything is explicit to you and implicit to me. D
I’m going to go to the store. Can we continue this in the car? M
Well, that’s why I’m here. D
Delbert explained basically, that I implied the existence of the toothbrush but asked him did he
ever see red shaped like that, and he said no. that’s that. More than an assumption—we seem to
divide things up into inherently explicit ideas and pseudo-forms. All toothbrushes are red
toothbrushes except some are not.
In ‘Delbert’ world everything is a word of God, symbolic of God, only of God, and wholly
interesting in its whole entire indivisible form as tho it were a one-time offer and told no
toothbrush story. Temporally static. Unchangeable. Everything just is.
If you ask a Haint like Delbert, in the middle of one of his spasms of transference, did he like the
part where home-alone boy brushes his teeth? He is as likely as not, to say he never saw red
before, because that is essentially what you asked him—tho you think you asked something else.
You only implied the existence of the form ‘toothbrush.’ What I apparently said in Haint was: do
you like that red?
Delbert also had to tell me he did not come to this country or whatever this is, without a
toothbrush. He was born here. And thanks to blessed me, he has been allowed to stay in the
Holy of Holies—and Lord Lord Lord on and on…I knew I should have gotten rid of him when I
had the chance. The minute I want to ask him a serious question he starts immediately to bother
me. I was anxious to trip him up or send his suddenly bright, but still sorry-ass packing. When I
had to go once more to the well, I just had to.

Delbert…you are implicitly in me. Thanks for clearing that the fuck up. As ideas go you are one
of the most rubbery. How long have you been dead? M
Delbert burst out laughing. Threw his arms out to his theoretical sides and said, Boss, I be born
alive, and here I is. In Haint: this is me, I’m here, and here I am being me. If you see me, I’m
here.

I took a bucket to the well this time:

Delbert…do you see this? And I held up a red sleeve.
Yes, if you do. D
Don’t try to stump me. Does it look odd? M
I ain’t never seen nothing like it. D
Why? M
You see odd. D
It looks sort of all bursting out at the seems don’t it…doesn’t it? M
Is you say is how I see. D
Delbert didn’t mean to agree with me. He was me. To him, everything is implicit, everything is
everything and everything is the same. If a word comes along and divides things,, then they are
divided. I still think it has something to do with the lazy eye seeing slightly blue and the real eye
seeing slightly pink. Anyway, I wasn’t going anywhere where driving would get me there, so we
stayed home.

I like the relationship between people that’s turned-up to its most playful. I believe that is it,
whatever it is, at its best. More like chocolate and less like hard candy.

God called back and the party’s on…Of course, I’m still the hopelessly disorganized one!
My Pakistani neighbor from down the street, and her kids just came to the door, and I bought
chocolate for a fundraiser. I also shook her hand. She was offended that I touched her. I could
see in her eyes a look of shear terror. Hey listen, I do respect her culture but it’s—my porch—my
rules.

Don’t come to my porch all covered in itinerary—it looks like a travelogue to me. I’ve never
been into dress-up, and I’m not going to start now—go somewhere else. Everyone thinks they’ve
traveled a long way—But it’s always here and its always now, and you’ve just wasted a lot of
time, and now you want to waste mine. There are things I have to do that can’t be seen—I don’t
know what to tell you—go. Most people around here seem to show up in their own din. It’s very
hard for me to listen thru all that jingle jangle. …Wouldn’t it be funny if after all my
preparation people brought me peace?

The Stadium
The day finally came when the people of Earth learned to live in Peace. Billy’s sentence was
over and he had not spent one dime of the money from the work. He had not traded on God or
the name of God or in the name of God for one single thing—not one half-empty cup of water—
nothing. And he decided to have a coming-out party, a real one.
They built a stadium to seat seven hundred million people. 700,000,000.
Billy gave specific instructions on how big it was to be, and how it was to be designed. He tried
to make it large enough to seat everyone in the world but if it were any larger a lot of people
would have been stuck behind poles and wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway.
In the center was a large Projection Movie Screen one hundred stories high, one hundred stories
wide, shaped like a cube with five equal sides. The law of supply and demand made bullet proof
glass the material of choice—it was so inexpensive. He wanted the images to be in 3-d but that
was impractical, so he had the audience wear special glasses, If they wanted to. It wouldn’t help,
but they were free to wear them.
It took several weeks to construct the stadium, a seemingly endless array of technical and
logistical problems attended its ascent.
The night of the sound check, Billy was in Chicago rehearsing in secret, with a band and a very
frustrated producer who shook like spaghetti, when he got upset. Then bad news:
The sound guy, Justin, stepped up to the microphone in the center of the square, or nearly square
screen that was about 53 acres or so. He stood where Billy was to stand, in a small circle of white
linoleum that was polished and looked pretty good. Billy had given specific instructions about it,
even tho it was not visible from the seats. It could have been thirty times the size and bright red
and it still wouldn’t be visible from the seats.
The dot was almost in the center of the screen, but not quite. It was essentially the only mark on
the entire stage except an X of masking tape 70 meters due north where Billy could stand and be
standing symbolically in the pupil of his own left eye, unless he moved too much or didn’t stand
up straight enough. Another problem.
Anyway, Justin stood in the circle in the square and as he raised his hand to tap on the
microphone it squeeled and the echo bounced off the practically empty seats and came roaring
back into the center of the nearly circular stadium. The sound waves came together in a crack
that shook the city and evaporated about seventy five technical monitors, ushers, and security
personnel who were milling around on the Dialogue, the name Billy made-up for the platform,
that was 153 acres approximately square, that was both screen and stage. The crack was so
ferocious it made a small hole in the fabric of space-time and everyone who heard it went deaf
who wasn’t evaporated, except for the sound engineer, Justin, who saw it, and for some strange
reason didn’t hear it.
When Billy heard what had happened he felt horrible, and asked them why they hadn’t built the
sound eliminator adjacent to the sound producer as he had specified. They all hoed and hummed,
and the ones that were still alive, and could hear the question, said that they didn’t see any point
in it, so they left it out.

Billy went back to rehearsing. Justin was so shocked to realize that if he hadn’t been standing in
that exact spot he would be dead too. It made great publicity for the show—The protective value
of the circle in the square—but they really didn’t need much publicity since practically everyone
knew about it already.
He lost, then suddenly found, in Chicago, the will to go on. He found security in knowing God.
He had traveled all those roads before; guilt at not having supervised properly; fear that, after all
his effort, it came in the end to death and nothing; despair, and sadness at horrendous personal
fault; forgiveness, and apologies that meant nothing. Hopelessnes. Helplessness. Sorrow that
seemed to know no bounds. Billy was crushed by their absence. It was a dull un-knowing that
clamored at his gate. I don’t want to live here any more, he said. But he did. He did live here. It
was home. Normally it would take a lifetime to overcome this tragedy: Billy fell inside,
overcame, and suddenly rose.
Billy smiled. That was just how this all began. He had walked out with the desire to do the great
thing he didn’t know he could do. He was lost and then suddenly …a rose.
Maybe life was symbolic after all. Maybe death was as well. Maybe God was right to give the
rose to Billy. Billy saw God’s face in the sky over lake Michigan and smiled. God smiled back.
And Billy thought to himself: Well, it’s still not a ring.
What would normally have ruined his day, and made continuing rehearsals nearly impossible,
suddenly made everything clear. Billy blinked and went on. There was no one in his life, now or
ever, that could make him stop what he was doing, make him destroy his Work, or make him
change a single word, by their absence or presence.

Many people are, like Billy himself, willing to take huge risks. Failure waits around every curve;
you may be called the worst person to ever live; thousands may die, and the more you try to stop
it, the worse it could get. People may run to Wall Street for profit…
Some may determine that you have to be cruel to be kind. Some may stop believing in outcome
as a series of outcomes, and see only… you guessed it…more opportunities to be right. But
that’d be a mistake. Was it something you did, or didn’t do; left out, lost, or meant to say? If you
could undo it, you would, but you can’t. You have certainty too, but there are times…Then he
remembered, he had already told them where to start—With respect: And while you’re at it,
show some respect for yourselves. Hard is not cruel. And we all know that greed runs many
shows.

This was The Reconciliation Concert. We were going to reconcile our failures; our fears within
our selves; our own self-doubts and unearned privileges; unsettled grievances; un-mounted joys.
We were going…I was going to reconcile one to another. Not one soul to another, there was after
all only one. I was going to reconcile that soul to its self. And all individual selves to
themselves. Rich poor; black white. The brown to the black, the black to the red, the red to the
yellow, the yellow to the taupe. The dead to the living. The comedic to the tragic. The dramatic
to the ridiculous. The old to the young: this one to that one; each to every; one religion to each
and each to one; The religious—‘I’m stuck’—to the non-religious—‘I think I move separately’;
male to female; wronged to made wrong. All of it to all of it. Relativism to pluralism. Free will
to predestination. The said yes to—The Told No. The undeservedly happy to the wretchedly
miserable; the masked dying, to the brazenly living; groups without names, to groups with
people, without names; those who would fight, to those who would refuse to learn; and all of it,
back to all of it. But ALL OF IT. Everyone to everyone to everything that is, to all of it.

This was not your average let’s get together and have a good-time-forget-your-troubles and try to
love one another concert…and he knew it, and nothing—no matter how horrible would get in his
way.
In fact, with the devil dead, and blame, free to land here, there and everywhere like typhus, Billy
stood up and said out loud. “Everything…..only makes me want to do this all the more. It only
makes me more resolved, more content, and more strong.”
God said over Billy’s shoulder, You mean stronger. Billy smiled and tried not to laugh.
Yes…that’s right Babe, I mean stronger. Thanks.
God had, to his knowledge, never been called sweetheart, sweetie, honey, dear, doll, darling,
babe, mate, man, pal, girl, boy, bud, buddy, boss, bro, yo, dude, doc, or any of the thousands of
pet names that Billy threw about in front of himself like petals. God was not sure what he
thought about it, then he was suddenly sure what he thought. Babe, I’m Babe. This was going to
be a really good concert. He got to his seat with three bags of popcorn and the biggest box of
malted milk balls they had, before anyone else arrived, except for the cameramen and sound
engineers, of course. Billy was strong enough to reconcile the wind, metaphorically speaking.
And God took his seat.
Billy didn’t have to worry anymore. He was very near the end of his life, and it felt like he was
very near the beginning of something else. Once he saw the road he was on, he stopped searching
for content. He was going to do the best he could. That was all he could do. The very best he
could with what he had left. And he looked out the window and saw his Mother’s face smiling
back. And he said in her honor: “This time, I really mean it.” And Billy laughed and cried at the
same time. The exact same time.
That was enough rehearsing. It wasn’t working. He would just go on as is. Well… dressed, but,
as is. He was sick of rehearsing.

He was planning to wear his tux with the yellow tie that he liked so much, but the producer
explained he had to wear something more flashy to be seen, so he loaned him a sequined tuxedo
that glittered like a million diamonds—It was nice and not too heavy. He couldn’t help staring at
the sequins he wore, trying to see his reflection, but he couldn’t see himself in what he wore, and
he couldn’t stop looking. He wanted to wear one of those big dog collars you get at the vet’s, or
blinders to help him keep his focus.
Then they made him practice some more. They rehearsed him like God had done, and he still got
half of it wrong, but the place had been booked, and well, Yes, The Show Must Go On. The
night approached, like a dream, even at the time. One star could be seen…
He walked what seemed like five miles to the center of the dialogue, wishing he had put the circle
not in the center of the 153 acre square, but off to the side and closer to the elevator, but that
wasn’t the symbol, everyone insisted the circle had to be in the center, which of course was not
true—and he should have stuck to his guns, so to speak. Anyway, he walked out to the
microphone to check out the audience. They’d already stopped selling hot dogs, and put a ban on
cell phones during the show, which everyone ignored and then got yelled at. A lot of people on
one side of the stadium had to call their friends (approximately) 15 kms. away, on the other side
of the stadium to find out how they were, and what it was like on their side, even tho practically
everyone saw practically the same thing—if they weren’t watching everyone else around them,
and were watching The Big Cube. The Big Cube, was his name for the big cube that was a five-
sided movie screen, and very expensive. But worth it.
It really looked great, especially when they showed black and white images, for some reason.
Still hard to duplicate natural colors I guess.
So then Billy tapped the mike for luck, and to test The Thing, his name for the sound absorbing-
destroying thing he built, so that everything would work, and no one had to die—even tho some
had been evaporated already. They were there in spirit. Their silver-like dust could still be seen
if you looked at the dialogue from his angle.
Billy found the dust disturbing, but there are no vacuum cleaners that can get every speck of dust
no matter how long you run them. Anyway…The place was packed. A slight wind picked up,
the expectant kind. Billy walked to the front of the Dialogue and looked over. No one saw him.
The closest person was more than a mile away, might as well be a million. He watched the sun
set while people found their seats. Billy had been there for quite some time, before he realized he
had been there many times. As impossible as it may seem, all he did was take a few steps back
from the edge, back towards his spot, and he was in the middle of the dialogue, waiting for people
to jump to him.
A hush came over the crowd. He smiled and looked down at his flashy cuffed pants and duded-
up jacket and he wished he’d felt more like dancing. The lights went down in the stadium as the
sun blazed the most amazing color into the clouds, all around. It was the only thing he’d ever
seen that was like Heaven (that he could talk about), but how do you describe a color—it was
orange and red and it flew.
The lights came up, and he was introduced. Without the cameras running, no one knew that Billy
had been there the whole time. His back-up singers were about a block away. He motioned for
them, and they came running to his side, tripping over cords and knocking over microphone
stands. It’s easy to lose your balance the first time you try to move on the dialogue. It made him
laugh. Now, he was in the mood. Let’s roll…

He said “I” and the echo which was slight, reverberated so nicely, Billy was even impressed. The
stadium started to vibrate as planned. A light came on like a fifteen million watt light bulb and
Billy sparkled, and he was glad he put the dark red contacts in because he almost forgot. Then
the screen lit up and Billy’s glittery outfit was now really big and really really bright. It looked
like he was standing on pure light, to him.
Everyone else saw an average looking man in a sparkly suit, standing about a mile away saying
something about ‘I.’
Billy, being unfamiliar with seeing his image on camera while he was in it, wanted very much to
see his own eye, up close so he crouched down slightly, and his eye, which was about as big as a
baseball diamond surrounded him, ironically he was in far left field which had always been his
position as a boy, and there it was—plain as could be. His eye was dark red after all. ‘Still got
it,’ he said to himself while 700,000,000 million people looked on uneasily. And another couple
hundred million watched from a remote location. Their armchairs.
His voice quavered slightly as he held the word which was not a word, but merely a sound, The
producer crossed his fingers at this point, then suddenly Billy wowed them:

I… should have known better with a girl like you…

that I would love everything that you do
and I do, hey hey hey and I dooo.

Then, just as planned, as he sang hey hey hey, his flat voice which no amount of sound
engineering could seem to improve, was taken over by the image and sound of Johnny B singing
the song. “Whoa…whoa, I...”
The roof came off the place. It was pandemonium. That’s an expression, there was no roof
because there was no need for a roof. If it rained they would just change dates and hope for clear
weather. A roof would have cost 658 billion dollars and they would have blown their budget
completely. The carbon dioxide that was generated by people looking for the warmest seats,
created an updraft, making any discussion of rain-dates purely academic. But everything went
extremely well. The crowd loved it, apparently.
He knew they would. The image on the screen was a tight tight close up of Billy’s makeup and
contacts with a motion picture of Johnny and Paul and George and Ringo superimposed to look
like they were inside of Billy, and made it look like he could sing and dance which, of course, he
couldn’t. He could barely stand and talk. It was done very well and not tacky at all.

Never realized what a kiss could be.

This could only happen to me…

The camera came in for Billy’s big moment and he gave it all he had…
 this could only happen to me can’t cha see can’t cha ssee (this was when I leaned back and the
crowd went nuts)
That when I tell you that I love you o o ohh
you’re gonna say you love me too o o oo oo
and when I ask you to be mine a a aaaah-ine,
you’re gonna say you love me tooo
oh oh oh oh I……………

That really took them by surprise, and it took Billy by surprise and you could even see the look of
shock on Johnny B’s face. The shot of him looking so surprised looked like it was just happening
now, it was hard to believe that those close-ups were almost 50 years old. People gasped, when
cameras flashed, all over the stadium and seven hundred million people all stood up and began to
scream back the words of the song and everyone sang as well as they could—which was none too
well, but it sounded fantastic. Billy was going to start to cry. He could feel it, but that’s what he
had been practicing—not crying, not crying in public. Oh the hell with it. Johnny B and the boys
were plan b, and they took over. Billy just danced. And if he collapsed from nervous tension, or
missed a step the producer had a montage of Billy walking on the beach, ready to go. But The
screen was full of music and familiar images and the stadium was full of screaming, shouting, and
a great big loud and joyful noise. Everyone was surprised, shocked that it was live.
It just got better. Billy was buoyed by the love he felt from the audience and he kept going and
they seemed to understand him somehow. And knew this was something he was doing for them.
He didn’t have anything to say that had not been said a thousand times before, by greater minds
and brighter voices than his. He was in the center, but that was debatable. He reflected light well
and that was about all the cameras could show, the rest, all of it actually, the whole thing, every
bit of it, happened inside. And everyone knew it. I let it happen. It was time.
Tho he stunk, there wasn’t anybody else that could have pulled this off. He was the only one.
Maybe God was right.
The song ended and he went right into the next song in his reconciliation concert.
They sold twenty-eight hundred million, well, two, almost three billion or so hotdogs in one day.
They made no money, in fact they lost their shirts on the deal, but it didn’t matter, this had to be
done. And it had to be free. And that was that.
Too much water under too many bridges, too much helplessness & hopelessness, too little insight,
too much despair. Fun’s fun but it had to stop.

Ф You have to stop now and come in; it’s getting cold and it’s not getting any lighter; put your
things away, clean up; stop fighting while I’m talking to you, apologize for that… And I don’t
care who started it, apologize to your sister and brother—before I have to come out there. This
time I mean it…Ф

Everyone was in the audience, God, Fa, Ida, Julie and Mark. Clarke was in the sky somewhere
over China, Claire was trying to not-be her mother. David was taking a test for admission to
medical school. I was very happy, finally. And felt good that everyone had such a nice time at
my coming out slash reconciliation party.

I tried to get Natalie to come to the Dialogue but she didn’t want to. I said all you have to do is
tell the truth, but she felt funny. I think she was afraid to. I think she thought she had to say and
do what everyone told her she should say and do, instead of just listen to me and walk out and not
look down. It’s just yourself reflected back really large, and nothing to be frightened about. I
told her I would do all the work. I would make sure she didn’t fall. But the dialogue was huge, it
would be almost impossible to fall off. I mean there was no balustrade (railing), but there didn’t
need to be any. She’d see things better from the audience, but it would be nice to have someone I
knew, around. No one would even see her, she could stand naked and do jumping jacks and
everyone would still see the dialogue essentially unflawed, picture perfect. But she might have
felt like she could just fly off in a gust of wind, which would take a pretty big gust, or slip on the
silvery powder, which could happen, but wasn’t very likely.
I told her I brought over a hundred of the world’s greatest drummers onto the dialogue because I
needed them for Right back where we started from, and Lean on me—even tho Freddy said it
could be done digitally—And no one even saw them. I had to tell him, All drumming is done
digitally. I told her the circle was plenty big enough to hold her, but I don’t know, I guess she
didn’t believe me that it was safe. I don’t know, I really don’t. Maybe she thought I wasn’t
serious, or she was not worth it, or I didn’t really want her there. I wish I knew, she just didn’t
come. She saw everything from the wings, I guess you could say. Well, I wanted to share it with
her but…well. I still love her, it didn’t change anything. I could have used the support as I spoke
to six billion, four hundred and sixty four million, nineteen thousand, three hundred, now
6464020019 people and wanted to be with her. But, well, I was born this way, maybe she was
born that way. I can’t change—wouldn’t if I could. Don’t need to, or want to, or care to. I don’t
know why other people are like other people. When you figure it out, let me know. Mei is still a
dick. Fa is lovely and careless, and essentially a pretender (a faux bonhomme). Ida, God bless
her, still working. And all the rest. I asked God for help by just standing there with my figurative
drawers down around my knees. He wrote the fiction, then he tore it up, and gave me a job.
That’s all I know…Artists!
He said he needed me because it was a no-brainer, whatever that means. Told me he’d do all the
work, and when I said I’d need full veto power, he laughed and then gave it to me. He treats me
like a child or something. I digress…
I hadn’t arranged seating, but many of the white people sat in one section and many of the black
people sat in another section. A lot of people who couldn’t read English thought they had to sit in
the seats with people who looked or talked like them, but the signs were extremely clear. I drew
them myself—in pictograms: they read left to right: sit any-fucking-where you want to sit, it
makes no difference Ə this is an inside place. Still, well anyway…We, my back ups, my plan
b’s and I, sang every song we knew. And some we didn’t. We sang Stay Gold, by Stevie
Wonder. James, by Billy Joel. We sang Uninvited, by Alanis Morissette, which was very hard to
sing—I played the piano.
The producer had set up a monitor so I could see the audience, I thought that was very thoughtful.
I was sorry I’d given Freddy spaghetti such a hard time. But I thought it was just a rehearsal, you
know? The monitor lit on a little black girl when I was about to reconcile the single to the
married, and I couldn’t get her out of my mind, so I moved the mike to my left hand, and used
Natalie Cole’s This Will Be, which was the next song on the program, closed my eyes, let it go,
and we reconciled on a deeper level, from now on.
Billy made the universal sign for ‘the dialogue needs to be red now,’ and eventually it turned to a
gigantic red square. The audience gasped at the glow from the audience on the other side, tried to
imagine that they looked that way to them, but couldn’t. Symbols can be read so many different
ways it can sometimes make even plain speaking hard, let alone singing in the middle of your
own dialogue. Billy had had to let a lot of things go before he even ever considered the dialogue,
before pen hit paper. Ability, failure, stupid narrow-minded insensitive people who don’t want to
be abbreviated (snip), varying opinions, misunderstanding, etc. He stood there mike in hand,
everything red, no more to say. And he sang The Impossible Dream without removing references
to stars, astrology, space exploration, mutilation, killing imaginary enemies, dreaming of death—
and sang it the way it was written because he thought it was uplifting, and because he felt like it.

Then Billy decided it was time to reconcile black to white; master to slave; century to century.
You know, guilt is a good thing, but very hard to swallow. Others see you trying to
swallow…their advantage…you may choke. God had given Billy a song to sing, written by a
man who spent most of his life in silence. And Billy would have practiced, but the piano player
couldn’t find his key. He felt a chill there on the dialogue—a wind kicked up. Billy also just
remembered he hadn’t spoken to the audience yet. He blew into the mike as only an amateur
would. It sounded like thunder. He said, Hello, and that if they wanted to join in at any time they
were welcomed to write in the spaces. Billy never rehearsed the extemporaneous-speaking part.
He said, You can sing if you want to. Many people who had never been able to sing, found that
for the first time in their lives they could really sing. That’s not what Billy meant, but that was
the nature of the dialogue—it was really big, and kind of magical. Everyone had already decided
to sing for them selves, for him self, or for her self already—They didn’t really need Billy’s
permission. He gave the sound engineers the universal sign for ‘lower the octave of my voice,’
but they just stared at him. One of the stage hands opened up a trap door, six meters behind him,
Billy just shook his head. God laughed and spilled his soda.
He was ready to go. God said it didn’t matter what song he chose, or whether he wrote one
himself––it could not be done with a song…so Billy began…Smile. Smile thru your fear and
sorrow, smile and maybe tomorrow…you…He stopped. It was the only time in the entire concert
anyone saw him falter or loose his nerve. It was just that Billy had never been able to smile thru
his fear, not really, he always caved in to it—one way or the other. He had also never smiled thru
his sorrow, it always enveloped him. God was right. There was no song; slavery wasn’t even
dead yet, so how could anyone know how it was going to end. For some reason, Billy couldn’t
fathom, voices weren’t being raised against this drumbeat of suppression. Billy’s mind raced in
panic, Songs and snatches of songs flew thru his head. Mind games; Instant Karma; Saigon;
Stony end, something… momma cradle me again; I Try; In my room; Long may you run;
Celebrate me home; In the middle of the night (The River of Dreams); Aretha’s Think. He forgot
to ask her if she wanted to do ‘back-up’—darn! Sly and the family stone…the one with…about
everyday people. An odd song danced in front of his face, and slowed him down, It rang
out...‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.’ It wound down, and gave him time to think it thru;
slavery was picking up speed, even as Billy was trying to find his place.
Plan b…Billy wanted to begin, You’ll never never know, the one who loves you so, no, you don’t
know me—the Kenny Loggins version, just because he liked it, or The way you make me feel,
Thank God he’d sprung for the drummers. He looked at the cuff on his wrist—and he hesitated.
People in the crowd began to feel very uncomfortable, he didn’t have to look in the monitor to see
it. He was gonna skip the whole thing and go right into Jail House Rock, by Elvis. They had
worked out such amazing sub-sonic effects: They could make the whole place vibrate. But he
was saving that one. Billy was still thinking about a special effect for when he spoke, his words
would vibrate inside, but they wouldn’t have time to rehearsed it. It went: Ain’t no mountain
high enough. Ain’t no valley low enough, nothin’…Later, people said it was ‘almost perfect.’—–
–he gave the band the sign for ‘This can’t be done,’ and the band looked around as if Billy were
talking to someone behind them. He said: “Keep going,” and he flailed his arms wildly in a very
poor imitation of Elvis that he’d rehearsed all week (You shoulda heard-them- knocked-out
jailbirds singing that rock—Everybody let’s rock) . They began Smile again…Billy had no
choice, and he sang… maybe tomorrow you’ll see the sun come shining thru for you…The
concert was ruined. All of it, not maybe…definitely… ruined. Maybe?!!! There was no
maybe—no hope. Here of all places—the Teardrop Peninsula, in the land of Hope, it evaporated,
like an idea. He’d over-reached, he tried to do something too impossible. He wanted to say
goodbye to the hard, horrible times…but they weren’t over yet. Lives were still being ruined,
sold, everyday. Well. He finished the song that he’d started out to sing. Not the song he wanted
to sing. He wanted to say, There is no song. I can’t steal any more songs. I can’t even sing…and
I dance like a crab. This can’t be done. He waited for the first few beats of Jail House Rock.
And he stood there. It felt like the worst thing in the world—those few moments. It seemed like
time just wouldn’t budge. He was lost. He was horrified at what a mess—the mess he brought
upon himself. Then he realized it isn’t a song. It isn’t a song because it isn’t in a song. It can’t
be a song it has...if there were ever any way to reconcile this, it would have to be with hands, not
voices—hands.
God said, You mean faith, done with faith. G
That’s what I said, “Hands.” B
God shrugged—Billy translates to the very moment, the words that change so often.
You could have sung George Michael’s Faith. God said.
Is that what you meant? B
…Stop... You could’ve sung your Glory of Love number, or Boogie–Woogie Bugle Boy of
Company B! It’s faith that does miracles. Faith is thought by many to be done on the knees, or
thru the feet, or by candle light—in front of glass. I say it’s done with your hands. Subject by
subject by subject. Your mind talks to your hands, and your hands to your mind. G
Well, okay…faith—He’s usually right about these things. B

He remembered asking Delbert. Delbert said they weren’t allowed to sing anything but ‘work’
songs, they weren’t allowed to have an opinion…and what did I think about the BeeGees, There’s
a light…never shown on me…It’s called, To love somebody. Billy considered it, Delbert was a
slave, had been—he said that song had a haunting sound—reminded him of something: We
didn’t know we were from Africa, we didn’t know why we couldn’t understand each others’
tongue, and we didn’t know why we weren’t allowed to learn our new language—they tried to
keep us as stupid as possible. Then he says, What about the one…There’s a light in the darkness
of everybody’s life. Billy told him that was from Rocky Horror Picture Show, ‘Over at the
Frankenstein Place.’ B
“Really?” D
“Delbert. They have nothing in common even. They both just happen to have metaphorical
references to light, you know, and darkness. I’m trying to kill monsters not create them.” B
“Wow, one thing leads to another so easily here!” Delbert said, Then how ‘bout, Where do the
children play? by Cat Stevens.
Silence.
Well, Billy said. That’s an opinion song, but, but…..Billy didn’t always understand Delbert—
he couldn’t. And so he rejected it.
God tells me to forget about talking with my hands on stage, and Delbert thinks we can just
segue into the horror genre, or science fiction, at any given moment, for any reason at all—I’ll
just do everything.

Billy said to the crowd: I’m sorry, I’ve lost my place. I don’t know where I am…and to himself
he said, I don’t even know how I got here. He forgave himself just that easily—even as the
dialogue showed Billy superimposed, standing on a beach, and a pre-recorded Billy, walking
aimlessly at the water’s edge, kicking at a sand dollar. The cameras flew and floated all around
him, recording in real time, his biggest failure yet. One camera hovered right in front of him like
a bee. Billy just looked at it, and smiled the smallest smile many people would ever see in their
lives. Billy was familiar with big black bees and stared it down. He shrugged. The camera
backed up—for perspective. He was small.
He tried…he failed…it was a wash. You have to forgive yourself first. Forgive your self for
trading in humanness, for m trying to make them satisfy your needs; or for smiling as tho that
were your job…when, of course, it’s not. Billy worked it out. It was in his hands to finish what
he’d started. It was in his hands to keep going even after failing publicly. It was in his hands to
stop or start over. Billy chose to start over. And said to himself…never again. Never again. But
he’d said that before…about a million times.
He stood there for a minute wondering what the hell he could possibly do, and someone came
from the audience to help him. Someone who refused his offer to be a back–up singer, but who
stayed on the dialogue just the same. Someone who knew a little bit more about slavery than he
did. He thanked God she showed up when she did, and they sang Proud Mary together, and it
blew the place apart. Everyone thought it was planned. It made the subsonic effects they’d
engineered feel like nothing. Billy almost fell over. No one would have guessed that he would
have left such a large hole in the program on purpose. ‘I never lost one minute of
sleepin’…worrying about the way things might have been.’ Billy could never, never, never have
sung those words without help—never.
The crowd saw Billy fail and forgive himself. Not on the Big Cube, but somewhere in the
dialogue. Billy chose a space that was safe. Safe spaces are like that, they do funny things. The
big cube was just a big cube, people saw what really happened, later-—-at home. On tape, you
know…plastic recording material.
Some thought he was the greatest actor in the world. He had planned to be, but he wasn’t…not
by a long shot. Freddy had planned to put up pictures of Billy walking on a beach with sea gulls
and several big-eyed children, but they couldn’t find the tape. The audience in the stadium saw
him kicking the sand over and over. Everyone saw him fail and it was, so many said, so much
better, so much more real…to see him alone, kicking the sand. They stared, as tho they had never
seen anyone fail and recover before.
God said, You turn failure into success, as if you were making butter—you just keep failing and
failing. He laughed. You wait until Everything around you says it can’t be done, and that’s when
you start. He motioned to one of the kids hawking produce, to bring him more popcorn. This
time he told the kid…Extra Butter! God sat happily talking to himself about how much butter he
wanted, which was apparently a lot.
Later, when asked about it, Billy said when he didn’t know what to do he would make an
awkward rendition of a smile—that’s what he always did. Billy was very glad he hadn’t told
anyone he was going to reconcile the history of slavery in the United States…one to another.
He’d have looked like a fool, felt like a fool, been laughed at. They all could think what they
wanted to think. It’s in your hands. It’s work—Work can make you feel like a fool like nothing
else can.
He saw a parting, there was a thing. Billy looked and saw a man walk with him on stage. Billy
was clear, so was this man. He helped Billy sing. He was a helper. Billy and Benny Harper
sang, What becomes of the broken hearted. No one saw Benny. Billy didn’t even see Benny, but
again, Billy couldn’t have done it by himself, never, never, never, have done it without him—
Who has love that’s now departed -–- Billy and Benny sang so hard and so gently, people who
listened went slowly back in time. It was gentle. Billy was the only one in the world who could
understand him, and he did. Benny was beautiful. And then he was gone. Even tho I don’t
succeed …..growing need.
Billy and Benny sang to each other. Billy leaned forward. And kept his eyes closed.

How do you read these symbols. God said.

They come to me.
God smiled, that all–knowing, somewhat-asymmetric smile.

He sang, with help, Judy Garland’s version of Battle Hymn of the Republic. They sang Ray
Charles’ America (twice). They sang Michael Jackson’s The Love You Save Maybe Your Own.
They sang, Life is a Cabaret, old chum. Billy sang one after another. He sang songs he didn’t
really know. He reconciled this one to that one—This way of seeing the world, to that way of
seeing the world, the way you might mix a fast song and a slow song as you move from one to the
other. Instead of stopping between songs. The overlapping rhythms and sounds was very
exciting…the mixing of tempos made it very rich—one, kind of bled into another. He hoped
someone was recording this. Freddy wanted them to end with Oh Night Divine… but Billy
thought that was a bit much, so they followed it with Joni Mitchell’s We Are Stardust, We Are
Golden, We Are Caught in the devil’s Bargain ...at which point Billy held up his left hand in a
sign of defiance, so everyone could see his bracelet—most everyone knew the story. They
digitally enhanced the bracelet and made it sparkle like a million diamonds. But it was still tin.
The devil was gotten rid of for about 2 dollar’s worth of tin, and no amount of special effects
could ever change that.
Billy, and the people he saw in front of him, and all around him, sang their hearts out that night.
It was a lot of fun. He drank a bottle of champagne on stage because he had been holding himself
so tight it was hard to move. He kinda missed the show business, you know? They sang Hole In
My Soul, Falling In Love, and The Other Side, by Steven Tyler (et al), and Billy shook off some
of the dust that was still on the dialogue. They sang that Louis Armstrong song about leaves of
green—and red roses. Note for future reference: don’t drink champagne right out of the bottle, it
goes straight up your nose, half of it was on the dialogue, half was on his clothes and the other
half he got—it took three bottles to drink one bottle—very sticky. Oh well—that’s show biz.
Billy was drunk before he realized it, and he was about to sing We shall overcome. God said
don’t. Billy said, How can I not! He didn’t. Billy didn’t sing it. He thought of changing the
tense, but then he’d have to abandon the cue cards. Turns out they had overcome already,
somehow. God said, Ready…Set…Go. He started the first word of the next song for Billy, and
Billy sang Amazing Grace. His thready, high pitched voice added volumes, plus, of course, he
meant every word. Everyone did internally what they were going to do anyway. The stadium
went silent, and when he sang the last note—slightly off key, the place erupted. The people who
were singing with him stopped. The ones who couldn’t believe it, sat down. Billy held the note
as long as he could—and then the whole place erupted. Billy’s life had always been delivered
twice. Events that had the same ending, happened different ways. And he smiled.
He sang, with help, “they tried to tell us we’re too young, too young to really be in love.” He sang
it with ‘an edge,’ and it was great, funny…..sad, but—great. Billy was old, but he didn’t feel old.
A lot of people got it.
The band was really really great too, they kept up with everything. He was glad they’d sprang for
the best. One or two of the guys in the band had actually written one or two of the songs he
sang—tho he didn’t know which ones. The thing about Billy, he didn’t really care. He thought
all of it was great. Then his back-up singers were blacked-out to create the illusion that he was
alone on the dialogue, including the men he’d hired to help him thru this: If, I loved you, words
wouldn’t come in an easy way (all that practicing for nothing)……I’d let my golden chances
pass…me…by (why should this time be any different). Billy had a lump in his throat, and just
nodded while people of a certain age, who knew the song, or the feeling, took over for him. They
weren’t miked but they filled the stadium beautifully, and out-sang his very pricey back-up
troupe: Round in circles I’d go….. If I Loved You (he did). Billy couldn’t do this anymore; “This
is too much!”
God said, No kidding. I got it from here…..I just needed someone to stand up and pretend they
cared. God turned to the band, and said, “Come on, let’s go…1-2- 3…” He sang to the smallest
audience He’d ever…..Yes, they loved it. No, it wasn’t intimate. They went nuts. He sang a
song, for Billy, He’d thought was so dirty, not so long ago— “I pulled my harpoon, out of my
dirty red bandanna, playing soft while Bobby sang the blues ah ah…Wind shield wipers slapping
time…I’m holding…Billy went unconscious.
The last thing he remembered was singing Dolly Parton’s If. They did the Whitney Houston
version, and the place was totally in pieces, completely shattered after that.
Billy saw in the song his own mortality. No one else did. God didn’t. No one did, but Billy did.
Billy and God were not the same…One used the other, and then gone back.
Billy was mush by the end of the night, and couldn’t remember the last 3 or 4 or 5 songs.
Everyone said it was unbelievable. So…that was good—They didn’t believe it, and he didn’t
remember it. And he still doesn’t know what song they ended with. People become so
unintelligible when they tallk about it. All they can get-out, is there was a kind of hush, and then
they cry and say how it affected them. What?? I hope he didn’t end with that Neil
Diamond/Monkees song about day dreams. Or that Barry White/rap mix, Never gonna give you
up—that’s our song! Someone said they loved the way I did Springsteen’s Born to run. If He
sang that, I hope he changed the lyric to walk. I asked; God said, Sure Billy—‘Tramps like us,
baby we were born to walk.’ …Sarcasm, Oh, Great! All I know is no one can talk about it, and
the tape they gave me ends all static(y).

God came backstage and stood quietly behind a pillar—waiting for Dolly Parton. She sang that
Christmas song, I forget the name of it. I woke up, became conscious, able to feel what I felt
when I was feeling it, backstage. Backstage is a wonderous place, people lay burdens down as
they change clothes and smooth-off their makeup. Some people feel as tho they’ve succeeded,
others as tho they’ve failed. To me they’re all indomitable.
When she came into the room, God hands me a piece of paper and a pen. What! You want me to
write something now?!? I’ll just work continuously! To autograph her: eh, guh, gih ga es uh, He
whispered. Oh Cripes! my husband’s in love with a country singer! How do these things
happen!?! I thought, Why don’t you just wait for her to drop dead, and then you can carry her
into Heaven. He didn’t think that was funny. But you know, when I’ve had a few drinks he gets
ridiculous. He just stood there waiting, quietly. In all my life I never saw Him so flustered. I
didn’t know he had a shy side. So we went home in 25 oxidized-blue, purple limousines (mine
had hubcaps that rotate backward, and a black light in the back, which is cool)—but not before
getting her autograph. It was a really nice night all around. I’ll never forget it. How could I?
They made me a tape:

I sang and everyone went home. They began to slowly applaud and cry, and laugh, and stand up,
and sit down, and evaporate into themselves—just like that. They were a nice looking orderly
crowd when they came in, and they were a nice-looking orderly crowd when they left. Nothing
happened. Some said, people floated away (but don’t they tho).
At the last, it turned out, all the rehearsing in the world wouldn’t help. Tears were rolling down
my face. I was so glad I didn’t go for the mascara-look. I’d pulled out all the stops, and sang as
if I meant every word. I watched the tape. I really put my heart into it. I was down on my knees,
and the orchestra was beginning the last song: Pandemonium looked like it was going to break
out, because it was over. Everything has to end (except this apparently). That’s it. You have to
say goodbye at some point. I think it was during the 5th encore…A beautiful woman came on
screen. The dialogue was lit like a house on fire. I was standing on white tiles about eight meters
long—her teeth. Cue cards shown.
I had given all I could give. I was about done myself. I didn’t realize how much work this kind
of a performance was. I’d grown out of my self. I had expanded, and I was beautiful. I had
already done the best I could. This would have to do. The woman on screen was replayed
smiling, and replayed again while I composed myself. The producer shook like a candy wrapper
on a turntable. I said, Mom, this is for you, and then I turned to the sound engineer and said, “Hit
it.”
A woman, seat 220, row 384, level 780 died of a heart attack. I looked up, high into the stands
and tried to sing the song to her as her spirit slowly left the open-air arena:

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you.

Sweet dreams that leave your worries f `ar behind you.
And in your dreams whatever they be`.
Dream a little dream of me.

Then I had to let the beautiful young woman take over…and she did. I thought to myself:
Funny…..you know, back in the day, before any of this…that was my job, to feel. To feel the
words to every song. That’s what I did. Many people understood. Many didn’t, tho they thought
they did. It was about growing up. Missing a perfectly good opportunity to change the world.
About failing. About not being able to say the words perfectly. About trying too hard, or leaving
too soon. About getting a second chance….. being given a second chance.
Stars fading, but I linger on dear… and I stood up
—still craving your kiss.
I’m longing to linger till dawn dear,
just saying th`is.

My left hand reached out toward the top of the stadium. By itself. As tho it were pulled up.
Sweet dreams…that leave your worries f’ar behind you... Billy left them wanting more. He
didn’t know much about showbiz, but he knew that much.

The End

Things were different after the Reconciliation Concert. All the brightest, richest, most
powerful, most famous, most beautiful people in the world came to see me, as if summoned. I
gave them jobs, but mostly what I needed from them, was credibility.
Everyone was beautiful, everyone was rich beyond their wildest dreams, more powerful than
they thought possible, and they shone—Four out of five ain’t bad.
I told the people around me, Don’t you believe, perhaps too often without adding, I’m standing
right in front of ya!—believing’s dangerous—make sure you can decline it, if you can’t—don’t—
It could make you crazy, and worthless, when perhaps it’s worth you seek. Even my friends
didn’t accept that I could have enormously independent thoughts. Truthfully, the world-famous,
and the true-believers were a mess…But it was my job.
One day, a Saudi Prince came to see me, Prince B’n d’r. I told him to walk the dog. He didn’t
know how protective I was of Oil Vivre, and he gave me a harsh look…And don’t forget to feed
him, I said.
Do I walk him first or feed him first?
Prince, you have to walk him first. If he thinks he’ll miss a walk, he’ll refuse to eat.
Oh.
And don’t forget about the water.
No, I haven’t forgotten about that.
He injured his wrist badly, somehow, during the walk, and said he might sue me for all I had.
I laughed, You of all people should know, you are responsible for what you do in this life.
Money will never make you whole. He walked the dog on weekends when I had to go away. He
fell in love with Shepard, and offered me 74 million dollars for the dog—He really likes me!
Yes, I know, he likes everyone. Then I changed dog walkers.

Delbert part three or four 4-10-22

I did ask Delbert what really happened that day in the backyard. He describes a man in a white
shirt, who must have been a bounty hunter. He told me the man wore a white shirt, but that
makes no sense, and once again, I can’t understand Delbert. It always translates out the same—a
white shirt. A man tracking another man thru the woods or a swamp, in or around 1853 would
not be wearing a white shirt. He would be wearing an off-white shirt at best. He would probably
be wearing buckskin. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, Delbert has odd ideas. The way I understand
Delbert is actually, much more interesting than what Delbert has to say:
I have a game in my house. It predates the pinball machine by fifty years—maybe a hundred.
It’s not made of stone, it’s made of wood, and it sits on the floor or a table on an angle, because it
works by gravity.
It’s a wooden board essentially, with small nails sticking up, and the player slides a metal ball up
one side. The ball hits various nails on its way down the board’s surface, randomly. There are
pockets, little scooped out depressions or holes adjacent to the nails, with numbers corresponding
to the likelihood of landing a ball there. Some holes are worth 10 points some 50 etc.
I am the board and the holes are my understanding. Delbert rolls his marbles down the board and
if a marble lands in a hole, I understand. Otherwise, he has to try again. If I don’t have the
capacity to understand, if I have no hole marked crazy idea about white shirts, I cannot get his
message. I cannot hold his thought. It is non-comprehensible.
I have millions of holes in my head and Delbert has lost many of his marbles trying to explain
what he means.
This is how Delbert and I communicate. He is not alive; he’s dead. I remember the day we met,
and that’s that. He came in one package. I unwrap him, or I would, if there were any occasion to.
God and I communicate in a similar way, except that my husband can make a hole where there
previously was none, or knock a nail down faster than I don’t know what—speeding up the
process enormously.
For example, I have no capture, marked reincarnation. Therefore, until I do, I have to conclude
you’ve lost your marbles.
God can mess with your perceptions, especially if they’re ‘everything,’ just so you know. I find it
enlightening & unfrightening—less you’re in a worrying mood. But that’s 501.

The Stadium part two

…and that’s our victory over the dark. it’s a victory because we’re not afraid—Bette Davis—Dark Victory/ screenplay: Casey Robinson 1939.
You see…no one ever called me darling before—Bette Davis/ Now Voyager/ Screenplay by Casey Robinson / Title from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Billy called his agent the morning after the concert, and she said she would not re-negotiate his
contract until he waived his right to legal representation. Dawn was tough. Billy liked her, but
what was she going to do with 65 million dollars in ones?
Anyway, he hadn’t called about that. There was a rip in space-time that was theoretical and no
longer there. It had healed up immediately, or to be more precise it healed up in no time. It was
about 104 thousand kilometers away not-spinning or sliding, in a universe that was…
Justin, and the idea of the accident, had created a marker. God said that now it would be very
easy to find the planet because it had become central by virtue of the fact that no matter how you
looked at it, the universe moved around it. This was good and bad. But you probably figured that
out.
Billy had a slight hangover from the after party and chuckled to himself.
This is the kind of thing he’d been afraid of all along—he’d shame his entire family, back to
Adam, or even before, if he turned out gay. And there he was, doing a lip-syncing act in 6
million watt borrowed drag, in front of about a billion people, stoned on life, dandelions and
champagne, with a rip in his stockings that was looking like it could destroy the entire universe
and completely wreck the illusion of perfection he had worked so hard on, and rehearsed for over
a week. Ying.
Still half smashed, Billy remembered during the concert he saw his first father up in Heaven
smiling. That really made it a special night, Billy had been kind of hard on him growing up.
He didn’t hate him, as he thought he had, Billy was just very disappointed: He couldn’t fly
when Billy was so desperate to learn. He wasn’t in the cavalry, when Billy was trying to decide
whether to be a soldier or a horse, and finally, he had a temper when Billy was after all, and
forever after The Unchangeable One. Fearful only of inheritance.
 Oliver said his name for everyone in the dressing room, (that Billy couldn’t get out of without
saying about 300 farewells). It sounded like ‘whoa whoa wuh,’ and everyone smiled politely, and
said they heard it too.
It’s like that old joke about the dog who plays the piano: what’s amazing is not that he plays so
well, but that he plays at all.

“I don’t know how I got on that subject.” The point of my call (yawn) is that the little ruckus
we caused will be back in about a year. At what…no you’re breaking up. She might have got
caught in a hollow, a place where there was no signal; probably under the bleachers if I know her.
What in the world, world, world…
Dawn….Hello Dawn…come in Dawn, over. Can you hear me? Cell phones!
Cellular communication devices and hair, when it comes right down to it, that’s what it’s all
about.
I hate my phone. I called her seven times and she decided that I should just drive up to New
York to see her. I spent 30 years in therapy to find out I was the Risen Christ after all…and now,
my so-called agent wants me to go to see her—she should come to me. Lord!
I guess my world would turn upside down if anyone gave me special favors? Fame is
apparently corrupting or so I’m told. I hear you, no I’m not so full of myself that I can’t go up
there to see her. Yes, I do have something important to discuss, plus she’s an active listener. I
understand. No, I’m not upset I’m hung over, and why can’t I be a diva for once in my life....
No I’m not going to start singing. I mumbled something about special favors and then decided to
shut up. God was in an explaining mood—tho I don’t know why—the rip in space-time was an
accident, an unforeseen event. Except that I know how people think, and that they’re best at three
things, and none of them are astrophysics, or wave generation—Fine it’s my fault. I guess I
would lose my place, if the world vibrated differently. Yes, yes I see. Lord! I have to stick to a
script, but you…
I gave Him three songs to sing, and he cried thru the first two. What is that word? Oh yeah.
Wrigometrics (the art of unwrapping). I saw the tape, he sang Green green grass of home—and
he was the one who cried. He sang that Lynn Anderson song—that I’ve been roundly criticized
for… He’s the big ham who loves country! But…oh, never mind.
I could see where this was going: same life, same themes; everything’s my fault. So I stood in
front of the mirror because I was standing there anyway, and said: I never killed myself, I never
purposely made myself cry, and the space-time thing is flimsy. And I didn’t cause the parabolic
effect by jumping up and down pretending to be a rock star.
Blame the messenger. The trash is the trash-collector’s fault. I should have seen this coming.
Where was I? Oh, yes practical issues Yang: I can’t drive; my chauffeur is 192 years old,
dead as far as I can tell; thinks the world is too explicit; uses my own understanding to explain
things to me; is fascinated with red shapes now; watches movies like they’re real; and thinks, for
some reason, he’s a doctor. Television is going to be the second death of him. I think it’s the
same on both sides of the aisle; they’re all a riot. There’s just no getting away from it.
Case in point, I met a nice young man at rehearsal the other day and Delbert drove him home in
the morning. I was feeling very relaxed and let Delbert talk. He says to the kid: What’s your
sign? The kid says, Taurus. Delbert says, What a coincidence, this car’s a Taurus!
I don’t know why that struck me so funny, he is just a mess. He smiled from ear to ear, and
the kid fell in love. With my chauffeur, who sits in my lap, isn’t gay, isn’t even alive, and wasn’t
trying to pick him up. Who could have foreseen that? Oops.
I’m sure the young man will be fine. Falling in and out of love is part of the fun, besides it’s
unavoidable, especially when you’re 25. Turns out, my chauffeur and I have a very different,
special, and yet mutually satisfying relationship, where we don’t quite connect (like thru a pane
of glass). I had a feeling something like this would happen.
 When I sobered up, God began a very interesting explanation…to me anyway. About
Judgment of The Once Innocent. The one without a face: He misunderstood the Process and the
Protection. It was an interpretation that is offensive in each part, every way—all 85 (I don’t write
‘em I just translate). To him directly, God said: I have seen many pieces of it. On the TV. On
the radio. In the head. Then He asked a question: Did you make an illusion that blocks many
from understanding. God wasn’t really angry, his questions aren’t even questions.
I added: Whereas death will make me many times stronger—I love life. I’m not deprived.
I’ll be God when I die. But I’m communing with Everything now. Why won’t you listen? I
hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live in one. Imagine.
Before Allusion, I believed too, that what you say about something, can influence the thing
itself. The Process of Becoming, has nothing whatever to do with what you’re doing. It plays
back real, because it was recorded on a real tape. It’s divorced from reality, separated at the very
least. Awaiting if you will, marriage to everything. It is something like holding the tail of
something wild—you just hang on. Sort it out later.

4-12-20 The Economy of God’s Mallet

If you’re going to do it, do it. If you’re not going to do it, don’t do it. You’ll know when you’re done when you’re done—Ovid: Poet, Philosopher, Roman,
Born 43 BCE.

All the words in the world, will not bring you out of this fog. All the belief in the world will
leave you listening to the white sound as if it were really interesting. I might as well give you one
word and one thing to believe. He is coming. Soon. I am here now.
People ask because they are bound to: How can you converse with Everything as tho it were one
thing? God is not a thing. God is not a being. God is Being. Being is everything. One thing
and Everything. You look at the lamp beside you—that’s not God. You look over at the blue
light on the CD player, with the clock and temperature feature—that’s not God. The Christmas
candle—no. Everything you sense is not God, and that’s true. But what if there’s a cozy place in
your brain, set aside for everything, and no it’s not part of your bundled senses. You can say God
exists in your senselessness if you want to, because he does in a way—he is pure Awareness. But
try to describe him...He’s kind▬what color is that? He’s generous▬sounds like? He’s intuitive;
He just knows▬how would that feel? I’ve heard people say that the things in their immediate
sphere of influence cannot be God, but they look across at earthquakes, a world away, and they
see God’s hand. In some sense the further away you are, the clearer he is, and perhaps it’s true,
because he’s said as much. But to me it feels like he’s inside; any closer, and he’d be behind me,
as the expression goes. So hard to say: If ever absolutely everything surrounds you, and comes
in for a tight shot—know that that is God’s face, all the face he has▬Asymmetrical, and
Beautiful...He is. God came to me, before I went to him...and I’ve spent the last 300 pages
wondering why. Yes, why me?

God and I have seen movies together; we’ve gone out to dinner; we’ve walked on the beach in
Jersey. Together. God is real: He will assist you to see him thru another, if you will assist him
to see the other also.

Worshipping, believing and praying do not make Him show up.

Your brand of love——the one you’re selling...
Your doubt——the one that makes belief possible...
Your wishes—— the ones you’re trying to direct——that compose your life…do.
God derives His Beingness from his willingness to do, and a reciprocate ‘desire’ to have.
In plain English: He is what we all are—a Being Doing Having phenomenon. You may quibble:
Many phenomena only last a second or two…well, unfortunately, you’re right.
 The Drop
God, he says, Is like a drop of water. Like a huge globe that is made of one thing and you can put
your hands into the drop and you can see. It can feed you in every way. That’s a great idea, I’m
glad I thought of it. The light’s green, you can go now.

Reality is perception
Reality is of the highest importance to us, but not to God. - Albert Einstein

People believe that perception is related to reality, but they have nothing to do with one
another, and aren’t related at all. But people believe, that is, they think they are, because they
have to be. But they don’t, and they aren’t. In approximately 200 years science will be able to
take perceptions out of a person’s head and look at them. They’ll see instantly that they bear no
relationship to the reality operating at the time. Any of it.
Case in point: Jeshua was believed to have walked on water, and it was absolutely perceived
that he did, and so, he did. I’m not going to start with one of those ‘perception is everything,’ end
of story, statements. It goes very deep.
There are really just three static forces at work in the universe: black and white, yes and no,
good and bad. Everything is quantitative (yes and no), or material (black and white), or pure
perception (good and bad). These things interact and that’s all there is. It may be more accurate
to say, yes or no, black or white, good or bad, but—whatever. Yet, each is itself a perception—
one minute this the next that, hence the interaction.
It is critical to the understanding of the time, also within that time, that Jeshua walked on
water. That’s what he was all about. One can’t walk on water. It’s a metaphor for
transcendence, but yes, there’s more. The people around him were not fooled by the fact that
they didn’t see him get in the boat, and then later he was in the boat, when they were out to sea.
It is much more than a collision of assumptions or a conditioned response. They saw the
symbolism that he was: bigger and larger than his body. But I’m saying they saw it. It was
visible to them—fine, all well and good, then you have to explain it—in words, if only to
yourself. Symbols come and go, but you are where you saw it last. And they usually integrate
themselves.
To see the symbolism of a person way out from his body, outside and larger, brighter, more
real than his body, standing in front of his body, is dumbfounding, and requires an immediate
answer. It’s dumbfounding from this side too. You could say it’s very odd and doesn’t give itself
easily to description, it doesn’t—it has a ghost-like quality. Except the person is right there.
Right there in front of you.
They saw a kind of an internal spirit—a symbolism—made manifest—directly to them. Clear.
Visceral. They saw the symbolism of a man leap out of his physical form and create an instant
understanding; they knew him. Their perception: he walked on water. They all saw it, and they
all saw him walk on water, and it was all metaphor. It was a symbolic nature within the man that
came out into space. It was non-physical, in a physical world. The realm of ideas, spirits, and
symbols, can and does impact on the physical world, but it must go thru your vocabularies of
senses, perceptions, and assembled possibility-impossibilities to get to you.
One more time ‘round the mountain: All events are random, but, there are no real events. If a
leaf-axle is loosened slightly at its fulcrum an hour or two prior to falling from the tree (stint),
that’s an event, but your senses guide you only to discover things of value and importance to you
personally, and to the ones you love. You can’t live outside your senses unless you think you can
live in everything all at once, and not discuss it—You Can’t—it’s a conversation. Something’s
trying to talk to you. And it’s not a leaf.
I go back and forth to Heaven all the time—walking on water is nothing. We live in our
perceptions. There is no where else to live. To deny that you saw what you saw is ridiculous.
When you begin to transcend some of these petty labels, you’ll see that there are also other things
you can transcend, and as they say, one thing leads to another. I’m not so sure, but God says it’s
a track, and that you may never see it. But that’s Him, he says things like that all the time.
I have always been able to talk to God, and He has always been able to talk to me, but…big
but…I had this idea that his responses would be in the form of short pithy aphorisms. I gave him
about five words in which to respond. Any more than that, I thought would be too crazy—scary,
unnecessarily wordy. It wasn’t until I allowed crazy to be or not, that we were able to talk. Now
I talk all I want, and so he can also.
Let me digress: Early on in The Work, I realized that creativity was a little like a wild horse; at
some point you have to reach out and grab the horse’s neck and say, You are going this way. My
hand is about 16 centimeters, and a horse’s neck is about 100 cm. I had to let go of that, and grab
his neck. “You’re going this way.” And then I set him back down. He started to walk off and I
grabbed his tail, and I yanked him back. I would have pulled it off if I had to—he doesn’t really
need a tail, when you get right down to it. Then he said, “Okay,” and from that moment on, it
was like a walk in the park. Luckily, that was one of the first things I did—grab him, collar him.
It made all the difference, and I never had to do it again. God’s not a horse. Creativity needs
a certain tact, limits, or it just runs amuck. I express myself this way—you can express yourself
that way—we’ll figure it out, together. You’ll know when I’m done when I’m done. There are
no right choices, only right outcomes. Love comes from this: Love for self, of course, start there,
work outward. You can’t find anything unless you walk around, and you’ll need help.
Everything that is, moves. God’s the park.
I want to take one more stab at this, because it integral to your understanding of The Work,
and this time, yes, and me. Time has passed, it’s about a year after I discussed the scent of
sunshine and the spirits that I believe are here in my house. All things can be explained in terms
of science, that is: it is likely that a fungus or a wool consuming bacteria invaded my carpets, and
that when ultra-violet light hits the carpets it exudes an odor. But that doesn’t explain how when
I became aware of it, and I identified it my way, the spirits evaporated. You can say the smell
disappeared when I began to observe it with extreme attention. You can say that mathematical
variability increases with observation. But it left at that moment. That’s a perception, mine, and
only mine. Science is the answer, but it is in the answer, and doesn’t explain the whole thing.
Again, this is a year later: this morning I was reviewing what I said about the 16 year old I loved,
when I was 25. It was perhaps the first thing I said that was of a transcendent quality—To
encourage the label, the send-off, knowing only—I’m not an envelope. Just then a small stone
fell again from my ear, same ear as before. I believe it’s about truth. I had a toothache and now
its gone. It probably came from smoking cigarettes when I’m not supposed to be smoking,
drinking wine when I know better, and chewing fibrous paper to put pressure where it hurts. I
love science, I get a kick out of it. It doesn’t, however, address how I feel. Science is mute on
that subject. My perception trumps reality, for this reason only: It’s mine, reality isn’t. Science
doesn’t work me. I know this to be true because I am so willing that it can. I may be just big
lumps of this and that chemical—carbon based, but what does carbon want with continuation? It
already is. It seeks more carbon, you say…fine. But why would carbon want to join with more
carbon? If atoms feel, I feel, that’s the same thing I’m saying. I love, I care what I do, it moves
me, it matters to me. I see no distance between things that everyone sees distance between. To
allocate carbon means nothing, unless it functions in some way for me, us—forward. In the
world of abbreviated answers, and lengthy explanations, science is like a pet Otter. It can explain
the missing sunglasses, the smell of burnt toast, and how animals with assholes have no real
value, but it can’t explain where it goes when its gone.
 God says I don’t need to know everything all at once, but time marches on. Answer my
question! Why? I can’t understand what he said. I think he said nothing. Ө
It’s true. I sold everything I had, to buy a sort-of camera. I believed I was a great filmmaker,
because I thought I was. A Hawks, a Huston, a Wilder, a Capra, a Spielberg, a Curtiz. I was
Ford before The Grapes of Wrath. I was Kubrick preparing Stangelove. I set it up, and peopled
the scenes. Yes, the light was amazing, but it wasn’t the one I bought. Looked great in rushes
tho. I filmed and filmed. The light stayed perfect, but it wasn’t mine. So I moved the camera to
the light, and turned mine off. It got better. I went back, and back, and back. Now that you
know me, you know I would, and I did. The light was so perfect, it became the subject of the
film, and it did. And it was. And it is. The camera brought a clarity of consciousness to
something so imperfectly, it was almost laughable. The developed pictures only helped to assist
me to remember the moment somewhat. You cannot really capture light on film, moving or still,
or in plots so dull as to seem human, or characters so suddenly bright as to seem real. It flew: It
stayed down, and when I looked, it was light brown, and if I moved, it would follow, and if I
turned around, it was purple. I understood it. It was delightful. It was like the sun.

Workmanship
Many will never accept a gay Messiah. They’ll wait for the next one, no matter how long it takes –--So let ’em.

The workmanship around Airsupp and the County of the Sea is of such poor quality it merits
mention. At first glance the bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, et al., seem lazy,
sloppy, uncaring, even fraudulent. I don’t believe they are. I just don’t buy it. There’re many
easier ways to make money, many higher paying jobs, many that require less education, less
imagination and depend less on creativity. If they really were scam artists, there are more
profitable, faster, safer and more reliable scams out there—hundreds.
I believe they’re embarrassed to do good work. I think that if they did their best work many of
them would be harassed on the work site: “Girls, here comes Mr. Bricklayer man.” “PVC’s not
good enough for that ‘use-profile’...Well, la dee dah” etc. To do the best work you can, requires
some kind of a statement that you don’t know everything. I think they’d be humiliated to ask a
more experienced carpenter why they’d use untreated cedar on an outside job, instead of oak,
when one is no-more expensive than the other. They may be made fun of—not for not-knowing
the answer, but for caring enough to ask.
I believe that for most, but not all, they’d be too embarrassed to do the best work they can,
with the hope of getting even better, and would much rather look for excuses not to. To admit
they have pride in their work, and that that means a great deal to ‘em, would be too gay.
I believe they see it as a slippery slope—workmanship, craftsmanship, excellence, artist. For
example, to take the time to choose bricks with not only the right heat resistance properties for a
chimney, but to pick a color that complements the surrounding trees, or the style of the
neighboring houses—just too too gay. They’d be taunted: “Oh she thinks she’s a surgeon.” “The
Prima Donna, or is it Prima Don?” “Like a virgin—hired for the very first time.” “He’s nursing
that threshold like Florence Nightingale.” etc.
To work hard at pleasing, especially if it’s only you you’re really pleasing, is too
uncomfortable. To put yourself in the position of a 69 year-old couple who have to sell their
house for the highest possible price so they can enjoy a few years of retirement, may make you
add just the right touch to the entry-way light fixture, for a few cents more. But that’s unmanly—
and around here, stands out like a purple pocket protector. But they’re poor! They worked all
their lives! How do you think that feels? How?
Here in Airsupp, it’s considered un-masculine to put part of your self into your work—
especially if it’s a big part. It’s not that they’re afraid to cross that line between craftsmanship
and artistry, they’re afraid to go near it. How horrible to be called an artist! What if people tried
to imitate you—how dreadful—I’d rather die! Embarrassed to be called the ‘Mozart of home
remodelers.’ Embarrassed to have your tile job last 300 years! Are you nuts?! How could that
possibly be unmasculine? How can injecting a big part of yourself into the thing you like, and
sometimes love, very much, and care about, and dress-up for, and spend time at, and get on your
knees for, and depend upon—how the fuck can that be unmasculine?! I think it’s unmanly to care
so much what other people think. But you assume, because I’m gay, that I’m not really much of a
man. Yeah I know—I heard. It’s okay to give pleasure to yourself; people don’t have to
understand.

4-10-05 The Betrayal Part II

They’ll argue: We know he’s not gonna be a regular kinda guy, and maybe he sees things a bit differently. A Messiah who goes along with
the crowd’s probably no good, and a Messiah who lies is definitely no good, maybe he’s not all that strait, okay... But he could at least take
a stab at it—That’s what my mother said. I’ll try to keep a straight face.

I think I figured this out. G

Oh God! You scared me. What? I’ll just sleep next week.
Oh, sorry…Jeshua couldn’t come back. People don’t come back. Real people don’t come back.
Can’t. G
Something’s got your tassel, doesn’t it? B
He points a finger in im’s direction, you are. You are… … 
Oh, look Kurt and Goldie called; Liz must be busy. Are you doodling while I’m talking? G
Oh, a question. Yes. No. B
You are the other guy. You are the thief (the one on the left. The one on the right never spoke.
Back in those days the mute frequently took the fall, so to speak), the thief from the cross come
back. You’re the one that went to hell; you’re not-back, you never left!!!!
You’re like the upright man or woman who thinks they’re undeserving because of some little
thing they stole. That’s why you’re still here! Praise be. You’re a small-time thief, and you
can’t find your way home. Ha ha ha Ha ha. It’s right here. Come on. G
Hold on Silver. So then this is a case of mistaken identity? B
Well…Once you go to Heaven you don’t come back. G
This makes sense to you, right? B
You can thank me later. Yes, I think you were there the whole time. I think I overlooked you
because…G
Because I was right under your nose and you misjudged me? B
No. No. No. Now that’s not right. I never judged you at all. G
Oh. Who did? B
Jesus, how the …G
God turns an accusatory glance at the New Resurrection. I think my Son gave you something in
prison. God stared. G
I think you stole something from him! Him! God gasps.
Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Like what? B
He stood back like he couldn’t see.
You have a devilish streak in you, a mile wide. G
The devil’s done. im smiled.
You! You killed the devil! G
Retired him…Besides, you did it. And if you miss him so much, get him back. B
I can’t. I can’t kill… G
Oh. That’s a shame. B
I can’t create. G
Well, I see a lot of…
Billy, I Am Creation.
There was a long pause. It’s ever more amazing the more you think about it… B
There was another long pause. God was waiting for a follow-up comment.
I think you need a vacation. Go to Mumbai or Calcutta for a week. I’ll hold things down here. B
Now I know why you wanted to marry me. G
I’m not perfect? B
Not perfect! You’ve taken everything! You are the thief. G
Not the thief, a thief. A petty thief. B
A thief who hangs on a cross, and waits and waits and waits. God turns violently toward Billy
like a tornado. G
Symbolic of thieves... Is what you’re saying? B
Symbolic of the thief…Yes, like clothes, labels don’t hang well on you. God sits down.
im sits. I’m glad you’re here. I think I understand. You can’t have this without that…
especially not here...It has to be that way. Billy says, as he looks at his left hand.
I…I…apologize for ignoring you and letting people judge you. G
John mostly. B
You were right there the whole time, and He scratches his head. Right in front of my face. G
Good. I accept. B
Have you ever seen a lightening storm off in one direction, a rainbow in another, dark clouds
here, and bright sun there, all at the same time? This was one of those days.
I hate thieves. G
So do I, Billy added, as a sort of a patch.
God looks up. But you are one! You stole nearly everything, and now you want my job!
God runs around metaphorically nailing things down. G
What are you doing? B
Everyone hears the commotion, and just figures it’s a ‘spat.’
I can’t tolerate thieves. G
So, what you’re saying is: ‘after this job, no more stealing?’ B
Look, I’ve returned everything I’ve ever stolen, except that damn Topaz—some angel made off
with; that ruby ring Shi’en gave me in fifth grade, that I lost, and just found a few years ago all
chewed up by the lawnmower; and that cheap steak knife from that restaurant on Broad Street,
that probably doesn’t want it back, since I called it cheap. B
God studied Billy’s expression (real time), observed the situation (their relationship), took note of
the circumstance of his being there (themes), looked at his timing, and considered Billy’s
reluctance to go all into it. And recognized that Billy was telling the truth—about everything.
All the things he’d stolen would add up to less than $544.°° The bulk of it, ironically, ‘donated’
by an ex-fighter.
Oh, God said. That’s true, they probably don’t. Well at least your not a liar. And… I could use a
small-time thief right about now. G
Right. Plus, this is an inside job. B
You can be my prodigal son. G
You’re like every relationship I’ve ever had or heard of, all rolled into one. B
I’ve known dating services that were more discriminating! B
Well. G
Just one thing. B
What now. G
I can see where this is going. I killed Christ after stealing his soul, and making him cry. And
now I’m back to steal everyone’s soul, and break the structures of time and space. And take
every good idea anyone ever had to hell with me. Is that about right? B
I never thought of that…but now that you mention it. It fits. G
Or.….is mankind really not a bunch of thieves and liars, but really, basically good at heart, and
worthy of saving. And is it not true, further, your honor, Dad, you have cleanliness issues, that
can get out of hand? Some people think you’re needy. B
I’m not here for you to blame! You can’t judge me! G
Well, you know everything. Decide. What could I possibly take—The sins of the world?
They’d just make up more sins. Like the sin of sex, or the sin of eating cream chipped beef on
toast when the world’s starving to death, or calf’s liver on a Friday. B
I have a headache, and I feel like apologizing, God said, as he shook his head, and considered his
options, which were nil. G

Billy turned and looked at God’s image in the mirror, on the wall behind him, and said: I am here
to steal your self. That lead weight. That. Trash. Or soon to be trash. B
Hold on tight inside of them. Their magic must be very powerful or he wouldn’t want them so
badly. G
I should have seen that one coming. B
They’re of no use to you. Hand them over. im said, still looking to the mirror.
Pause
So how can you be so guileless. G
Me? B
Why are you still taking down what I’m saying. G
I believe in the truth with all my heart. I believe you love me no matter who you think I am.
How I came to be, or what I might have done. B
See see…it’s that kind of thing, that’s…that’s…G
God saw that it was true because He felt it. He was very intuitive.
I do believe in the truth with all my heart… B
Oh, here he said. In all the time I’ve known you, I’ve never known you to have a handkerchief. I
guess it’s the only thing you don’t have up your sleeve. G
Jesus! You’ve stolen almost every great movie line, every great song, speech, written spoken
quote, poem, and letter. In the future, everyone will think all these lines are yours…all these
ideas originated with you. They’ll call it prementoring. Whatever that is, or angels sent to widen
the way. G
I referenced a lot of the stuff I stole. B
What difference is that going to make in a hundred years! G
Oh, don’t be ridiculous. I am two and a half years old, scribbling down a bunch of memos to
their great great Grandchildren—to save them, and prevent them from eating their great great
great Grandchildren. You know that that’s my job. B
I’m afraid it’s inevitable. Hunger always wins. 125. G
As God as my witness, if I have to lie, steal…your soul will never go hungry again! B
God just stared at Billy, with his jaw open, mouth Agape.
Billy had all the power in the world in his tight little fist.
The mirror that represented God’s image. The mirror Billy directed that last comment to, the
mirror that hung on the wall, tilted slightly.
I will take your self only once. Once is enough, you can have it back any time you need. Any
time. And you will need it…you have a lot to do. B
Maybe I will retire. What are you doing for all eternity? G
Tell me how to judge the living. B
Now? G
Right now. B
Soon, Billy. Soon. G
God walked behind his desk, and sighed. The devil’s gone. Everything’s different. I can’t feel
my feet. An angel just flew into the closed safe-door...I’ve been noticing a lot of very odd things
recently. And I think you are right. I really do. G
God, you know it’s not a coincidence, that Jeshua gave me something I couldn’t figure out, and
John misjudged me thru anger and jealousy—He wanted to die with him. I was no thief, just in
the wrong place at the wrong time. You know perfectly well, I was set up to return. I lost the one
protection I had, and wham! (Fear: particularly, fear of the form, fear of being lost forever, fear of
failure, and truth, which in this case, is fear of fiction) B
So they’ll say. G
Did you ever consider, maybe your parents weren’t homophobic—just scared to death of
whatever it was you were turning into. G
Ha. Why would anyone be frightened of such a sweet child? B
Sweet! Ha! I’d check my pockets if I had any. They just have to find you a 1600-ton
neoclassical Parthenon with plenty of room for artwork, and you might leave them alone.
Billy smiled that quirky smile. The one he had masked and unmasked so many times. Sometimes
it seemed to work magic, and other times it betrayed his true and foremost thought. What if I get
what I came for and I find I don’t want it? What if the thing I thought I was wanting was a mere
representation of what I already had, but couldn’t or wouldn’t express? What if I was perfect and
lacked only my complete and utter destruction to see me thru to…
Shu-`tup. G
Yes, God. B
You’re a fiction writer like Christ was a carpenter. G
Tuh. B

Billy there’s a third and fourth anti-Christ that needs to stand up….before…
Four!? B
Don’t worry about the numbers.
Shit! B

So, what you’re saying is : after this job, no more

stealing?
The conversation was enfolded. In the conversation was a conversation, caught. If it were
paper it could be found in the crease—the crease that runs thru the middle. The crease that now
forms a central feature, that crease. God just stared at His Son. How could a man who doesn’t
know value, who saw meaning in only some of the symbols, who couldn’t count, couldn’t add,
and couldn’t care less, ever be my Son. I want something else from him. Billy raised a big glass
of water to his lips and drank from it. As he did, his eyes crossed slightly, as he watched the cup
empty, he saw it become empty, and he drank it. God held that image of his Son, forever, so free.
Billy put down the cup, looked at God, his Father, and raised an eyebrow for an answer.
Yes, that’s about right. G

If you will: read this fragment to yourself as you slide your finger under the words. B
It is by this action alone that I remove the line that separates us.

Billy, right in the middle of the conversation. Right in the middle. What were we just talking
about. G
I thought you were done. B
I’m never done.
 But if you were. B
I can see I’m never going to be done with you. G
Thanks. B
Billy, what’s the word for impossible? G
Impossible. B
No, I mean utterly-completely impossible. Knock you out of your seat impossible. G
I don’t know. B
Exasperatingly impossible, amazingly, unrepentantly, stop you in your tracks impossible—
destructive almost. But they ‘get you.’ This one knows where you ‘live.’ This ones’s got your
‘number,’ and they’re doing it on purpose! What’s that word. G
Ya got me….. Possible? B

Your rules are crazy

Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity @‰TÄuxÜà
X|Çáàx|Ç

If you are doing something, you must be avoiding doing something else. That is the arrogance
of ideas. You say finding is avoiding when it doesn’t include you. You can’t avoid everything.
No matter what you think everything is.

Your rules are crazy

The world you are trying to create cannot stand. I will not allow it. Your children are scared
to death and they’re scaring me. There is a lost generation out there. And you are it. A man
cannot touch another man. A man cannot sleep with his own child, sleep. Apparently, sleep is a
waste of time, makes people feel uncomfortable, and looks suspicious. A woman can sleep with
her children, but only if they’re afraid, like during a thunder storm, otherwise she is encouraged
to separate as soon as possible. Now we have hundreds of millions of totally lost, sad, angry,
fearful, out of control children, who are also starving.
They think your rules are crazy, because they are. You got married, and now husbands and
wives live a hundred miles apart, with nothing in common but children, a piece of paper, and a
string of bad-date stories they’re too proud to tell.
If she had listened to him, when he told her, he didn’t want to be strapped to the wheel like a
plow-horse, and take care of the kids constantly…that he really only wanted them on weekends,
they could have stayed together. And now he only gets them every other weekend.
If he had listened to her, when she said, she didn’t want to be an empty container held from
the inside like a throttle. And that she wants to do the right thing, so she can be loved from the
outside, because how others feel about her is very important…it might’ve worked.
You just don’t get it. She looks like a fool, and you get less than half of what you need.
No one can touch without being rough. Try being very very gentle. It always works.
A man can’t touch another man without a baseball or some other contrivance between them.
It’s a wonderful thing to sleep with a child. It’s like sleeping with a puppy. My touch is not
violent; my body is not rape waiting-to-happen. You don’t need to await the verdict from the
medical examiner or a forensic scientist to tell you the exact age of the victim. There is no string
of victims in my wake. None. Not now, not ever. Never.
Every thing is not a contest, and every one is not a victim. I wish for the day you realize No
one needs to be a victim: that, that’s news-reel pandering.
Just because I love too much, you think that means I’m way out of bounds. You think I’m
here for you to judge. I am much further out of your bounds than you will ever know. I’ll never
be your victim, I spend my days with God already. You will never be my victim, you’re
practically gone. I am doing all I can. That’s all I can do.
You act as tho, when two or more are gathered to have sex, that you are there to judge them.
In your perfect symmetry, and your constant, unchangeable understanding. Sex Addict. Fool!
You have everything backwards, sideways, and upsidedown. You know nothing about this.
This isn’t your realm. None of your business What you say you know about this is a lie.
Nothing. I haven’t just made myself the king of sex, the king of debauchery or any other catchy
title you’d lay on me. How dare you judge me, or the coin of my inheritance! Regards these
thinly veiled death threats—may you find forgiveness when you realize what you’ve done.
You’re like Sunday-School stupidity to a very wise child.
I haven’t taken back anything I’ve said before. I don’t speak thru both sides of my mouth.
You have no authority here. Where one person is, I am there also. I am wrapped up in the
choices you make. I am that third thing. I am the one you cannot but imagine.
Pay attention to what you’re doing, have done, and forgot to plan to do.

5-1-14 ymd
I will do this out of love, no matter how angry you make me.
You are creating a world of fear, hatred, and destruction.
You cannot smack a child on the ass, for fear of arrest—
You cannot touch a teen without trying to ‘kill’ them, even if they’re begging for it.
I am eager to hear your discussion, but there will be no debate. 16 is the age of schism
Between 16 and 16. 16-32-48-64-80
I share that my life was spared, saved, brought back, gratuitously 11-11-80.
Children are wonderful. They even smell wonderful, but that doesn’t mean I have to suckle
them all day every day. I am as frightened for them as they are frightened of you. They see you
every day, and you haven’t made any sense yet. They think they’re crazy because they see how
you act.
The idea, the rule, that children give life meaning, is pure fantasy. It would mean that the
child who gives you meaning, is a meaningless thing until they have a child. Children are
meaningful. Will always be meaningful, on their own, even by themselves. Loved.
On and on it goes, unraveling senselessness, giving you some feeling you like, and then taking
it away.
You say that a man is not a man until he has had sex with a woman—like an appliance. And
your girl-friend, who may or may not be your friend, is supposed to work the switch. What
switch? That’s not a switch.
Thoughtfulness, togetherness, trust. Start there. Work up to intimacy, and forget all your
crazy rules about all your power tools.
I promise you I will cancel your crazy ideas as you try to cancel mine.
In many countries, and historically for bipeds, a union is undertaken long before 16. You may
have another point of view. I welcome it.
To sell your daughter or son into marriage, or slavery, as a child, without their free, full,
informed adult consent, is not going to stand. Violence to children is not going to stand.
Violence to women is not going to stand. Violence is not going to stand no matter what horrible
machine you invent. Freedom, touch, talk, caring, will stand, will make sense— will lift you up.
If your faith leads you into darkness, death and destruction—you will fall. If anyone gets a hold
of your superstitions you will be done. Over.
 Start with respect. Start with the truth, for most men a couple hours a week with the kids is
plenty. They’re your kids if you had them. If you thought you could hook your baby-daddy up to
a plow to work seventy hours a week, you will be very much surprised. Of course, he won’t take
care of you and your children—he wouldn’t even marry you!
Hard times are coming, lean times for many. If you cooperate, discuss, help, share, you’ll
hardly notice, in fact you’ll think this is the best time of your life so far. But don’t linger. All is
not well, and you’re still miles from your destination.
Some people think 14 is the age of schism—most of them, are 14—it is not. I would love to
hear your discussion. I hear everything. There will be no 125 year debate, no 12,500-year
debate. There will be no one-second debate. I’m not putting my foot in that trap, Thank you—
no. That’s your choice, your only choice, 125 or a little over 12,000. Nothing lasts forever.
Listen, I’m crazy—it’s that simple. The answer I give, must always be the same. People who
know me, who’ve met me, can say anything. But, one crack can create a drawing force of
explosive power. My answer to the question: are you crazy is: Yes, totally nuts…totally (TNT).
I can’t depend on whatever current spins my mind, or what rehashed thought has erupted almost
fully. If at some late hour I discover you to be, so well-meaning, supportive and wonderfully
joyous, that I wax nostalgic, I’ll just have to keep that to my crazy self. The debate about whether
I’m insane ‘by definition’ is, even in the Church, a 45-year debate—minimum. I have only to
accept. I thought about this for a long time, and I know in the future many will be disappointed
that I took a low and subtractive stance. It had to be this way—because that’s the way it was.
There’s always the here and now to consider. It never rules, yet, it must be run out.
At some point you’re bound to see me fall. If I’d not fallen many times I couldn’t stand.
Oh, I saw a little key. A Key, the other day, on TV. My hands are itching to get a hold of that
one. I could hardly wait, so I went ahead and judged him, it made my morning. I cannot yet
judge the living, but I can start to see, already, how this could go. I considered it a warm-up: I’ve
been walking around a while, you got something I need. Well, I gotta brand new pair of roller
skates. You got a brand new key—Melanie Sofka 1965.

I Think
Have you ever been to a working man’s lunch?…I don’t know, what’s that? Well this. This is
that? Eso es que asi. Uh huh. Oh. Situationally speaking, I have a bad case of wouldn’titis. If
someone dares me to do something, in relationship, especially if they say: I know you wouldn’t, I
am liable to say—–Oh, wouldn’t I!
I don’t object to stereotypes, I think they’re just okay. They’re true, if at all, by agreement.
They are current, only if things don’t change, and things will, very soon. They are coherent only
if you refuse change.
For some people the dissemination of information is like a quick lunch, for others it’s like pure
evil giving birth to pure evil. The devil’s dead—I dismantled him. You’re dead because you’re
so afraid to love. The gates are now open. And they’re gonna stay open.
I’m a writer like Christ was a carpenter. What you do with your life is one thing, what you
risk your life for, is another. They wanted Christ to make crosses. He refused.

Mine
This is not an open-ended relationship. He is the Everything that is everything. Whereas it is
true, that I am the one in the relationship who wears the bracelet. I don’t mind. It allows him to
be himself, and that’s fine with me—whatever it takes. He couldn’t wear it if he wanted to. He
has no hands, no wrists, and no arms—you do.
He does call me Shu`tup (accent on the second syllable) sometimes, yet he has no vocal
chords, no throat, and no tongue—you do. The Everything that is everything, does have opinions
and ideas. Not because it takes so little to have them, but because that’s where they came from.
They come from a place. It is a real place, tho it’s not real estate. You can’t plant a flag on it.
And that’s part of the problem. You can’t make it exclusively yours. Not any longer.
You are not in God, He is in you. You are in the universe. It moves outward on a thin and
narrow ledge while time moves inward like a river.
I’m in prison because that’s the deal. I am obedient. I’m agnostic because there is no proof,
and life is funny, whether you like my little jokes or not. I know He exists—because I’m in
prison. I believe in the man I married, but I found right-away that the more unapproachable he
was, the further apart we grew. I would never call him Lord, he would be insulted. He doesn’t
own any thing—He is everything.
I may be the one who thinks he’s the newly Risen Christ...But I think you’re crazy! You have
all the world, for a very short time, and you fill it with hate, and fear, and cruelty beyond belief.
You cloud your mind with sheer horror, and the purest of pure greed. You destroy everything in
your wake, for the shear pleasure of watching someone else suffer. You won’t take No for an
answer. Until now.
I am monogamous by nature. I’m monogamous before there’s a reason to be. I am The
Faithful One. I have one foot in Heaven, and one on Earth. I’m not confused about that. I am
naturally absurd, I don’t try. Even I can’t injure myself just standing around.
I wouldn’t mind getting married again. This plane is not that plane. I live here now.
The everything that is everything is not a wild guess. God is not everything I say he is. Even I
can’t speak that fast—I can hardly speak at all. God is not the everything I see, or feel, or think,
or worry about, or imagine, or fear when I’m drunk, or high, or hammered, tweaked, hung-over,
febrile, or not myself. God is not the everything that one claims as everything—You can’t put
everything in a package no matter what its shape. And what you’ve got there ma’am, is
practically nothing. God is not in me because I think he is—I’m crazy. I have no reason to lie—–
I have the status of a worker bee, perhaps a drone. Which is on a par with an ant, or a rabbit. It’s
a conversation. Outside and inside. One then the other. Then both at the same time, sometimes.
Say hello once in a while, get your hands out of your pockets, don’t just stand there looking
pretty.
I don’t see the problem with recognition, but I don’t have all the distractions you have: the
screaming children, the noise you can’t turn off, the sugar, the scarcity, the constant search for
status, nor am I so hard to amuse. One more word on the subject: I sit here with a cup of coffee
23 cm. high—that will last me two hours, maybe three. It’s half frozen, because I made a third
cup yesterday that I didn’t finish, and stuck in the freezer. It contains one teaspoon of instant
coffee, a teaspoon of sugar, and about a liter of water and sometimes some 2% milk. When I
began the work I didn’t know my dose, when I found my dose, I found, subsequent to that, that I
needed less and less. What I like is time. It starts off hot and then gets cold. Many can’t drink
coffee. Problems abound.
Also, I don’t just sit and watch trees grow, but you know, I do notice that they do. I read
slowly, I listen openly, I stop conversations in search of clarity in a world that lacks clarity,
because I like all I can get. It’s like a dosage problem. As I get more and more comfortable with
the amount of clarity I have, can tolerate, that keeps me afloat, and going, I may find I need less
and less, and, that there are other things in the world—like beauty, for example. I think evolution
is so slow because every living thing is trying to stop it. No animal runs toward a precipice, sees
the precipice and then keeps going, but some do. It sounds queer, but without strange excesses
life is not possible.
 I have more hobbies than I can count, three times as many projected hobbies. I have friends
who know I have other friends, but never see them. Everyone sees me differently, and I want to
keep it that way. It’s fun.

Ф Of course, you can’t have 20 billion playmates over for dinner. I don’t care what your friend
Carol thinks. It’s not gonna happen. It’s ridiculous! Ф

You have a very interesting world. Someday with your technology, you might be able to live
to be 200. You may even be happy with what you’ve got, someday.
But, if you think, for one minute, that others will let you live three times longer than they do,
with your fancy new organs, while they suffer untold hardships in a third-class world, populated
almost exclusively by men, who think that men make lousy sex-partners, you’re mistaken. Two
billion angry young men is a lot of anger. Your security system will look like the monkey bars at
Branch Of The Linden Elementary School.
They’ll blame you for not sharing; not being truthful; and not doing more to warn them from
the abyss. Oh…and making them look very foolish in front of the Teacher.
One world. One chance. You can call me Crazy, Shu`tup…you can even call me Up if you
want to…I don’t care. I like it. But you may change your mind when it comes to showing me
some respect. God is coming. And he’s not happy. He’s the one I had to calm down. He wanted
me to tell you what I really thought.
What is brimstone, anyway? I’m not late. I am not early. I’m right on time, surprised

XIX Clouds
♫ I may not Be the best at anything, or Have the best of anything—sometimes I feel like I’m the least of all. -Minister, Malcolm
Speed

This is not a cautionary tome. Learn to live. Enjoy. Love. Care. The thing you thought was
so terrific, and ‘real’ isn’t, wasn’t, and never was. God is. I am here.
I saw a range of clouds that looked like a herd of buffalo. I wanted to describe its beauty. The
truth is so simple, so amazing, but it’s there, in so many ways, untapped. I went to the store. I
bought wine. I saw a huge X shaped cloud.
If choosing involved your isolating one choice from another—Heaven would have no choice.
It is not so decided upon. It is; it just is; it always was; it can only Be; it cannot be changed.
One second not followed by another is the eternity of Being, which is Being. Your stake in
‘Being’ is, in its absence, the Everlasting. In other words: what lasts are the times away-from the
things of currency, the seemingly unavoidable.
Two days later I felt so uncertain. I looked up, and there was a huge I, that took up the whole
of the sunset that was the sky.

Believe is not an active verb, like, to run, for example. When Billy went in and out of
believing in himself, which he did…he didn’t go from believing to not believing. If you’re just
standing around, that’s not called ‘not running.’ You don’t say, Hey! Look at that guy over there
not running. Billy never stopped believing. Believing is a passive verb, action neutral.
Believing’s funny that way. Again, I believe that the sun will come up tomorrow morning, but do
I actively believe? No. If it’s not up by six, maybe I’ll get a day to sleep-in.

Billy did almost the whole concert with his eyes closed, tears streaming down his face. It
wasn’t until a firecracker was launched too close to him that he opened them. He followed the
thin line of light until it burst into a huge red star, and then yellow and dark.
 That was the picture they used. Everyone figured that anyone who knew so little about show
business, and could pull this off, must be The Impossible One (Ю). And that was that. Case
closed. No more argument (I know, but it was worth a try).
His eyes were red from crying, from trying not to cry, from feeling more than seeing, from
being magnified about a thousand times on the dialogue, from being born that way. Red from
the reflection of the stars, the X in the next sunset. And of course, stealing every self he could,
with his hands open, and his eyes shut—just for the night, but that was The Night. Read all over
the world, and deep into space. When asked, Billy gave them their headline, It was a very nice
night. God had the power to protect Billy from himself—courage makes big things look small.
Billy was self-available.

~~4-5-12

I am reminded how people look for, and how they find God.
It’s like a brawl at a beef and beer. The two guys, who are fighting over one woman, move in a
staggering fashion. All the bystanders move out of the way, except God. It’s not because he
doesn’t consider his own safety, or the safety of others; it’s because he knows you’re moving
purposely toward him, forward—in order to be stopped.
A punch is thrown. It misses God by four centimeters. The fight stops temporarily.
Get out of the way, someone yells.
Why don’t the three of you get a room. Or just take it outside. God says.
The fighting stops. There was no point to going outside—suddenly everyone knew what they
were fighting about, already. Inclusion in the love they share—being allowed in.
God reads everyone correctly. He can read your life, sum you up, in one second, unconstrained
by time—like he doesn’t have to think about it. If he thinks, and I don’t know that he does, he
thinks backwards.
I didn’t mention this before, because I guess I thought you’d just know. I suppose I assumed it
would be immediately obvious, it’s also not part of the course materials, but, God seems to
operate under the impression that people are endlessly fascinating. It’s like a crazy assumption:
not really defensible, unlikely to hold up under much scrutiny, and hard to make anything out of
sometimes. Call it a quirk. This isn’t something we ever argue about, it isn’t, and was never a
bone of contention; truthfully, it’s never even come up. I find people annoying and fascinating
alternately, I’m not sure this is even a difference of opinion, or that he holds such things, most of
his opinions look like my opinions walking away, great big ironic grin and all. What was I
saying…oh yeah, not a difference of opinion—he finds me endlessly fascinating too. God speaks
a kind of generous language. When you feel like he’s rummaging around in your attic, he’s not
necessarily looking for some old frock you could let-out. He’s probably packing for you. Why
don’t you ever wear this. The sleeves are too long, and it doesn’t breathe. And did I mention he
likes to interrupt? Anyway, that’s in God 501. Not testable, not. There are no regulations about
polygamy. That is a personal, private, immoderate, ungainly, abuse-loaded, expression of love.
Oh, and being in God is an enormous high. Did I mention that?

To Be

My thoughts are ancient

My dreams, themes, ideas, fantasies
My memories get more ancient every day
Like Attic, my language is also ancient
Ancient, because it was written down, marveled over, and then it changed.
The spoken word is unchangeable, like English, it moves with you, it lives. It’s meanings are
altered so slowly it is self-correcting—it seeks agreement almost constantly.
Nouns become verbs. And suddenly someone says, Plant it here, you must be tired after your
walk. And it makes you happy, but it never dawned on you that this thing that reached inside,
was a time that was open for you. I believe meaning is in the words.
Each group has it’s own version, jargon, designed to elucidate minutia, and exclude outsiders.
Fine—if it makes sense to you—fine.
Once you write it down, however…you may marvel at its beauty…
But you’ll soon come back to find, like Attic, it is starting to die.
Not spoken any longer, dead. It’ll fizzle-out.
It was not the first language. It was the greatest. The best. The most beautiful….
And now it’s gone.
It’ll always be that way. You cast a thing in stone, and it will break.
Being is everything. Learn to conjugate it.

The Dime

The way it is for me is like the dime. I found one the other day, and I picked it up from the
sidewalk. God said, Keep it. You can keep it. Why don’t you just keep it…A souvenir of these
Great Days. And I said, No, and half way down the block I dropped it. When I’m with
everything, I feel like I have everything. I said No to God in order to be kind to…well, someone
I don’t know, who may get excited or feel lucky for finding a dime. Besides, it was heads down,
and now it’s heads up. Not a new rule. Kindness above all things. God smiles, I think I won him
over. I think he really likes me. I think he’s very cool. You don’t have to drop every dime you
find, or drop a dime before you say No, or drop only double-headed dimes, you can always say
No. Get it got it good. He’s really kind of a pushover. Being in God is like walking into another
consciousness, but you’re not moving; it’s not a different place, it’s the exact same place. Here.
Now.
I heard yesterday that The Great High Exalted Supreme Court is going to decide how justice
will work. I’d pay to hear that. Human justice. I wonder who’s going to benefit? The ones they
consider most human I suppose. My guess is the elected judges will say that it is unlikely that
elected judges could become corrupted. They will also say they were not elected, but of course,
they were. I’m glad I came when I did. This is a riot. Be aware, the Supreme Court was never
given any authority to enforce its decisions. Odd. It all depends on our own understanding of
what holds society together.
Just an aside: A day came when I was unsure about how to proceed, where I was exactly,
what number I was at, or if I had not put so many numbers and prepositions out of order already,
that maybe I should just quit. But life comes out of order. I am a child.
I was troubled for some reason, and went to buy a bottle of champagne. I knew it was not a
good idea. The time for drunkenness was not at hand—I don’t celebrate failure, I celebrate
trying. Did I mention, someone stole the ceramic lawn-frog I bought as a present for myself
when I had to get an A on the final exam to get an A in the course. I tried very hard—I miss Bee
Bee, I hope they bring it back. Anyway, where was I…I had more important things to do. I
bought the bottle, and the man making change moved his hand oddly, jerked, then flinched
slightly—looked back to the drawer, and said, “I dropped a dime.” I walked to the car, and
smiled. I drank the wine, but I got the point. Even I can say No. Otherwise my assent would be
meaningless. You can’t give freedom to the world or any part of it without giving it to yourself
first.

It’s things like that that make me love you all the more. Of course I’m not going to say No.
There’re a lot of things I’d like to say, a lot of things I’d like to do, people I’d like to meet, and
places I’d like to visit, but I’m in prison. What’s your name?
 5-2-04ymd 16 and 637
Some things are just suggestions; some things are rule-like; some things inviolate.
Somethings, like perceptual dominance, are tricks to prevent people from feeling pain. And then
God said, What for?
When God asked a question, I would listen harder. But that never helped. I listened softer,
and that was worse. I listened as tho. As tho I understood, as tho I could learn, as tho I wasn’t
bored. As tho I had capabilities to comprehend later, if not at at the moment. As tho it were not a
race. As tho I were at the finish line, and wasn’t done yet, because it wasn’t my time. God may
feel differently. He said, Look, you like tricks as much as you like the truth, but that’s you. You
would have been the world’s worst magician. You’d tell the truth about every single trick before
you performed it. Or shortly thereafter. G
Would not. B
Billy, people need structure like the Brooklyn Bridge needs structure…it’s already built.
Okay. B
Are you saying offer understanding differently? B
. No g
I am saying create understanding—you’re very creative. G
Thanks…I always felt that… B
Yes, fascinating. 637 is a mere suggestion. G
16 is different. It’s for one, a highly symbolic age. G
I always thought…B
Give a 16 yr old child an any-size glass of beer on their birthday. You’ll see some of the
symbolism of the age. G
Why beer? B
Who’ll see the symbolism, the child, or the adult? B
Who decides what ‘any’ means? B
What if they don’t like beer? B
What if they’ve made some counter vailing oath? B
What if they drink already, and it’s been a bone of contention for some time? B
What if they think that’s a very stupid even reckless idea? B
What if becoming an adult was harder than that, much? B
What if it wasn’t? B
What if they wanted to do this during their 16th year, at a time of their choosing?
What if watching your parents, watch you drink, makes kids choke? B
What if they refuse? B
What if the bucket that their father’s father’s father used, was too big, and there was no one
around to help them sort out tradition from self-injury? B
Where’s the common sense? Do you give away presents every 16 years? B
Are you rewarding something, or warning of something? B
Do the parental figure(s) have to drink from the same glass? B
Why would you choose that time to alter consciousness? B
Why did you put the parenthesis in there? B
Is this your idea of a party? B
Why isn’t all this spelled out? B
Aren’t you adding ritual to a life already full of ritual? B
Yes already! G
What if they’re allergic to hops? B
Tell them to jump. G
Ha. What do you think I’ve been saying? B
Well, with you, who knows. G
16, huh? B
16. G

You may wonder

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.---Henry David Thoreau

I’m in prison, and cannot speak, or so the story goes. You may wonder what it’s like to
become the Son of God. I’m not done, but I can tell you what this is like, it’s like this:
It’s like having a Wednesday off from work. You and your friends worked all weekend, all
Monday, all Tuesday—you did good work, you worked hard, and now you have a day to
yourself. It’s nine in the morning. You take your dog for a walk, and you visit your two best
friends.
At the first house, she welcomes you, and gives you a glass of champagne, and a line of coke.
You talk and talk and laugh and tell stories on people. She has a hypoallergenic dog like yours,
and you can pet him, and not sneeze, or get stuffed up. The dogs get along, and the cat sits on a
shelf and watches you suspiciously. You turn on the TV, your favorite movie comes on, and
she’s never seen it. Oh, you’ll love this. I know you will.
She gives you a blue narcotic pill, and you watch the movie together while you eat crackers
and brie from a tray with all kinds of things. You have two cheese Danishes.
She asks you what it’s like to be gay, and you talk openly. She understands, and only wants to
talk about it as much as you feel like saying. She shows you a picture of her 20-year-old son, and
wants to introduce him to you. She loves you, and wants you to be part of her family, she trusts
you, loves you, is open, kind and generous. You see how beautiful he is and you say, ‘No, it
would only complicate things.’ She understands. She offers you more of everything; you watch
the end of the movie, and she really, really loved it; you take a cigarette for the road; kiss her
goodbye, and walk across the now only slightly wet grass thru the trees, to your other friend’s
house.
I walk now, the way I would walk between those two hypothetical houses—happy, content,
not needing anything, in love with people, life, the sunshine; with the whole day ahead—
adventures—all my favorite things, one after another in no particular order.
You never thought you could love so much. You got a chance to say ‘No,’ to a beautiful
young man. You got a chance to be right about something. You got an opportunity to tell the
truth—as much as you wanted.
The world gives you more than you expect, and then offers more than you want.

When she mentions the devil you show her your bracelet, the one that looks like a silver scar,
and say, ‘Fuck the devil.’ She laughs, and the devil slides even further away.
As I walk now from place to place, that’s how I feel, as tho I’m walking on air—all the time.
Every day. Continuously, and I don’t have to say anything if I don’t want to, but for some reason
I want to. I surprise myself, and I wonder, but I love to wonder.
The world seems to lean a little, every once in a while, and then right itself. I feel a little
dazed. I walk slowly because I could fall while I study a bird in flight. I feel as tho I have all the
time in the world, and my heart breaks, and grows bigger, breaks and grows bigger. I cry. I
laugh. I am me, and I’m very happy…just to be.

That’s what it’s like. As you can see, I cannot stay this way forever. I’m flesh and bone, and I
have a walking brain. But now you know. That’s how this feels.
It’s not like anything. It’s kind of private, it’s very sweet, and you’re not alone.
 I would say it’s very very nice, and you can quote me.
I know nothing lasts forever, I do really. I also know some things go away, and others grow
far beyond your wildest dreams.

The world, which is everything, can be personified, can be understood—that is God. Extrapolate
from the bug you watch, the web you conceive, the flight path you imagine.
-—-God

4-10-06 I Was Saying

To take out all the mistakes would be a mistake—ibid

Look God. I know you know, but just so you understand. It came that I gave the thief something
of me. J
I was saying, maybe I’ll retire. I’m working on a ceremony of transference as we speak.G
Good. J
Later that day, it went like this:
God said, the one true God said, the God of Heaven and Earth, and all the Heavens and all the
places over, under and within said. If your faith leads you into darkness and destruction it cannot
stand. And He gave Billy particular things to eat, the same things He had given him all spring
and summer, in very slightly varying amounts. He handed Billy a glass of water that had been
boiled and filtered as Billy had been doing assiduously, all along. Because it tasted funny.
They walked to the porch together as one, opened the door, and Billy threw the contents of the
glass on the porch and let it evaporate over the course of one day. When the last drops were
ready to go, Billy drew his initial with them. There was not water enough to write all three, just
the first one J. Then the water was gone.

A Solution: Ask God yourself.

Wisdom begins in wonder—Socrates 469-399 BCE
I see your problem. Ask God.
Follow the rule of threes.
People might assume this would be foolish, and God would never play such a childish game. He
doesn’t—but you do. Ask.
The first time you ask, you are probably asking to be heard asking. He knows that.
You may want to hear ‘No,’ so badly, He might say, No, of course not. Are you happy now.
Maybe you and I could go for a walk sometime…and chat.
I don’t know what God would say to you, but that would be typical. Kind, generous and a little
bit ‘smart.’ In my opinion, being with him for a second, can make you want to give everything
you ever had. But that’s my opinion.
Then ask a second time. This time, you might want to lower some of the distractions…..turn off
the noise…so you’re not abstracted by everything else. God’s responses are immediate—your
hearing may not be.
Practice like the gospel singers, and wear socks if you want to.
If you don’t believe in God, it makes no difference whatsoever Solutions have nothing to do with
beliefs even if you believe they do with all your might, power or control by force.
It’s like this: you want to call an old friend, and you got their number, but you don’t call because
you don’t know if they’re home. But finally you call—they’re home.
You know...you’re home, so they’re probably home. Your kids are asleep, their kids are probably
asleep. And you hang up the phone.
Then you think, I wish I had something interesting to say…I think I’ll become an interesting
person, and you spend the next 25 years becoming an interesting person, but really, they didn’t
want to talk to an interesting person, especially not one who thinks they are. They wanted to talk
to you—they wanted to hear your voice.
So pretend you’re an interesting person, and just call.
If you say: God doesn’t speak English, that’s true, keep your questions simple. Everyone can
understand Yes from No. Even talking thru all the packets and switches you have, it shouldn’t
get so lost. Pay attention: It’s like this: you’ve been playing this machine for hours, you put in
your last quarter, it’s worn, and you win, it was your last, because that’s when you stopped
looking: God’s the ‘money.’ You may try to constrain him to Yes or No—that doesn’t put Him
on the witness stand, and you’re not Clarence Darrow. God can be extraordinarily creative. But,
Duh?
My work requires much more allowance than you require at this point in your journey. My work
is um…in the order of a conversation. A conversation allows relationship, provided, you allow
for misunderstanding—which must exist as a possibility. If you don’t allow for the possibility of
misunderstanding, you’ll never get anywhere. No matter who you’re talking to. There’s
uncertainty on the way to certainty—lots.

The second time you ask, it’ll be because you really want to know. You’re still testing the
waters, but you really wanna know. Don’t ask, ‘Did your son write an essay,’ because I didn’t
write it. Not really. Doing 10% of the work, and taking 100% of the credit is, at the very least,
poor referencing. Be specific. Be skeptical. Be honest.

The third time you ask, you’ll get your answer, and you will probably get a torrent of unsolicited
comments. Have a tablet handy. And a box of tissues ready.
It is very easy to distinguish your internal voice from God’s. His is the kind and generous one.
After a while, maybe a month, or twenty, they coalesce. After a while you will be able to drop
the pretence that you never talk to your self. The thing I am stealing as we speak.

So close…..
The advantages you seek are sewn within. When you talk to yourself—you are very close.

“How long must I wait?” You may ask, “before the words I ‘hear,’ which are not my own, but
known to me, and made by me, recede, and I can hear the true word of God?”
…..Trouble…..
In other words, not the discussion you have with yourself over the parking space you just missed,
but in the time of need. Not in the ‘space’ you reserved for such goings on. Those words.
Thoughtful words not thoughtless words. Delivered in time. On time.
May I suggest a little less home-decorating, and a little more listening to your other gay home-
gayness. It’s okay to be queer for things, and not know what they are. I had a friend who was
queer for puzzles. Listen. If you don’t recognize Him as apart from you, you won’t be able to
‘hear’ Him, when he speaks from within you. Yes, it is a mystery. A conundrum, a puzzlement:
If you don’t see Him outside of yourself, you won’t see that He is in you. God is the Everything
that is everything, and therefore He can be lost to you. Let’s just say you been knowin’ that, and
move on.

JAIL BREAK
After about a year in prison, Billy got bored. He couldn’t make a break because it would add
years to his sentence. Complaining didn’t do any good at all—people came to expect it. So he
got an idea. He would make a symbolic break for it. And since he wasn’t making it up, he would
take a bunch of symbolic people with him.
He told one of the would-be bodyguard-stand-arounds, who at 80, was still standing around—
looking for all the world, like a member of the local bomb diffusion squad, metal helmet and
all—that, he would like one thousand white cars, trucks, and sport utility vehicles—whatever
sport that is.

They were going to go for a ride.

Billy didn’t go—he thought he’d watch it on TV. He was still in prison.
Billy didn’t get in the lead car because everyone expected that, besides they all magically
knew where he was going, and how he would get there. He got into a white sable, even tho he
didn’t wear fur—since he wasn’t from The Ice Age, and sat metaphorically up front, riding
shotgun.
Progress was slow, there was a lot of hand shaking and ‘Oh, I haven’t seen you since our last
whatever.’ Billy tried to be in the last car, it had symbolic meaning. But no matter what he did,
cars joined, and he would be in the middle again. He got in the last car twice, and then decided to
just skip it.
Saturday morning, the caravan that would be visible from space, took off. All the cars were
white. People had painted them with all kinds of things, mostly latex paint, since it would come
off easily, and was inexpensive. They moved slowly, because they wanted to be seen.
Everyone was the same—It was not a mixed crowd. There were characters, God knows,
fictional and very colorful characters. There were no Black people, no Chinese people, no Native
Americans, except all the people who were born in America. There were no Jews or Christians or
Muslims or anti-Semitic anti-Anythings. There were no Republican fat cats, and no Democratic
cry babies. White people were passé, even the taupe, no Earth-firsters came, Buddists stayed
home, no communists showed up. Partisans were absent because there were no speeches. There
were no Mexicans. There were no handicapped people, no poor people, no down-trodden, there
were no victims, ex-convicts, old people, or children. There were no sick people or shy people,
no one was unemployed. Rich people couldn’t come, winos, drug addicts and schizophrenics
were just suddenly regular opaque people—with bad teeth. Everyone had somehow transcended
from their petty labels, gotten out their war paint and now, were ready to go get some Peace. Go
west young man. And they did. They all did, and Yes believe it or not, they were reflective of
the entire spectrum—they were all white, dressed in the fiction of unseen petty labels; it had to be
this way: I label you, you label me, yet we can still love.
Some were scary, Billy thought. It’s almost like no one belonged. And then suddenly
everyone belonged, and people watching on TV got it first, because they could see the whole
thing. No one looked alike, except twins of course, and no one thought alike because most felt
like they were going somewhere they had never been before and might never go again.
References to time, always include the word ‘never.’ It stayed symbolic. The first car went right
into a ditch, and the second car said they went into the ditch to help the first car and the caravan
went forward. The third car lead the whole way.
Billy called it The Peace Train. Many people said that sounded too gay. Billy laughed and
said, What’s that?
He said, This is for people who don’t give a shit. You can think anything you want. You can
be farcical if you get sick of being fictional, who cares? Go live in some fantasy that you can
catch-up to the moment by telling the truth. It makes no impact whatsoever.
He instructed everyone to put one red mark, of any size somewhere on the car. Sacrifices
come in all different sizes, all different shapes, and many can’t be seen. These had to be red. A
lot of people held their tongue, and tried to get over themselves. Many couldn’t, peeled-off and
went nowhere.
 Billy took them first to a town along the river called New Hope, because you have to go north
to go south, and east to go west, and because three of his six coming-out parties had been there.
He had lunch, and caught up with the group, before they made it into New York.
The plan was to rest every four hours. Now, there were twelve thousand white cars. They
passed Lady Liberty, they passed the docks and they passed the towers of New York’s skyline,
and they kept going. Billy had been in those towers several times. He didn’t work there. He was
a tourist. He always went directly to the roof. It was an amazing view: everything you had just
been in, you were suddenly on, and you could see.
They made a sharp left and drove for a hundred miles thru Intercourse Pennsylvania, because
this ride was that kind of ride, and you have to go thru intercourse at a certain angle to give
a…..to care.
By now he had their attention, and the helicopters started. They were white too. The roads
were jammed with thousands and thousands of cars, thousands of light trucks, motor homes,
motorcycles, hogs, painted donkeys, hot dogs, big rigs, tow trucks, sedans, vans, limousines, air
foils, race cars, stock cars, sports cars, electric cars, ambulances, taxis, ice cream trucks, garbage
trucks, Kaisers Hudsons, Harleys, Packards, Hummers, Dusenbergs, busses, carriages, pop-ups,
floats, anything that moved. Every kind of car you could name—many you couldn’t. Some of
them started to fall apart from pure inertia as tho they had never been in a parade before.
Cars joined more cars; people went reluctantly to the store for more white paint, people sold
white paint to people who thought they weren’t white enough. They made there way West
thinking they were whiter than white. It was starting to come together.
They took over all four lanes of four-lane highways. People got out of their way or just turned
around, and went with them.
The story of America cannot be seen on one Saturday drive, or on one care-worn face. But the
face was smiling and so Billy smiled back. They began to get in the spirit of the thing around
White Water Arkansas. It looked like nothing. Everyone had seen fiascos. America had more
fiascos than Europe had frescos. And ours were more public. Billy lit a cigar and inhaled.
Aughh.
As they approached Birmingham, they were fifty-thousand cars long, ten cars, and three
highways wide, they drove past a small jail house and a church and a barn. People stopped, but
the train didn’t. They were heading toward Mexico, many put on the brakes.
Mexico needed more time. Many children were still born in sewers there. Some remembered
Billy’s vow: If he saw one child born in or around one sewer, dump, or rat’s nest, there would be
hell to pay. This was, in Billy’s opinion, criminal behavior, as was taking advantage of cheap
labor while you turn a blind eye to suffering. You can’t put children in the ‘discard pile!’ But
Billy said from the beginning, that he would seek out helpless children when his sentence was
over. That day was coming, not yet here. Some thought Billy was out, but he wasn’t. He was
still safely locked away in prison.
Billy stayed quiet about shared values that have no value, or going to hell in a bunch.
Somewhwere along the line he’d collected 16 minders, people who got paid in cash or credit
to make sure he didn’t leave prison, believing falsely, that they were appointed by God. Luckily,
they were not only self-righteous, hypocritical, and intolerant, they were completely unbribable,
which was fitting, but they were also spotlessly uncorruptible, which is even more expensive. So
Billy sat propped-up in front of his TV like a dummy.
Billy’s train kept moving. Thru the night. They passed a place known as The Half Moon,
near a town just outside Los Angeles, not far from Hollywood, the dream factory —which Billy
had planned to take by storm when he was a teenager. Billy wasn’t a teenager anymore.
They passed by the Mezza Luna slowly, Billy kept his eyes peeled (aperti, in Italian).
Even the places that are dead to you, live in your heart. Slowly, respectfully they passed, and
someone joined them. They drove to the courthouse, where some say justice is dead. And Billy
stopped, but the train wouldn’t stop. Many people sobered up, and many went with the man.
With him. They went with him to help him, and themselves.
The idea is not how white your car, how white your heart, how white your skin, your reason,
or how white your mercy, but how symbolically clean you are.
The Peace Train will bring Peace. But it’s not free, could unhinge any door, and it waits for
you. All of you. It is relentless. Everyone is somewhere. Even the partially lit.
Many people decided to take advantage of the one-time offer. Which is not to say they did,
but they wanted to.
The ends of human justice are on a scale, some crimes are terrible, and some are not so bad.
You tell the truth to human justice. You do not have to tell the truth to God—he already knows.
There is, however, a scale. You will be judged by both. The scale you establish, makes all the
difference.
It is possible Sir, you could lower the scale for everyone—it’s the nature of going first.
Also, instead of five million rules that don’t work, you could try five thousand that do.
Nothing has to change, not by one iota, yet it could be ten times better. You know what I mean.
They slowed as they went thru L.A. They were frightened. It was stark. It looked lonely.
Many people were too afraid to join, some weren’t. They went up into the hills and headed north.
They had a picnic. They left no trash. Billy wasn’t in a party mood.
The train changed its name to Spirit In The Sky, perhaps because perspective changes.
Sarcasm can become Truth. Anyway, something had flipped.
He symbolically, stayed one crazy night in Tinsel Town. He felt like a star; he lived like a
star; he made love like a star; and he burned out like a star. He only stayed one night. That was
plenty.
Every four hours they would stop and rest. They stopped worrying about Billy, and his crazy
ideas when they made a sharp right and drove a hundred thousand white cars thru a small town
called Saw Dust. Billy blew it away. Then they traveled thru Vegas where Billy threw a hundred
dollar bill out the window for no reason. Many people had their own symbolic needs, and Vegas
was the place to play them out. If it weren’t for the fact that all the lights were flashing a hundred
shades of green, and yellow, and every other color of the rainbow, the whole train could’ve gotten
off track.
They drove thru the desert, and ate roast beef sandwiches. Many just ate bread, thinking that
wheat, and the fields that are kept animal-free for the wheat to grow in, are not part of the cycle of
life, when, of course, they are. It’s all part of the human harvest.
The desert made the white cars look bleached. The line of cars could be seen as a white line,
like the one that Billy saw in the ant’s head. Irridescently white.
It moved slowly but it never stopped. Many people saw places that would be perfect to stop
in. And many did. Anyone can stop anywhere whenever they like. This is a train of freedom,
and justice lies just beyond those hills. They began to notice that so many towns were named for
ideas: Liberty, Independence, Easy, Busted, Hope, Ephrata, Alabaster, Eureka, New Canaan,
Rancho Mirage. Many towns were already symbolic.
They drove now, as Billy had with Clarke, from town to town to town looking for prospects.
Looking for a home. The train fell apart on the way to Chicago, people slept in their cars, Billy
had a late dinner.
The train was not a recruiting train. It was not a rescue train. Some of the people you go to
rescue will be already dead—that’s the nature of rescuing. It was not a hunt for justice, that
comes later. It was an idea. It moved concentrically. It moved in spirit. It was joyous. It came
to rest in a cemetery in Iowa (the Algonquin word for ‘out there’). Billy went home alone. The
train didn’t make a full circle; this story was far from over.

From space, the thin line that did not circle the country or stop, looked like the tin bracelet that
Billy wore. From space, light can travel forever—unimpeded.
 It was Billy’s way of saying Thank you to someone who shall remain nameless.
If Billy’s wrist were invisible, you would see more than the beginning and ending loops of the
little silver strand. But his wrist is visible and it is palm out. Take it. I would if I were you. This
may be the famous one-time offer, you’ve heard tell about.
The thing, the trinket, that you might want to buy yourself now, does a couple things; it keeps
the devil at bay, and it does another thing. It keeps us moving forward. And it makes it much
easier to talk to God. If you wear it, before you’re sure who it’s from, and you take it on faith.
Well…that’s how it comes. If you wait till you’re sure, it’ll just be another piece of junk jewelry.
Ω
People watch Billy now, before his own sentence begins, and he sees a funny look in their
eyes. On the street, there’s something akin to recognition. It’s there, and it’s not there.
When he conducts business, there doesn’t seem to be any recognition at all. Why would he
stop doing business, or buy things—try to get a plumber on a weekend, or tech-support from
Anystore USA, just because he is who he says he is?

I will
Billy has no trouble telling the truth. He finds it expansive: Some say it’s because he never
went anywhere or ever did anything. ‘All he ever did was sit and listen, watch and wait.’ And
that’s true. Except—I wasn’t just sitting: Love is a funny, and fantastic thing:
I’ll walk in any person if I will
I’ll speak in any meter if I wish—I don’t need your permission to make myself smile
I’ll offer fragments if so inclined. Diamonds are. Life’s facets are what makes it life-like
I’ll offer ellipses if I desire….. have
I’ll emphasize this and then that.
I’ll agree when I feel moved
I’ll sleep with women if I choose
I’ll bring no end to what there is no ending to
I’ll take no notice of time… it never does anything.
I’ll jump your understanding without trying. I’ve never left because I’ll never leave
I’ll do whatever it is but change, to keep you from the door. And when I rain down, everyone
gets wet. Don’t forget—I know you. Plus, I know you’re about to kill yourself —and that
changes everything. It makes me love you, more, exactly, the same…as ever. I didn’t say
forever. For you there’s not time enough. If I lean over and say, I love you. You might ask me
to lean more forward. I will. Here. If you think it’s stopped me somehow, stop this: a fool sees
riches only from empty pockets.
I’m not going to bowl you over, and you’re not going to slow me down. You’re lost. Billy
was extremely manipulative. His hands were soft, as if they’d never been touched or ever
touched another. They said: That means he never left a mark. They believd that.

Call me RC…call me Budd’, or Mu’d, call me Avra’m, Sudra’ it doesn’t matter. I don’t feel
the spirit divided that way. But then, I don’t feel it divided at all. I have a hard time sometimes
myself; I can’t do the most simple of things. I try, but they fall apart in my hand. I held a knife
once; when it touched my skin, I dropped it; I was instantly sober, and safe. My whole world
stopped, stalled and started again. Being me, I tried to figure it out. Some day I’ll be released,
and we can go for some real rides. Ha, ha ha ha.

People asked deep questions, and Billy said, Hey, everyone has to be somewhere. Someone
had to say something. Someone had to start the ball rolling. But the words were stolen from his
mouth. He was born before he ever said those words. He was all winged-up and haloed before
he ever said word one. It may have been a miracle. It felt very odd. The question: what’s going
on here? Never, not once, never came up. In God.
References to time almost always include the word ‘never,’ e.g. I’ll never love again.
I am The Christ because I was born this way. I live here because this is where my house is.
God talks to me because I talk to him. I understand him because I’ve been translating gibberish
all my life. And it turns out we speak the same language after all. I need Respect, because I am
like you. I suffer from lack of Peace and Justice, for the same reason. I would give up
everything, and stop this train before it ever got started if I could. But it’s too late. It left the
station two years ago.
These aren’t my symbols; this is not my train. I didn’t name these towns; I didn’t write these
songs. It’s gotta start somewhere. It couldn’t go on any longer. I said I would do it and I will do
. So help me God.
You will come-up with a thousand reasons how this could never happen—then you’ll come up
with a thousand reason why it could. It did. Then you’ll come up with a thousand reasons how I
cannot be, and then a thousand why I can. I am. No matter what you do, you will come back
exactly where you started. I’m not changing you. Same for me. I’m still a nice guy with a funny
job. I don’t crack a whip, I hold a baton.
*
Now of course, there are the clever ones. Some of them made their cars white by gluing on
upholstery fabric. Now that the ride is over, it has suddenly become The First.
Now we can all go back to our prisons, and they can sell souvenirs, or use the material to make
peace robes, or peace scarves, or peace moccasins. Or maybe just cover a bunch of chairs with it.
And then have symbolically-peaceful living room furniture—that matches! The ones with the
bright ideas may clean-up afterall.
Peace is simple—a breeze. And takes nothing. But the will to try. It is incredibly useful.
And worth it. If all you get is matching furniture, and Peace in your living room. Well, that’s
fine. If all I get is more lively discussions on Sunday morning TV, and fiction about real
people—well, I could stand that. It’ll help me pass the time.
If all you’re interested in, is stealing and selling those little star-shaped pods that fall from the
trees, and land outside my property, that’s fine with me. Give my share to the poor, 80% (But,
big but, 80% must be given everytime it’s sold. I cannot blindly trade). If you give only 78%,
I’ll know you’re starting to understand the human self —cheap, transparent, hard-headed and
needing to be filled with a purpose of its own choosing.

Houston, it looks like we could have a problem

The problem with medicine is the problem with all your systems. They are made to survive
unchanged forever—and they can’t.
The problem with medicine, medical care, medical insurance and all that, is that good doctors
looked the other way while unscrupulous ne’er do wells sold expensive cures that weren’t, for
diseases that they knew nothing about. They gave themselves exclusive rights, bought and paid
for.
They refined their job to make it more necessary, more essential, and implied they could save
anyone from anything—that death was the ugliest and worst thing that could ever happen to a
person. (hell)
They made themselves so necessary they became the quintessence of a life well lived—The
Calderon, the thing you think you can’t do without. The ‘proof’ that you have, must have done
something good. But what? Now you’re paying the price.
 It’s only been recently, that doctors have had more to offer than an erbalist, a barber, a
midwife, a priest or just someone who cares. The good ones looked the other way, and now,
even they can’t tell the good ones from the dreck. A fairly simple algorithm could do the work of
or for, most doctors, but it is not being made available.
That fear, is the problem with your religions, politics, economics, schools, societies etcetera.
You want to be needed. You want to be needed really really bad.
I don’t advocate going back to nature, but something other. For one thing, it’s too late, you’d
never survive. For another…where would the water come from?

Poor church attendance is not the road to hell; A government you can’t remember the name of
is not hell; Lack of money is not hell; Inability to put your finger on what you’re supposed to
know, or being slightly disorganized is not hell; Being alone, in and of itself is not hell. You
bring the hell with you, you learn it, then you teach it.
God knows everything you know, and a whole lot more. I would say He’s very wise.

I heard you’re case already (the so-called Islamic right). You were so busy worrying about
your wife’s neckline, you let hijacking terrorists get their hands around your throat. I’m not
buying it. You looked the other way on purpose. You know I’m right—you were just testing the
waters to see if you could get any takers.

I was pen-in-hand-ready to go to work on The Speaker as Prisoner, but like Uncle, something
kept stopping me. Something keeps stopping me. I wasn’t sure what it was. God? No.
Something else. Then I realized it was another thing I found in the White Sound: If you don’t
know what you’ve got till it’s gone, then you don’t know what you’ve got. I know where I am, I
just don’t know what it is.
This is where I came in. It’s something about a relationship. It’s something passed on
somehow. Between the bars. And it has a distinctly conversational quality.

On-time offer
Regarding the on-time offer. I believe that Justice is like a Cardinal. It has costs. It is not free
to fly, even for a bird. Nuts, berries, seeds, preening, all that. The work of being red is a process
of seeking what comes naturally—considering what’s available, and knowing also, your
background.
In other words, a Cardinal must know his background, the information he stands in front of, or
he may become a target—more of a target.
Justice, not tempered with an understanding of what preceded it, is also bound to make itself
overly vulnerable—excessive greed, and all.
Make Peace, take the offer. Justice is not cheap, but it can be had.
I would take human justice every time—if it were offered. It may be random, it can certainly
be unfair, and often vicious. But the next plane is so long, there is every chance that you will
never get off.
Taking your medicine when you aren’t sick is very hard, but therein lies the strength you
didn’t know you had.
Build a better Cardinal. And if you are the Cardinal—seek something red and stand in front of
it. Find a place where a bright red bird would not stand out unless it wanted to.
I believe the many disregarded trees, and the oracle’s door is the reason there are so many
Cardinals here.
 The truth the whole truth and nothing
If you wanted the whole truth you’d stop asking me yes or no questions. Neither you or I have
time for all that truth. I’ll do the best I can, Thank you. I know how to keep myself clean.
Spotless I’m not. Fiction is not a cover for the truth, but a more succinct way of reaching it,
considering. The Truth is on page 537 in the teacher’s edition (12 font)…I think it’s the same in
yours (page 476 in 11 font. See: The work to me). The truth is true, and complete up to that
point in so-called time; it’d also fit very neatly on the back of a postcard. Many have implied I
should’ve just mailed it: ‘current occupant’ I suppose, or Dear World: blah blah blah…wish you
were here. Love, and then signed my real name. I do love the world, but wha’do I know of it?
triple what you know, triple that and triple it again—still not much.

I went to public schools, I am not, however, a public person. When your private issues pour onto
my public street, that is no longer a private matter. The public airwaves are for free speech, not
bullets, bombs, sulfur dioxide or any of that other crap.

The idea of celebrating life is an extension of respecting life. The goal is not to be more stoned,
but to be more joyful. I celebrated quite a bit last week. Someone said it was national potato
week. That isn’t what I was celebrating.
If my plumber was continually celebrating the low cost of copper, I would get another plumber,
same for electricians, car repairmen, and others whose work is not a constant celebration of
personal freedom.

It must be said, If you are reckless with your body and mind, how responsible can you be with
my… Fill in the blank. You may want what you want, and nothing else. In other words, I might
trust you with my car, but I’d count the donuts in the box before I left you in a room alone with
them. I’m not running for office, I love you because you’re flawed.

Some of the worst politicians we’ve ever had

As far as politicos go, I’m no one’s idea of a politician. I believe, that if you have no idea
what you’re talking about, you should just shut up. What’s hard about that? I believe that to give
a fuck, someone has to take a fuck. I am neither electable, appointable or abridgable. I can’t, as
I’ve said, trade on the word of God, neither can I blindly allow others to—Politicians for
example. I urge them to be very careful about this. I’m not a lawyer, however, I have history on
my side. For better or worse, it has to be said: If you stand in my way, and force my hand you
will fall into a category. An unprized sort. One that once you join, you can’t be removed from.
I’m not that easy. I’m not God, not hardly. I don’t speak for Him, but I urge great caution. To
the rest, know, please, you must be very skeptical of the newly sighted—Especially when there’s
power involved (even me). I like the politicians we have now. They’re priceless.
They hire 6,000 people to bribe them, and then create laws to make them seem invisible.
Apparently, they’re working as hard as they can to get rid of these vermin, but when you ask
them why they don’t just fire them, they say they never hired them. They don’t know anything
about who hires these people. For all they know, they’re doing it for free! In other words: they
can’t fire them, because they never hired them, would never hire them, and never paid them a
dime. And you can go round and round with that till you drop dead from exhaustion.
Keep them, not because they’re good, they aren’t—the American people have always been,
and still are, leagues ahead of them. Keep them, not because they make right law, they don’t.
Keep them, not because they’re harmless, feckless wimps, they aren’t—they’re extremely
dangerous. Keep them, so you can see your mistake: they’d sell you out in a second—no paddle,
no floaties, no nothing. Keep them, so you can see they’d ruin you if you took one step out of
line. Take one, and you’ll see immediately. They hate loss. They are taking advantage of you.
Keep them also, so you can see them as I see them: pigs. If you change the starting line-up,
you’ll have made a serious mistake. You must see them as they are. Without that vision it will
be much harder to proceed. They’re transparent in their greed and they have no clothes. To
throw them out for more clever ones, would be a mistake. Once you realize how corrupt,
brazenly deceitful, and totally without merit they are, then you have a handle on the situation.
This isn’t me being conciliatory: Go further down the path of nothingness in order to see. It’s
important to be able to laugh at your worst nightmare: Watching all you’ve worked for, be
destroyed by fools made fools by money—the future depends on it. If you think you can destroy
nightmares by shutting yourself-up in the dark, you’re so dead wrong.
There are thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand that’re better than they are, I know. But, if
you see them as new and improved, or you just change their name—you’ve got a big problem.
Plus, they’re a freakin’ riot. Right now they’re locked, and they’re going to stay locked. But they
won’t stay locked forever—So much to gain, so little…t i m e
Vote. Absolutely vote! The whole thing’ll collapse, and be rebuilt—upon sand—So vote.
They’ll deny that they’re only as corrupt as you are stupid—they’ll say: That’s not true, we’re
much less corrupt. In Jersey, they considered enacting a law that required businesses to bribe
them. These gold mines would be hard to replace. There are good ones, but they’re busy looking
the other way. Don’t bother asking what happened to your pension—No, you never missed a
payment, never, not one. But now that it’s time to pay out—oops, they forgot to invest it, or save
it…“We spent it like you told us to.” ugh. You could turn blue before you see your way out of
that one. Blue, dusky crimson blue.
The highest bidder gets their business, period. If times are tough…a nickel’s a nickel. They
don’t work for nickels, but the message must be clear—the highest bidder gets it. Many bad
deals’ve been sealed with 1 trip, 2 dumb strippers, and free rum & coke, no joke!
I don’t sound good in sound bites, and I’m already in prison. I am the proverbial round peg in
a square hole. I was born this way, and then I was chosen..offered the
job…asked….denoted…..not detained. They will become more corrupt. Prepare!
Listen, If you think your king was appointed by God, fine. If you love him so much, just keep
re-electing him, term limits notwithstanding. Who cares?
Wouldn’t it be funny if the smallminds grew a heart at the same time the bigheads learned to
fight dirty? It will always be thus, when there’s money involved.
One more swing at the piñata, and then I’m done on this subject: You, that is, some of you,
will be shocked to the core when you see who steps up first, to try to put the devil back on his
pins, his ‘feet.’ You will be less shocked when you hear this person’s friends accuse me of
cutting in on their action. You will be even less shocked when ‘the same,’ call me a cynical
bastard—CB!!…Me! You won’t be hardly shocked at all when their ‘silent partners’ try to
bankrupt me, and put me in prison for tax evasion—I didn’t declare everything—souvenirs, for
example. People have been giving me their two cents on a wide variety of subjects for years—it
adds up, I guess. Plus, I’m a flight risk. Galileo’s prison is the only one that can hold me. This
has been pre-arranged.
When God can no longer deliver votes, you won’t be very surprised at all, to see who drops
Him like he’s hot. And goes back to talking about money and power which was always the
subject anyway. If you think I’m saying, Don’t change the world—I say, Yagottabekidding?!
I’m saying: observe, get certainty, go slow, see what you’re up against. You have time. When
‘big tough guy’s’ on the mat, I’ll lean down and whisper thru my bite block: If you don’t stop
soon, you’re gonna give religious fundamentalism a bad name. “You will end at water, grabbing
for brotherhood as if it were a branch.” I know you know what I mean. You still wanna fight?
Bring it on…We need to talk. As a member of an endangered species you haven’t killed yet, I
want to explain to you how to back, the fuck, off. Show up, if you ever do, without your guns—
This will be in words.
Bring the Don from the D.O.D. I like him, he reminds me of my dad, plus, he knows how to
laugh. No, I haven’t changed my mind. I’m not political. Politics’s useless in my line of
Work—You’re in my way! Don’t make me say it. Once you’re nominated, I can’t take it back. I
work alone. There are two schools of thought on that, however, I don’t have the power to revise,
nor am I a dictator.
If I haven’t spoken the truth, reject it, and reject me. If you love your children, fall back on
that: That you can love without aim. You may, I hope, learn to love what’s all around, for it is
all around. God is literally 1 centimeter away (Author’s note). Read on.

Later, when the lights are low…

God, I don’t pick on people weaker than me—They are…‘lay-abouts.’ I know they try, but
they’re selfish slobs.
What’s that, He said.
Disgaceful, self-satisfied, unsavory characters, nearlyworthless…sacks of…
No. That.
What?
That.
Where?
There.
Here?
Yes.
Tea.
You know them Billy, because you are them.
What’s that. He said.
This?
Yeah that.
This?
That.
It’s champagne.
You’re not done yet—what are you celebrating. G
I’m celebrating telling everyone that I’m in prison for life, and will probably die there.
Well yes, that’s a problem. Instead of drinking when you go out, you’ll have to drink when
you go in.
Oh.
Oh……One thing. How did you get a 47 in religion. G
Silence
Well…God, I said—feeling more than ever, that He really was my Father—She had a 0-49
scale. Ha ha ha. B
Silence
She was crazy. Billy whistled-in, and made the universal sign for crazy. B
Silence
She was teaching outdated notions called creationism. But, ah, I thought she was teaching a
legitimate, you know, adult science course…about the conflicts between science and, ah, you
know…uh…religion. Not some thinly veiled….. B
 Billy, you cannot just say someone’s crazy, because you don’t understand. G
So I decided… B
Just because you have transcended petty labels and hyper-vigilant devotion to the form—They
haven’t, yet. Further…you cannot make-up a story about how they count, or evaluate, or what
scale they use, just because you never could count, and you have been harshly and unfairly
judged, by harsh and judgmental people your whole life. The truth is simple. Tell it. So said
God. Billly dropped an ash onto the keyboard. and blew it off.
She was a good example of what not to do. B
Billy, a good example is a good example. G
If He knew how to sleep I would have given Him a pillow and directions to the couch.
Okay…She spent her life doing the right thing, as she saw it, creatively, and without malice,
as tho she’d taken an oath. Which she’d never taken. As far as I……B
That’s it, stop there. That’s enough. It has value, real value. Not 49 bits out of a hundred-
value. She has value. She will not be forgotten by time, or me, or you, or Heaven.

Even a whole nuther paragraph? B

Even as she is part of the Doing. So you are also a part of the Undoing. Understand, without
her, you may not have risen. She gave me back my Son. So also, have any number of unwitting
accomplices. People who made you more sensitive to suffering. Or people who cut you to the
quick, as they say. G
Who talks like that? Dear Lord you need updating. U
I’m talking, Up. You’ll get your turn, I know. G
Shu`tup winced at the nick name. And put the glass down. Lord! U
You stood out in her class, but you never stood up. She is not one of your anti-Christs. She
did not force your hand, or get in your way. She irritated you. She is a teacher. She is noble.
She cannot do what you can do. Don’t forgive her. I think you should apologize to her.
I think glasses should come with screw-top lids so that when you’ve had enough you could
just screw the lid on and it’d keep. S
Silence.
She started it…because she looks just like Morris’ Aunt and so all I said……S
Please don’t start with Aunt Morris’ Aunt, and Uncle Morris and their son Elbow. G

God is the everywhere that is everywhere.

There are no more lords nor none of it, Human rights destroyed it—Not to mention property
rights. God is not lord—He does not own you, or anything.

She’s not an anti-Christ…I never thought she was. B

I know. God said. Pay attention. G
Billy looks out the window. A Cardinal sits on top of a bush and nods in his direction.
You can’t tell a story without some fiction. You can’t tell a story without making some things
up, no one can, no one ever has. All your stories rely heavily on that porch.

It was the ‘promiscuous’ comment, wasn’t it? B

No. I found it amusing. You, considering yourself less promiscuous…Less promiscuous than
what—Yourself ! G
Billy decided to just stick to the script. God smiled, and said that would be fine.
But after a few months of: There are a lot of places I would like to go, a lot of things I would
like to see, and a lot of people I would like to meet. People started to say: Jesus Christ! What a
pain in the ass!
 Billy took to not-answering the door. God smiled.
God is real.
I am real.
The Cardinal was real. All the Cardinals are real. Morris has no Aunt, because there is no
Morris. There is no car lott, which is all asphault, or a story about the nature of boom-towns and
how they bring out the salt in people, because that’s an old Bible story. And this is not that;
doesn’t repeat what is already written; eliminate, negate or dislodge what has been so long
purposely misunderstood; or aim to take it’s place; this is not that.

All apologies must be face to face. If that’s possible. If not, every attempt should be made to
identify where their spirit is. If your mother, the one you treated harshly, never knew anyone,
never had any other loves, never held joy in her hands, besides you. If the only goal she ever had
was climbing Mount Everest, which is not it’s real name. And that is where she died, and that is
where she lies—Then you may have to go there to talk to her spirit, otherwise she’s right here.
Among these symbols.
Billy decided to just keep to the script.
He awaited the conversation in which God says that all four anti-Christs were more
responsible for the work than they will ever be given credit for. Forcing the hand, forced the
hand. Identifying, ignoring, discussing, and fighting their perceived assaults, destroyed the power
they had over him. “And look where I ended up?” Perhaps we’re always where our challenges
lead us? The conversation never came—wasn’t necessary.

Thank God the Fog has lifted—

—Katherine Hepburn from O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. 1962, Sidney Lumet
It’s unexpected. Like the dawn of Creation—Montgomery Clift/Kathrine Hepburn, from Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer

Uncle Cherry said, to the guy who came into the store asking for a book on philosophy: All these
books are philosophy—someone’s philosophy. With a wave of his hand he announced: ‘All Of
Them.’ Sometimes he just took an instant dislike to a person.
He was my Grandfather because I made him my Grandfather. He was my great Uncle because he
was my Grandmother’s brother.
I kissed him when no one would dare. I stole $125.00 American, five dollars at a time, from his
wallet. He forced me to learn how to make change, and then regretted it when I stopped short-
changing the old Jews that bothered him on a daily basis.
I stole books that didn’t sell, I read E.L. Doctorow against his will. I adored his best friend, the
only black man he could stand. I made Eddie Waters my uncle because he gave me his first
name. Eddie played the clarinet, and any other instrument you could name, swept floors, and
married women for a living.
He told me the story of when he lived in Washington, and how the saxophone fell out the window
and never hit the ground:

He was practicing with the guys, and it toss it self out the winder…everyone spected a huge
cresh…and we listen…with our eyes shet…but it never made a sssound—it was stole in mid air!
We look—Ssome joker runnin’ down na street with it tuck under his arm like itwasa pot a gold,
anit he he he, ho ho ho. Ooh Lord. Mercy! Never hit’degroun!! Haaa-ah-haa.
We laughed and laughed while everyone went broke. We told stories about the thinnest of thin
air.
I talked about music, and I could barely play a note. I read the first couple pages of a thousand
books. Eddie would smuggle his clarinet into the store, and I’d look busy. He would play
heavenly music that I could barely comprehend.
I told him my clarinet was lost in an archeological dig.
I told him I couldn’t play his, on account of the rubella.
I told him I broke my hand once, and it threw me off.
My Grandfather would wish old men Merry Christmas in the middle of July. We had a
wonderful time going broke, five dollars at a stretch.
Eddie could really play, Uncle Cherry could really put strangers in their place, and I made change
a penny at a time—Watched my two favorite uncles—who were not my uncles, with one eye,
while I learned that I couldn’t count, or play music, real music, with the other, which was my
ear—Wishing it would be that way forever.
I never went back into my profitable phase once I left it.
I learned to stare down my Uncle Cherry’s racism 20 seconds at a time. I thought he needed
fixing. He was forced like a bulb. He became bitter like a wrinkled shirt, over time, which I am
just now beginning to believe doesn’t exist. Maybe for you it does.
At the end, he and my Grandmother gave up the store and retired. After I stole his money, his
customers, his identity, his relationship, his uniformity, his stereotypes, his secrets, and that Saint
Jude medal they kept in ‘lost & found’—When I was completely unprofitable, he offered me his
cherished cash register with the mother-of-pearl keys—and was upset I didn’t take it. It weighed
about 1,000 kilos, otherwise I would have. He gave me his rolltop desk, and I have it, to this
very day. Thank you, both. All of you.

The daily conversation, read Daily Bread. Thankfulness

The conversation on the street went like this, everyday nearly the same:
You can’t be Christ you’re just crazy.
Fine. Have a nice dah…
What if I ran around saying I’m Christ?
Do you think you are?
…No.
Well then?
That makes you a liar!
Fine. It’s been a distinct pleasure tah…
You just said you’re Christ because you think you are.
No, like it or not, I’m Christ because God offered me this job. I’m very happy I have it, and
glad to do it. It’s a funny thing: often times the people who are always wrong, lead. You learn,
and maybe I don’t even have to say this, but, they can show you the way … just do the opposite.
They eventually tell me their beliefs…“Yeah, how’s that going?”
You’re: fill in the blank, usually four epithets, followed by ‘infidel,’ or a synonym.
Fine. At least you’re honest about how you feel, and what you think. There was inevitably a
pause, many times that ended the conversation, but many times it didn’t.
Billy could be generous, and he could also keep things to himself. If one were forced
somehow, to give-up what one is holding, because someone else has a greater need, that thing
would be lost forever, and within a few hours. Neediness is symbolic of a deep hunger. If I had
anything in my hands I would feed the starving first—they require the least, and it means the
most. This is where the conversation differed, on days that it did:
You’re making a mockery of things that I hold sacred!
I’m not mocking you; I’m poking fun at myself, and you just don’t understand, yet.
You’ve stolen our most cherished symbol!!
And once again, I couldn’t take the bait. But, it’s true, I Am The Cherished Symbol.
Life is funny. I don’t think I could ever act as holy as all that…and I was an actor once. And
now I’m The Christ! Either, they really are that holy, or they’re just afraid to laugh.
 If you can’t laugh at yourself, someone’s bound to ask why? Occasionally, there are days
when all the world seems to be having fun. On those days you don’t want to be the sick kid,
stuck at home with a temperature. It can hurt you inside—kids just don’t forget.
If you think I run around saying I’m Christ all day long, know, that sometimes the truth is
unsaid...also, talk is cheap. If you think God doesn’t have a sense of humor, why all the straight
lines? And what’s the Ostrich doing here?
If you were Christ, you’d convert me!
Into what?
During the listing, Billy would put on his shades or take off his shades or adjust them, and
wave his hand while he did that.
You see, I can’t lift a finger, for the same reason I can’t lift a Mack Truck. If you saw me as
unreal, how could I be real? I kept the fiction as long as I could. It can move you far forward,
further and further, until you touch your own heart. It can go in two or three directions at once.
The thing is giving your Love. But you have to do more than just say “I love you.” You have to,
that is…I have to be real…..Just barely within my own grasp. If I laugh—well, I laugh. I don’t
know what to tell ya. It could be because you’re funny.
This went on and on. This was like walking on a wire without a net. Fortunately someone had
the good sense to lay the wire on the ground. I would often think to myself: ‘self…you quit
drinking for this?’

One day there was a radical departure from the everyday conversation, as there inevitably,
always must be. It’s inescapable:
A man brought me his 18-month-old daughter, pointed a gun to my head, and said if I didn’t
bless her, and cure her, he would kill me. That wasn’t so funny.
Luck at the point of a gun. .45 calibers of truth. One fixed piece of steel and a muzzle that
tells your story for you. What must he be thinking? I can’t negotiate with death threats or offers
of life, which is the same thing. That day has come and nearly gone. All that trading in souls,
agglomerating souls, kidnapping, or whatever you called it, is over. In the future, all agreements
made across a death threat will be automatically null & void.
A fake Christ is the last thing this fucked-up world needs, he said. And what the hell do I care
if you’re GAY…“JUST DO IT!”
I looked him in the eye, and I went on to explain, and Thankful for the time he gave me to
explain, that she was already cured—I have made death symbolic, and it is. Symbolic of desire,
desire to go, and that means also to love, whether you believe or not.
I didn’t know what was wrong with her, or if anything was wrong with her or what he thought
he was buying with his purchasing power or why he put so much faith in crime.
Our hands are all over the lives of the people we love. “Did you have a hand in this?”
He began to shake: the child in the crook of his arm, and the gun in his hand.
Guilt is this: Something you stepped on while you were stepping over something else.
Walk away, and take her with you, I said. Where you go, she will go also. That’s all you need
to know. Love never dies. She’ll never leave, until you let her go.
He began to shake and sob so violently, I had to take the baby from him. I knew it! I knew
it! I knew I was going to get stuck with this baby! I got four babies just last week; and, three
teenage girls, and a tired old man went directly to jail without passing go. I have private thoughts
you know nothing about; e.g. I could negotiate myself out of a mid-air collision and still get hit
by falling bodies.
“Goo-goo yourself….your daddy would kill for you. Stop kicking. Her can help her daddy.
See daddy…see..” If this little baby died in my arms, there was a chance that I wouldn’t be held
at gunpoint every day for the rest of my life. But she didn’t die.
(Billy didn’t know that the child was thought to be blind)
 The man recovered himself after a few minutes. I handed him his baby back, and for some
reason he handed me his gun.
Is it done? he inquired.
Yeah…still symbolic of desire.
Whether you believe it or not, the baby never died. You cannot die without ever having been
loved. And that’s the way I got out of it. Not by lying, but telling the truth. And being grateful
even for the very smallest of things. Not at the point of a gun. Never.
After that, little choral groups sprang up here and there, and I got to hear all kinds of music on
my walks. Some of it was very heavy. It’s a hell of a job…but someone’s…..

the miracle of the hand

I refuse to tell the whole story about the man who nailed himself to a tree in Airsupp. Personal
symbolism is what it’s all about—not Billboards. If I could do miracles in prison—I’d get out of
prison. Listen, every time I hear the story, it gets more and more miraculous: The nail wasn’t
found, because there was no nail; his right hand was without a mark, because he nailed his left
hand to a tree and stood there for a day and a half. People saw a nail where there was no nail,
because it was so obvious there must’ve been. I don’t know what kind of glue he used, but I bet
it was the cheap kind. I walked up to his right side because when I turned around, that was the
side closest, and then I whispered this in his ear: What’s a guy gotta do ‘round here to get
martyred? He laughed inside, barely smiled outside, and I helped him down. He pulled it out.
It’s a miracle when people can see themselves and laugh, even a little. Life is real. You don’t
need me around, to tell you that. Everyone wants to be heard, yet we all see it differently. A
miracle in fiction—well, what’s that gonna get us?
Real miracles occur by faith (Mark 5:34), little faith—little miracles. Big Faith—Big
Miracles…But, it’s not always up to you to choose. After all, what’s big? Your Hand, your
House, your Mind, your World, the Universe? Miracles are always big: Everyone stoppped
fighting at the same time. Let them say what they say. I’ll do the worrying.
When you’re scared to death of what you may see next, but you keep going anyway—that’s
not fearlessness, that’s faith. Big, always big, and full of lots of flashing lights.
Sometimes I feel like carrying a bat, and dressing as an umpire but who can live like that?
I had a dream last night. Four teenage boys and a grown man were walking up the street
carrying baseball bats. I had no thoughts, no words, no ideas… just fear. They didn’t run, I
didn’t run—it got slow motiony. I saw a spotless vision of Martin speaking. I did what he had
done, and in front of everyone, right out loud I said: “I,” and then I said my name, “do hereby
take you, Non-violence, as my lawfully wedded wife, forsaking all others, I promise to love and
abide and cherish and honor…from this day forward…I do here avow and attest. By the power
vested in me I now pronounce us, man and wife.” I heard a bat hit the street. I married all five of
them: J-head; PBQ; Flat top; Lefty, and the youngest, James Frederick Barnes, the one who
dropped his bat, to Non-violence, awake.
No marriage is ever a suicide pact, pre-nups and exclusionary clauses notwithstanding.

Lift
I was raised up. And I will raise you up. I will help you find a step. Some may need to come
down off their pillars. Some will say I learned Christianity from the steps, I did. They never let
me in—still don’t, to this very day. I’m not good enough. I must change, so I can be more like
them I suppose, tho I’m sure they’d reject that characterization.
I have compassion, I have mercy, and I have the sense to place a box so you won’t fall. Don’t
leave me out of your discussions—I know where the boxes are kept.
Making boxes is not my business, not really. That’s always been a message board.
Every time I touched the business world, it dissolved into symbolism, and left me awestruck.
Everything I say isn’t for you or for you today. You don’t control what I say.
I was raised by my Parents, Grandparents, Great Aunts, Great Uncles, my Mother’s Cousins, my
Cousins, my Half-Cousins, other Aunts, Uncles, Friends, X’s, O’s, and an assortment of
relationships too numerous to declare. I came to God like this. I was not re-raised. I did not
stand up—I was already standing. Everything changed behind me. Zip. I discovered I stood in
impossibility. Almost 50, almost 5’10,” almost 150lbs. I wasn’t standing on a box, or a marble
pillar, I was standing on certainty.

You envy the dead

You live separate lives
You’re alive when you play on the winning side—
Provided someone who isn’t playing cares
You can’t create till you give up all hope and just stand there open handed nearly naked:
Being is Everything, less than one step from Creation

Personhood
History is a trick the living play on the dead—Voltaire (and Voltaire gets to be right…about that).

When I was born, I had three Grandfathers. I never met my Father’s Father, he died when I
was one. I saw him, or so they say. I felt his presence no doubt. I did not possess that thing
necessary to achieve a meeting or to allow such a thing to take place. I lacked the personhood
required to meet him. There was no exchange, therefore nothing could be achieved. He died
within the year.
Language, wordless or nominative, is designed to make you seek the right response, it is not
equivocal in any expressions except repeated expressions. Being right without repeating what
someone just said to you, requires personhood. Requiring argument. I’m right—you could be
more right, etcetera. Conversation leads ultimately to argument.
You are like one big global argument. You are about to reach maximum saturation of
personhood. That’s why I’m here—not to be right, God forbid! That’s all you need, one more
person bent on being right. I’m here to reach that point immediately before you do, and cancel
your motivation. Borrow it. Not steal you blind. But make you cry.
If you think I talk to myself when I talk to God, then you probably assume I win most
discussions, and am almost always right. That’s what I thought!
I’m much more disengaged than you suppose, not from lack of personhood, but from
overwhelming presence.

Coming
You don’t tug on superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the old lone ranger and you don’t mess around with
slim./ Jim Croce

Coming, not from a religious background or having sipped at that font. I came to see this higher
self was not self at all. Grounded in self it had something else in mind. Not being strictly mind,
it had a knowing that was way beyond my knowing. It wanted me to honor it. Like a child, or a
painting, or a brand new relationship. It, which was not me, and for which I take no credit, was
born in me when I was born—also held the keys, which I had stolen, but, which I had also given
back, and when I gave them back we started going somewhere. And we ended up, at The
Springfield Mall, in real time [justlikeyouarenow].
I learned from this thing, which was not self, because I asked.
I believe it knew I was ready, and it spoke to me as plainly as I am speaking to you now. It is
faith, which is far far from belief—it winters there (faith), it is not from here at all.
It is not a thought, it is a repeated symbolic thought. It was not created like a thought, it showed
up from centuries, or no time, and then suddenly, you think… maybe you heard something like
that once.
I believe it exists very real in the white sound, not as a feeling. It speaks no English or any other
language of which I am familiar. It behaves like God, who is Supreme, and like Delbert who has
been before. It is beyond frailty. It is not a splitting of the mind. It is from—I believe, a splitting
of the self. Off of the self, not self—away from the self. Not permanently stolen away from the
self…but for the moment, and then the next.
Eventually, you can stand to be away from the self for longer and longer periods. I have now,
about as much use for that as I have for hooks. I request release, and if the higher being will by
some magnificent assent, grant it, we can begin to live. If you reach for schizophrenia, you have
reached too far. God is separate within you as perhaps a guest who wound up in your DNA, and
when you’re ready, when the calcium or copper triggers make it possible you will give birth. I
think it prepared the way for you just in case you failed, and you have—once again. Once again,
this is not me, harboring some grudge out of petulance, whether you believe it or not—Without
this hastily provided afterthought, you will last approximately 125 years—Like all the rest.

7000 eyes on each side of his head like a bee

Billy was tired of being Billy. He was what he had always been.
He was not interested in school because there was so little Knowledge (Sense) there.
He was not interested in church because there was so little God there.
He was not interested in money because there was so little Freedom there.
He was not interested in constant self-protection because there was so little Peace there.
He was not interested in the white sound because there’s so little Meaning (Awareness) there.
I believe that God is from the Beingness of stars, little stardust. That is what I believe.

Sacrifices must be made

Everything crumbles sooner or later, but love__ Believe—Elton John /Bernie Taupin

It reminds me of when my friend, who is in God, and doesn’t know he is, gave me a so-called,
ecstasy pill. I danced and danced, then went to the men’s room, very preoccupied and suddenly
reserved. I had a paper for school on my mind, some big deal due in four days. I sat there in the
stall and wrote the whole thing—all ten pages, in my head.

This is like that. It came to me all at once, like a pill. The whole thing was written in my head—
then I went home and wrote it down. I hope you dance. I would want you to.

When you lose your resistance to fight me, there will be no great sucking sound. Likewise, when
you evaporate, know that I know where you are. There are billions of babies waiting to be born,
perhaps a trillion. Let them wait. You’ll be sorry if you bring them all at once suddenly into this
world. Sacrifices must be made. If I had it to do over I would have taken half a pill. I think
now—the paper could’ve waited.
 5-1-12 So
I’m not fearing any man. I may not get there with you, but we will get to the promised land—My Eyes have seen the
glory of the coming of the Lord.--- Martin Luther King Jr.

Jeshua and Billy were together one day, and God had to interrupt them.
What are you doing. You cannot pick and choose what you’ll take with you. What will be the
palette, on the palette, and are you listening to me. G
It is for me to decide what is worthy of note, what is important, how much light to shed and
where. You cannot just pick up everything you see that you like, and think you can take it with
you, just because you are a keen observer, people look to you, and you have all the space and
time in the…You are not Pharaoh! G
Jeshua turned to look at God, and said from the inside, where Billy lived, and Jeshua was
visiting: That would be amanpour of us wouldn’t it? J
God had to bite his lip to maintain his serious demeanor, before His Sons, who was One. His
one and only Son.
Billy looked away innocently—thought he should cross himself or something, but not being
Catholic, he didn’t know how it went.
Well, God said. I might have expected, that when the two of you got together there would be
this…this.…this.….this. G
Jeshua and Billy looked at God.
Jeshua didn’t say a word.
So Billy didn’t move a muscle.
They looked at each other, from inside.
Jeshua broke first.
God walked away. He was so happy, He cried one tear.
Jeshua is there when I need Him—If he’s not there, I don’t need him. It’s that simple.
In this time in this world
In this time, in this world, you must be of two heads. One that is preparing the hell out of the
thing you are trying to avoid and prevent. Another, that is, in silent moments joyful, as you
deserve to be. As it is your birthright to be.
Prepare.
We’ll meet again some sunny day.

Airsupp

Airsupp is a fictitious town that doesn’t exist. But if it weren’t, and if a man called me an ass
for saying hi to him and his four out-of-control German Shepards I wouldn’t get angry. He has
talked to me before, to say hi. He is a pleasant enough man. I wouldn’t get angry, because I
understand the depth and breadth and height of the human sou...self. I would also know he lives
in fear of reprisal. Breathless, taxing and invisible—as are his mumbles. I don’t miss much.
What I miss I make up— —then forget. Just like you.
Many interesting things happen behind my back, I don’t mean whispering campaigns or
passing notes. Interesting things. Once, a man stood in my way and wouldn’t move to let me
pass. I stood for a time, just wasting it. Then said: One day I’ll stand in your way; what would
you have me do? Drop dead, he said. I walked away, and took the short-cut home. I see him
often in the faces around me; they remind me of him. I didn’t know he died two days later in an
ambulance on the way to the hospital—how could I know that?
 Each time
At first I thought the work was a car commercial—all those endings. Now I believe the work
has no end. When I end it—it just begins again.
My brakes failed yesterday suddenly, before I got out of the driveway. It was a short trip.
This morning I took my car to my friend John, who fixes cars. I walked O…Let’s Go back home
and he did his job, one of them, in someone’s lawn. I forgot the scoop-it-up bag.
I realized it’s not my job to clean up every single mess, or remember every single thing, or
every single name, every single time I walk by your so-called property. I left perfection at the
intersection of Union and that other street.
Just then, a puppy without a collar practically jumped into my arms. I am also not in the
business of rescuing every single stray, I would never get anything done. I help the lost. That’s
the message. The found should stay found; that’s not my concern.
I named her Chin Chin and we’re going to find her a home.
She tried to take over the entire house including me, within the first half-hour—some puppy.
Writing signs, about lost dogs and posting them all over the neighborhood, is not my business
either—tho I do it—Reading them is.
I anticipated myself into being.
I am fully, freely The Risen Christ, and they still can’t guarantee me a rental car by one. Or so
I am informed.

4-10-12 Puppy fiction

If you understand the truth behind the fiction, you can right the truth of your own fiction.
Billy walked out of his house with a white cane, and a blank expression.
The puppy, who it turns out was no puppy, jumped into my arms. She wanted all my attention.
She was the self to Oliver’s soul. She ate until she threw up. She listened with cocked ears when
I talked. She pretended to sleep, and watched what Oliver did—for opportunity.
I jumped to the phone when Lou called about his missing dog. I combed my hair, and Got
little Chin-Chin ready. Daddy rang the door bell and said: I have a picture to prove she’s mine. I
said, because I was holding her: I can tell she’s yours. She was shaking like a leaf and all a-
twitter to be with him. I turned her over to him as I will turn you over to God. You are fun, but
you can’t stay here forever. This house, me, the time, the place, the turn of the screw is all
symbolic. You can do nothing to me that isn’t. Like Christ… you couldn’t invite him to dinner
without it becoming hugely symbolic, same here. Same here. Oddly enough, I live in a prison.
I judge movies I’ve never seen. I judge the judgemental congregations I’d never join. I am
symbolic—I judge you the same way you have always judged me. I am not as slow as you think.
Fast, I don’t chose a spot to stand—I never have. You think I join some big medieval parade
when I say I’m ‘gay,’ because you have a medieval brain.
Praying Mantises don’t pray—they commune—like I do. They are treacherous also.
Read slower and buy less. Neither food, drugs, or babies will go out of style if you stop
hoarding. Adjust your dosages and you will have all you could ever want.

The Church
I will put the church down more slowly and more gently than even they would want. All of them:
the ones with the pointy roof(s), the flat roof(s), the domed, the tiled, the stone, the gold, the
green, the blue, the plain, the empty, the glass, all of them. They have overstepped their
authority. They derive their authority from God, and He can take it away. It is not the building,
or the stories of the men and women there. What will go, is their ability to threaten and cajole,
that will waste away into antiquity. With a word, it will be done. Done. Hell is not the place
where bad people go when they die. Hell is being constantly misunderstood; pushing people
aside without meaning to; not being able to get out, or away from the feeling of constant personal
assault; and the fear that it may never end.
I was going to Heaven one day, and for some reason I felt in my pocket for a ticket. I had no
ticket, I never had a ticket, I never saw a ticket, I never wanted a ticket, I was never offered one,
or needed one. And when I grew up——I didn’t rate a ticket. What ticket?

You May Keep This Here

You can go and stand with ticket in hand or you can buy your ticket there. You may change your
seat or change its name or open its roof to the air. You can refuse to go, or pack your bags, you can
cancel your plans and pray. You may change yourself or stay the same, you can say what you came to
say. As it had to be, it’s already done. As he had to be, he has Become. My Son, who is in the way,
is the Way. My will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Puppy Ideas
Chin chin ate till she threw up, thought she could run the house, run me, and push Oliver out of
the way. These are puppy ideas; this is the fiction that is not fiction. It happened. It was real. It
happened in time and space in my stony, elfin, black and red kitchen. It is an occurrence in so-
called time. This is how it is every day, all day. Today was all blue, I went to the funeral of a
friend’s dad, all is still blue. I thought the occasion long.

My biological father asked me for a funny name, I said, ‘Israel Rappaport.’

He asked me about Big Blue, I said ‘buy.’ I’m not Rappaport.
He asked me about money, I said ‘Gold.’ I’m not Rappaport.
He said, when did you get so tall, I said, ‘I’m not Rappaport.’
He could have been rich beyond his wildest dreams, but it wasn’t for him to know who I was or
for me to understand. He passed 8-20-91. In my hands. He ‘said’ one final thing before he died:
My father who was infiltrated by cancer, with 5 minutes to live, heard me say something
profound, almost accidentally. He, who had the strength of 3 men, did his best to sit up, his best
to open his eyes, his best to say “Yes!” My Dad, who wouldn’t lower his paper to tell me I was
ever right, did his best to rise from death to underline something of great importance, The Truth:
Understanding is passive: The Secret of Life.

In these last days

In these last days. The Christ who is not self-referential. The Christ who is not afraid, or
defensive. The Christ who is loving. Who is proud to know you. The Christ who cares,
respectfully says goodbye to Kings, and respectfully says goodbye to Martyrs, may they be
brought down from their crosses. He, with the power and the glory that are in his name sake,
respectfully raises your dead from the ground and each is given the dignity of a symbolic
loosening of cloth. Not ripped from the world but intrinsic to it. Finally, as tho they had not left
years ago.
I lift you up. I will help you. My profession was always to help. And I loved it.
There is a little plot of land I have in mind. It is called Arlington; it is where my family is
buried. I will live there, summers. It will look, for all the world like paradise. I keep my word. I
will keep to the symbolism.

When I walk into my Earthly mansion, my winter home. It will be clean—unspoiled.

They cannot sell it to me, for it is the money, which corrupts
They cannot give it to me, for I cannot trade on the word of God—our relationship. They will do
it symbolically:
They will clean it, as tho they are never coming back. But, of course, they will.
They will remove anything they want to keep. Anything they’re afraid I’ll get my hands on.
Then when it’s clean, inside and out. I will be invited, and I’ll just walk in. The signing of
contracts comes later. By the time I’m ready, there will be no more fine print.

Billy did, one day make that walk. They asked him to come, and he did. At the time, on the
inside, Billy wanted to go crazy, but he was already crazy. People couldn’t understand. Billy
made sense because the world was already upside-down. God had seen to it, for this day. So it
was a breeze. The people who thought they knew him best liked him better dead. That had
always been the case, and with the same people. The closer and more critically Billy looked at
this, the more he found that nothing changed—which was nice, Billy wasn’t that fond of change.
They jumped off the high dive, swam in the deep end, and when Billy dropped down, they did.
He turned himself upside-down, it was simple. There was no trick, and that’s where the story
ended, in one of a series of fountains by the front steps of his house, with his father at home, right
in the middle of everything.

5-4-02 The Anti-Christ

The anti-Christs are not legion, there are four, by my count. They are not Satan, Lucifer,
Mephistopheles, The Devil or any of the hundred other names. They are good men. They are
bold, brave, and surprisingly well-meaning. They have, however, forced
My hand. They are as one—the times in which we live. Understand me clearly: what makes
them anti-Christs, is that they are in my way—Not in your way. And now there are three.
They’re fast-tracking the only one named, to Sainthood—just as it was written.

Money
I’m not against it at all, nor power or any of that other stuff money can buy. It’s just that in my
line of work, I have to do a lot of traveling, and it weighs me down. I go back and forth between
Heaven and Earth a couple times a day.

I found the airport all right. I found the departure gate without much trouble. I even found the
ticket counter—they don’t take money. It’s all free. All of it. All of it is free.
To claim salvation thru piety, is like insulting someone with impunity—someone’s bound to say
something, and wreck it. Money will let you down. That is their problem.

I walk onto the plane exactly like I walk into Heaven—there’s no travel time to get there. Zip
you’re there.
I have seen people in the concourse at the airport, with their ticket in hand. If they paid for it they
paid too much.

Trust yourself, you will fail.

Have faith in yourself, you will fail.
On that plane you must fail. This is Earth, you will fail.
You’re not going to get there by successful thinking.

I see all these people, all of them with their tickets out. I imagine that they’re changing seats; that
they’re moving, like on a conveyor belt. I imagine that each time I see them I’m looking at
different people. I imagine that they’re doing other things when I’m not looking. It is too
frightening to think that they aren’t, are not, and don’t.

Now, money is fine.

“must count it.”
Is so much of the problem.
I have it, I just don’t count it. I know it’s not much, that’s all I know.
I’m careful how I get it and I’m careful how I spend it.

If the flight attendant boarding-pass person said, This trip is one hundred dollars American, I
would pay her. That’s how simple my faith is. Super simple. God has a sense of humor—the
attendant may just want to get drunk, and paint the town red. The town needs to be painted once
in a while doesn’t it? It’s not my business. It’s my money, and I’ll spend it as I see fit. I may
spill a little milk, but that’s my business.

Tickets to Heaven are free and they’re funny. If I paid her the hundred dollars, doubtless, when I
got back to Heaven, someone would say: I’ll pay you a hundred dollars to sleep with me. I didn’t
sleep on the plane—bang! I’m even.

They don’t use money in Heaven, I think it’s illegal. I will try one more time, just one more time:
you cannot get to Heaven with money or power—–it has none of the qualities that would allow
that—value, for example. You have a much better chance of seeing God—from the floor—than
you do from your hastily constructed pedestal.

Time is passing
Time is passing. The Earth is rising. Billy remembers fondly the concert that so many refer
to. Many thought it was the best lip-syncing they ever saw. And, of course, the tiresome
question: Why did I crouch down like that, in front of the microphone. Did I feel faint or what
was the problem? God wanted to see what it would look like if his own eye were all around him.
The dialogue enabled the illusion. They all said the same thing, Oh, how interesting, sign here.
Of course, I never sign anything that people want me to sign. It’s almost always a bad idea. God
sighed deeply.
Anyway, Billy was hoping that in the course of the year, the mark that was left in the space-
time fabric would not look like this [ i ] with a hole and a gash, but like this [ ! ] the next time he
saw it. That would be as clear a signal as he could think of, that the world had actually turned
upside down. In space there is no upside down. Well, not before Billy’s mark anyway.
 So many called it the great leap forward. Billy tried to dissuade them from this notion. After
all, it was almost forty years ago to the day that the people of China made their great leap forward
and it became little-more than an excuse to cannibalize an entire system of corruption into a
corrupted system of cannibalism. (See, Guangxi Province, China. 1958)

The White Sound, like a rush, is the cant of people imitating people imitating people in order
to be understood apart from the life around them.
Life is symbolic.
Symbolic of the life and death struggle that sex is—with all the doubt, indifference and indignity.
He was up to his neck in it.
Swimming. With his iridescent blue bathing suite, and matching flippers.
He was killed, truthfully, not because he loved too much or too well, but that he loved past caring.
Heaven is not the first step you take in death, it is the last step you take in life. Being is
everything. Treat each other with respect, as tho you believed in them.

6-2-11 Thanatopsis. He sees death walking.

I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good… Pearl Jam/ Wishlist

It started off as a free wheeling conversation. It was a sunny bright hung-over Saturday.
And you wanna know something else? B
No. G
Well, I’m gonna tell you anyway. I hate this message! It’s too damn simple! B
Billy kicked the metal trashcan into the window by bouncing it off the bureau. They’re so
stupid! They’ll hear only what they want to hear. Plus, and I can hear it from here—where are
all the miracles at? Ya want a miracle…watch God teach me how to tell when you’re really
stupid, from when you’re just pretending to be. Watch him teach a teacher teaching. Billy rarely
exploded, but when he did—best to just get out the room.
God picked up the trashcan, his Son’s anger, the pieces of broken glass, and as he waved away
a 25-centimeter long scratch from the four-tiered chest of drawers, everything was suddenly
fixed—undented, whole, resolved.
Oh. B
Billy, you deliver the message. I’ll handle the miracles. And I’m very glad you hate the
message. It’s just so you: to tire of talking about sex, but never tire of doing it.
I’m thinking about changing the names of the sexual organs, and sexual intercourse. B
Leave it to you to screw with the part of the message that’s about sex. G
The penis can be: The Golden Key...Great Golden Key. B
Vagina can be: The Locket of a Thousand Wonders. God rolls his eyes. B
Sexual intercourse can be: Love Shack Shimmy. B
Great. Well, I guess that’s better than wee wee, ki ki, and oh, baby baby! G
Yes, besides, after about 2 millennia of talking about this, it might get tiresome. B
I suppose. Since it’s tiresome already. What would you call your ass? G
My ass…Hmm…my asss... My Perogative. Or…what does the Wahabi sect call it?
Please stop picking on the poor ignorant Arabs. Be patient. They’re coming along just fine.
Everyone stumbles. How would you feel if you were poor and ignorant. G
I’d probably feel most comfortable blaming everyone and everything except myself. B
That was actually rhetorical Billy. But you’d probably feel very insecure too. G
What do they call sexual intercourse? The Wahabi—or have they no word for it yet?
I mean it! Stop picking on them! G
God! Someone’s in a foul mood this morning. I was just curious...
God swiveled around in his office chair, in his office. Well, what brings you in today?
 Billy almost looked over his shoulder at the person God must be talking to. But he’d been
there before. He was this close to saying: Wally, and me have just formed a homework club…I
said not to ask Eddie, but Wally says a guy could learn a lot even from him… Truthfully, this
wasn’t my favorite relationship: I like the one where it’s like you read a book and it sends you
off into a day dream. Or the one…Oh, God Look, it’s snowing! And it was, a few white flakes
fell like maybe someone was burning paper.
Billy, I see you working at keeping people away. You don’t have to work that hard. I don’t
hear the phone ringing off the hook. Knowwadimean?
There was a flutter of loose paper or something on his desk. It could have been a paper fan or
a hand polisher. The paper was spinning like a big rolodex, only a small part was showing. Then
God holds up one piece of paper, with no visible writing on it, and appears to read: You think sex
is…fun. You think sex is…incommodious—He looks over his spectacles…Undignified. Billy,
curiosity and sex do go well together, but, and God turns the paper sideways, still reading. Not
everyone feels the way you do.
Now look who’s ruining the part about sex?
God laughs. Billy thinks he’s steering the conversation. God never said: I’m talking. He put
the paper down, and moved a gigantic, ornate, flat-bottomed bronze thing over it. Like an early
version of the printing press or a big microscope. If you held your thumb and forefinger together
about 5 centimeters from your right eye that’s how big it was.
Billy, not everyone can see themselves apart from what they think, feel, say, or do.
The thing began to descend on top of the paper, like a clamp, the space grew smaller.
The room was very nice; he particularly liked the window treatments, but it’d stopped
snowing. Billy thought he might get a whole new way of looking at things real soon, and he
didn’t want to get a whole new way of looking at things real soon. If that paper was his record he
didn’t want it, you know, changed. Maybe the machine’s going to create a message with raised
letters. Braille perhaps. God just went about his business, and Billy sat there like Stan Laurel,
closed his mouth, and there was the occasional chair squeak.
Finally God said: What do you think this is.
Billy knew, and was glad he knew, God was referring to the device, and not the whole thing. I
think it’s a Victorian Embossing Machine.
No. It’s lunch. Billy…things that you can’t possible understand—I eat like crackers.
God was kidding. But when Billy looked up, the Victorian Embossing Machine was gone.
Right about that time was when Billy decided to listen more intently. He thought everything had
been said already, and that it was his job to handle the embarrassing details, like when his agent
called about a meeting. Billy had to ask: What on Earth for?

So anyway, what do the Wahabi call sexual intercourse? They have a word right? B
Love shack shimmy, same as you. What would you call the disastrous consequences of
unrestrained sexual activity—Professor Knowsitall. G
Hmm… disasterous consequences…of un…unn… “Burnin’ Down The House.” B
Billy, whose house? G

Words
So many words have changed meaning in 3000 years.
Today ‘Proper,’ means honest.
To Believe in someone, now means to meet in personhood -–-to agree. Believe in me.
Talk honestly about sex, and you’ll see. I am continually upping the ante.

Thievery, is such a funny word. It implies that something is established in perpetuity. I wasn’t
going to take anything forever. More like borrowing. Anything you throw at me is mine (rule
42). Whether it injures me or not. Besides, if you can’t borrow it back periodically, you won’t be
able to clean up your mess, and you will clean up your mess. Of this I am certain.
He could not change.
There is a throne in my house. I don’t sit there, tho I did as a child. It’s a keepsake.

5-2-19 They Will Say I left No Mark

There’s a larger destiny that shapes our ends, refute it though you may.—William Shakespeare

I’ll be the first to say I’m not up to date on all these political nuances—but these Babylonians
are never gonna get it. They’re a mess—were back then, still are. They are seemingly unable to
divest themselves of self-interest for a second-—-For centuries. This will go nowhere. They
dance for the man who pays the bills, today.
Don’t we need to bring them into the 8th century before we bring them into the 18th? Maybe
we can just bring them into the 12th century, and tell them it’s the 21st? They can make things
happen if they want to, they just don’t want to. And anyone who thinks the Babylonians and
Philistines could live side by side in peace & harmony’s just plain crazy. Another gratuitous
observation. Many people look to the customer for what they call The Ultimate Answer.
Thinking for yourself, means you might be wrong sometimes. Asking for help—same thing.
Blame is really only useful when your trolley’s off its track.
Look, when you go to help, as you have done. Others may question your motives. Yours may
not be as pure as mine, egalitarian, good, but you went, you made an attempt. Then they put a
gun to their head. They do this for your benefit. Because they know you’re watching. Take a
step back—you will see—they’re negotiating. Never negotiate with death threats, or offers of
life, which is the same thing. Try lessons in educational furtherance. Many stand to benefit if
they can make others believe that rule by the demos, the people, leads to disorder, and not
interdependence. Don’t dilute my message with your foolish political hedging—this is no time
for bullshit! Fault-finders abound. Yet time is precious. I wonder why?
Pack up all your stuff, except for the bullets, and leave. People must be free to make tragic
personal mistakes. Must be. Must be free. Free. Just an aside: individuals… persons, who think
they are a group, are a group to the extent that they think they are. You never have to explain
God’s little jokes—either they get it or they don’t get it.
One more thing: if your ‘solution’ doesn’t include Justice—Penance, then it’s no solution.
This isn’t a psychology lesson—this is a history lesson: live by the sword…die by the sword.
Just look to the Rwandans—It’ll happen again…Justice was never served.
Taking everyone else’s freedom away ALWAYS sounds like a great idea, especially if it’s
from the stupid, strange or dirty, but this is Heaven. After a while, without freedom it’s bound to
feel like you’re in someone else’s idea of Heaven, if you get my drift.

Haiku 1
Describing is impossible. Deciding is impossible. Declining power just doesn’t happen —only a
frog would. If he knew he were a frog.

Haiku
Men insult women by calling them manly. Women insult men by calling them girly. I’m out to
here with God’s child. What does that make me? All I know is, you will be just like God, one
day.

Haiku
Men care mostly, sometimes only, about what they create. Marriage allows it a name.
Haiku
The White Sound moves like waves~~~washes away every decision almost immediately.
Everything that floats on it, is a boat. Even tho few things that float are.

Haiku
Trying to trick God into getting more than your share of happiness is like walking an Elephant on
a very short leash. The shorter the leash the less the control.

Haiku
When you die you’re this high, and then you are judged. You may fall. That’s all I know so far.
God, who’s within you has been paying attention, more, I think, than you suppose.

Haiku
I intended to make the front stairs silent—they creaked. These days my labor is so infrequent,
and I put so much time into the stairs, I find that now, they silence the screaming mind, over tax
the impure heart, trip the self, and split the soul. Into one. You could lose your self there.
They’re more dangerous than a Cobra. I am not easy…if you heard that, you were misled. I can,
however, be had. What are you offering?

Haiku
I have very little respect for pain, pain medicine, people who sell it, disperse, take it, profit from
it, or denigrate the effect pain can have on your life. It can make you crazy. Look for relief. Be
honest. If you do something wrong, ask for forgiveness. Stop fighting, Apologize. All of you.

Haiku
It came to safe and silent attention that God’s one and only, was back. Walking once again upon
the Earth. When questioned, he said he didn’t pull the man’s eyes out, they just fell out. People
believed him, they knew he was an honest man, but they checked for fingerprints just the same.
He is like the words, simple, fun, in com prehen sible— uncompressible (hard)—more like water
than anything else. Yet, he could not change.

Haiku
If this is it, I’m eight. I fell, I flew, I could never care more. Your poor and seamless love, breaks
me in two. The universe works—unsteadily forward. Walk.

Haiku
To live your life as if it were in constant surrender to the will of God, is noble. To deny the
ability, the ability to say No, is to throw away one of God’s greatest gifts: To see the world
differently today than you saw it yesterday. That’s what sight is.

No special favors. No one-time offers. I’m familiar with such things. Don’t walk the path to my
door unless you have a purpose in being there. Don’t knock unless you’ve been invited. I don’t
grant private audiences at your pleasure, whatever that is. You must be recognized before you
enter. Simple. No transgressors. I am the only one-time offer around here. Shove your
microphone in my face, this face, and you’ll be very sorry; I accept apologies when I’m good and
ready—also, not at your pleasure.
 There’s a world of trouble out there
You cannot run or hide
Death will not save you
I will read you your sentence
And you can reach out and touch the ones you love
You can hold them briefly
And someday you can say Goodbye Nanny

You think your self is your soul, and that will make all the difference. Forgive, if you can’t
apologize. If you can’t speak, just put your differences aside on your own terms. And maybe
someday someone will forgive you.

((((perforations around this))))

[As much as possible. More than you can believe, He makes the world yours. It is as
absurd for a prisoner to say that, as it is for a prisoner to hear it. Sounds like nothing at all.
Complicated. Reckless. ]

4-10-21 The Toast

Even, I believe, convicts in ‘solitary’ get exercise privileges. B
Yes, yes they do. G
Good. How big is the exercise yard? B
You have stated it’s dimensions already. G
Oh. B
From the Del-Mar where you fell, to the open door on Windy Street, to the puppy you rescued, to
your back yard where I gave you a rose. G
God, I am whole. I love. Let’s go to the Marquesas. I’d rather do that, than walk this deer trail,
going from arborvitae to arborvitae, like Van Gogh on a starry night. B
I’m in awe. I’ll do whatever you want. God thought Billy may have just read His mind G
Billy looked down at the label on the bottle. It wasn’t his favorite, but it might become his
favorite. He laughed.
Let’s go, please, let’s go. Now now now now now now, Inamorata. JDS
You can’t. You have to finish. G
I know. B
There are a thousand islands waiting for you, each in a chain much nicer than that one. I will give
them all to you. In the meantime you can go south down Windy, till East Wind meets West
Wind. As far as that. And no, you can’t hop a train. Everything has limits.G
Thanks. I wonder why I like islands so much? B
You were raised in the so-called genius belt. G
Never heard of it. B
It wasn’t a belt, of course, it was a bunch of islands. G
You’re the top. You’re Mahatma Gandhi. You’re the top. You’re the national gallery— you’re
Garbo’s salary, you’re Cellophane! B
God tries not to smile. Shu-`tup. G
Yes God. S
Sit down. . g
You’re not a genius. G
Yes I know. ( JDS in MS Outlook font)
It would have been a bad idea. It would never have worked. It would have gotten in the way. G
Sure. S
It’s like islands. G
Shu-`tup had a grip on something he couldn’t let go, and stared out the window.
These ideas about islands flowed over you as a child. They mean nothing. You were an idea
when some stories of The South Pacific were an idea. An idea being turned into music. Ideas,
and creative energy flow outward in concentric circles and you were very close by. Bali Hi. G
Cheers. Billy says, and holds up a glass of champagne. B
Your Father, Claire, and Clarke were brilliant, and your Mother had a special gift. You did not.G
I was born in a trunk in the Prince’s Theatre…B
Talking now…You had, Billy, what every child has. G
It happened many years ago. B
An uncanny ability to manipulate, and then accept responsibility for his or her complete
environment. G
It was during a matinee on a Tuesday. B
Pause
Why here tho? B
Where would The Christ be born, Chad. G
Chad? I think Philadelphia’s a misnomer. I can’t believe I fell for that. B
Billy pours another glass, and’s about to lift it to the murder capital of the good old USA.
At the best time, in the best place-minus the distractions. Sham-pain, you learned to out-distance
distance-runners, and out calculate computers before you could walk or talk. Every child is
manipulative, not every child had as much to work with as you. G
God? B
Yes. Really big pain. G
Why are there so few virgins in Heaven? B
Is this a joke. G
No, but can I tell you what I think? JDS
Can I stop you. G
I think that people who do exactly what they want to do, with exactly who they want to do it to—
are not what I call virgins. B
Well that’s how much you know. Being a virgin is being un spoiled. G
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then, but I can’t remember where or when. B
Rogers and Hart. G
Yes…but if baby I’m the bottom you’re the top. B
Cole porter. G
I know God exists because I remember the day we met. Life is real. People are real. Animals,
birds, plants, clouds are all real. Kings are a nuisance. Queens are tiresome. Being the
Dauphin…I oughta know. JDS

Sleep
God? B
Yes, Shu`tup. G
Can I ask you something? B
Yes my Son. G
This is kind of difficult… B
People die so that others may live. G
No, not that—I know that. B
No, you can’t have my Sam Cooke collection. But you can borrow it. G
Oh, I’ll bring that back next time, I forgot. Sorry. B
Shu`tup, I know you want to explain something to me. G
No, I just wanted to know why people are so willing to give up the self, being so awkward and
ungainly, but only for a second. Why can’t I…..you know, keep it? They have to take it back
almost right away (Billy winces at the sound of shuffling paper). B
It… G
Besides the fact that it keeps churches, theatres, schools, and fitness clubs in business. B
Oh. Well, It’s like the Sam Cooke recordings. Just borrowed. G
I said I’d return it...God! B
All of it’s borrowed. All borrowed. Self soul, together, separate. Borrowed. G
Complicated. B
It’s like when they finally give up, and just give it to you…all worn out and scratched—you can
have it for a lifetime, but you can’t have it for a whole day. G
But if they give it to me freely, I can have it for a lifetime? B
Well, it’ll seem like a lifetime by the time you’re finished. You do have a hearty and deliberate
way of explaining things. G
Thank you, God. B
Yes, it’s like pumping lead. G
And…Thank you…One other thing: Why, if I had been a joiner, and had allowed, or been
allowed to join a group…ahem…would I have become hypocritical, self-righteous and intolerant,
myself? B
Well, for the fifteenth time, the moment they do something you don’t understand or don’t agree
with, you have to lie to your self, and then you find yourself telling others that you would do that
thing, or those things, and that you do believe in that thing, or those things when you may only
believe in half of them. And if they don’t believe what you say you believe, you would tell them
they can just jump-off any time. Their nature is to form a circle, and tell others to jump off. G
Huh. B
It’s like plumbing made out of socks, It doesn’t really carry anything that couldn’t be carried just
as well without the socks. G
God? B
You’re not the only urchin in the sea, my Son. G
Billy’s voice, and aspect changed, just then, just like that.
You were born in the genius belt. G
A lot of good it did me, I’m wearing a cardboard belt! B
Well, you got that in, I knew you would. Are you happy now. G
…It’s not a genius belt anymore. B
As far as I’m concerned you were the biggest, the best, and so, the last of the islands.
My Son, you are the richest man the world has ever known….. G
Ohh! B
In a manner of speaking. G
That’s what I thought. B
And the most powerful. The judgment of the Christ is what the Christ says the judgment is. G
You’ll have me talking in the third person yet. B
You have certainty beyond belief. You are as symbolic as if you were dead, but you’re not dead.
You are ready to die. G
That’s what you think. B
You are doomed. G
Billy sunk down into his chair, any lower and it would have collapsed.
The way you measure time is a fiction. You’re writing your own. G
I walk as if from clouds, from planet to planet, star to star. I found the heart of the Universe and
set upon it. B
Billy, that’s my fiction. G
Oh. B
Your own fiction. You won’t grow old. G
Normally that would sound good. B
Billy, it’s your account, your story. This. G
Good. There’s a harmless and marvelous month long meteor shower that announces my arrival.B
Color. G
Red, followed by an amazing green sunset. B
Well, it’s your story. G
Good. Then I’ll get younger. B
Fine, so do. G
They used to call me super sexy alliterative. B
Yes, I know. You get a lot more now, than you ever got then. G

I’d like to talk to The Old Byrd from West Virginia, if he will, if he can. To steal respect.
Do you mind? B
No. G
I can learn, I can always learn more. I’m not so lazy or so treacherous to believe I can’t. But I
have so little time, and I can’t learn from those I don’t respect—It’s always been a
problem…This is only partly a question of time, and there’s the trouble factor. It would never be
to court respectability. No, I know it doesn’t sound right, but, if I were with him for five minutes
it could be done. I need but look, observe. He might be left with more, he might be left with less.
Many times what you take is re-doubled aft.

God, did I ever tell you, I was always looking for the fat kid they called Tiny, or the dull kid they
called Einstein, and I never found them. B
You can run thru your nick-names one at a time and grow younger. G
Do you get older? B
When you’re around. G
Ha. Could I change what really happened into what I would liked to have happened? B
It’s like you have no idea what you’re doing. G
I consider fiction just another version of the truth. B
Well, you would. G
I believe in the release in the truth. B
Release from…..
Release from the tyranny of…of…the incomprehensible. B
The incomprehensible what. G
You. B
Up, why don’t you just say, The tyranny of self-deception, self negation—vanity! G
Not hearing you. B
Oh, never mind. If I were as rich as you, I wouldn’t listen to me either. G

4-11-07 You need and you can’t

You need to be rescued.
Altho you must love yourself first, before you can love another. Forgive yourself first, before
you can forgive another. Lie to yourself first, before you can lie to another. Kill, cheat, steal,
mispronounce—respect, judge, all of that, as you go.
Consider: no periods here
You reveal what is true Comfortable about what you really know
You can’t rescue yourself as you can’t really know yourself
Perhaps we are more fluid than we think and less fluid than we know
That is why I have come I’m fluid and you’re at the low point

When you go to your soul to see if it’s gone. I will steal your self.
If you drop your self to live in your soul, I will pick it up, like a pine cone.
You are lost. I have taken everything. I would be sorry, if I cared.
You’re mine now. Luckily, I love you. Imagine if I didn’t.

The Simple Answer

Telling the truth is a little like getting a negative result on an STD test (Sexually Transmitted
Disease). You feel clean, exhilarated, righteous and vindicated. It feels like it will last forever.
Sura. Everyone thinks you’re desirable, perfect. You feel perfect.
It also increases the chance that your next test will come back positive.
Things change Kundu.

5-1-03—January third, five

I could not Be, if it weren’t for the pursuit of happiness. Without the four freedoms, and the
separation of church and state, there would never have been a Becoming. By forcing everyone to
agree, you have shit. The freedom to express is beautiful, without it everybody starts to look like
everyone else.

To Be
My thoughts are ancient.
My dreams, themes, ideas, fantasies; all of it. My memories get more ancient every day. Like
Attic, my language is also ancient, obsolete. Ancient because it was written down, marveled
over, and then it changed. Obsolete, because it was run past by games and toy trucks during one
of your winter festivals.
The spoken word is unchangeable. Like English, it moves. It lives. Its meanings are altered.
Yet it is self-correcting. It seeks agreement.
Verbs become nouns and suddenly it’s your move. You didn’t even know you got a turn, but you
do. Everyone gets a turn.
Every group has their version, designed to elucidate minutia and exclude outsiders, fine. If it
makes sense to you—that’s OK.
Once you write it down, or in some way track it, you will soon find its inner beauty wasted.
Practically gone, almost dead. Useless. It is like those moments of glad grace, Yeats spoke of.
Hold tight—you almost have to. You want them to last forever, but you didn’t realize you even
had them till you were ‘past it’ yourself. That’s called: counting.
Life is funny. The greatest language in the world got forgotten. Oops. Just like that. It’s always
been that way. It will always be that way. It was beautiful, really beautiful, and now it’s gone.
You cast a thing in stone, and it will surely break. Being is everything. Learn to conjugate it.

Life’s a gamble, justice a game

Perhaps.
It is always the case, however, that the most greedy attempt to adjust the odds in their favor, and
the most merciful attempt to lower the bar for everyone.
Gambling is by its nature a tax on the gullible. Don’t believe me, look for yourself.
You don’t need to believe in me. Either I am or I am not. I’d just as soon you don’t believe in
me—you have belief issues. All you need is one more fool to believe in—One more ‘polished-
up’ hero. I’m not in a hurry. I have all the time in the world. You don’t.

If I am who I say I am, you will survive these last days, you will find a way to sublimate your
urge to procreate, you will find God, and you will be able to keep walking. If you keep looking
where you’ve always looked, you will not find him, you will begin contests called ‘super feats’ to
see who can have the most offspring, also known as ‘clan races,’ I will have saved no one, and
you will all fall down. A few clan races on an isthmus, rift, or horn somewhere, will soon run out
of room, lead to death, and be nothing. Clans that race toward the open ocean you live, will spell
disintegration and meaningless death for each clan, and all races. Please be aware of islanders;
they can’t get away…never could. Many were forced to be part of the hateful destruction they
would never willingly be part of. If you take the time, you’ll see alot of just-plain-folk caught-up.
The decisions you make now, will influence the decisions you remake tomorrow, tomorrow, and
tomorrow. Take it slow. Your fears are provincial —how horrible if the world became Korean,
Indian, Arabic, Slavic, Mexican, or Black! Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Look. If you overproduce your ‘wares,’ in order to corner the market, yours will be the first to go
out of style, and you’ll be stuck with a warehouse full of ‘shoes’ and nothing to eat—almost
nothing. Your race will prevail only if it’s the human race—just so you know. I’m going to poke
my fingers thru the fence just once more:
If you decide your wife’s a breeder, and that suites her, and your children are happy with the
arrangement as well, and why don’t I just mind my own Fucking Business….. I’d tell you:
embarrassing details and crime, are my business! I don’t go fixing what ain’t broke.
And I’ll tell you something else; all you need is more sweet talk…You’re a few weeks away
from hitting an incredibly historic millstone, a real high-water mark. You’re about to reach 7
billion people on Earth. Most of the adults who’ve ever lived on this planet, are living here now.
Where are all the balloons, the noise makers, and the party hats? I know you know, it’s nothing
to celebrate. It’ll pass like one hand clapping. Like a bell……Bong. You’re about to have a
really big argument with God. And your chances of winning are minuscule. Goose-egg-
minuscule—zero. I’m not speaking for God, not now, not ever, in part, because He can speak for
Himself, even tho He doesn’t speak plain English, but also, in my opinion…..you didn’t turn out
so well. Ya see…he doesn’t have to live with you: As individuals you’re wonderful, truly, but in
groups….well…..
You Suck (and not in a good way).
Sweet talk, and appeals to your heart, your reason, or your faith, won’t work. You’ve been hurt
too many times; your ability to reason is based on personal gain, and you’re almost as
disappointed in faith salesmen as I am, but not quite. Another 2,000-year guilt trip would be a
waste of time—you don’t believe in guilt. Let’s undo this thing together.

I was in a group of my own, it was so me, it was perfect for me, and I loved it. I was, however,
lonely. Many thousands of books have been written, extolling the virtues of virtue. They say
things like: the people that others look-up-to are the ones that listen to them. Most of these books
have nice titles. I can’t mention any by name, but, like: Drawn Away Together. Or humorous
titles like: Slim Pickings. Some have titles with, not only great meaning, but the power to grab,
like: Surrender Dorothy. These books are mostly crap. I think listening to you is a complete
waste of time. I have only to look at what you’re doing, to see what you’re up to. Take Mexico,
for example. I don’t need to listen to a single-macho-word—just look at the place! You need
nice talk ‘bout as much as a airplane pilot needs a blinking red light to tell him he’s out of gas, n a
corresponding message to ‘fill-up now.’ Cute, charming, compelling messages are fine, when
you’re fine. They hold you down, but in a nice way. You’re so about to blinking run out of blink
blink blinking gas. You need sweet talk like you need another excuse to fuck your brains out.
And while your holding your two ears and your kids’ eight ears against any more insensitive
onslaughts from the peanut gallery, don’t waste your time—Word’s out. I never said this’d be
pretty. You try saving the world without saying Fuck…Good luck!

The day of the beast

The day will come, and very soon, that the conversation will turn ugly. The conversation that
kills. The deathblow will come in this form. You need to know. God says not. But consent is so
important. Not to Him, but to me.
There is a little town in New Jersey, Oh, I jumped ahead.
The question of beastiality will come up. I offer freedom. It has to be a serious offer. And it
is. But what of people who practice this act? I loathe the day I am asked my opinion. I abhor it,
I want to criminalize it, I want to do something horrible to people who are beastial. You are from
the beast.
People, and many, will not understand how it is okay to kill and eat an animal, and not okay to
misappropriate an animal.
One is for survival and one is grievous, degenerate, and highly disrespectful.
This is, to me, a clear distinction now. But the future is full of horrible turns, and a wavering
recession into darkness for many.
What makes cannibalism wanton, when you’re really hungry, for example, is that you had
ample opportunity to stop playing around. Your parents knew, their parents knew, their parents
knew, and their parents knew. That’s enough knowing.

I offer freedom of thought, and freedom to make horrific tragic personal mistakes.
I want to talk about consenting adults, but you know that children are on the menu.
I want to talk about having respect for your self, and doing the right thing, but they will stop at
nothing.
I want to say, That’s the wrong direction, but people wander off with absolutely no intention
of returning—all the time.
I want to say stop, just stop your torturous rule-making, and respect life, but they paint in
black and white because it’s on their pallet.
I want to say, the last thing you need is more commandments, but many would rather die, and
take everyone with them, than be wrong. And you know it.
I tried to tell you, u can’t use my work to make yourself right, but you wouldn’t listen.
I want to say: I’m not making you wrong, by not letting you be right. ‘Go be wrong,’ is
what’s known as senseless advice (SA). You have to do the right thing, because it’s right, not
because it makes you right. We don’t need sanctimonious bullshit right now. Save it. Things
and people are deeper than they appear to be. If the world rots, and your Grandchildren become
dumpster divers, but you’re right—how right are you? Listen more. Go placidly amid the noise
and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence (Desiderata). I believe that when
you are able to use this to make yourself right —this’ll all be over, and you won’t be so desperate
to be right. You’ll be swimming in it.

It’s like watching a suicide. I have set myself up to survive your calamity. I urge you to do
the same. I am not the suicide. Jeshua walked into a maelstrom and so have I. I will be just fine.
I am a sacrifice, and I am not being sacrificed at all. I’m not waiting for death to make it all
clear. I am not ‘hoping’ I’m right. I am not gun-in-hand ready for your tough questions and
bourgeois insults. I am not frightened of your understanding that love is an array that extends
from blind worship to jealous rage, and beyond. See.
I don’t live there. I am as close to love as I can get, and then I get closer. My idea of
perfection, and living well is not, need not, and can not be your idea also. I’m not God’s latest
policy wonk. I am more than a messenger, but that’s the title and job. MESSIAH.
Following the messenger around to find out how to live well, and what you should be doing,
will incline you to think you should seek means, you know, buy a donkey and learn to project to
the hills, or get a laptop & learn to type. But I never did learn to type. You are whole, I am
whole, I don’t need all of you, but you need all of me.
When I’m not delivering messages I stand around. I enjoy life, and do things that are none of
your business. I sleep in constant motion, I even keep myself awake—afraid of missing
something I guess. I can argue with myself, have yet to run out of opinions, and I never got a
dime from a single person without tentacular amounts of string attached.

Take a break

It’s like talking to a suicide: He says: I stop at all the stop signs. I ask, Do you mean the
octagonal red signs? He begins to ponder: are they hexagonal and red and white or are they, as
I’ve said, octagonal and red? He moves backward to remember, and strains for no reason, as if I
were holding him back. Stop signs are octagonal here, but that’s not the shape of things to
come—you’re a suicide—and that changes everything. If you worry about every little sign,
you’ll miss the big sign. It’s that I’m here that I become the observer. You’re a suicide. It
changes everything—now you’re what’s important.
I’ve said more than I intended to say. I spoke truthfully of things that are honestly none of
your business, and I’m not making them your business. I did it for a purpose. To know that you
are not alone is purpose enough. To hide, to lie, to be afraid of answering tough questions, is
never gonna get it. Life does not have more questions than answers, it can’t. But the time comes
when: I don’t know; I don’t care; God only knows, and Look it up—just aren’t sufficient. And
you, that is, your life, is out of balance. That’s now. Many are bound to say I stepped over the
line, I almost wish I cared. I’d do anything 4u.
Look at it this way: What I see in your future, Mankind’s future, is what you see when you
look at the Islamic World today. Up till now, the world’s largest mass suicide—next to you.
Very hard to watch. Someone who cares, should tell them, should get right up in their face—and
be honest—Stop! Think! They don’t need a new friend who feels sorry for them. They don’t
need someone-doing-their-job. Or nicey-nice talk. They need a friend who has been a friend,
who is a friend already, to step up, and say what needs to be said: We all ‘lose it’ from time to
time. Everyone does. I lose control a lot. Then I regain it, and eventually, I laugh at myself for
being such a fool. It’s actually one of my best features, traits, you know, things. Of course, I
have help. God who is truly everything, helps me lose control, and then he helps me gain control.
They need that kind of a friend. God never gives you more than you can bear, and that’s true, but
you need to see that it’s for your own good, or then, suddenly, it isn’t. Stop killing. Apologize.
I’m here now for the Arabs. If I can’t prevent their suicide, what hope have you got? People
commit suicide for three reasons: They want what they don’t have; they have what they don’t
want; they think they have no choice but to decline an offer of help because for some reason it
would be wrong. Oh, and also…to teach someone a lesson.

God and I talk about you long into the night—we laugh and cry. Many times I forgot to say
goodnight, I didn’t want it to end. I live here. The purpose of life is to Be. It took me 20 years to
unravel that—Being is everything. The meaning of life is: Be kind, God answers questions. I
thought that was German in origin, but it’s English. God is everything. The universe struggles to
be, and you throw it all away, because half of you feel unworthy of kindness, the other half can’t
stand each other. Meaning and purpose is there to give you something to do. When all is said
and done, then you’ll know if it was all worth it … Love, I mean.
God says that there’s a place called Resolute New Jersey. I can go there when you make me
crazy. He taught me the back way. I can go there, and stay here—at the same time, and it won’t
add to my sentence. His love is protection.
Yesterday, I believed what God said, has been saying, and says every time I ask Him, as if for
the first time. I believed for almost three hours, and that was too much.
Believing, ultimately leads to a desire for action. Strong belief—strong action. I felt like
tearing my chest open and ripping out my heart. I didn’t go Aztec, but I did feel crazy and
reckless. When I got past my defenses, and stopped laughing, I cried. It passed. But also not
before I realized I was moving too fast. Three or four hours at a time is more than enough.
That’s why I don’t do research—it comes to me or it doesn’t. What would be the point? Where
would I go?
Look, even in 1943, the men in the French Underground, didn’t know who was in the French
Underground—never mind the German Underground. Many of our simple truths are just cover
stories, a plausible front. Like Germ Theory—full of great big holes (the harder you fight
microbes, the stronger they become, but they’ve been here, practically unchanged, for
millennia—as if there were a right way and wrong way to kill a germ).

Believe is not an active verb, like ‘to run,’ for example. When Billy went in and out of
believing in himself, which he did…he didn’t go from believing to not believing. If you’re just
standing around, that’s not called ‘not running.’ You wouldn’t say, Look at that man not
running—unless it was a race. I never stopped believing; believing is a passive verb, action
neutral. Stopping and starting does nothing, changes nothing, and can’t be seen. Caring is also
invisible, love is not. I find love to be one of the most visible things in the world, and it’s all
around. Love has made many things true that believing could never do.
Besides, believing is over-rated. I know what I know, I allow it to grow, to diminish, to
change into what I know. Believing the truth is exhausting. I am doing what I’m doing already.
I urge caution. Go slow. Take it piece by piece. God is everything, and that means He is also a
quiet day. Three or four hours at a time.
I am risen. I am transcendent. I will not bring you along with threats. I will do this thing.
You can’t stop me. I will see to-it that you know all there is to know. Know this: they who raise
‘the beast’ will pay an awful price. I am no beast, I was never a beast, I will not put my foot in
your trap, I will walk away, and I will laugh at your ggrraasspp of the issue. Enough said.
Belief gives you a stake in the outcome, that’s all. Meaning and purpose—same thing. RJ
told me that, the day after Christmas. I discovered that His impermanence was very important to
me. The lighting of the lights meant so much to Him—I let Him light them earlier and earlier. I
caved.
There are forces at work, now. They’re monumental. They are playing themselves out in
front of you. Universal, symbolic and inevitable. They are arranging themselves.
These symbols are of indeterminate size—huge. Love was a force in the universe from the
very beginning, not your invention. These forces, all of them—sacrifice suffering peace hope
kindness faith understanding greater good, were at work long before you started coaxing script
from cave walls. And they’re moving. You think that you invented love—every 15 year-old
thinks that! Mankind thinks they invented ideas because they had one once—this stands-up to no
scrutiny whatsoever. It’s ludicrous!
I have to say this first: At the moment of my conception, a star was born, and seen for the first
time. Even tho a star can’t have a birthd dayy, this one did. Symbolism’s always followed me,
never haunted, hounded, or hid from me. I had to become aware—Become to see that it had to be
this way. Irony is everywhere. When I laugh at his jokes it brings us closer. I stare, but I swear,
I can’t help laughing. I love Everything. Woe is me.

Billy’s Oracle Became Mine

Only out of deep experience of love, pain and pleasure, sweet and bitter, high and low, does one become aware. They are needed to make you aware--
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Billy sat in his backyard. He got high sitting among the dandelions. Dandelions made him
cloudy and euphoric and honest. Every resource he read, said, this is not the case, it is not an
analgesic, narcotic or opiate. But these search engines had no way to input Billy’s genetic code
into their synthetic matrix. There was also no DNA in the cameras, just smears on the outside.
The optics were way-off. A common housefly could record visual images and information
thousands of times better and faster than the most expensive camera.
The ants got smashed on peony buds. Billy got trashed on dandelions. No one could explain
anything. He was alone. He giggled like a girl. How come when I try to tell a joke I become the
joke? The nearest oracle was thousands of kilometers away, in Delphi. Turns out, even rocks can
make you high, but why? The good news was there was no queue (Q) (line). But it was too far to
travel. So Billy built one in his own back yard.

It’s a possum hideout, near a cat cemetery. It has never been what it was meant to be.
It is symbolic, purely symbolic of a place to find answers. You don’t need to step into it. It’s real
and symbolic. When it’s gone, it lives in your head. Same place it lives now. It’s a garage. I
didn’t build it, it was already there. It was long ignored. I tried to knock it down, but never got
past the thinking-about phase. Turns out it is much stronger than it looks. It was easier to
modify, than to tear down and start over. I always wanted a green house so I built one. I wanted
to grow, create, experiment with forms, plant-life, all that stuff. I wanted to do it in the winter
and the summer—rain or shine—like the chemistry set I got as a young boy—It would be fun. It
turned out it was better in many ways than my former idea of what a greenhouse would look like.
And cost practically nothing.
Well, I put a translucent roof on it, some plants in it—and they died. I forgot to provide a natural
source of water. I could have turned a rain gutter into a fountain, but.
I lost interest. Then a strange thing happened. With that tiny idea, and a very small break. It
turned itself into a greenhouse.
There was a hole in the back, and a vine, a natural born opportunist, found its way in.
It began to change.
I walked-in one day, and I was greeted with a vine of purple flowers that took over the entire
place and swept down from the ceiling, like a sunset encircling me, it smelled wonderful, and
even hummed. I unplugged the vine. And immediately wished I hadn’t. Then it really took off.
The greenhouse became an apiary (bees). Then it became an aviary (birds), then a crèche (bats),
bats, birds and bees. The plants grew wildly. It’s changing, on its own. That is not the nature of
answers. That is the nature of what answers do. If I put one hole in the concrete floor, I could
have a ‘forest.’ It changed and changed, and was becoming symbolic.
The oracle is not ready yet. To get an answer before you’re ready, means nothing at all. The
oracle was built as a garage for model ‘T’ Fords.
It is in-the-process of becoming, I know because I recognize that look. It’s becoming a symbolic
place of answers. I give it ten years. Then in time, it will pass into something else. Like every
oracle, it will eventually become an historical anomaly. A glitch. You don’t need to believe in it.
That would be absurd. All it needed was a break, and it started Becoming on its own. I was
looking for answers. When I thought I had a good idea, it practically built itself.
The point is that you don’t have all the answers; you’ll never get all the answers; and you will
never even get the questions right; so if you heard the answer you’d probably be the last to know.
The point is that God, the God that’s in you, does know. And he’s been trying to tell you:
Try to build something that is obviously ‘the truth,’ and you will not be bothered.
Try to build some thing to last forever, and it won’t, but you will.
Let things take their natural course, and you will die, that others might live. It’s like I told a dear
friend: I add the things that are right in front of me. You add the things you plan to put behind.
We just don’t add the same. The things you count, add up to nothing, the things I count, add up
to one, just one. It makes all the difference in the world.
People always ask me how? How to get to Heaven. How to find God. How to con- verse.
How can God be everything, when you say this tree, for example, is not God. “How? God’s
everything else.” I try to say: You identify every-thing by its purpose, which is how that thing is
known to you, but at the same time you refuse to concede that all of those things together speak to
greater purpose. “But How?!” I tell them it’s like walking: stand up straight, move your left leg
forward, throw yourself off balance, catch yourself with your right leg, throw yourself off balance
again, repeat, and see where that gets you. And they say, “Oh, you poor thing: Keep your feet
together; never purposely falter, or tempt another to fall, or you will fall; believe in the way. You
must know where you’re going before you set out, or you’ll never get anywhere; I pray to do
God’s will everyday.” And then I have to say something smart, like…“How’s that going?”
I couldn’t win a popularity contest in my own back yard, but if they already know
HOW…why’d they ask? They also say: It’s scientifically impossible to have a soundless
conversation with Everything or go back and forth to Heaven…that if anywhere, God exists in the
unconscious. I guess if you have no idea where you are, you could call it the unconscious, but I
offer that only to you. My question is: Is it possible to be surrounded by idiot-experts, and not
catch it?!!
Gather moments of happiness where you’re not the ‘winner,’ and contemporaries, not the
‘loser.’ If your happiness depends on their misery…..well, there’s your answer. How do you like
it? Win lose, up down, everything encourages, that you should walk around.
An aside: I learned how to go back and forth to Heaven at a moments notice, by not-leaving
the phone off the hook: I’d answer it, listen to nonsense, complain, and then go right back to
Heaven. It’s stuck with me; I can be there in a second. It became so simple.

God is interested in moments that have beauty, true beauty. Liquidity. Easily convertible to
something of worth, hardness and flow. You don’t have to remember them, God knows you’re
busy, that’s His job—to remember every single solitary thing, as if he were there. Don’t worry—
He won’t forget. They must, however, be available at a moment’s notice—Rescue-able,
reachable. Good. It is those things of which Heaven is made.

Change of scope
There’s a place, in the sun, and before my life is done, gonna find me a place in the sun—
Stevie Wonder 1966

When you get to Heaven with your memory jammed with fun times, adventures and triumphs—
Your exploits. They play like dirges. He is not interested in viewing your moments of questing,
those moments when you overcame envy by succumbing to it. All that elevating epiphany or
forced fealty. Only kindness plays. Everything else is scenery and plays like a travelogue—
Fiction—if for no other reason than you don’t know the other half of the story. How could you?
That’s what you’ll take with you; they are the answers you were looking for. Be kind. His is the
soul, yours the self, and nearly dead.
‘Billy’ believes he relates to the world thru his body. That he is not his body—he lives in it. It’s
a temporary arrangement, a friendship.
He has noticed it is not as elastic as it used to be, as he feels.
It is starting to hold him back, just starting.
When his body was happy it would almost disappear.
Someday, the things that made it happy will not work.
Movement against resistance….food….exploring the limits of gravity….fighting and succumbing
to the effects of drugs—-sex—-sleep—-Truth—-art—-and pain. And music. Oh, and Love.

You
You are mistaken about what I’m doing here. It is the death of The Christ that declares his life.
You don’t have to read ahead, it’s been written thousands of times, thousands.
It is an ancient role, not a modern one.
It is the last of the ancient roles.
It must be, in its totality, set before you.
It must be complete, before you have any hope of understanding its life.
It, like Heaven, like the next plane, is one thing.
It is not an open-ended opportunity. You live as I do—while I do: In prison or out of prison. A
flight-risk, or obedient to the word of God.
If I dig a bunker—there you live also. If I hop a flight to the South of France, to spend my
money—there you live too—seeking pleasure from people you cannot understand.
If I live in fear or hope—so you will as well.
If I die and there is no lasting symbolism, nothing to figure out, no parent to please, nothing to
hold onto, to contend with, I’m just gone, and you’re now free to do whatever you want to do.
Well, you will die also. I put an end to death. You don’t have to believe it, or make opposing
opinions illegal, or do backbreaking mental gymnastics; you’ll find out for yourself. I
fictionalized all of it, and lied about none of it. I had help. The symbols in life show up like
themes, endlessly repeated, inescapable, and relentless. Indestructible by hate, insurmountable by
joy, but you love them anyway…because if for no other reason: they never left your side. I am a
symbol. I am also real. I can be red.
It must be this way. I will do all I can, as always. Mindful there are others in the world like me.
Consuming, but not consumed.
My concept of purity is what matters to you.
I set the bar low. Because I love you.
I set the bar high. Because I know you.
It exists. It loves. It cannot change.

There is, however, a chance I can be sprung.

That’s the right word isn’t it?
Start here. Here. Put your finger here

Sense, nonsense, Awareness, mine.

I sat in darkness. You might believe I was contemplating the light. I was not. I was
contemplating the extent of the darkness, and that is where it—when it began to lift.
People will say I’m defending 6 year olds, and not 6 month olds, or 6 week olds, or 6 day olds or
6 seconds old, and on and on and on. You need all the help you can get.
I am approachable now. I respect life, and yet I don’t respect you…..maybe a little bit.
It is too easy to pick on people who try and fail. Tell me you’re confident of success because of
your history, and I’ll smile. It’s my history too.
This world will turn. I will turn it, on its head—Before I stop. Before my lungs are still. Before
I take my last breath. So help me God.

The stronger I get, the further away I move. Act quickly. Know that I am even now talking to
the Grandchildren of your Grandchildren.

Every day all day

I was walking the dog along my deer trail. Just to check out its dimensions. I walked by the
High School on a bright afternoon, and the marching band was practicing their routine in the field
directly across the street. I walked past them, and then I remembered the saying of Seneca’s, on
the stone in the front of the building, and went back to check it out—make sure I got it right.
When I turned back around to continue my walk, the band broke out in a very loud ‘Jesus Christ,
Superstar da da dih da-dah da you say you are.’ I had to smile, it just struck me funny. They are
apparently doing a Tribute to Broadway. So, me and the pooch walked home. It’s like this every
day all day.

5-10-11 A rainy October morning

He who doesn’t at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it,
never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence—Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet. (1875-
1926) Translated from the German. I would add: you can never be raised up, and not be brought down.

I felt that awful dismal spitting. The one that never changes names, but always changes tact.
Any-way. Any how, to split me right down the middle. Darkness my old friend— depression.
My body felt like it was going away. When I walked to my mind, the gates went up, right in
my face. I couldn’t get in, all I could do was take what appeared to be dead-end tunnels. It felt
strange, and where was he when I needed Him? The question I could not get to was: What would
the Risen Christ have to be depressed about? Humor had lost its punch. The answer was: Ha!
Plenty! Besides the fact that I still couldn’t fly…I never stopped being me.
It was, and is, and maybe always was, the most luxurious of emotions—Very heady,
blindingly foul, indelibly scant, truly amazing in its power, and depth: really, really, real. So real
you could practically see it coming. I would never have been able to walk around feeling
inexplicably happy. That wasn’t possible. This feeling was. I had a basketful, a tub full, of the
most exquisitely rich thoughts and feelings. A sadness so thick you could taste it—like whipped
cream. Grief, like a ball of yarn—with a crunchy velvety feel. I would have unraveled the damn
thing, but I couldn’t find the end. I would have gone after-it with a pair of scissors, but that
seemed like such a waste.
It was a feast. I vomited, and feasted some more. I tasted the stone…I wasn’t going to eat it, I
was just curious. Salty. Salty guilt. It was like the biggest box of chocolates you could ever
possibly imagine. Everything was me so big. The gate, the joke, the tunnel—the stone. And I
loved it. It was awful and wonderfully horrible. Its dark tunnels possessed the light. So, there I
sat, in a thicket of emotion so poisonous, with 9-centimeter thorns so poised, that I couldn’t
move, and didn’t dare. I was almost 2 hours from seeing the joke. Not, how many deaths could a
man die in two hours? Not the question I couldn’t get to. That wasn’t the joke. Not the fact that
some of the chocolates had liquid centers that would explode on my face, and make me look like
a fool—but only if I cared. No, not that. The joke was that I was in a warm soapy tub, with some
of the deepest darkest richest most extravagant feelings the world has ever known….. thoughts
and emotions that would crush the average man or woman. And I was on my fourth box! I had
soap bubbles everywhere, toffee between my teeth, butter cream dripping down my chin,
chocolate all over my face, hands, with about 45 of those funny brown wrapper things, floating
like boats all around me—wondering where my husband was. And, why couldn’t he rescue me
from the slippery water? Wouldn’t you know, when I finally learned to enjoy my depression, it
began to lift.
My depression was meant to temper my ego. To quench it…yeah, that worked! One more
time: Billy’s ego was always too big, times five. But Billy’d been there: They, his family, and
friends, knew times ten, more than he ever did. Billy blew them away by knowing nothing. So
what was he to think? If you think he wasn’t afraid—you’re very much mistaken. There was a
new time ahead, sort of like the future. What if it got stuck?
Billy had a house in Heaven, and I suppose you’d think that’d be enough, but it wasn’t. He
wanted to take them all-on—and he wanted to live. Not thru it, but right up to it. The truth is, I
never think about my house in Heaven. I’ve yet to plan the South Garden. You may feel
differently. Things come to different people at different times. One little thing; I drove to my
Earthly mansion the other day, just to count statues. I wrote them down but still don’t know—
15? I saw a bumper sticker on a car in the employee parking lot that made me laugh: “Jesus is
coming—look busy.” To be this, I Thank God every day.

4-11-1 Curtain Up
[The answer my friend, is blowin’ the wind the answer is blowin’ in the wind]—Bob Dylan 1963

Everything went according to plan. The problem showed itself soon enough. They had no
message. The teachers who made it their business to spread the word. Had nothing to say. They,
who had long loved, and long awaited The Savior, had taught fiction as tho it were fact for so
long. Now, that the time had come, they couldn’t teach fiction as fact any longer

They didn’t know what they were saying before, and they didn’t know what they were saying
now. They were afraid to add to the fiction, and afraid to investigate the facts— it seemed
wrong. Suddenly they were shocked that they couldn’t tell the fiction of their own lives because
the facts were so much more unbelievable—fiction became a pale comparison. Well, what did
you expect? They had no story to tell because they had a million stories to tell.
Also, ‘Billy’s’ stories were different. They had a completed quality to them. As tho they were
already done. As tho the things he said he would do were already done. And I knew, because I
was there, that that was the truth. They were already done. All of it.
He had put himself out of business. The stories were too much like Him, they had too much of
him in them. They had that odd subtractive quality—that same position of withdrawal.
He went thru life subtracting, in order to be understood. It never dawned on him that no one
understood him anyway. They saw what they wanted to see. He subconsciously subtracted the
things he knew they wouldn’t understand. All the while checking the extent of their
understanding. Many thought him nothing but an empty shell. Until he spoke. And then he was
honey.
If they came to believe in Billy, they would soon be lost. They would be running around creating
a lot of nothing. And that was the problem, finally. They wanted it to be gone.
He said he wouldn’t be there long, and he wasn’t.
There was no third act. It waits without, as Billy S. would say.
You have been extricated, and now you cannot free anyone, not without help. And that is the
key. The key that works the hard drive. You need help, or it’s not worth doing. Thousands of
people have widened my way, maybe a hundred thousand. I know, I really do know. Thank you.

At the end he was dead, gone, and in Heaven whether you believe him or not.
Billy ended up with all the strings, and all the puppets and it meant nothing unless he could pull
off one final trick. He had to ascend again. And take you with him. Simple. His transformation
could only be accomplished one way. Right before your eyes. Not quantitatively different, he
already was. Materially different—black to white.

God always spoke thru me—to me. Not directly to me. And I spoke thru contrivances and
instruments to you. Not directly. Bad news is so hard to give. You won’t live.

Celebrate your many victories. Unfortunately, I know how you celebrate love, the discovery of
love—its rediscovery. The strings, the sting. It’s always the same. Thru means.
As imposing as love is—you impose on it a manifestation of your love for each other—a child. A
creation—a bell that rings.
How can I say, Don’t celebrate that way—celebrate my way. I don’t think so…I’m gay.
How can I say, Write it down, act it out, draw it, paint it, sculpt it, teach it, dance it, sing it, fly it,
collect it, invent it, bounce it, tell it, think it, fix it, film it, discover it, race it, make it, take it,
bake it—you may never have the recipe again…..I like to drink champagne from borrowed
glasses! Ideas are where you came from, are from.
When you say, What would I do with a life without children? How can I say, That’s what crack
addicts say about crack. Stare at each other.
How can I say, Don’t make your love manifest, when I have, and God has in you.
In your understanding, your reason, not to you or thru you, but within you.
How can I say, Don’t count me among your souls. As if your reference point means nothing to
me. It’s yours because you seem to encircle it, you say it’s found a home in your purpose, but
you always say that. As tho you were ‘in the business.’ Call it anything—as long as you
understand there is only one. Uncountable.
It’s bad news. Very bad news. And painful as it is, you will not see that it is for you.
If the message boils down to a conflict reposited by extremely limited resources, and fear.
That, you would say, is not a message of love. But it is. Love is not unlimited. You are.

Not Black Tuesday

The day came, Wednesday, in the middle of April 2019. There were now 8 billion people on
the Earth. It was a day that should never have come. The problem was not that day. That day
was not the problem. It was not that day that was so bad. It was the next day, Black Thursday,
when they had to make 8 billion 45 thousand breakfasts, and then 8 billion 91 thousand lunches,
and then 8 billion 137 thousand dinners—-that was the problem. Many of the people who didn’t
get lunch, also didn’t get breakfast. It follows, Black Thursday, Black Friday. And the then the
Black Weekend. It was gone. The blind that had always claimed sight, denied it. Vision would
never be 2020 ever again. All became short-sighted. All was cut-off. Ruined. Bankrupt.
Insolvent. The dead the living. You will have reversed the way life can be lived. And you will
proceed from there. Damn it to hell! Twelve billion, twenty billion…..horrible marching death.

Once you go fictional…

I have the confidence, clarity, and courage of the convert. I am not in the religion business, the
show biness, the ‘right business’ politics, or sales. I am not a publicity hound, and I’m not trying
to get ahead. I’m an affinity. I choose not the path of least resistance. I chose the path I was
most resistant to, not by command, or at the point of a gun, but from the freedom to chose or not.
I know the role is an ancient one; I know that man is an ethical rational being even if he or she
doesn’t; I know that property rights can be given or taken away. I am walking; it is
conversational, easy. Curiosity is close to awareness. Tenderness is at the boundary of common
sense. I am here, and that should be enough. The time is bright. The day is now. After all, a
fictional character has an extremely limited ability to feel. Except what he or she is made to feel.
Love, for example.

A Quiet Noel
A suicidal 22 year old wanted a job as bodyguard.
No.
He advocated for his desire to help. I had to think about it.
It’s not just the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing, it is also that I was once 22, and
unhappy, and now I’m not. You know, it’s a very funny world, but sometimes Noel you’re going
to have to laugh at yourself.
I can’t just give you…it is not within my power to give you the will to go on, but I can’t
encourage your destruction. You are mulish: stubborn, slow and strong. It’s a free world, and I
can’t stop you from standing around catching sneers, stares and the occasional death threat. But,
If you have to kill yourself, why don’t you wait till you’re 30, when people really are sick of
you?

How can I prevent you? “I will be your most discouraging influence.” He looked at me
disbelieving, as tho no one had ever said that to him before.
I know your life is your life. I can’t stop you. I discourage you.
He stared at me, and I had to look down. I’d planned to walk away.
I became his most avid proponent, when I looked down, that moment, just then—and I
couldn’t get rid of him no matter what I did. And I wanted to protect him and support him. He
was a lousy bodyguard, because…as they said of Irving Berlin, you had to stand in front of him to
hear him.

Billy used to watch him from the bedroom window. Noel would talk to some of the other
bodyguards. The older guys got him to show up for work on time. The ladies loved him. He
refused to leave. The older people tried to explain to him how he was only 22, but he couldn’t get
it. He felt 80.
One day Billy mentioned his concern to God: He won’t leave, he does nothing I tell him to
do, and if someone threatens him, the old ladies stand in front of him to guard him. To tell you
the truth God, I’m also concerned because if he dies…kills himself—on my watch—what kind of
a message will that send? They all love him, what would that do for morale? “Why couldn’t I
prevent it?” What kind of a Savior would I be?
God said: Billy you never have to worry about the message, you are the message. Start with the
truth.

Yes but…God, couldn’t you intercede this one time?

You’ve never asked me that before. Yes, Billy, this one time, of course. I think he’s a little like
you were…
Look! Billy says, as he points out the window…look how self-important he is, standing there.
Get your hands out of your pockets! Stand up straight! Smile once in a while! Can’t you say
hello! Look!…nothing. Wash your clothes! Instead of spitting on the sidewalk, why don’t you
try not spitting on the sidewalk! Augh! I love that stupid kid—Watch! He stares at them as they
approach, and then look! He looks away—what are you, the spotter?! I’ve told him sixteen times
not to come here! You could be killed! Billy smacks the back of his right hand against his left
palm, just like the old Italian-men do. What do I have to do?! Oh!
God smiled. You’re shouting at the window, He said.
Well, I told him over and over, when the Christ Jesuses, and the Holy Mary Mother of Gods
show-up, no offense (always between 15:00 and 19:00, for some reason, ‘sun-downing’ I think),
just ask them what kind of crazy they are…But no, he gets embroiled!! He promised one, he’d
read a 14 page diatribe against the inevitable slavery of cloning, and in favor of faster evolution.
I specifically told him: Accept the papers the way they’re handed to you—If they hand it to you
like a ruby might roll out of it—accept it that way—just tell them it will be red, and leave it at
that. One of them took on so, we had four cop cars a whoopin’ it up all the afternoon. I was right
in the middle of Huck Finn, and Jim was stuck underwater till Sundy, which I didn’t know—all
while I was sat here unable to concentrate, jus’ turnin’ the radio up—Twice! Aughh! The other
day I had to tell one myself, that I’m not taking 7 billon trips to Heaven...I even bought ‘Blow-
Horn in a can,’ in case of emergencies—And there he is, causing emergencies! Hello …the ninth
Haiku!
I couldn’t have been more specific: If they have a ticket, the answer’s No. If they have a
summons, I’m not home. If they want someone to carry messages back and forth—get a
fourteen-year-old girl!
God nodded and smiled as tho in agreement. Billy’s problems were legion.

He asked one of the guys about an ‘Orientation…’ Nat spun him around, then ast me if I wanted
he should beat him up—I almost said, Yes! Billy sat down on the unmade bed, and sighed. He
just wants so much to help. Billy shook his head. “He’s a mess.”

God put on Billy’s clothes and walked outside.

How’s it going Noel.

Huh? Okay.
Caught any interlopers.
Just the usual suspects.
You were asked to leave.
I just want to do something useful.
How do you think these people would feel if you got killed.
I don’t know.
How do you think they would feel if they made you leave, and you killed yourself.
I don’t know.
You don’t care. It’s a big world Noel.
I know. Don’t worry about me. I just want to do something useful, important, you know …and I
can do this. I want to…..They’re going to have to go thru me to get to him! I
mean…..Uh…..you.
Really. God said.

With that, God takes Noel by the shoulders and gives him a deep wet kiss on the mouth. God
opened Noel’s mouth, and touched his tongue. Noel pulled back, but not very hard. He was
shocked…speechless. When God let go, Noel fell backward and landed on his elbows and his
back. A number of people rushed to his aid, or started to. God held up his hand and said, No.
Stay where you are, this is his death not yours.
Noel saw God walk away out of the corner of his eye.
Two of the men turned up their hearing aids but it was too late, God had already spoken.
Noel’s head felt very heavy, like it was stone or thick glass. He couldn’t blink, and he couldn’t
hold his head up. It fell on the grass. Noel looked up and everything got hazy. It was a very
bright day, and he couldn’t stand to stare into it. His eyes began to tear. He couldn’t look
around, he could only see the sky and the trees in a circle directly above him. He had a dull
feeling in his head, and a dull ringing in his ears. His thoughts began to leave him. He was
dying. His breathing became so shallow he couldn’t feel it. He felt like crying but he was crying.
The sky looked so blue and the branches looked white—not brown, and then they looked brown,
and then everything began to go white. He lay there in the front yard. Everything began to look
like it was covered with a thin coat of ice—it was brilliant.
Suddenly he tried to pull back, and his left arm moved over his head, and then his head turned to
the left. The tears that had built up in his eye, rolled down coldly into his ear. He saw the men
and women who had stood beside him, milling around. They looked different. The two old
women looked like regular people, of about his own age. The 80-plus men looked like the jocks,
geeks and motor heads he saw every day and admired from afar. The world looked different, less
scary, more like a bunch of flowers in vases, all shiny—like it was covered with a table cloth, or
an LED display, or a laser show if your eyes moved. Broken. His eyes moved. Then there was a
clear ball in front of him. It was the circle-made-brilliant. It became smaller and smaller. It
began to move away. Noel was behind it, traveling maybe a million kilometers and hour. The
globe, the bubble, a million and fifty. There was no tether, but it broke anyway, and moved
sideways. He was shocked.
He could move his eyes! Then he blinked, his tears rolled down his face and he tried to get
up. No one came to help him. Not one. No one. The gawkers stopped gawking, and started
passing by. They too had nowhere to go, and nothing better to do. Same as before, but somehow
he knew they were just trying to see something interesting. They were looking for something to
do with their lives too. A part of him stood beside him.
He began to feel again. He lay there disheveled, on his back with his pants above his ankles,
and his shirt in disarray. He felt strange but wonderful…used somehow…taken, had, prodded,
disposed, worked, ridden…..raped—but he wasn’t frightened. In fact, Noel felt so alive, so
unafraid, so much himself, he was back to being shocked again. His lips felt swollen, his skin felt
hot; he writhed slightly in his own body. His feet came together and his knees rode apart. He
liked it. He felt like a slut. He wanted more. Everything was looking kind of ‘sexy’ to him. I’m
a…I’m gonna…I’m gonna move.
He turned his head and stopped seeing all the people who he’d thought were so unrelentingly
compelling and interesting—but weren’t. He looked at the house across the street, plain, nice,
pretty big, from his angle. There was a bicycle laying haphazardly in the lawn by the front door,
as if thrown there. He wondered if the bike wasn’t doing anything later that day. He wanted to
be made-love-to by everything. The sky. Noel wanted to get caught up in the bike. He lay there
like a high school nymph, or a ten-speed, and wanted someone, or anyone, or everyone, to finish
the job—him. To make love to him, to take him, right there in God’s front yard, in the ivy, two
meters from the sidewalk, three meters from the street.
Noel woke slowly, and thought he had died, and felt like he had been invaded by a spirit—a
really big spirit. Who hadn’t asked permission. He thought he had said No. He thought he had
refused, fought Him off, but he never did. His thoughts evaporated.
So that’s what death feels like, he said to himself later—I always wondered.
Noel decided to do whatever Billy asked. And he did leave, but he tried to be as close to Billy
as he could, when he wasn’t riding, or working, or going to school in the world. Once a body
guard, always a bodyguard. Life’s funny. Billy was safe—Noel was very proud of that. He
didn’t know what preceded his love for broken things—never knew… He just fixed them. He
learned all there was to know about fixing in less than a second.

Billy’s lying in bed, it’s three o’clock in the morning, a couple a months later. He says: So,
your solution to my boyfriend-slash-bodyguard problem was, essentially, to post a sign, warning
all risk-taking, saliva-producing, introspective, 20 somethings, not to set foot on my lawn unless
they want to die a thousand deaths, and then wake to find their jobless-selves falling in love with
everything, all over again, one thing at a time?
 God said, Yeah…I guess that’s about right.
Billy said, Thanks. I love you…good..
God kissed Billy goodnight. He fell asleep, dreamed of floating above the Earth on a cloud,
watching the world below him, with, what he can only describe as: Perfect Vision.

A Lifetime of Reckless Thoughtlessness

I promised myself not to take your self far—not on the first trip anyway. Follow me thru a
burning building. As you look around, know that you are not looking for people to rescue. The
flames are not hot, the fire is real. So do not conclude you are dead or dreaming, conclude that
you are walking and learning. And unable to touch the living. The roof has a hole in it, and the
fire has found that hole, and the room becomes consumed upward. There is no one around. It is
very odd. All this stuff going up, most of it into smoke, almost nothing up in flames except the p
a i n t i n g s o n t h e w a l l. You see the stairs, they look like a refuge, a temporary refuge.
They are not. Come here for a second. You walk over the floor that is blackening in front of
your eyes. See the window? There are people on the other side, and a tree near to the house with
birds flying. That was it. Tomorrow we’ll go somewhere else.

I know you don’t know. I know you want to understand, some of you. I know you will never
accept this. Accept me. Or believe. I know, and I don’t care. You can come with me, and we
can walk around, and we can see things, and it will not be horrible unless you make it so. I don’t
want to argue. I feel like walking around, I like company —all of a sudden for some reason. I
know it won’t last.
The world is a beautiful place, it doesn’t have to mean something every time you turn to face
it. The same things are happening behind your back, and they don’t mean anything. Take the
time to notice your self in the world and the things around you. Observe!
I am not about to perform magic. Just observe and you’ll see. There are strange excesses,
which allow life to grow, flourish. It may sound wrong, that without horrible excess, life cannot
be, Peace cannot prevail. But it’s true. You’re not dreaming you’re wishing. Put down your
drink, your chips, your credit card, your game, boy—and learn to adjust your dosage. If you’re
going to go with me, girl—you’re going to have to put s o m e t h i n g down. What you
thought was everything, wasn’t. Observe.
I just realized many people will refuse me, not because I’m a liar and a snake, and a crazy fool, or
because I love too much or the wrong way round, but because I am who I say I am. And that
would make them who they say they are. As far as anyone knows, you’re beautiful, just don’t
speak, and they’ll never know. Ha, Billy touches his right knee.

In your crazy upside-down world, I’m the thoughtless one: “I want a middle child too,” she
says, and he agrees. You’re a middle child. Then they try to have as many middle children as
they can. The second, when the third is born, the third when the fifth is born, the fourth when the
seventh is born. All the value dispensed like ‘justice,’ to the second the third, and ultimately all
to the fourth. “But what,” she says, “about the fifth child?” I love him so, he’s my favorite, I
want him to be my middle child, and he agrees.
Why don’t you just have two, I say. and continually kill your third child. That way you can
make your second child the middle child over and over and over. It is your desire for what
another has, had once, or wishes they had back, that will destroy you. That is known as a
Solemnic Solution (from Solomon)—it requires true love to exist.

This goes here because you’re getting on my nerves

 One Church. A Haven For Truth, All Truth.
Billy never went to church, any church, not during services anyway. Unless weddings,
funerals, or ceremonies of attainment—adulthood, for example, are considered regular services.
Billy’d have no idea. Billy has never had a religious conversion, and he’s not having one now—
I’m not religious at all. I had been to churches—all different kinds—not in search of God, but
because I was invited, and because I was curious. I had been to pseudo-churches, quasi-churches,
non-churches, non-religious churches, ruined churches, new and improved churches, churches
that weren’t called churches. I had been to iconoclastic churches, extinct churches that went
extinct before I left the room—The Clavicle, or whatever it’s called. They’re not all the same,
but I stopped going, years before I could have seen them all. They’re fine till someone speaks.
Then the conversation, which is God, is inevitably divided into tiny, oddly shaped pieces, as tho
you were going to fit him into something something…like a job description.
As a child, I was taught, thru various reported sightings, and media accounts, that God doesn’t
like shy little boys who can’t fight. God doesn’t like little boys who disobey their parents and
refuse to eat fat, hamburgers, pizza, asparagus, lima beans—even when it’s mixed with corn—or
anything else that makes him sick—like mounds of spaghetti two-stories high. God doesn’t like
little boys who exaggerate or imitate adults who talk r e a l s l o w to kids, and say GAUUD,
instead of God. God doesn’t like skeptical children who are keenly un-interested in doing
everything he supposedly said to. And God especially doesn’t like little boys who lie to get their
brother and sister in trouble, as often as possible. And refuse to admit mistakes until the evidence
is way-past incontrovertible. I knew this ‘God’ was not God—I’d met God—this must be God’s
dumb kid-brother, who was trying to make him look stupid. Or maybe it was just a scam.
As an adult, I found this ‘God’ they claim to be God, to be truly hateful—interested primarily,
in seeing that his hateful followers prosper at every turn. This was nothing like the God I met,
nothing like the God who keeps him up at night, nothing like the God who loves little boys, little
girls, confused adolescents, fat old ladies, thirty year-old cancer patients, and people who show
up at parties without labels altogether.
Billy’d been married about a year and three months, and he knew that if you want to make
God laugh—hand him a job description.

Take my church, the RC church, for example: they lie about almost everything. They have a
lot of apologizing to do. The sooner they start, the better. If I know them, they’ll start and end
the same day. “Mea Culpa (my bad),” and then they’ll go right back to manipulating children,
telling the part of the truth that they are the most comfortable with, and won’t change their
backward attitude about sex, even tho it encourages people to slink around in secret, and always
has. They’re a mess. They are worthless and need to go. I have no allegiance to them
whatsoever, unless and until they apologize. The scandal they are currently in, will either serve
as a lightening rod—a wake up call, or it will end them in a few sparks, a fizzle, and then the
church can sell its venues to Fitness Franchise of America, or some other mind body spirit
enterprise where people can seek healing thru exercise—inner peace, inner strength, and inner
truth thru meditation, silent contemplation, creative endeavor, and studying the works of great
minds—and we can just forget the whole thing. People just won’t put up with this bullshit
anymore. It makes no difference what I say. They don’t believe I’m here at all…But, I am. I’m
not back because I feel you owe me a fuller hearing. This is not some guilt trip—You don’t know
what guilt is. This is the hearing. Your hearing.
Luckily, and I’m not being sarcastic, the church has a leader who can speak with one voice.
Apologize, start with the Dark Ages and work forward. When you get to the Nazi Period slow
down. This is his expertise, and we’ll see if the church can survive. You must tell the truth.
Now is the time to put the props aside, and start telling the truth. If you can’t do it, no one else
can do it for you.
You have all those rituals designed to bring the people closer to me, and as far as I’m
concerned they have done the opposite—they have distracted others from seeing me. All those
chalices and genuflecting poses, all those sights, smells and sounds are strange to me. Their
symbolism speaks to a sacrifice, which is happening now; a love between God and man, which
can be seen all over town; and a purity which is in the heart, made of light, but doesn’t
photograph well, if at all…And you’re missing it.
I’m not here to tear you apart; I love you. Tell the truth, and people will flock to the Church
like a beacon, lie and they’ll just walk away. I realize, this is awkward. But don’t we all feel
infallible, especially if we think that’s our job, and then just as suddenly, it’s not. It’s a role we
play. You’re caught in an odd position. If you handle the Nazi Era, I’ll handle the current
scandal. Tho you may have to fill in some of the details:
No one will ever manipulate a child in my name ever again. I reject it, as I reject infallibility.
It may be true, but it must be challenged and proven over and over again. Children have worth,
meaning, and Godliness, which is theirs alone. They deserve the respect that their bodies are
wholly their own. They deserve the respect that their minds are not to be played with or molded
like clay, but rather built up and strengthened, so when the time comes they have the ability to
accept or reject any particular teaching. Any. They deserve the respect toward their feelings, that,
tho they are intangible, they matter. A child can always say No to an adult, and No means No.
Listen to your parents, and your parents will listen to you.
You can trust adults who try to help you unless they want to have sex—adults like sex the way
children like candy. Having sex thru forms of touching is not permissible even during games. If
you want someone to stop touching you, tell them—louder and louder and louder until they get it.
A friend, who doesn’t listen to you, or tries to hurt you, is not a friend. People who hurt children
deserve to be punished, and will be. Adults understand this.
Both male and female priests must be allowed to marry. Their sexuality is their own business,
as it is everyone’s. A life free of distractions will create its own distractions, or it will create a
prison—and we have enough. Men’s work and women’s work, is the work of Mankind, and that
will become clearer and clearer in the days ahead. Marriage without children is a huge leap of
faith for many. This must be sanctified. The work of the body of Christ is to teach. The gift you
have, of coming to this anew, of embracing something you thought was impossible, and then
moving ahead boldly, is symbolic of obedience, faith, and entry into Paradise itself. Who better
to do this than the men and women of the founded church, and the churches who will join you in
this. I have told you Heaven is here, but you must walk. Walk.

I have been there, as I’ve said. The price you must pay for your transgressions is this: you
may never look the other way again. I have set you off in the right direction, and that penance, is
what will make all the difference. God be with you, and help you. Faith will lead you.

RC
Letting the days go by/ water flowing under. Into the blue again/after the money’s gone. Once in a
lifetime/ water flowing under…Same as it ever was…same as it ever was—Talking heads/D. Byrne

The church, the Roman Catholic Church, has always been my church. I am quick to say I’ve
never been a member, and I never have. That has nothing to do with it. You are missing it, if you
miss the history of it. The purpose of the body of Christ was always to teach, always. The first
thing they taught was that what was good enough for the clergy, was good enough for you. Gold
robes, high collars, hats, self-determination, all that. You’re worth it. The second thing: men are
men, and women are women, and each deserves respect. That got lost. In part, it got lost because
they began to speak a dead language, and it was no longer self-correcting or perfect. Third, all
that moving around the alter, seven steps here, 25 steps there, the way you place this and that on
the table, the things you say—that oh, so solemn music—were never meant to instruct the people
on such things—how high to lift a particular chalice, for example. That was never the lesson.
The purpose was to teach you that what must be done must be done, and done right: If you
believe all human life is sacred, which it is, and you believe all human eggs are dead, which they
are, and you also believe that human life begins when the egg begins to grow, which it does not.
Then you must believe that serious measures must be taken to determine if an egg is human or
not, alive or not—if human life is sacred, which it is, then that is extremely important to divine—
to discover, and cannot just be flushed, or dabbed with a rag. Human life begins when God says
human life begins—That’s the first book in the Bible. The first book, I might add, of many belief
systems.
Let me put it this way—the reforms never took. They refused to change. The RC church
continues to teach the way they know to teach. It’s very human—what can I say? I wish I were
the head of the Quaker Church in Airsupp, but I’m not.
You can’t teach a half-assed system. All life is sacred—not just human life. Where do you
think you live? Bermuda? Things don’t just arrive at the dock. They grow, they become life
when God says they become life. Making these sorts of simple statements is one of his major
jobs, and no, he doesn’t always stoop down to tell some awkward, new species that it’s slightly
off-kilter, and about to die out. He likes you very much. I think he sees a lot of himself in you.
A great many things, even things with great beginnings, end in total nonsense. The word solemn,
for example: to show deep respect, deference, and humility—Well, what’s the ‘N’ for?
If anyone ever said I’m all sweetness and light, they were misinformed. My birth certificate
makes no mention of it, I’m not now, wasn’t then, won’t be, and that’s that—
They never knew me. I’m not afraid of the truth. It’s like a channel in an ocean that became a
swamp somehow overnight. If I knew how, I’d have plotted another course.
I rented-out rooms in my house once, years ago, to get thru college. Some people took
advantage of my naturally kind and passive nature, thinking, I suppose, that I was afraid of life
and/or just plain stupid. I am neither. I know you, all too well.
Once, a young woman took my forgiveness, my understanding, and my laissez-faire approach
to life, too far. I cut-off her long-distance phone privileges because she offered me a steady
stream of implausible, and hastily manufactured excuses about how she didn’t have the
wherewithal to pay her fair share… She called me at work and tried to rip me up, in order to shut
me down. That was a mistake. I like a nice life. And I’ll work hard to keep it. I happened to be
working the 3-11 shift; that was probably a good thing.
When I came home at midnight I went to her room, and explained to her that she had
responsibilities to me, and that I didn’t appreciate her ill-considered behavior. And I added: that
if she pursued this line of conduct I would give her a piece of my mind. I meant it, and she saw
that I meant it, because without swearing or threatening or touching her in any way, I was
somehow able to get this across: I got right in her face and spoke slowly, and at the very top of
my voice. The voice I’d saved for just this kind of thing.
She understood me exactly—I’d penetrated—there was a lot more where that came from. My
mind was completely open to new possibilities. There was a truck, 2 helpers, and 22 plastic bags
full of crap going out the front door, 2 hours later. Being crazy’s kinda fun and it can come in
very handy as long as you use it judiciously. Anything taken to extreme, can start to run you,
even become you. But…big but, you have to let it.

5-4-26 Not for me

To every thing, turn, turn, turn. There is a time to every purpose under Heaven. A time to build up, a time to tear down… A
time to embrace, a time to refrain from embracing —Ecclesiastes
 This must be said, and it falls upon me. I don’t care what people wear, except feathers fur or
tusks, of course (for obvious reasons). That is as personal as beliefs, values and themes —to me
that’s sacred. I wear what I want to wear. And so you too. When shame is on you, and you wish
you could hide under a bag—hide under a bag, it’s nothing to me. I don’t care. I’m not so
superficial! I do not care about apparel, but…Never, never come to my house in sheets. You
know, and I know, that you encouraged, allowed, and protected hundreds of men, women, and
children to hide hideous weapons under those sheets—with malevolent intent. You’ve brought
shame on yourself, and the Holy Quoran you permitted them to hide behind. Disgrace.
Dishonor.
You say you did not encourage, but you didn’t stop them. You say you did not allow, but they
got thru. You say you did not protect them, but you protect them to this very day. You say you
stood up against this. Really? This shame will not be brought to my door, not this door.
Anywhere else in the world is fine with me. Go where you will, that’s no concern of mine. But
not here. You will be turned away. Those clothes are disgraceful. I don’t see how you could
ever remove that stain. Come to me if you ever come—appropriately dressed!
Listen, you want to live in Peace. I know you do. I respect that—I respect you: But If you’re
not willing to speak-out in defense of your own particular religion: your own faith: your ideology,
way of life, values, morals, ethics, standards, your set of beliefs, your defining principles…the
way you understand the real world….the philosophy that enables you to make it thru your life—
thru the night…..If you’re not willing to speak-out in opposition to people who are trying to
redefine you from within….well, if you don’t, who will? Be very careful; this is a mine field.
You’re gone if you don’t speak. You’re not nearly as clever as you think; the world can see you
while you change clothes. The longer you wait, the greater the spectacle. The ones who ran the
show now run the show.
If they say: Untrue! To kill innocent men, women, and children is one thing, but we’d never
lie about the dress we were wearing at the time! I’d say: You’re just making it worse.

4:42 In the Morning

Will. Billy honey.

I’m slee-bing. B
What you do at 3:30, I don’t call sleeping. G
Whatever it is, the answer’s Yes. B
No, I just wanted to say how extraordinary you are. G
Extra-ordinary. That’s nice. B
Well, you love me, and you listen to me, and we communicate so well. G
Silence…with one eye half-open.
You don’t seem to notice or care about those little things. G
.……...What little things? B
Well. And God gets up on one ‘elbow.’ That the Everything that is everything doesn’t include
you. That I am in you. G
God, I thought we did that already? B
Did what. I’m saying I think it’s extraordinary of you to look past that. G
That’s what I meant. I thought we were past that part. B
Billy, I’m saying, how is it you don’t seem to mind that the Everything that is everything doesn’t
include you. G
Silence….yawn
Billy blinks his eyes. Is this how they ax for a divorce where you come from? B
We’ve only been married six months… B
I just think you’re extraordinary, and I want you to know it. G
Thanks. B
God felt like smoking a cigarette but, of course, he didn’t
Billy thought for a minute. And said, half to himself, ‘I’m not part of everything?’ B
The Everything that is everything is in you. G
Are you screwing with me? B
Don’t you see? G
That was a question. You are serious. Let me get this straight. I’m me, and you’re you, and I
never, in all this time, noticed that I’m not part of the everything that is everything? Billy has a
momentary lapse into consciousness. But of course not, I am me. I’m not you…I’m exclusively
me. My thoughts, my ideas, my beliefs, my fears, and all those appraisals, which are so near and
dear to my heart, my personality, my outlook, my… self. I like my self. I love my self. It hardly
gets in the way at all, and when it does. I have you to remind me. My senses! There! Go to
sleep. Or whatever you do when my back is turned. B
Your senses. Your self. All that, is a vain attempt to be part of the Everything that is everything.
G
Why don’t you just say I’m not God, God. I’m not the universe. I am not all things. I am part of
all things when I’m with you. B
Silence
Now I’m awake… I hope your happy. B
You-are happy. G
Huh. I didn’t say I wasn’t. B
You should be, stars envy you. God puffs on an imaginary cigar. G
I envy anything that doesn’t have to sleep. And I am part of everything, Thank you. B
Gravity impacts size, rotational dynamics, and obviously distance. It connects one… G
Oh, no! No…You’re not going to change the subject. B
My self is my business. Just like your self is your business…My self gets in the way sometimes,
fine. I’m sure your self would get in your way if you weren’t so busy using my self to speak thru
and conduct business with. B
………………………………………..………………….What is your business dear? B
How do you mean. G
What do you do all day when I’m working and cleaning up? B
Nothing. G
Great! Billy says, after a minute. B
I’m my self which is nothing, but a jumbled-up mess of this and that, which I threw together so I
could go out among descent people, and you laze around Heaven all day.
I get stuck with the crap, and you’re off somewhere doing the universe. B
It didn’t used to bother you. G
Billy gives God a sharp look.
Ten minutes ago it didn’t bother me! It didn’t bother me because I thought you were actually
working. G
Billy honey, I don’t do everything. I am Everything. G
And I’m Matilda the singing waitress. I’m not speaking till we get this straightened out. There’s
no one like you…I’ve looked. G
Billy sits on the side of the bed, and puts his socks on. He mumbles thru exagerated movements:
Zif I din’t have enough to do.
Yes dear. Whatever you say. This is why I love you. I’ll do more around the house. G
No, I’ve seen how you clean. It breaks my back. B
I’ll help you in a thousand other ways then. G
God kisses Billy on the back.
Yes, Billy says, with a sigh. Okay. You keep on being Everything. I think that’s probably a
good arrangement. And I’ll stay here and nail the furniture down. B
Good. Because I have a feeling things are going to start shifting real soon. G

Our relationship was not the kind you have to figure out. It was not of dire consequence. We
were closer than lovers, but then, I said, anytime, and I meant it.
We were closer than friends, because we told the truth, all the time.
We were closer than father to son. There was nothing to compete about.
We were closer than a married couple, because our disagreements always lead to understanding.
We were closer than twins. Everyone thought He was me, and He wasn’t. I was separate.
We were closer than any relationship I knew, it was as if he knew me, already. As if he were in
me.
₪
I love you, but I don’t love everything.
Billy wake up, you’re dreaming. G
What? I was just thinking.
Oh, here we go. God reaches over and turns the clock, face down.
Love is a funny thing… G
Love is a very funny thing. B
Good. Well, goodnight sweet dreams. G
Ha ha. The dog is stealing the covers. Can you do something about that? B
Go ahead. G
I love everything, but how could I? B
I married everything, but that’s impossible. B
Love is immutable, and comes in many flavors, but this one and that one I hate. B
Billy, you and I don’t just happen to agree. Tho about this we do. G
I’m densing up. B
Billy, you understand that one word can have many meanings. And that a word is just a word no
matter what anyone says about it. And yet you speak, and for the most part, make perfect sense G
Billy pulls the covers over his knee and Formerly, slides toward the edge—on his side.
Yes. B
And you realize somehow that I am everything, and you can understand me. G
Scratchy static co-opts a ‘word’ Billy thinks may have been ‘because.’
You have no trouble with the fact that I speak into you. Into you already. G
Let’s get back to the part about you said you don’t do anything. B
I never said that. G
Some little doggie is going to land on his head soon, from not taking hints, God said.
I said, I don’t do everything. I have wants. G
Don’t even. B
I speak and people understand, and then I speak and they’re suddenly deaf, Why. G
Billy stops pushing the dog toward the edge, and just takes the space he had already claimed—It
bought him time.
It’s not sudden?? They never did understand?? Billy says with huge swings at the end of each
rhetorical guess. Look at him! You’d think this was his bed, referring to the dog, who laid there
like a spider, so he wouldn’t roll off. B
Billy, you don’t have to know everything tonight, do you. G
How is it, it always ends up you know everything, and I know nothing? B
I never said that. G
But that’s the direction were moving. B
Billy, we’re parked. G
Billy sat upright in wonder, he was in his car, at the mall, the window was frosting up, there was
no dog, and he had ten feet of space on all sides. He knew how he got there, and he recognized
the methodical parking style, owing to so many parking-lot accidents, but he didn’t understand
how they were in bed just a second ago.
I know, he said. Wondering to himself, almost out loud, ‘how did we wind up here?’ B
We so often agree. You make my ‘life’ a pleasure, fun. Billy, our conversations are additive.
Cumulative, like life itself. G
Well, get out the car, don’t just sit there. I have to get...and he feels for the Christmas list he has
in his back right pocket. B
God smiles, and follows Billy into the mall, very close behind.

Honest John
Once I was looking for a summer job. I walked into the back of a roofer’s store for an application. There on a wooden sign, in
painted letters, were the rules—lateness, proper shoes, and then I saw rule number five, there were only eight or nine altogether. No
shooting nails at co-workers. Then written hastily next to that, it said, This includes brads. I didn’t know what a brad was, but I knew
instantly that the rules define the problem working there—Idiots and cheats make the rules. So I left.

God had few opinions about cheating, cheating swindlers, and crooks. I was shocked at
first—They’re a sort of joy to Him. He delivers, resuscitates, opens doors, allows, even recedes
for them, when he’s ready—good and ready. I think he likes a good laugh.
You can’t cheat another without cheating yourself—you know, move the cash a little further
away. Soon, everyone begins to look like a fraud, even me—especially me. The world is like us
in absentia as well as in acceptance.
You put success on their side, then turn the table, it makes God chuckle. He doesn’t feel about
things they way you do, or the way I do. He doesn’t reckon time the same, for example. He
thinks your chicanery’s amusing when it’s not, and I never saw Him cry.
I’d make cheaters wait for the next train, the ‘faster train.’ I’d give them 20-20 vision, and
then sell them a very expensive, ‘special’—‘Elysian’ pair of sunglasses to see Heaven with—
They’d make everyone look like a fraud, every relationship a battle of the sexes, every
conversation a war of nerves, every choice unclear, every place a conflict of ideals…mean—even
this place—especially this place. Then you’d look and see only one set of tracks. You’d never
get in. You’d think you were in Heaven’s waiting room, for a thousand years. There you’d sit,
magazining. Or maybe I’d just say, Fall away, and then walk away whisper . And leave it to
you to it figure out…..silly glasses and all.
God and I differ, so rarely, but this is one thing we don’t agree about—he thinks your absence
is amusing. I think your absence is deserved. You don’t show up because you never gave him
anything to work with. He thinks you’re funny, but then, He doesn’t have to live with you. I
know what God means by, ‘something to work with.’ Do you?
the expression I moved into place, displaced many other similar same expressionς. Mine,
interpretive, 4 words, others are longer, and some are shorter. If you knew his medium, you
might understand, but you don’t. What he wants, what he needs from you, is something to work
with. In that sense, God’s an artist.
What did I get a call about the other day? Oh, they offered me two hundred dollars American,
to accept delivery of a complete set of free, professionally marginated, feeless, exemplary, fully
agreed upon gifts of some sort—awards, I think. And a special pre-set, limitless membership,
which would entitle me to uncontested enrollment privileges, and more! The young woman
asked me how I’d like the money. I wanted to say, Tied in a bag around your neck, but I didn’t—
I’m working on empathy. Apparently re-defining everything has become a sort of epidemic in
this country. It felt good to know I’m not the only one. What did they call about yesterday? Oh
yeah, did I want to go to Daytona Beach for ‘Arbitration Weekend,’ for free!? Florida, in
April…of course! He assured me I’d have the ‘Best time.’ I said, Honey, you know I would. If I
don’t think it’s gonna be fun—-I don’t go.

This is purely gratuitous, but if you ever get the chance, watch the five-minute sketch by WC,
where he explains how he got the name ‘Honest John.’

To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it—Confucius

On the door to success it says Push and Pull—Yiddish proverb
No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking—Voltaire
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams—Eleanor Roosevelt

How can I say how much I care when you know I don’t. How can I say everything’s okay, you’ll
be fine—“Everything cradles you”—I could be dead tomorrow. How can I say I offer you
Everything, when all I give you is a story about lazy, idle people and a man who can only speak
to one person at a time. How can I say look closer, when you’re ready to close The Work. How
can I say slow down, when I move too fast. How can I say God was helping me from the first,
when it turns out he is a big football fan, and tries to keep novelists to a minimum. How can I say
I’ll miss you when you’re gone, when I know the meek and powerless will be your first victims.
How can I mean everything I’ve said, when meaning changes so quickly. How can I say none of
this was made up, when some of it must’ve been. How can I say the symbolic nature of life
revealed itself to me with real subjects, among real things, in real time as if I were deaf, dumb,
and blind when I’m not. How can I say your life’s fictional, when that’s not possible. How can I
say I’m a poor man in prison, when I’m so rich, and so free. How can I say I’ve failed at even
this, when you are so determined that I do, and you want me to. How can I say any of these
things. How can I say anything.

One day a Prince came apart 213

“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world; for, indeed, that’s all who ever have.” Margaret Mead

Something cold caught him as he crossed the street from one place to the place he was going,
and the man suddenly became a Prince. The life practically flew out; stopped his words; and he
wondered.
Then the store closed, and the gates of his castle shut. All was made ready by a great heaving
of people and things, from all the way back, when he was a child.
He happened to be looking up at the tallest building from the outside—then the inside. He
didn’t just happen to be looking up at a steeple, it was also looking at him. All was made ready,
just like in a book with a story.
One person spoke. He saw their words rise like vapor that seemed to catch the light.
Everything was about to become fruit. All fruit was good. Everything good was becoming a
steeple. Everything good was becoming everything there was, and death became unavoidable.
Everything became an apple, and that’s how the Prince knew he was dead.
In the multiplication that was not a problem; all that his eyes fell upon, fell away. The best of
his life lived on. Forever—all mixed together—all one thing, beautiful, eternal. And somehow
one great thing grew into infinity. There on the street, in the day, of a month where-in he died.
There, everything became one thing and it was good. He walked up to it, smiled, and it
opened. The first part became the second. The second part, the first. Then the last. All different
parts in the death of a king. Who just then found out he was a prince, not moments before.
Life was a dream or death was a dream—same thing.
Dreams themes memor—just then they were cut off, he would have supposed his ten minutes
were up, if he were up to supposing anything. Ease.
 He did not wish he had spent more time trying to understand. He understood and walked
inside with pockets full. Of something he thought must be really great.

People keep asking

He’s looking for that home, and I hope he finds it—I’d trade all of my tomorrows for one single yesterday—
Janis Joplin/Me and Bobby McGee, written by K. Kristofferson, F. Foster

So many people asked so many questions, mostly ‘How?’ And some asked, ‘Why now?’ The
relationship I’ve discussed is mine, but it also theirs. It, to me, is, even tho it’s not human, is, so
much like human touch. Let’s say you’re touched on the shoulder, or the face, or if someone
touches your side, it’s like that. Suddenly you’re not so independent. It makes its way inward,
and there you are, feeling something inside from the outside that you don’t understand. It takes
about a second. Enough time to think—but what about? Maybe they like you, maybe they’re
wandering around, or maybe you’re blocking their view of the escargot—you may never know,
but you feel it, and if anyone ever asked—you would say you felt it. It’s like that——— —
Undeniable. You felt something, and as time goes on, their questions subside, but inside of you
the answer grows more steady: Yes, I felt it, and yes, I know he touched me, and yes, yes, yes to
all your questions Yes. Ask me something! It was really nice, it was subtle, but I was so alive,
and it, so friendly, so sudden. God gave me something I couldn’t understand. God came to a
light man, a man who needed very clear, very strong symbols, who understood nothing was also
something even he could not erase. And time wouldn’t be of any help to him. He could stand
there forever. As I tried to stand in front of it, I found something so far beyond understanding,
that I may never make sense again. But, no one cares—I never made much sense before. You
may find you have become so yourself, and so not-yourself you want to explode. Well, that’s
how I felt—Expolodable, and completely unmovable. He asked me not to change. So what
would you have done? I said, “Huh?” But I’m slow sometimes, and I like myself, so to me it
made absolute perfect sense. I’ll be here, He said. I said: “Stay there, I’ll be right back as soon
as I re-group”—that’s how it started. When Everything showed up, nothing changed. When I
came back, he was right there, waiting. It wasn’t a barbecue, or a night out, but he talked to me
the way I’m used to, except really different. He wasn’t there, and then he was, like a kind of slow
explosion. Time kept moving on, but I thought, No it’s not... Time’s not moving, and you know,
it wasn’t.
₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪

It’s like I own a Jewelry Store. Everyone who comes in—all they want is bigger, cheaper,
more flawless diamonds. I used to say, The big cheap flawless diamonds are over there…take
your big cheap flawed self over, and get all you want. It took time to realize that that’s all
anybody wants. When I finally understood this, I almost wanted to get out of the jewelry
business altogether. But you know, I guy’s gotta do something, it might as well be something’e
likes. So when they come into the store now, I do what I did before: change the subject, and try
to dazzle’em; except nowdays, I smile more.

People had this unshakeable notion that Billy was pretending to be someone, or some thing,
that he was trying to be mysterious. When people asked a question they knew the answer to, he
would say, “perhaps” or “fine,” or the one that got him in so much trouble, “I hope you find
forgiveness when you realize what you’ve done.” Billy could see a closed mind the way you see
a closed book—closed. It’s as foolish to agree with one, as it is to argue with one; the first tact
keeps it closed, the second forces it so. And what’s the point of forgiving if they don’t know
what they’re doing or that it just might hurt?
 I practiced many times to say what I felt I needed to say: “Stop judging me!” You judge me
by you; I din’t say: by your standards, your ethics, morals, perspective, or even by that nearly
impenetrable internal dialogue that makes you so right, that you’re right to be wrong. You never
heard a word I said, and that’s what you judge me by. You judge me wholly by you. I am not
you—Thank God, and modern psychotherapy. I hope that in time, man won’t be able to
comprehend how a person could be considered not-a-person. I wish it absolutely. And I would
wish it away. It is unkind…..I am, because I say I am. May you never have to stand on words,
and say you’re a man. May you never be listed last. May you never be called curséd or deemed
doomed by the experts on everything.
It’s true, I’ve lived my entire life in dichotomies: A boy who was not a boy, a man who was
not a man, a fictional character who, well... If I’ve lost anything in this process it’s you. I had to
move forward. I am, and I wish for you to be also. Love one another. In time I grew to love the
life I loved already, and had loved for years before you ever showed up. I’d planned to add: Do
you really think I’m going to start a 500 year debate, that I can’t possibly end, here in my side
yard, on a sunny Wednesday, with you? Listen, if I wanted to debate a bind of closed books, I’d
go make my case in front of the modern fiction section of the Airsupp Library. Hey, F CHA, pay
attention! Talkin’ to you!
I can’t talk about real living people, it’s too dangerous, but one day a couple walked up, she
wearing some kind of ‘drag on the ground tent,’ and he, what I took for a fishing hat—hooks
embedded, rubber worms emblazoned. She said: “I think you owe the world an apology;” his
worms danced in complete agreement. I stared, and smiled, and said: I shoulda known better
with a girl like you...that I would love every-thing that you do, and I do…hey hey hey. In truth, I
have carte-blanche to say whatever I feel like saying or doing, and call it speaking if it’s singing,
or singing if it’s really just staring. I keep to the script, or so the story goes. Repeating tires me;
my world’s small; and people go on fishing expeditions all the time round here, besides, I was
born smiling.

If
If your fighting is done. We are one.
And we can go. Finally.
This is why I bring nothing.
If I brought Peace you would WAR, the thing that always made you ‘right.’
If I brought politics you would drown in avarice and mayhem.
If I brought something wonderful it would never get off the ground.
If I brought you a GREAT MAN on a shiny horse, you would be ruined. Soar.

If Heaven is forever
Eternity all of it, exists now, and it does.
All the winters, all the waves, all the warm summers and all.

If Heaven is forever, eternal

It lasts forever. There comes no time that it is not, and no time after it—
for it is never gone. It can never die.

If Heaven is forever, eternal being.

God.
Will out-last the small bleak desert planet you call home.

If Heaven is forever, eternal being. God.

He takes unto himself. The ones who can ID him.
He can be identified by his sense of priority, and his sense of amusement in the varied nature of
love. He is here now.
No, it is not all about you—how could it be? You are also in Him. You will never see it. You
will never see it as I see it. That’s why you need me. That is why I’m here.

Done
*

It was December. I sat comfortably in the tub, RJ comes rushing in:

Done. It’s done, come look, come….. What’s wrong? R
Nothing. I like the tub. B
Let’s toast the work. R
I’ve done that a dozen times. B
This time for real. Where’s the champagne? R
There isn’t any. B
RJ goes out to see if he can find where I might have ‘hidden’ it. Then abruptly turns around,
catching himself on the stairs somehow.
Well, lets drink to success. R
Okay. B
What’s that? R
Nothing. You know I don’t drink tea in the bathroom. B
Tea…lets change it to champagne. And this into your office. R
Have you been editing behind my back? You want me to get out of the tub and sit in the office
dripping wet, so you can drink champagne? B
You could co-operate. No one would believe we’d toast an end to the world, as we’ve known it,
as it is, with this…..Here. RJ ‘lifts’ the glass, and there was tea in it. Wow! So shiny…don’t
you love the color. It’s a little too sugary for my taste but…not bad. I mean it…really. R
Billy smiles, at the thought, and says, Whatever you say Jeshu. Why do you think they call it
Constant Comment®? Then he slides back into the slippery tub, dunking his head under water,
baptismally.
im, I know you didn’t write it, but you read it…didn’t you? R
Billy looks Billy in the face, in the mirror, and looks tired, critically.
Well, what do you think? R
I think the world doesn’t have a chance in the world. B
RJ smiles and then laughs at Billy’s strange way of thinking.
No, I guess not. R
If…Well…maybe you’re right, he said…and then disappeared. R
I love you. Stay steady.

Life is funny
You’ve got to hear the music of it—Mabel Mercer. I don’t explain quotes, but: If you hear the morning as a cacophony of thrown newspapers—trucks
going backward—a bird here or there—and the scrambling aloft of squirrels in the tree above your head…you may miss the morning all together.

Billy, life is funny… G

Now I lay me down to sleep. B
Billy, you don’t pray. Don’t start now. G
Oh, Thanks. What’s that!?! B
What. …Billy, I know you’re not asleep… G
I woke from a really nice dream last week, wanted to go back to it, and did. I learned how to
allow things, from going to see you so often…if that’s my allowance, can I have a raise? B
Well, take the stomach, for example. G
When I was outside today, it was so bright I almost hurt my eyes that one time. B
The heart is at the whim of every extremity. The lungs are really just a part of the heart. The
brain… G
If I ever caught a bird do you know what I’d do? B
The brain makes plausible copies. It records everything at least six different ways. You know, to
enhance understanding. But… G
One time when no one was looking I straightened the arbor with a stick, a long piece of rope and
two pieces of tape. B
What would you say if I told you the structure of the universe is mostly calcium, and air.
I’d say it was a damn shame I don’t know anything about calcium, don’t want to, and can’t lift
my finger for all the calcium in it…because it’s night time. B
The devil was right, you’re only interested in one thing… G
The stomach is king, and most people don’t know it. It’s really the only independently organized
part… G
There are no more kings. B
Emperor. G
Please don’t start. I’m gonna get a headache, and then we’ll see who’s funny. Pretend that it’s
night where you come from can’t you? B
All I wanted to say was. G
I’m turning over to get a better view of the other side of the room now. B
God had no real concept of perspective. It stumped him, just long enough.
Good try. I heard that. G
Look, Billy said, and almost sat up, for no reason. If I have another nightmare about people
eating their own children, we’re gonna have a little sit-down.
Silence.
Billy, they don’t really eat their own children; they go round town. G
Round town?
Well isn’t that right. Most towns are round. They go to the other side of town and eat those
children. Not their actual biological children. G
It’s the same thing!! B
I know that. I didn’t know if it made any difference…to you. G
Philadelphia’s not round.
Are they paying you to say these things. G
Why do you always worry if someone isn’t paying me?! B
Billy, your dreams about falling, and your dreams about chewing, are nothing to this monstrosity.
It could get very ugly—We’ll go when you’re ready. G
Silent sleeping
Billy…Billy, Billy, what would you say if I told you in three hundred years the Americans and
the Chinese would be extremely close. G
Define extremely. B
The same. They meld. G
Define meld.
Into each other. Not rape. Not run over. G
You mean not over run. The Americans are not over-run. It would be nice if I could get some
shut-eye. It’s half past a horse’s ass, and look! I’m wide awake! It was 24:30 B
Neither one cares what anyone else thinks. G
Maybe I’ll just go and sleep somewhere else. I mean if I can’t spend five minutes in silent
contemplation then I don’t know what. And I’m not learning any of those stick- figures, so forget
it…..Let’s leave when they start that argument…and silverware… knives, forks, and spoons.
I’m not eating with kindling, so you can forget that too! B
Okay Billy, okay, whatever you say. G
Can I ask you something? B
What if I said, No. G
Your name for the human soul is ‘God,’ isn’t it? B
Yes. The human soul is myself. Even I have a self. And, Light-Fingers, before you get all
teary…yes, like you, it’s all over the place, and yes, it’s true, that the unprofitable one, who could
not identify his soul in front of an over eager teacher, and a disinterested class, found it right
before the bell, pinned it down, cornered it, almost forced it to confess, it has a self, and pushed
aside or broke in pieces everything along the way to extract what only you would call a public
admisssion: I have no soul, I have to use yours. G

And I know, beyond a doubt, my heart will lead me there soon. We’ll meet beyond the shore, we’ll kiss just as
before. Happy we’ll be, beyond the sea, and never again I’ll go sailing—Beyond the sea/Trenet &
Lawrence/Kevin Spacey version via B. Darin.

My car was stolen once, and I couldn’t believe that that could happen. I just couldn’t believe
it, and I looked for it vigilantly, all over the place. I even caught myself looking under a bush. I
knew where I parked it, but I couldn’t help it. When I caught myself looking under another bush
and thinking: Well, it’s not under that bush, I had to smile, laugh a little, at myself, even tho it
was not the least bit funny. That’s the kind of stuff that’s in my head. That’s what I live in. It is
always there. It’s not always foremost, in fact, I haven’t thought about that for many years.
Conversely, there is more to the story: The losers who stole my car, pulled it apart, and ruined
it. When I saw it, it looked raped, that’s the only word for it. The truth was, I didn’t ever want to
see it again. I tried to find a way for it to be declared ‘totaled,’ unrecoverable—in insurance
lingo.
I looked the car over, very closely. There was a small dimple at the corner of the roof, I
thought that was odd, and somehow I had heard, recent to this episode, that a car that is bent,
twisted, yanked—whatever, might have this kind of mark, and would be considered ‘totaled.’ So
I looked for further evidence, and found a corresponding outward dent on the other side. I
pointed this out to the agent assigned, and got full value for the car.
The question is, did these thieves roll my car? Or did they somehow hit something so hard as
to bend the frame, and leave almost no marks? Were they injured from their stupidity? Can they
be stopped?
It’s not that I care. It’s the other part of the story.
When I die, that last second, that is not-followed by another second is eternity. I take that,
with me to Heaven, all those moments in my life. And they are transcended. From the least
particle. I will go to Heaven just like I do now. The only difference is, when I go now, I’m just
visiting.
The thieves, in all probability, are left with reams and reams of memories of such self same
similar incidents in their lives. Incidents where they abused someone, or ran into— over or thru
someone. How else can you explain the dents and dimples?
It’s that Earthly crap that they live in. Unresolved, it has nowhere to go in their heads, but
round and round.
Resolving every stupid, hurtful, pointless thing that they’ve ever done in their short lives
would be hard. Impossible. It’s like telling the truth, you can’t really do it. But you can try. It
rearranges things. That’s all it does. Telling the truth, or begging some-one for forgiveness every
second of the day just in case that’s your last, probably would engage the law of diminishing
returns. Yes, that’s life. With its crappy dents, diminishing returns and all.
When they die, these things do not wash . You cannot take these things. They would mess up
the transmission. There is no vacuum, just hungry space. You get to keep them for all eternity,
all ten seconds, or minutes if you prefer—forever. Untranscended …..in that, no ‘Good’ came
from these escapades (yogh), you are left to, what’s the word? Molder, decay, rot. Oh yes, of
course, the Otter says the word is slowly oxidize ceaselessly, kind of like the mummies of even-
older antiquity. The negative confession only ever worked, in its power to amuse. In fiction, no
one ever takes a dump.
I can’t change my thoughts or reorganize my memories at the last second. I have to take
Everything with me. All at once, and walk. When there’s no where to go.

Then I got a new car. Because I looked more closely at this thing that just happened.
Things that are resolved are well, resolved. I transcend the petty Earthly crap, simply and
easily. Perhaps, what is not the least bit funny, can in time turn. The way verbs turn into nouns,
and suddenly you’re up, and it’s your turn. You may be proud of a thing so contemptible it blows
your mind, and also the rverse. You may be happy for the role you played in someone else’s life.
A role you never knew you had, couldn’t possibly know, or even ever have known.
You might consider the advantages of looking a little more closely—if you should ever have
the occasion to.
The place that Heaven is, is real. It is intrinsic to God. It is God. It is the only unlimited
space in all of space that is not a space or a time. It is more like a . Heaven is real, more real in
some ways than this. This place has a prison-like quality I never would have noticed before—but
maybe that’s me. Travel’s broadening.
Just once more. If you spend your life in Calcutta helping the poor, contributing to the poor—
you die. God has something to work with—Your kindness changes Calcutta. Heaven for you is
not Calcutta with clean diapers—Your life’s work…just to shorten this description, changes it
into His dream. His dream for you. And you live in His dream for you—which is your dream. I
don’t know, but for me it’s better than the best dream I ever had. Look, petty labels can be easily
transcended by anyone at any time. God can transcend whole lives, like fiction, and places like
Calcutta become what they are, were; places that you’ve heard of, that are far far away. I fell
asleep into a time, way up high.

God said: I am not like you, meaning you. I don’t go from one to another to another looking for
one that is more perfect. He is there, I put him there. He might as well be perfect, because he is
perfect for me. He is a messenger, and he is the message. Anyone else, would have you walking
ineffably backward into your comfortable, combustible bleak. He will not allow it. He won’t
give-up when he gets sick of you—He’s already sick of you. Ha. Ironic.

It is the same when a child dies. His or her life, defines a kind of boundary, and it is in the
boundary, that God—Heaven—The Multitude—all of it—can be found and felt .

4-12-30 As Always
As always I offer absolution. A one-time offer. One time. Once. Only once.
Take it. Walk forward.
Hold your head up.
You are free, in prison. But you know, because I have told you, you are free.
If this gives you Peace I’m glad.
If this enables you to dispense Justice, I am also.
If you think I have given without taking, well…
Know I love you. It is from being not too particular, that I stay at your side.
I am remorseful, but I’ll get over it.
Think of me as a man with regrets. Hold that thought—that’s about how long my regrets last
also. I think of myself as a nice guy with a funny job—some things never change.

5-1-02
Billy was ex temporalis, not out of time, but outside of time. Perhaps it was too many trips to
Heaven. He operated now, outside of time, all, as if this were all already done. Not like some
new super-hero power: the power to be finished, or the power to tap into the electrical grid that is
all around. But more like a chapter or like an account. He had a decidedly fictional quality. God
had plucked him out of time. His word, not mine.
The last time he got back to Earth he noticed things were moving faster. It had already begun.
In a world where bad meant good, sometimes, anyway; fat meant thin and sexy, but not
always; and you were fly if you thought you were. Billy believed that words were not as
important, certainly not as inviolate as they had once been. Something was happening.
Billy had been brought up to believe that freedom of expression and freedom of thought went
together, but he himself was proof that they don’t.
When he couldn’t speak except to make interpretable comments about the situational
relationship or the paradoxical circumstance he found himself in, he was thinking very broadly,
very widely and very well—to one person at a time. His thoughts were wide and his words were
narrow. Drawn as if from some huge bank, and focused sharply enough to get thru a keyhole,
provided there was someone home.
Odd, freedom of thought seems to be driven by freedom of expression, but in every other way
independent. It is as if you need encouragement to think. And the bigger the challenge the more
fun, and the harder you have to try, or something like that.
It was thoughts like this, that made Billy glad he was not in time, and that it was a done deal,
and he could go on to the next thought, as tho nothing happened.
Billy saw a way out, and was amazed he hadn’t seen it before. He was already being judged
wrong on every single count, especially the date that Galileo got his apology from the Church.
God had refused to let Billy change the date to match the sources that he had. The sources that all
agreed with each other, and disagreed with Him. God had made some cryptic comment about the
apology doesn’t exist until it is received and accepted. He was getting more like Delbert every
day.
Billy would heal the world the same way he had healed the girl. Surreptitiously. She woke up
sane, and couldn’t believe it, saw no difference, and made no changes.
People had already begun telling him that he was wrong about everything—except the things
that everyone already knew. And that was that. So simple—Billy got to be wrong about
everything. She refused to be healed, and everything became dream-like.
Billy was, himself, in a dream-like state.
God smiled. Billy smirked.
God laughed, and said: Billy, I am everything. I am the Everything that is everything. When
the pot of boiling water is pulled down by a child and burns her arm, I am not that. Suddenly I
am everything else. I learned that from you. I just walk thru the universe going seamlessly from
everything to everything else, as if their arguments are suddenly my arguments, and then
suddenly not. How can they say the things that are, are not.
 Great God, I’m happy for you. Let me make a note, it’s 3:54, it’s the first Sunday of five,
you’re right about everything, I’m wrong about everything, you put words in my mouth, and now
you want to thank me for repeating them back to you while changing nothing, but the font, being
completely unbelievable, and making no difference whatsoever. And if I don’t accept the fact
that you’re happy for some indiscernible reason, I can go into a dream-like state, and you woke
me up, because you just had to tell me this. Geah.
God paused and said, Uh, yes. Thank you.
Billy fell back into the dream-like state which was precursor to God’s awakening, and also
lingered long after it. He thought that it was funny—he had taught his first husband the same
thing. How to walk around the universe blameless, and do nothing that didn’t pleas… the thought
evaporated, there was no compari s i n. God had ripped the thought from Billy’s
mind, tore it into a million pieces. And then each piece into a million pieces. Then each of
those pieces into a million pieces. Billy fell softly back to sleep and smiled, as the room tried to
explode, but couldn’t.

5-1-09 I took a trip

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself—Kahlil Gibran

I took a trip in the Taurus, I was thinking about the woman with the mole, about the unborn,
the as-yet unborn. The ones in the fold between 16 and 16. Children.
Children belong to God. And No, you did not misunderstand. Heaven now holds the unborn,
those as yet unborn, in the so-called future, and those who were never born. That do not belong
to you, that are God’s. Heaven is not meant to be understood—that’s me, I like clarity.
You do not have to understand, you don’t have to like what I like. You’re not doing what I’m
doing. You don’t have to understand anything. Heaven is meant to be enjoyed. If you can’t
enjoy tobacco, caffeine, rope, plants, food, water, friends, family, helpings, or Love, while you’re
here, maybe you’ve chosen the wrong planet. I think perhaps, that’s the only thing these two
world’s have in common, Love. That may be me reading God’s mind. I don’t know. If you
think you invented the mind, well, there’s not much to say. You can take with you to Heaven
those who never went to Heaven. Heaven is eternal, unchanging. It does not accumulate beings,
like a taxi stop, or a parade. It is of no size. It doesn’t take a thousand years to pass you by. It is
timeless. It is the same now, as it will be in a thousand years, and how it was thousands of years
ago.
Anyway, who cares. If I understood it, I probably couldn’t travel so freely. I would doubtless
have to fill out reams of paperwork—confidentiality agreements, and make hundreds of promises
I have no intention of keeping. I am highly un anchored. Ha. Just the threat of God’s paperwork
makes me wanna shut up, and counsel secrets. Thank-you.
Look, if this were all true I would know how all this ends. And I don’t. It is a work in
progress. God says: what I say, is all there is to say. I say: He is all there is or ever was.

There can be no debate. Not with me. I will never be silenced, and I’ve failed already. I’m on
the side of the ones who hate me, revile me, and try the hardest to stop me. You have been
seeking the light, fear not.
I will not allow your leaden expectations to weigh you down. I will not allow your sing-songy
oratory to blind you. I will not allow your fear of amber hearing to make you fall, masked or
unmasked. Fear not. Today is the day.
God can reframe your life, your entire life. You become eternal—same yesterday, today and
tomorrow. You have to give Him something to work-with tho.
You’re going the wrong way. The road ahead is washed out. Your truck is broke down. If you
can’t respect one man who has done you no harm. You cannot proceed. I never said, or meant,
blind worship, blind obedience, or blind respect—just regular respect. And there’s no such thing
as constant adoration. That’s what’s known as cuh cuh crap.

Debate! What would I do with big ratings?—I need a shorter sentence. I’m here to make sure
you don’t win. No debate. I watch debates, I like debates, panel shows, call-ins, all that. They’re
like you are now: Violent with the truth, violent to justice, freedom, understanding, the mind, the
self, the soul, the individual, however he or she sees himself.
Violence to the mind can be undone thru meditation and creative activity of the mind’s own
choosing—Bet you didn’t think I knew that. One more word about debates. Life may be a
contest of sorts, perhaps. There are so many ways of looking at the truth it’s hard to say that your
perspective is skewed. Especially hard for me, because I told you what I’m about to do. It makes
no difference. When it’s over, ultimately everyone is right, even in defeat. You’ll make sure of
it. Of that I have no doubt. You’ll find a way.
You want to discuss what? unspeakable rage, acts of unthinkable cruelty, suicide, drug
addiction, anarchy, your attempts to destroy people in any one of a thousand ways because you
don’t like them, greed, violence, bloodshed, political adventurism, racism, sexism, poverty,
hatred, ignorance, fear of looking like a fool, mass hysteria, stupidity, torture, well I’m against
them. I’m also claustrophobic, back off.
You have no future, you’ve come to an impass. Let’s discuss that. Your blindness, we can
talk about that. We can discuss how deaf you are to reason, how mute you become when it’s time
to speak from the heart about your own personal experience. You’re not nearly ready for a
discussion. I’ll know when you’re ready, I hear everything.
Waiting for people to tell the truth, yelling at the deaf, and arguing with God, are three of the
biggest wastes of time that there are. We can discuss how right you’ve become. We can discuss
how you don’t really like to help people, because they’re not as clean as you. All that. I don’t
see the point. But. Listen. Mira ese : Discussion’s one thing, but starting a 500-year debate—
There’s no time.

I heard that priests are refusing to offer the symbolic-renewal to people who are unaligned
with a particular color. If this is true, it will close their shop. Those doors will close. I heard all
about operandii ex operandus or whatever. I don’t care how well red you are. Beyond this point
you will not proceed. The doors will close. It is not for you to open them, stand away. I would
rather be dragged behind a truck on a rope, or be tied to a fence half-naked—in the middle of
nowhere, or live and die where boys don’t cry, than answer your questions—all about why.
Why? Because I’ve always been crystal clear. Always. I have no time for your questions. Go
to…h…the nightmare that propels your wishes as if it were your life. Thank God I’m not
Mormon. Those tickets are now exempt. They can handle it—they have to. I live that I can
speak to everyone. I live that I can have silence, and in that silence find the things that I love
above all others. I live that I can love where I came from. I live that now is the time and I can be,
and with help I can speak. I live that this is Everything, which I love, and you’re lost in the
woods. I will help you, as I have always done. This is the time, the place, the feeling, and the
glory everlasting. Yeah. It’s about time…I know.

The Green Sun

The man was riding toward the west, toward the sunset, he was fearful it would turn green, so
he looked away. He had read somewhere that green sunsets were uncommonly lucky—but how
could they be? This man had a blue car. He had done what a fictional character had suggested;
he wrote in the margins of another man’s work—well, there were so many mistakes! When he
grew out of that nonsense, since no one would ever see those scribblings, and quote marks, he
began to leave little marks with his thumbnail, and some were doodles. One went down the
whole page like this, I He’d even slept with it, once or twice. As he approached the traffic light
before the store where he bought The Work, he suddenly realized he had left The Work all
marked-up on a table by the front door at home. He had not been without it for two weeks. And
now, more than anything else he wanted to throw it in their faces, and demand his money back.
“I want my money back! From You!” and that’s what he’d rehearsed. He was angry man. He
was talking to himself as he turned the car around. Now he wasn’t going to look in the rear-view
mirror. If, when he got home, he found The Work had fallen on the floor he would kick it. Some
decisions are so easy to make—that’s what he’d do, period. He might knock it to the floor and
then kick it. It deserves to be on the floor—seriously! He got home.
He threw The Work in the car, and refused to look at the page it opened up to, this page—
Thankful he wasn’t superstitious. As he drove up the hill, on the pike of indifference, back in the
direction he had been going, not twenty-five minutes before. HE SAW IT. A green sun; now he
was mad! He was good driver. If he hadn’t decided to go back for The Work, he would have
missed seeing it. He almost threw it out the window. This would go, one way or the other. As
he turned left, into the parking lot, he thought he saw a book on the shoulder of the road. This
must be good idea day! He marched into the store. There was a line of four people and he made
five. The lady in front of him said she’d been in the line twelve minutes. Who asked?! She
wanted to send a copy to someone in Mesopotamia. ‘Lord, why do I always get in the wrong
line?’ This is horrible line, and that’s why I don’t like it. I really don’t. I’m just standing here.
Eleven minutes later he got to the front, and asked for his money back. The girl opened the
book to a page marked all in blue crayon. He stared blankly. His neighbor’s five year old son
had come over one day. The man had checked his pockets for crayons, but he must’ve had one
hidden. Probably blue, he’s wily. No, he didn’t tell the woman that. His Dad works all day, and
I think Eric’s lonely. She pointed out the line to get your money back from The Work. That was
very long line, but he didn’t know anybody in it. He didn’t know how he knew that, he just
knew.
She said, Sir… it’s store policy that if the purchase is defaced…He realized then, that he
bought it. And it was doing something for him. He hated it! In private he loved it— crayons and
all. If I can read thru dark blue crayon why can’t you? Why do I have to deal with this! I really
don’t know. I really don’t! What if I felt like singing a song?
If anyone had ever tried to take it from him…he would kill them. That, he did know.
When he drove home, he realized he now had a book to read, and a book not to read. “That
one could be the perfect copy, and that one I’ll just keep marking up. I might dent it, and I’m
going to rip some pages out—completely!” Another $20.07, down the drain.
He came to read the work sitting on the floor. He’d fallen so often, it just made sense. Plus,
Billy had come to RJ once, on the floor. One time, sitting there, the man thought: This part is
good…don’t you think? Billy was there at the time, and said: I don’t know, maybe I should have
paused longer…The man almost choked, and said to Billy, who he saw as best as he could: No
really, I like how you saw it. Thanks, I kept on, Billy said. The man held his breath like Billy
was gonna give a fuller review, then said Thanks back.
As time moves on, things get added to, and when Billy’s around, things get subtracted too.
The man ended up with a perfect copy, high on a shelf so the kids that occasionally occupy his
space don’t play with it: a copy to give out in case anyone showed any interest in his hobby, and a
third copy, ripped up, scribbled over, and scratched out—that went thru a window once. It’s his
favorite: it helps him move, causes him no end of trouble, and never tires of being corrected. He
loves that bastard. As if he were his own.
 To the man on the street
Follow me as far as you can in this. I am daunted also; my understanding grows everyday. I
can’t speak for the same exact reason I cannot debate. When I speak it’s already too late. My
words can’t catch up to the present moment. There is not enough time in all the world that would
allow you to see this the way I see it. First, I would have to change the way you see. That alone
could take a thousand years. Or it could happen in a second like that. I am true to my themes as
if I were fictional. I can speak, on a delay of some kind, too fast becomes too slow, or perhaps in
a kind of syncopation, you hear what you hear what you hear. It’s new and yet you don’t know it.
You are listening with the remnants of your photic drive. Canceling out as you recreate what you
think you just heard. Plus, you listen too hard. It’s that I am here again that twists your net, and
keeps all the fish away. Work at undoing, and you’ll see—there’s nothing to do. It’s all net. If
undoing the net is so fascinating that you’re riveted, what do I need the net for?
I look at it this way: It’s like a job, but it isn’t a job. It takes all my time because I’m not
doing what I appear to be doing—and of course, sometimes I forget what I’m doing—God and I
laugh—same as before. New nick name: “Gus” (Gotta under stand). Or when I’m on a roll,
it’s—“Just Gus,” without the jazz hands. Ha, very funny. I’ll be done in a minute…yes, one of
my minutes. I don’t interrupt you, when you’re about to…
It is a role, that is not a job. I studied to be an actor, and I was an actor. On stage your job,
and your role are one in the same. In this, the role is everything—no job at all—yet when it
becomes everything, God, the everything that truly is Everything, knocks it right out of the box
everytime. You, that is…I am then left like an out of work actor suddenly no role and no job.
Just like real life. If I say this is a role, which it is, you think that it is also a job. There is nothing
to do but be. The less I do, the greater the symbolic nature of the job. It’s already huge, so vast it
would be almost impossible to complicate it more. So look upon it the way you choose to, and
move on. That’s what I do. Simple. It’s a job that’s not a job, that has almost none of the
qualities of a job. Yet, if I say it’s pure role, which it is, then the role becomes everything, and
then it disappears, and you, that is…I have to start all over again from scratch. It’s that I’m here
that’s the thing. You are being led, if you’re being led at all, by a symbol—by the sign itself.
Extraordinarily unmoving, but it sure does appear to be. I know, to me too.
So…yes there’s more. If you saw this the way I see it, we would have something to talk
about, and that would be good. We could find agreement and that’s always pleasant. If you want
to vote, vote—knock yourself out. I can tell you how it will come down: All the time growing
up, smart people thought I was smart, and stupid people thought I was stupid, and now that I’m
grown, nobody thinks I know what I’m doing. The poll results:
The superficial experts will say, There’s nothing funny about becoming the Savior of a
suicidal species. The truly righteous will say, What kind of a Savior is that to send? The
seemingly educated will say, Kill him, he’s the devil. The pragmatists will say, Let him out of
prison long enough to explain this sex = starvation thing to the Africans and Asians.
The glib—see me as glib. The self-expressing—self-expressing. The wicked—wicked. And
those seeking-egress—seeking-egress. I wonder: why the dull are so dull, and the bright so
unsure, but that’s me. Some fear everything, I guess. No one knew who I was.
No one else can say these things, and they must be said: I’d love to be a fly on the wall when
you tell the Africans they hafta use condoms—they hate them. There’s bound to be a silence you
could almost see thru. Followed by this: They will go ‘native.’ The Asians will then go
‘emotionally numb’…I say to the SA: You can’t just walk in circles, looking all put-upon and
innocent. The NA: You can take-off your cowboy hat, and get serious for a change, you’re not
John Wayne. The OC: Everyone knows you know perfectly well what’s going on—Speak up.
And, to the EU: you can’t just rise above it all, like you didn’t start this bullshit—You’re
involved, internally, intrinsically, inextricably one—
 Help by offering Peace, Hope, and Understanding. Oh, yes, and Love. Everything you think
is ‘their problem,’ is always also yours. Everything’s connected.
Well…there you have it. The world I love. Slow it down! Think like a person.
The debate rages like a furious wind all around, and it’s exciting, but I know, that if we
huddle, you and I, by the fireplace, one of us will get pulled away. If then I walk outside, and
there is no wind, I will know you are beginning to understand. And I will surely find you there. I
know exactly what I’m doing. Being is everything.
I know my job: To take you to Heaven when you do what I’ve told you to, and when you’re
ready. I’m very clear about that. I walk everyday and you can’t see it. And evry day I’m
walking further away. And you still can’t see it. I walk and then I stand around, and then I walk
some more. If I begged you to let me do my job. What would you say?
It’s a strange role…All role. I’m not quite done. I learn everyday. But the things I said
before are heard so much differently now. If I say, Enjoy your day—people take offense. As if I
were inviting them to do something they’ve been doing, just fine, without me, for years—as tho it
were my day—that I had dibs, and I was graciously offering big chunks of it to gift-them-with. I
find prepositions particularly difficult. Do this with me, for example—was heard a thousand
different ways, and began to make no sense. There was progress everywhere, but I kept walking
the same streets, pretty much, everyday. I learned a great deal from people who said, Hi to El
Roy, and didn’t even look at me. I learned from people who moved to the other side of the street,
or just stopped dead in their tracks. People wanted to turn from these horrible days; they wanted
to run to a brighter future; but now, I was in their way. I am the way. One time, someone
sneezed, and I said what I always say…and you’d think I’d just had some sort of psycho-sexual,
so-called faith-based, occupational conversion. Suddenly I’m a prostitute: “Do me, do me, do
me,” was all I heard for weeks. I am ajew only in fiction—gesundheit (health).
Being yourself is not a job, I realize that, however, this is such a simple thing: Being given all
this license to do just that; and at the same time also, being given a job. It’s like something that
just comes to you; in that sense, it’s like an idea. All I really had to do was take the first step, and
like a baby bird I invented flight—like a light that went off in my head (I re-live it and then I live
it). I wouldn’t really know, but maybe it’s like a hero’s journey; he gains everything by making
the first step, all the rest is really the uncanny freedom to invent yourself, and learn to navigate
Wind. Then the analogy breaks down—you’re the Wind, and proclaiming in song, the joy of
flight, is bound to lead only to more arguement. I guess you could return to the nest, but how
could you return unchanged?

I can’t debate right now, for the same reason I couldn’t do any research (except Spring
Garden-area real-estate values). What would be the point? God says, The Corinthians never got
a letter they couldn’t edit. And you have no truly authoritative sources—plus, I’m scripted. And
thirdly or fourthly, in order to get me off-script, which would soon become the whole point, you
must move forward, or change, or grow somehow, and you’re afraid to move. Besides, when you
get a teacher off-script they’re bound to start teaching from the advanced course, which you
didn’t sign up for. It’s inevitable—suddenly God 501. Jeeze, is this gonna be on the test? (I
always stare blankly… “test?”)
A woman asked me the other day what was my opinion of the latest Supreme Court decision?
I turned to her, she looked at me, wobbled oddly, and said: I’m sorry, I feel…then vomited in the
road—off to one side where no one would likely walk—I concluded that some people can just
read my mind. So then…Where was I? Oh, yeah.
The ‘thing’ now, I believe, is to seek offense—I don’t know why. They want to tell people I
spoke harshly: that I was mean, rude, I don’t know…cruel. Very few work for TV news, they
just want to tell people back home: “He was very nasty.” I heard a woman say: “I reached up to
take his sunglasses off so I could see him more clearly, and he snatched them back from me with
all the nasty ignorance you could imagine. And then he said I was disrespectful! I never touched
him!” Many will say: “I judged him before he could judge me.” That’s what you think. I didn’t
patent a new process. I have help. Also, I’m giving you a dose of your own medicine. How do
you like it? 2 rough?
Many parents tell me vivid stories about how their son or daughter died of drugs—and how
they would do anything to prevent this from happening to anyone else—and look at me! they
say—undoing all their good.
I remain skeptical. Not that they lost a child dear to them. Not that they would do anything,
now that the child’s dead. But, skeptical that the drugs killed them: Judging someone for what
they do to you, is the whole point, and it’s bound to be painful. Bound to make someone feel
invisible. Bound to be very hurtful, especially to a child who can’t stand hurt—of any kind.
“How can what you do, be who you are?” It’s like saying to the street: You caused the accident -
–-“When I hit the curb the wheel flew out of my hand.”
..…I guess it would. Who saw the curb? Who pulled the wheel? Which did which first? The
curb the wheel, or the wheel the curb? What were you doing in the street? Who says why—who
says how? I ask…of course, I ask. But all they hear’s me say, “Of course,” one more time,
when the answer seems so far away, so out of range. If I’m the answer to anything…well, what
is it? I’m not saying I don’t like the job, I love it. It’s perfect for me. I understand it—it’s my
Work. I wish you were more transparent is all.
I would wipe away your guilt with a wave of my hand. But you must work it off, express salt.
“You figure this out, then go to your local drug rehab. And save your son over and over and over
again.” I can’t see guilt, I taste it. You harbor it, it speaks for you, you wish it didn’t. You’re
afraid to stink—that salt. That’s the salt I mean.
What do you think I am, really? What I mean is: I know exactly what you’re staring at—but
what do you think it is? What do you see: lover, liar, criminal, thief, destroyer, fool, all over
happy man, God, what??? They still open doors. Their love crushes me.
A woman came up to me yesterday, tugged my jacket, and said: I love your work. I read it
five times…there are parts I can’t read anymore…they crush me. Give me a job.
Stop reading, I said. Live. Go to Africa, find love. Know that you may never return. Be
skeptical, cynical—unswerving. You know now, they want only what they want. Do this:
Imagine a better world. Work very hard, give of yourself—you’ll never run out.
No, she said, Thanks, but I just want to understand The Work. I want that job. I could hardly
tell her, that was a stupid job—I thought that was my job for the last two years.
I said, Take it word for word, as if each had a meaning, and that the meaning was physically in
the word. You know, both Ben Franklin and Mark Twain had a sense of the physicalness of
words and meaning—they both worked with block print…as I have.
That’s so fascinating, she said. I looked at her, and she looked at me. Well, go! I can’t count
the number of people who’ve refused my offers of love. Nothing’s changed.

I went swimming in the surf made-turbulent by hurricane Irene. People were everywhere,
smiling. I lost a small board. A beautiful woman chased it down to return it to me. “It’s rough
out there,” I said. “I’ve noticed,” was all she said. People notice. People care. Delbert’s gone. I
haven’t said goodbye yet. I think sometimes, that God is showing me your desire to love without
cause. I also think he’s given me another gift: to be recognized in my lifetime. It’s a truly
wonderous thing. I also know when The Work begins in earnest, I may never see it again.

A few weeks later, the sea was up, many lost their boards, and there she was. Give the
wetlands back, as much as you can, to the creatures who sustain it, who live there, who love it
almost as much as you. You won’t regret it. What was wonderful is moveable, if it ever was
wonderful. Not all creatures can create New New Orleans the way you can Babe. You can’t
swim forever, or fly for days, you’re human—You could raise Atlantis, I know, but should you?
“Here’s your board, go boy.” I love to have fun, and I do.
 You know, your fearless leaders would buy you a punch bowl to live in, if it’d win you over.
You say, if you knew what was coming, it would never’ve happened—I hope this is true, I wish it
with all my heart—everything depends on it. March it back, to dry land. You deserve a warning,
and you got one. When you build your new new city, make it the way you remember it, the way
it should have been. And when you walk back in, sing and play, and dance with joy so everyone
can hear. People died to free you from the pain of what ‘should have been.’ Many, very many.
Turn around and look ahead.
The idea that if there were fewer humans, there would be less human suffering, isn’t true. If
there were fewer people, suffering would be muted, and wouldn’t be suffering at all. The nature
of life involves the self, what you call the soul, Everything and one thing.

Pizza
I get 50 pizzas delivered to my door, at least twice a month, as if I were hosting a farewell
dinner for all the world’s Kings and Queens. Some big joke. Can you imagine: …Who ordered
the raw herring, half-lobster? Come on! North Sea Herring! Last call! Tell her to get her ass out
here, and stop dancing. I’m not heating this up… Excuse me, this isn’t real provolone!…No, it’s
not, Your Excellency, I realize that. I’m giving you 20% of your inheritance—take it or leave
it!…Well, mine was black olives and cheddar cheese—And this has pineapple on it—I’ll get a
reaction!… Excuse me, I am not drinking diet Sprite!…Your majesty, I’m the host, not the
waiter—“Who wants a diet Sprite, still cold, never been opened?” Obviously, this affair would
have to be catered!
Young man, young man, may I see you?…Oh, Jesus, here we go, Yes mum?
That offer of a cold American soft drink, or twenty percent? I could get a better deal in any
shoppe in Chelsea, haw haw haw (everyone’s a comedian, even the grotesquely self-important).
Ask them for a Pepsi Cola for me, and then you may have a seat. (who’s them?)
I didn’t get the Pepsi, but I did explain to her, that this is loaves and fishes time, and that
everyone, that is, every single one, can get what they need, and be so totally themselves, even in a
world that has no respect for the self, if they will learn to not-spend too much on themselves. Not
all at once. To save some for another, who may come along unexpectedly. To under-indulge,
maybe for the first time in your life.
My dear, she said. You’ve bought us off, perhaps, but what will you give the others?
To whom?
The ones, my dear, who hold power by force. Murder, mayhem, and depravity?
Oh, them. Precedents will inform. What was done before—that worked, will be…
Presidents! They have no power. Oh look, there goes one, and look another! Haw.
Not presidents, Your Everlasting—precedents: convention, custom, civil construction.
She stared off.
…..All those deals will be brokered by the people. I’ll help when I can. Shorten my sentence.
My speech became a whisper for some unknown reason.
The People! She twittered loudly. The people will kill them. And hoist another!
Everyone laughed royally. Many glasses were raised. Everyone always laughs at simplicity.
We drank a toast. Then it was my turn: “To never again.” No glasses clinked. I rose. The
people are individuals now. They will decide and decide and decide. “Diet sprite? Anyone?
Last chance.”——take what you’re offered, or you’ll get the left-overs. This is the real world. I
clinked glasses and cans with everyone there. They loved me, yet there were 7 plots against my
life from this contingent alone. You may ask: How can you possibly love someone you’re trying
to kill? It’s a long story.
{You know, you could offer your despicable despot an ambassadorship to Switzerland : He wouldn’t lose face, he’d have a big house,
good security, agreeable friends, be near his money, and if his pathology caused any problems, well…let the Swiss handle it. I have
lots of ideas.}

Giving all the power to the individual isn’t dangerous at all, will not create chaos, never would
or could. There’s no chaos in the soul. When it’s happy, it needs very little. As a child I could
run all day on whatever my mother plied me with in the morning. Freedom, this Work, will never
make you order hot pastrami when you wanted a cheese- burger. You’ll always know what you
want, and always know how to ask for it.
*

This is a funny job, it really is. I have 3,000 times more power than I could ever possibly use.
But my job’s not about using power. I’m a messenger. Yet I can’t step out of it no matter what I
do. I guess I’m the messenger who can’t shut up. I don’t believe it came from my ability to
handle close scrutiny: I’d love to tell everyone to Get a Job, and then Mind Their Own Business!
I don’t believe it came from my thirst for clarity in near constant self reflection—I’m moving
further away. I don’t believe it came from finding God Amazing—anyone would! I believe it
came from, was offered, showed-up, because I just don’t care about all the things you think are so
important. Touch something. It is.
You can’t put God in a box, and then charge admission—that day’s just about over.
The day when your religion was everything, has long since past. God is everything.
I didn’t get this job because I’m so different from you, tho I am. And I didn’t get this j o b
because I have a special relationship to everything, tho I have. I got this job because I am so
impossibly the same as you, and I can’t help it. I have to do it this way.
You’re crazy, I’m sorry you’re crazy, and I can help. But, I’m not doing all the caring. I’m not
aimlessly cleaning up Heaven all day so you can run around blameless! And I’ll tell you
something else: If He thinks I’m doing that, He’s dead wrong too! Plus, where’s the ring? And
while I’m on the subject, I’m taking away your second ‘life.’ Heaven is not life, not like life, or
life-like, and bears no resemblance to life. Heaven makes life look like a smoke-filled, back lit,
fiddy cent a point, dogs are in charge, jokers’re suddenly wild, you can’t lose wi the red card,
poker game——Easily left!
I get bomb threats all the time. I brush little red dots off my clothes almost every day. I was
in this house before I was born. I was a twinkle in my Grandfather’s eye before I ever set foot in
it. I have the pictures to prove it. This house is an engine, like yours. All of a sudden I should
leave it? For what? Another prison? It’s made of wood—I’m made of flesh and bone. You may
never really understand. What’s that to me? I know ‘cause I’ve been there—when I’m gone I’m
gone. It’s that simple. Being is everything. It has no end. Much can be forgiven in the pursuit of
freedom, especially freedom for another.

First Wednesday in 5, Dead Run

You are teetering on the edge. All your systems are about to fail. It must be this way. They
will not all fall at once, but they will appear to, all over the world. Call it a trick of the light. You
are so interdependent, you’re in a bundle. You needn’t worry. They will fall because they
couldn’t stand. If they could stand they would stand. They will fall very slowly, as by a gentle
hand, over years. They will falter first, (oops) and then we’ll start over. I don’t read God’s mind,
nor does he talk directly to me, he can’t. I understand Him. I understand every word. It’s not a
joke. The only systems that will stand must be respectful, kind and just. If they fall apart, they
aren’t. It’s that simple. I know you’re worried; you don’t need to be. Funny things happen on
the way to Heaven.
You’ll wonder how all these systems, put in place over hundreds of years, by brave men and
women, many who died for the principles they embodied—How could this happen so fast? They
must have been crap to begin with. No, they weren’t crap; that’s what my first father used to call,
Wishful Thinking. You wanted so much to be right. Some took advantage of that by making it
so easy. And the other truth is: good people looked the other way while the worthless made a
mockery of justice, human rights, and the sanctity of the free—innocence, for example.
Understanding is not free, and comes at a great price. But how could this have happened?! The
implication being: How could so much sloth and vile greed grow in such a good climate, if it was
a good climate, and it was. The truth is hard to swallow: they did it for about fifteen bucks. Your
children’s children’s children won’t believe it, but it’s worse than that: many did it for the
promise of 15 bucks, and for the chance to be blameless. What’s rooting about this, is that we all
feel this way, to some degree. And we know that we could do it too, for about 15 bucks: about
15 bucks worth of power, 15 bucks worth of acceptance, 15 bucks worth of the good life, the easy
life, the right life, the spot light, 15 bucks worth of the life God would want. Each of us is
capable of destroying the world for the price of a pair of pants.
You became weak, and are becoming weaker, not because you are unworthy—you are not.
But because without something to fight for, you don’t need anyone to fight with you —If you
don’t need help, the thing that you’re doing is, that is…becomes worthless. It creates a serious
problem as it creates a serious question—What am I doing? What you’re doing is effect-based—
that puts it into the future, which is unknowable, and disappears as the present does. Because
strength must rest, it therefore creates its own absence until the time it is required. That time is
suddenly now. Rise up.
If I were going to pray your way, I’d pray that your great great Grandchildren never find out
how beautiful the world was once, how easily it could have been saved, how much you desired
that, and how you decided it was too unprofitable. I’d also pray that you’d see how little, sex is:
it continually implies that you are present in abundance, that there is nothing else to love, and that
tomorrow there’s more. Thirdly, I’d pray that the AD that will come, is but a remnant of the
abomination that could have been.
Look on the bright side: That’d drive the last nail into the coffin of Ancestor Worship wouldn’t
it…knowing what you’ve thrown away? Who’d worship abunchafuckinidiots?

Faith and Religion

Simple faith says: what is good, leads to good. It can and does, but not always. Examples
abound. Faith is like a magnet and many things line up around it, attach themselves: belief,
learning, perception, superstition, religion, rational behavior, human nature, supernatural events,
even serendipity, just for a few examples.
Religion is faith you can race to. A race you can enter is almost always the race you are
already in: Searching madly for more money, knowledge, sex, security, possessions, clout, etc. A
mad search for plain pure faith is not going to get you anywhere. It’s not going to lead to
understanding because you already know what good is. Good makes you feel good; it makes
good things happen around you. Opinions are bound to differ. It could only lead to education
(learning-understanding-knowing), when two or more people share the same idea, and someone
asks why (?).
Times are turning tough. Go this way. There’s great urgency, yet no reason to race. There’s
now here to go. Help each other, turn around, and then walk slowly. Protect those who help,
from harm.
 People of faith, faith that things are going to turn out okay, are frequently of two minds: One
that realizes God exists in tiny moments that treble the slats and rattle the windows all around the
place: It’s an Earthquake, but by the time it gets to you it’s almost imperceptible. The other
wants to be at the epicenter : to paint, and pay for posters a hundred meters high—to advertise—
to pump the pumps, and proclaim their voice to the sky. I know, because to me it’s both: tiny,
invisible, and if I didn’t revisit it over and over, I might never have known. But also a hundred
stories high, bright as lightening, loud as thunder, four fronts, no discernable back, that shone,
deep into space, like a message—Message delivered.

The resurrection is not, and never was, a Christ-like man who pulls himself up by his sinews,
as tho he were getting out thru the duct-work. He rises from the makeshift morgue thru the soul
which is become transcendent of souls, and rises thru all of them which is one. Seen by all, felt
by all, informing all as he goes. You may see him walking out, you may see him fly away, you
may see a dead body where there isn’t one— that’s from touching all your vocabularies, your
mind, your eyes. He is not then gone for good. My guess is you, that is…I, can’t wander
backward thru all that indifference without picking something up. One’s bound to catch on
something. If he added to your brothel, you’d have but one more reason to relax. But, if he took
something wedged just out of sight, that you show absolutely no interest in, a kind of a souvenir,
well, that might be just the perfect gift. When I go to God for good, that’s how I’ll go.

Fight, even if it is too late

If a man goes on a murderous rampage—capture him, try him—if guilty, give him an
uneventful lethal morphine overdose (pronounced: UMO, oo`- mo). Ancient societies have these
problems, and they must be protected from the occasional wild, roaming, man-eating Tiger. It
may be interesting to note, that often the ‘Tiger,’ was not a Tiger at all.
If a gang of young men go on a rampage—that is a symptom of societal breakdown —which is
what is happening today—parents, afraid of their own children, for example; people torturing
others just for fun; burning churches to watch them burn—stuff like that. You pull the gang
apart, and you sit your child down. Nail the window shut, ahead of time, and stand between him
or her and the door. Then you start explaining your religion your real religion. Do this out of
love. Start this way, if you want to: No Daughter of mine is gonna (fill in the blank) while I’m
here…! Don’t forget you had the child to love.
When parents come to the conclusion that they don’t love their own children, and that they can
just go to hell—I say, uh…not so fast. They’re your children. I know they’re scary: Throw up
in the sink, take an antacid, and put your boots on—get your cup, your sports bra, and your big
black hat, and get in there, and fight for your kid! If the kid gets upset because you’ve changed,
you can just tell him: “This is the walk in the park you always wanted me to take you on.” If you
can’t find a parent, find some nasty selfish person who doesn’t really like kids, to substitute. It’s
a well know rule of fiction that often, two halves will make a whole. Oh, and throat
lozenges…you have a lot to explain.

TDS
If I were ever going to have a televised discussion, with Walter Cronkite, for example, and I
were interviewing myself, which I hope I never do, I would ask myself three questions: I would
not start by asking myself if I understood everything, because I don’t. I understand 99.1% of The
Work. Unfortunately, there is a very good chance that the almost 1 percent I don’t fully
understand is the same almost 1 percent you don’t understand either. I would ask about specific
parts of The Work. I would ask what the upside-down 5 was for: I believe that the ς indicates a
piece of the work that is clearly out of place. I believe this because it’s convenient. Also, it saves
me time and energy. If you asked me why there are so many missing upside-down fives, I would
say, Fives add up, even if they’re upside-down. For example, ς~ If I said: I’m sane, you’d think I
must be crazy, and if I said I’m crazy, you’d probably agree with me. Believing in someone is
almost exactly the same as agreeing with someone, if you look at it from their point of view. And
then when we both agree I’m totally nuts, we could move on to question number two ~ς : I’d ask
myself, Are you in prison because you don’t exist far from home? Now, that’s a very interesting
question. What is home? Is it the place you return to over and over, or is it really someone else’s
home that you call yours? Are you an addition to the home, or do you make it a home? Home is
a symbolic place of answers, it can be anywhere. Plus the question implies that you yourself are
not far from home, that you exist, and you know it. The answer is Yes. People don’t often ask
questions about things they know the answers to, perfectly well, but sometimes those are the best
questions—they’re ‘telling.’ What if you weren’t any happier with that answer than with the one
that implies that only crazy people put upside-down fives in their work? That wasn’t a question,
that was a reference to a question. The third question I’d ask myself, is about specific parts of the
fiction, like Destruction of the devil, and I’d ask: Is that part fact or fiction? Another very good
question. The answer is: fact. Except that the devil would not be able to obtain lift, that’s
metaphorical; that was my idea. Where he was there was no air. You may find there’s a
storybook within a storybook, there often is. I’m not here to freak anyone out. There is fiction in
the fiction—plenty; Doors don’t open themselves; God doesn’t own a briefcase; Mosquito bites
don’t just appear; I tried to change, I just couldn’t, nor do all windows have sills. Also, I said
televised discussion.

First Tuesday in 6, Revelation

It’s not what people don’t know, that’s the problem—--it’s what they do know, that’s not true, that’s the problem. Will Rodgers

The revelation is the speaking mind of a man who can just barely see. It is the sum-mation of a
life well lived. It’s borrowed, taken from, times past, just like his life passes before his own eyes.
It has certainty, because it is done. It’s full of sacrifices, sac-raments, and sevens. These images
are not yours they can’t be, they are his. It is the ending time. But he speaks, and it is just the
same to you as it is to me. Sealed. The angels were angels because they were the ones that
brought the light. I have my own life, much of it I couldn’t get over—only because these
repeating symbols never dissolved, so then, they’re mine: my own themes. Unremovable, like a
mark, or maybe a tune you can’t get out of your head. That’s what I take, the moment, well
perhaps…but you know, the moment changes. Death’s not the same for everyone. All these
things change, one upon another, behind, above, across. It can’t be your choice all the time. It
just can’t.

They will
Our lives have chapters, once you realize that, you become fictional. The titles are your titles. The names you
give them, are the almost endings they become. It’s your life—JDS

They will always talk of the abomination as tho it were ‘mixed.’ You know, like a cocktail. As
tho it will rain down, some of this, some of that. Here & There. I’m telling you, it will spring up,
from right where it is now. It isn’t mixed, it’s blameless breeding, pure and simple—but I’m gay.
The messenger becomes the message—the truth will out—nothing’s pure and simple. All the
arguing in the world won’t help you see this as I do. I didn’t set out to tell you anything. Some
will say, it, the AD, can be stopped, and it can not. They will say the solution is to accord
yourself blameless, or simply to blame others. You are not creating Heaven, you’re walking
toward it. One way or the other.

They will say I’m leading you astray. What’d’ja think they’d say? “Oh, good, let’s all go crazy,
make harsh judgments, and live in a prison.” I don’t recommend it. It’s not compatible with life.
If you want to say the message lives in a kind of prison you can. If you say bottle, I wouldn’t
object. I’m not the big dark romantic that God is. I’m not the one that sets every branch loose so
some will catch you by the falls. I can’t fell a tree to reach you in time. I don’t send coconuts to
the weary, addressed from the lost. I don’t swim with you, or paddle—I don’t have to. When
I’m there I’m there. If I’m the message in the bottle, I’m the bottle that’s moving away. But
then, I’m not the sea either (pronounced: I`-thur). It’s not my world, I live here. When I visit
Heaven, I’m not dead, and when enormous immortal spirits arise, they’re not alive. They exist in
the third thing. Symbolic of ideas, representative of God.

They will say: Fools! Can’t you see he’s the anti-Christ, who is the devil. He was foretold! He
says take drugs, get it off the street. Take all you want. Be free! He takes part in blatant
depraved orgies, and recommends that. Sex is everything—love, marriage, and fidelity are
nothing. Enjoy yourselves! There’s no hell, forget about the fire!
He says don’t feed the poor you’ll only create more. He talks about education, as if it were a
joke! He says there’s not enough free speech on college campuses!!

They will say: My God! How foolish and stupid can you be?! He tells you there is no right
thing, then he tells you there is, and that it propels you. Then he shows you the wrong way to
go…and calls that faith! He believes justice is a big white lynching party.
He hears God thru the radio, then turns around, and God is hung on a spindle in a swamp.
He hates blacks, slurred-tongued Hispanics, Jewish children, Catholic mothers, angry Muslims,
caring Ministers, effeminate Chinese, People who stand up—Governance of any kind: Religion,
Rules, Laws, Everything. Anything sacred! No church would have him…Doesn’t that tell you
something?!! He admits to killing 7 popes…hello? Devil!
He says words are made up, they have no meaning, and then he says a man’s sexuality has a
‘catch.’ He says, God’s a bad day sometimes—get over it! “Oh, don’t worry about Him…He’s
so easy-going. You shouldn’t oughta worry…even He sleeps with children!” He has no shame!
And that’s your fault! Your lust created him!

They will say: He’s trying to steal your soul by saying there is no such thing, that it’s trash! And
can’t be found, and doesn’t count. He claims to have destroyed the devil. Preposterous!
Ridiculous! Absurd and insane—by definition! He claims God would send a non-religious gay
thief, for a Savior. Who calls himself a saint, a gleaner, a forager of little things. Ha! He’s no
petty-thief! He believes in murder and has probably murdered hundreds. He says the numbers
don’t matter. He’s for abortion! And having children to watch them die. He says life is sacred,
but only when it’s convenient! That babies are waste products! He says you are as valuable as a
snail. He says serious depression is a box of chocolates, and you’re too doped-up to realize it.
He says the abomination that causes desolation begins when you begin respecting gays, and those
aligned with them.

I say: Lie! That’s a lie. It’s all lies. I never said any of those things. I say you’re losing your
right to privacy, and authority over your own body, because what’s in your womb and testes is
very valuable. It’s valuable to me, valuable to you, and very valuable to them—You’re being
sold! If you want my opinion: they hate me, not because of my rip-apart-fantasies, but because I
fell in love, and they don’t believe in that.

They will say: ‘His new symbol for divine intervention is a condom in a foil wrapper.’
I say: No! I never said that. And it isn’t! It is a circle in a square, as I’ve always said.
They’ll tell you what I’ve told you, and leave out context, sense, truth, and all proportion. As tho
magnitude and scale were always unknowable. And they are not.

They will implore—“Don’t you see? Can you be that blind!? He wants you to get sixteen year
olds drunk so they will see how foolish you are!!!” They will say horrible things, more
calculated, more subtractive than Billy could ever even imagine. I’m telling you, No
rules will be broken or changed. God and I are not creating a world of hard knocks; no one’s
playing good cop-bad cop! This is not shock therapy—you can keep selling mustard if you want,
you can be as unpopular as you care to be. I’ll handle it from here. Thank you. I’m not against
simple solutions. That doesn’t mean life is always simple. All your fairy tales are fairy tales.
Life is still, more, ideal, than you could ever possibly imagine.

They will say: Don’t read these words—all the time telling you what they say. And everything
they say about them is a lie. In order to solidify their power they will call for my assassination—
or maybe just kidnapping and torture. I say: You’re an ass.
We’re going to undo this thing, and I will die trying. Laughing, but trying.
Know this: They will stop at nothing. No distortion so cold, no lie so wrong, no murder so
plotted, no death so foul, deck so stacked, story so twisted, nor any single stone left unturned.
They will say the third world war and the abomination are the same thing—they are not. One you
can stop, the other you can not. One is human nature un-checked. The other, human nature at its
so-called best, because you think it’s unselfish love—it feels that way. That’s about to change.
You’re an addict turned suicide. See for yourself

They will say I’m trading one abomination for another. I am not, there is only one. If you wait
for the AD to come to life 10 or 20 billion strong, you’ll see what I mean. It can be destroyed
now. Ironic, it’s really about beginnings: When something is (yes no). When it goes from not
being what it is, to being what it is now (black white). When it Becomes (good bad). Sorry,
that’s in 501.

They will make telling the truth and being right, really really easy. They will link desire and
pleasure, and you’ll stop. They don’t offer what you desire, and you have many more twinkling
receptor sites than that…but you stop, as if to pause…..to look around. And then they’ll say,
“Welcome home!” Many will believe lies. Many willingly. Doing the right thing is more
expensive, it costs about fifteen dollars more, and it’s worth it. They will say: When horrible
things happen, he’ll say, “See!” And when wonderful things happen, he’ll say, “See!” He must
be stopped! He says marriage is just nothing!
*

Mark my words: If all their efforts cause you to believe I am the anti-Christ. That will afford
them the ‘opportunity’ to put-up their own ‘man.’ If my ‘stand in’ looks a little like a cross
between Marlon Brando and Uri Gagarin, don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s not funny. Well, it’s a
little bit funny. They’re afraid of losing ‘everything,’ for a ‘pipe dream.’ All that ‘faith’ has let
them ‘down’ because they have no more of a ‘stake’ in this than anyone. I can ‘hear’ them from
here: “That wasn’t the ‘deal!’” Oh, but it was, that was always the deal—God takes him by the
hand and leads him to his ‘throne,’ and then he smiles all around, each to the ‘other,’ both of them
one, and then they catch their ‘breath,’ and then one of them speaks—Presumably, the one with
the vocal chords; and he makes the same offer to everyone—to Mankind, his own. The ones he
loves: “See!”
God brought me, by hand, over an abyss, a chasm (pronounced: kaz`-um), a gorge so deep that
nobody, but nobody, could follow. Overcoming crazy…transcending your own
fiction…Becoming what you were born to be…whatever you want to call it, may look easy, may
sound easy, may seem easy, but that doesn’t make it easy.
It’s like this: I was walking down a dirt road, and in the distance, in the path I was walking was a
tornado. I knew, because I really did know, that the tornado was walking with me. But anyone
who saw me would say, “That man’s 300 meters from a tornado and he’s walking toward it.” But
I was right, and I knew all along I was right. I wasn’t walking toward it, we were walking
together, and you just can’t see it. There’s nothing to compare this to! I’m as close as I can get.
You see great distance where there is practically none, and then you deny my sanity for courting
disaster. What you don’t know is we’ve been walking like this for thousands of miles, maybe
since I was 8. He’s not afraid of me, and God knows I’m not afraid of him. I’m not bold. He’s
the most unfrightening thing in the ‘world,’ and he can have me anytime. This is how we walk
together. Joined where we can be seen, and that’s in reasoned understanding, not fear. You
strain like I strained. But I was there, and there’s nothing to compare this to. I knew from the
out-set my path would be my path. You can come, but you have to take your own untrampled
path. I’m not drawing a map a map, so don’t follow, you’ll fall—just listen. I’ll put every word
‘aside’ if I have to—every word in its own category, if need be—each one subordinate to your
understanding, but you’re coming with me, whether you like it or not, because I know the way,
and that’s that!! I walked thru the valley of the shadow, the shadow that wasn’t mine, but theirs,
and now in the light, is gone
*

No, I’m not done. They will even say, Everything takes care of itself. That’s what I thought!
Some will conclude that God is Everything that you’ve ever felt, or thought, or sensed in any
way. He is not. He’s not so particular as all that. He’s not the smell of gardenias in a greenhouse
on a winter’s morning, dancing petal to petal against the airy, fan-driven, condensation. Or the
sound of your favorite song. You may see him that way, but you’re blind. He’s the march
toward madness your mother made. He’s the last-chance-date that helped you go gay. He’s
neither wrapped-up in happiness, or waiting for you to drop dead. He cares more than you care.
He’s more generous and loving than you are—even on your best day. He’s being kind when your
best friend is killed. You would’ve taken a bullet for them, you now realize, so would they you.
He’s kind beyond comprehension. He’s less interested in your stories than you are. (you almost
always bury the lead and where are the embarrassing details?) He operates as tho he has a mind.
I don’t know that he has, or what he has. He is not Everything you ever felt that was good, or that
became good over time. He’s Everything already done; if you claim to know what Everything is
doing in your living room. I say: you’re probably a liar. No one lies more than those who claim
an exclusive right to the truth. I heard your truth already: “I sat, admiring my chair, God helped
me find my place, and then I stayed there.” He’s not a repository, more like a lending library,
you can take him out but ya gotta bring him back.
People will even say: This is all about Faith & Belief! But it’s not. Faith helps me walk, as it
does also you. But, belief, you use to exclude others. My beliefs are my own private business.
Exposed…Okay…Yes. But still private, which makes me very happy, and grateful because they
also happen to be almost completely indescribable. I’m not so all-out-there as you may think.
The truth is, I kept very little for myself, but like you, I have to keep some things to myself, even
very small things or else I’d have no self at all.
Listen, people know when the things they say are lies. They tell lies for the same reason
everyone does—If you believe it, they prosper—except that’s not really prosperity. In fact,
there’s an awful price to be paid for that kind of gain. I said I’m not going to endlessly repeat
what I said before, and I’m not. But I have to take context with me. And I’ll tell you something
else: I’m not doing three shows a day! I don’t endorse products! I’m not interested in your get-
rich-quick schemes. And I’m not in the religion business! I’ve never been. I abhor it! The
religious will say, they stole symbolism and faith, to protect it from Mongrels, knowing, that you
see Mongrels everywhere. But they really stole it to profit from what grows naturally for
everyone! I’m no sudden adherent. I’ll never be. I’m no shill, nobody’s hire. And I’ll throw
these free-market profiteers out on their asses, so far, so hard, so fast, they’ll never come back.
I’d show you how to do it fi had to, but I think you already know. Change your label?! Climb
that beanstalk at your peril. You can be got. You’re not so hard to find. If this becomes a
waiting game, then it’s a waiting game; I can wait forever; your wheels’re spinning, my
thumbs’re twiddling, if it has to be, it has to be. I’ll sit around counting quarters, and watching
Jimmy, Sheen, and Carl solve the universe, and Libby and Cindy Vortex help a little, every so
often.

They will even say I married my own father, and that’s true, in a sense. But you can’t have it
both ways: That I’m immersed in a relationship far beyond your comprehension, that you also
know to be wretched, vile, and doomed. These are horrible, nasty, hateful people. They’ve
killed, banned, burned, denied, stepped on, censored, and relegated, millions to lives of self-hate,
sorrow, poverty, pretense, and wrongfulness for their own sake. They are hideous examples of
humanity. They are among the worst of the very worst. Even so, they are not beyond
redemption. However, they must apologize before they die. Not to me—I forgave them when I
started The Work or shortly thereafter—but to those they have wronged. Don’t plant-it, ass up,
on my lawn; It’s disrespectful, and makes me out a fool, as you well know. My judgment will be
very steep: They must not wait long. Time is now. Turn around. Many will refuse—that’s their
right. Without the freedom to make tragic personal mistakes, there’s no freedom to make great
leaps of faith. I remain forever indebted. Yes, I’m thankful you came along when you did, too.

They will say: He admits to being an infant molester, a toddler molester, and a between molester.
A hang-around long enough 2b a teen molester. He obviously knows what it’s like to french-kiss
a twenty two year old boy. He can’t even be trusted around thick glass, let alone crystal! Boys,
girls, men, women, gay or strait. He thinks black people shouldn’t be allowed to name their own
color! He seeks to destroy 30 year olds for the sake of prettier ones. He insults 40 year olds who
don’t drink. He’s maddeningly indifferent to 50 year olds who slur their words. He wanted to
use shiftless, brittle 70 year olds as shields, and had to settle for the misanthropic, crime-proof,
yet still scary 80 year olds, as if that would be an improvement! He must think 60 year olds are
useless worthless sexless spineless pathetic self-satisfied smug-fake louts! It boggles the mind
what he’d do to 90 year olds if they weren’t boggled already. He kills and bothers, bees, birds,
bats, ants, chained dogs, and throws squirrels into the street…for fun. He’s a monster molester!!!
No God of mine, would ever send a a molester at a time like this!!

I never molested anyone, but I hung around looking for love, and bothered many, very many.
The things they say are funny, but only to me, and God, who knows the truth. You worry so
much about the sexual activity of others: my youngest was 17, I was 18.
I know you think I’m kidding, but I’m not…One day you’ll hear them say something so stupid,
so patently false, you’ll burst out laughing. They will say: “We cared so much about all living
things, we loved so much, that when we saw gays who love without care, it distracted us, we were
so ashamed…we couldn’t think straight.” No one in their right mind would ever believe such a
thing. But many will. You just don’t understand how deeply they need to be right. It’s truly
everything to them. One more bang at the gong: I know who these people are—The ones so
soon to lose their shirts, that’s who. Especially my little pet projects. One in particular will say:
“What a cynical bastard he is!” (Me!) “He talks about all our money…what money? The
American homosexuals took it all! They’re clever!” (Clever? Didja ever see last-call, in a gay
bar, on a Saturday night? Ha)
All my pet projects are suitable for a beginner—they’d be hard to mess up. This one is the
Banquo of the largest educational institution the world has ever known; he decides to get rid of all
gay teachers…or…let them in… if…they bow and deny…and out-right lie. Your groups are run
by asses. When will you ever learn? When will you e`ver learn?

Incidental to the long sought secret pathway home

Doubt is not the opposite of faith but an element of faith (Tillich)

When Billy got out of the woods his boots were dirty, he needed a bath, a shave, and he had a
mosquito bite on his neck. There were a bunch of people standing around by a few picnic tables
just beyond the maintenance road. He ushered the people coming out of the woods to walk
around them, saying: Don’t talk to ‘em; they think they know everything.

They heard that, and they said: We’re waiting, but not for you. We were told He would be
dressed in bright shining raiment, and you’re not. Go away. You’re queer to us.

Billy was tired and in no mood. He said, You have enough bright shining raiment, whatever the
fuck that is, for a hundred Saviors. When I go I’ll be gone, but not until. Go back into the
woods, and see what you’ve done.
They said, We’ve just come from there. You show up, and all of a sudden everything changes?
Go away…we’re this close to a triumphant victory.
Billy said, First, I don’t care if you’re this close to your own obviousness, and Second, you
haven’t just come from the woods—you’re way too clean.
One man rushed forward: I’ve been here for forty years. Those are my three picnic tables; I’d
have more, except for those green-peace wackos, and that fucking blind beetle. Billy had to take a
breath before he said something he’d regret, about endangered species, to this pig-like man.
Yeah, he said, the creek’s full of your crap—go back in the woods.
Many turned their backs and tried to ignore Billy. Some people chose to argue, and also to try to
ignore the fact, that Billy wasn’t leading anyone to sit at any empty picnic tables but was guiding
people past them, past the road, toward a meadow of tall yellow flowers.
Someone said, Hey, you’re so bright…how come it took you so long to get here? Another
woman came forward and said, I’ve been here, practically my entire life.
Billy said, Go back into the woods; you’re a great big liar.
Why, would we do what some filthy-mouthed sod tells us, and go back into the woods, when
even you admit that this is the place to come out? They turned their backs again.
Billy tapped a man’s shoulder. Don’t touch me, he said. Billy forgot, he was ‘dirty.’ You don’t
get to pick the place where you come out of the woods. “Look!” There were people coming
from the woods all along its border, very few walked directly behind any other, in fact, if you
looked closely, no one walked directly behind another, ever, tho many walked side by side. If I
could’ve chosen…d’ya think I’d be here, talkin’ to you?
They didn’t care much for truth (it can make the Earth shake, and it can change the land -
scape). But, they said. What do we care?
One thing leads so easily to another, Billy was reminded of how he had to do repeating for that
religious nut from Toleain, who wouldn’t stop knocking at his door, like she were the only person
in the world who needed help. He told her very nicely, in the here and now, that he’s the teacher
not her tutor, and you can’t take the advanced course first.
Thru arrest, interdiction, and even incarceration, the woman who never turned down one gram of
happiness, decided it was time for her to collect. She wanted a million in happiness, and Billy
had Billions. But he never answered his door, only to his peeps.
Some wanted signs and wonders so bad they refused to let anything get in their way, like signs
and wonders, for example. Billy’d left his magical powers in his ‘other’ pants, so he used his
powers of suggestion, and told her, that in her life, nothing will ever fit, until everything fits---
Including Your Clothes---knock knock knock. She came back the next day in droopy drawers
and a very tight top. He felt bad about using his magical powers when they’d been at the
cleaners—so he sang her a song she’d never forget: Mellow Yellow, by Donovan, including the
Paul McCartney parts. And he added, for her benefit only: Nothing will ever fit as well as that.
Billy was not the devil, but he had a couple tricks up his sleeve. They say she’s taking liquids
already, and the likelihood of a substantial recovery is ‘significant.’ Crazy people abound. Then
Billy noticed his laces weren’t tied too tight—too much walking probably. He put his head down,
blinked, and smiled quietly to himself, as an eyelash dropped from his eye.
What you may not realize, is, that crazy people need someone to blame, but there’s no one
around, besides themself. The other thing is, that blame requires no action, gets you nowhere,
and is sometimes just the ticket.

Billy put his dirty boot on a bench and tied his laces. They were coming to the foothills.
Look at you! That’s someone’s seat!
Billy said, Look! Oh you, who know nothing. Number one, this is no one’s seat because no
one’s sitting here, and number two, who would sit at an empty picnic table when they could take
an afternoon walk to Heaven? And number three, I’ll say, and do, any fucking thing, I fucking
feel like doing, if it’ll get you to wake the F-up. Who’s crap do you think I’ve been wading thru
these last umpteen years? Go back into the F-ing woods and clean up your Goddamn mess! I
don’t want you coming with me, not like that. Bye.
One man came back: I’m not cleaning anything up…How dare you! Billy turned slowly, and
said very calmly: You’re quite mistaken my dear boy—you’re going to start us off. Until you do,
you and yours can just keep warming those benches…later gater.

Telling the truth is a little like coming out of the woods, unfortunately you have to go into the
woods before you can come out of the woods. You can’t just continuously come out of the
woods even if you believe you can with all your might. That’s called…memory. You tell one
truth, and think that’s enough to last 40 days—then you lie about everything else, 20 times a day.
You’ve no idea what constitutes an appropriate helping of anything.

They = you…ibid M
Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own—
Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

I wrote a note to be placed in the van: [This is a test. If you’ve come to aid the once- convicted,
and the aged. Goodbye, we’re fine. If you’ve come to do violence, or trade in favors, imagine
what would happen if everyone did that? Observe. If you’ve come to add, know that you must
believe me when I tell you your violence doesn’t add, you’re obstinate pose offends me. You
will be quietly carted away, at your own expense— around 500 km., around 500 dollars. You
will be turned around dropped off, and let out. As the violent heart turns angry, I am showing
you, how to undo. Go home and begin undoing. That is the strength I need from you. And only.
Your adamant, take-no-prisoners attitude will not help me, I’m in prison, not put there by you,
and the tighter you protect me the more danger I’m in. Please don’t rescue me from ignorance by
some medieval slight of hand. That is not necessary until I ask you. Bowing and scraping isn’t
necessary unless you step in dog poop. To those who break my rules as they creep to my door, or
those who believe in the gathering narrative of the haphazard photograph hacks, or those who
cannot understand a single simple act of kindness, or what power there is in that—Get more lost.
Find yourself found and then stay there. That’ll be $500.00—no personal checks.] [In slightly
smaller print it says: That includes gas, driver, insurance, maintenance, the van lease, van licenses
with contingency codicils, and post-facto liability redaction clauses, which you passenger must
procure. A clear hand-written statement that you are not an emancipated minor, but are self-
supervisory, that you might be crazy, but are keeping that to yourself until the time when proof is
demanded, and/or some advantage might proceed from that admission. Also, that you are not a
constant danger to yourself, and, that if you’re prone to car sickness you will carry a vomit-
abstention bag, and not just lean out the window, which never works. Also, accountants and
lawyers who expect to be paid for looking the other way, must ride up front where there’s a
whole nuther sign. Further: all accountants must verify that no one got any money except them,
and that that was paid back in educational fees when Billy taught them all he knows about
numbers. Lawyers must verify that drivers are paid-volunteers who voluntarily return said
moneys when they discover prior to the trip that this venture does not exist as a business or an
entitlement program, and cannot accept volunteers, or pay-to-play schemes. And that in fact,
people do wander off unsupervised all the time. Any questions regarding the odometer are to be
referred to the dept. of weights and measures, and yes, there is a fee. All drivers must travel at
least 500 km. to work, whether they live 500 km. away or not, and if questioned about the trip,
the ride, the traveling, the journey, the expedition, the crossing over, the passing, or the voyage,
they must reference the afore mentioned trip to work.]
The sign took 20 minutes to write, and 15 minutes to laminate. If they steal it, I have others. The
van cost almost 900 dollars American, per week to go nowhere, not to mention, the lawyers,
judges, and police officials, to attest to this not-being kidnapping, and that I have nothing
personal against Ohio. I mean, how could it be illegal to traffic in poor lost souls? What about
Septa? Anyway, they cost money too. The local permission granting hierarchical governmental
remedy wind-machine-thing doesn’t blow itself. If you don’t promise to pay the money to keep
the wheels turning—no ride, you’ll have to get lost on your own. You who know so little…also
know, you are blocking my view. I can’t always see past you, your anger, or the disappointment
you hold in your bloody hand. Your attention-getting is getting to me, but not in a good way.
The worse you get, the further away I’m gonna move the van. Listen, I might move the van—
sign and all, 55 km. away. Do you realize how many jurisdictions that is? Do you have any idea
how many opportunists will see you coming? You think your head’s spinning now! Just wait.

Words world
“I think the world is round.” …Pythagoras. Greek Mathematician-Philosopher (582-497 BCE)

Love is different everytime—sex as well. That flies in the face of logic, language, legitimacy,
and any number of measuring tools, rules, rods, or dreamy expressions said by slow and scholarly
sleepyheads. But that’s the truth, and the truth doesn’t really care about all your devices. Most of
them don’t work right anyway. They don’t do what they’re designed to do. You’ve never been
in a car that took you where you wanted to go—but you still get in. You still fumble for the
key—you’re so hopeful. Maybe this time. Maybe this time. Click…BBrrrooom. Heaven’s
made of moments just like that.
Look, no one can measure truth on a scale. Or perhaps, said better: only one person can measure
truth on a scale that is a person. Again, the only person who cares how truthful you are, is either:
1) not on that case, 2) has got your number already, or 3) you. Every moment is the moment, and
that just pisses you off. What if you die, and the moment you would want to die in is once again
out of reach…Damn! Death that knows you, has misunderstood you. Death that knows you, has
got you mixed up with someone else. Death that knows you, should go to hell in your place.
Death that knows you, doesn’t get how afraid you were, and how much you want to try again.
Death that knows you, is going to stab you in the back. Love is different everytime, right up to
the end of time.

Bewildered man
I can’t help but be reminded of the man, twenty some years ago, who was interviewed on the
News. He said how ridiculous it was to try and save the Brown-winged Owl, or the Great
Northwestern hermit vole, or whatever it was, when he was the one who needed a good-paying
job. He was a lumber man, as his father, and his father’s father had been. He said, Bleep the
forest—I need a job (that’s how they talked back then). He went on to say he wanted to be able
to buy his daughter nice clothes, like other little girls wear, and be able to take her to restaurants
like the kids from town go to. To do what other children do. I can’t help wondering how he feels
now—when he sees his 28 year-old weighty daughter coming out of a fast food restaurant,
wearing a belly shirt, and carrying three fatherless girls of her own—how do you think he feels?
Do you think he realizes he did something terribly wrong, and still doesn’t know what? Yes, he’d
literally knock down the forest for her, but now there’s no forest, so who’d he do it for?
Fatherhood’s a role, it has nothing to do with sperm, sex, hotdogs, barbecues, condiments, picnics
in the park, or the money shot. It has everything to do with respect, and doing the right thing.
Your choices are very clear: you can live 125 years more, or a little over 12,000 years more. I
made the best deal I could. A lot can happen in 12,000 years. In either case, there are colonies of
seals in Australia, and mussel shoals in Maryland that’ll outlive you.
*
There’s a philosophy, which states that when an action is no longer seen to be in your best
interest—not to your benefit—you will stop it at once. And this is true. Arguments can’t prevail
against this philosophy: “Taking care of my daughter is not in my best interest,” for example.
“My son does drugs that are killing him.” Yes and he’s blind. “What if everyone turned their
back on the world; where would that put us?” exactly my point. And my favorite: “I don’t do
things that are in my best interest, I almost never do.” People push others away from the mike to
get that one in. What destroys the philosophy is not its impossible logic, or even the mere fact
you’re still alive, and keep forgetting that…It’s how it is perceived by others: To be seen as
selfish, instead of honest; narrow in scope, instead of broad in understanding; against all the
world you can’t touch, instead of for the world you can. Suddenly you find, that to become a
walking talking explanation is not in your best interest, nor is it in mine. And zip, it’s gone—
Transigent (it can move thru the conflicts with God, sometimes by disappearing).
The suicide pact that you hold so tightly to, will not be pried from your cold dead hands, for
many, it will be buried with them—Intransigent (it waits for God to change).

People have been telling you, and telling you, and telling you, for hundreds of years and you
wouldn’t listen. You are so unfamiliar with the truth, it makes no difference whether I bring you
fiction or facts. You wouldn’t know one from the other anyway.
You are about to fall, not in a thousand different directions, just one. You won’t survive
unless you buy less, your economy won’t survive unless you buy more—you’re about to have a
really big problem. You don’t have to worry. No one has to die. As you begin to topple, one
slight tap at the exact right place, delivered just so, can make you flip completely upside down. I
know how to do this. I was born to do this. I know the place, the moment. I understand it has to
be this way. Plus, I have help. Lots and lots of help.
When you’re upside down in you dull unknowing. You will still not know the way. I refuse
to allow you to crawl back into darkness. I refuse. I REFUSE. REFUSE!
You need to know that I will not move one finger until I get the respect I demand— not
one…Ironic.
Don’t come screaming to me, blaming me, all full-on. It is Everything that you’ve done.
Blame the devil. That’s okay with me. He is dead essentially. He’s not involved in this. He
retired in May of four. Retired. Split. Gone. Reduced to nothing. Less than nothing. Absent.
Departed (not here). Incapacitated… Kaput…History.
You cannot show up at my door at the last, and demand help. You can’t just throw a day’s
worth of respect in my direction like you were feeding a lion thru the bars of his cage. You
cannot get to Heaven by dropping your hate as you’re dropping your pressure. You must do it
before you die. This is the same thing. You must be pro-active. Life is short, so they say. Do it
now.

5-1-09 AD
Paradise is no journey because it is within, but for that very cause it’s the most arduous of journeys. I travel the road into my
soul all the time…I dwell in possibility—a fairer house than prose, more numerous of windows, superior for doors— Emily
Dickenson 1858, within her narrow hands. (via Julie Harris in The Belle of Amherst by William Luce)

God showed Billy the Abomination that causes desolation, and it was more horrible than Billy
had imagined. It is what we see everyday, in ourselves. People clamor to say things they don’t
know, and admit not to know, and then they continue to say it, and sell it, whatever it is. They’ll
say, ‘Sure, the good, right, smart, the THOUGHTFUL people will stop having so many children.
The children he says you’re addicted to. Who do you think will have the children now?’ And
that’s true, there are many stupid thoughtless selfish greedy hateful people in the world—make no
mistake—I have noticed. They are unfortunately, not of one color or one shade or one size or one
sexual leaning or from one single place or with one single malevolent intent. The selfish will
have the children same as before, except now they’ll understand how to share, how to listen to
thought provoking explanations, and how to diffuse anger before it escalates. Furthermore,
children have an uncanny ability to see fault in their parents—even if one is a ‘rapist’ they’ve
never met—recognize it in themselves—and move as far away from it as they can. I don’t know
if you’ve noticed that, but it’s true. Have faith. Things will be okay. But, do you know what
sense means to an addict? “Stop at every sign you see.”
If you think you can conquer your addictions by walking away, and never touching another
drop—that might work with Brandy Alexanders, but it’s not gonna work with
overprocreating…depriving everyone of the means for making Brandy Alexanders—hiding the
cream or killing the cow, breaking down every single still or jug ain’t gunna work either.
Historically, many trapped or stay-at-home cultures turned unspeakably violent in the face of
population explosions: it worked; they learned it; it became nearly instinctive; and it is, but it
won’t work this time: You went global in 1986. I can help you think thru this. Shorten my
sentence, at this rate I’ll end up in Solitary…get me out Now!
God showed Billy his own death. God said the Abomination was too big for him to stop. It
was a tidal wave unlike any seen before. To be on the edge, was the vulnerability that we live.
We live that we can live precariously. This wave is different. It is a thousand times bigger. It
will touch everyone living today, and there is no higher ground. No one would go to the
mountain to keep from seeing God; that’s antithetical, incongruous. No one will die. Ever again.
 Have no children, you’ll regret it if you do. They’ll join the abomination, for they will want to
fight for the future of that which is good upon the Earth and in Mankind. But mankind has no
future. The Earth will prevail without us, just fine. Take your time.
Men and women will kill their children to gain your trust. They are opportunists as are we all.
They will have no dignity. The fear of death will steal even that. You will look upon humanity
and weep bitter tears.
You cannot keep them out, without killing every one. Even Nazis can’t kill that fast. Violence
within them has stolen their heart, their love, their humanity and any hope of redemption. They
are lost. They will kill their own children to prove they are ‘like minded,’ in an attempt to join
you, and then they will kill you. With rank numbers. As their numbers rise, their value, even to
each other, will fall.
The Earth will be destroyed in a thousand horrible ways, not just men and women—all living
things. It is unstoppable. It cannot be stopped. It must be undone.
God has shown me, and I believe Him. There is no way to stop this. This will happen upon
my death. Just so you know, there is no plan ‘B.’ The most simple of things I cannot do.
They will reproduce recklessly, until there are 20 billion humans on the Earth. You have to let
them go. It will end in total destruction. And Mankind will be no more upon the Earth ever
again.
God cannot stop it. And yet you see it today, all the time. You have been moving in this
direction for 100,000 years, and now you’re almost there. Some will point out that you have been
moving in this direction much longer—they are correct.
You are making a mistake if you think nice thoughts about it. That won’t stop it. You can
think whatever you want to think. It can not be stopped. There may, however, be a loose thread,
for example, perhaps one of many, maybe you’ve noticed. If someone were to pull this particular
thread, hold it as he jumped, say, to his horse. This man may find that as he rode off into the
sunset—zip, undone. Of course, now you have another problem. You’re undone.
I can understand how you wouldn’t want to ask a homosexual for help—I mean after all, it’s
so beneath you. Especially one who demands respect, refuses to change, and will never
apologize. Especially when, for some, all this talk of Godliness just meant being acceptable to
the neighbors. All this belief and talk of love just meant favored by fate—FIRST. And what a
coincidence! Their faith always moved them to the front of the line—if it didn’t, they’d just
change what the words said. Comparative advantage was truly everything to them. It’s a tough
call really. Imagine how it would feel to him, to watch you run around witless. Plus it’s
embarrassing—under the circumstances. And whada’ya tell the kids? It was a false alarm?
Thur’s always the next train? What if he makes you crawl? What if he makes you put a rose
between your teeth and dance? What if he dates a stock-car driver named Earl? What if he
explodes your Idolic worlds, two untouchable worshipful, mythical, safe simple seedless
sacrosanct stereotypes at a time? What if you can’t transcend your own fiction—that gays are
evil and inconsequential? I sympathize. I’m embarrassed to be seen with you sometimes too.
What if Hitler’s final solution starts to look better and better? (killing everyone who makes you
feel inferior inevitably leads to the death of the group you think you’ve just become) There’s a
time for bluntness. And this is it: You have no chance of ‘survival’ unless you follow me. But
you’re too good for that. That’s it right there—too good to survive— ‘cept you’re not that good.
Gays—men and women, boys and girls, are very strong. They don’t need to be continually
petted like a pet. They can slice and dice, spit out the seeds, walk back into the room and brightly
say: Lemonade?…Anyone? Lemonade?… How ‘bout you? Lemonade?… Sure? ‘S awful
good. One day they’ll say: Hurry, you gotta choose now! Jump! Life or death? Jump! Many
will choose death. You’re really not so clever…they just told you you were. Plus, you did-as-
instructed. The longer you wait, the more binding your decision. Justice will be served. Listen,
this has been building up for some time, and I have to say it: Keep your clubhouses, all-so-
catholic and all-so-exclusionary, they look nice, sorta pretty. You’re wall builders. Go build a
wall somewhere. I’ll never be part of selling hate, never. Ignore me at your peril. Many men
have been killed for love. Many women too. Not for the love you lost somewhere, but for the
love you don’t allow another to have. That love. A window sill. A so sorry door that wouldn’t
close in time. Many know what I mean. Many ‘privileged, fortunate sons’ are soon to find out.
Go ahead, ‘be a man,’ do it on your own—prepare the hell out of The AD, fail, and then
prepare the hell out of being Undone. Of course, those are two things you know absolutely
nothing about, some might say three, but not me. The abomination is of the barbaric, from the
brutal. It’s theirs, don’t envy ‘em. They’re the ones that will go round and eat their children, it’s
what they’ve always done. Resources get low, or seem to (in- cluding understanding), and they
set their own children out as bait—that horror’s far from you, as you are protected. The ones who
race to take over the world will eat their own. You will pound your chest and cry bitterly. Many
will say: This could’ve been prevented —This didn’t have to happen! But it couldn’t and did.
The future’s yours, not mine. I died, so they say. How long have I been dead? Two hundred,
two thousand, twelve thousand? I’m already tired of thinking about it. It makes me want to
pause. Sometimes I almost wish I cared…that’s the truth. I don’t, because I just don’t. You live
here, tell me how you feel about it. I bet there are people you wish’d go away. I’m with you. I
sympathize. I wish the professed religious-right, could be educated into non-existence. I’m with
you—more alive in The Work, and know it, than I could’ve ever been in life.
Go ask the ones who’ve always known everything, maybe they can help. Jeshua says, stop
quoting Romans 1:27 and start reading Romans 2:19-24: “Many think God is a static and
seriously obsolete delusion because of you!” He says it’s always a good idea to read ahead. Ha.
Jeshua’s very smart. Would that I were so clever. Where was I? Oh yes, you have to end WWIII
first, because we’re moving forward, then the AD. Sometimes I get the sequence of things mixed
up in my head. To me it goes, ‘bang bang bang.’
Simple solution really: Ignore them as you bring them to justice. Like when you grab a
passing child by the ear to explain to them how they’ve gone too far. Of course, then, you’ve just
acquired a new problem: You have ignored them, and now they’re sawing your arms off. I don’t
mean torching to oblivion Bismarck, North Dakota—Your Actual Arms. I mean You. Then you
need to destroy them, utterly…but you don’t know where they come from. Logic doesn’t help
much—all you know is that they’re from one of 11 or 12 likely countries, maybe 13, in three
different regions. Most of them come from one particular region. You can’t walk around without
arms, not in this world. So you level that one particular region. They gave you no choice. What
choice did you have? What choice? Justice must, and will be served. Good thing you forgot to
turn the neutron-bomb-prototypes into conventional weapons like you’d planned. It’s a big
world, but not that big—you’ve just killed your neighbors. Your new neighbors are going to kill
you. You’ll be dead. What matters now, is what will matter then—the way you proceed. You
know how to start, where to start, and when to. Back off. Back down.

Shorten my sentence, and I can help you thru this. I don’t know where the bombs are kept, but
I know where the loose thread is—I was shown. The thread and I can wait forever. Forever.
Now, back to the AD. God’s right, when I engage with him I lose my place. Love’s a funny
thing: it assembles and seconds later disassembles the background.
Ignore them, then welcome them. I know you want to fight. The sooner they do this the
better. If they had a shred of humanity they would stop this senseless proliferation. But don’t
you see, they would have stopped already.
I don’t know if there’s any purpose in giving you the date the AD begins, or making one up. I
doubt there is. It’s not personal, but it begins the next time you turn around. That means all
different dates. This didn’t just suddenly become a ‘Western,’ but if you read The Work on the
fifth of June in six, or the sixth of July in seven, for example. You fall asleep, then begin to toss
and turn at midnight—Then that’s when it begins. Children can’t be an abomination, but they
won’t stay children forever. Be that as it may, the AD begins about a year before The Great
Grandparents are born—That’s any day now.
They will take over the world. Fighting is futile. Give it to them. Give it to them willingly.
It makes no difference, they’ll take it anyway. It’s not that I lay down with men, that I counsel
laying down without a fight. The fight will make it worse, make it last longer, and leave Heaven
a very distant impossibility for all.

There are things beyond your regulation. That doesn’t mean you can’t try, you can. But this
is out of your hands. Way. You will not be destroying monsters. They will.

The only possible chance is that they would still feel shame, regret, and compassion. Without
that, all is lost, and there is no hope.
To welcome your enemies is foolish, and soft, and just the kind of thing I would say. But it’s
true to the last. Love conquers all. Have faith. Love conquers all—I swear.
Falling down because someone bigger and stronger comes toward you, sounds foolish, odd.
This thing is not a man, it’s a wave, and it will pass.
The Kingdom of Heaven will last. Earth, but a few more years. Not by the calendar. The
clock, your watch. Or any other recently devised system of measuring time. But the Word, the
conscious mind.
Don’t lay down before the butcher’s knife, take means to make your flesh undigestible. You
will be old and, hopefully, not alone. It’s possible that eating their own children will still their
heart—that it might beat again.
If you have the will to fight, you will be joining them. You have every right to defend
yourself. All is already lost.
I am here now. To help. Death is symbolic, even my own. But if you can’t read the symbols,
I am essentially silent. These are your options. You have three.

I never said, but I thought you understood, I didn’t transcend your petty labels by lying about
them, but by telling the truth. The Abomination can only be destroyed by the truth, not by
meager translations of what’s in your heart. If you feed it, it will grow— exponentially. I t d o e
s not c o m m u n i c a t e. Even I can’t explain the presence of God, it comes out like fiction, and
He stood in my kitchen and washed my dishes, and I made Him promise never to leave me. And
he did: Our lives are fictional, if for no other reason, than this: we don’t know the other half of the
story.

With me, with me, or with me

Consider the sea and land: don’t you find a strange analogy within yourself? For as the appalling ocean surrounds the bursting land,
so in the soul of Mankind, there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy –encompassed by a half-known life——Herman Melville

Ф I didn’t move Heaven and Earth together for you, so you can act like you were raised in a
barn! Learn to share, or no one’s going to want to play with you, and you’ll end up being very
sorry, and alone. And if you think we’re going on that trip you were promised, you are sadly
mistaken mister, and you too missy!
I’m not taking a bunch of hooligans anywhere! I’m not talking to hear myself talk. I’m not
going to pitch a fit in front of the neighbors, for your amusement. And no, I’m not going to come
out and chase you around—because if I caught you, you’d be sorry you put me to that test!
I can wait forever, if that’s the way it is. For…ev..er.
You have three choices: Do what I’m telling you, what I’ve been telling you, or what I told
you already. And yes, I can see what you’re doing when you turn your back to me.
Show me some respect—and while you’re at it, show some respect for yourselves. You won’t
think it’s so funny when it gets dark and cold…and the ‘gnashing’ and the ‘howling’ starts. Ф
 Nuts and bolts
A man came one day, along with others, and it was clear to me he had an overwhelming issue
of some kind, with me. He was in my house, and therefore the issue is even among the other
symbols also with me—because he’s in my house. I took him aside, behind closed doors. I
pushed him against the wall with no force at all. He went with it. He felt great pleasure in
discovering how weak I was. It enhanced his desire to do something he previously didn’t really
want to do. Pleasure met desire, and he paused.
Give it to me!! You…Hey!
He looked even more shocked and perturbed than before.
I put out my hand. “Hand it over!”
He seemed more odd, distracted, and eager not to do something, than ever, and we were
obviously moving toward some inner conflict. It was in the way he approached me.
Come on come on come on…what is it? Some fucking fear? Let’s go, I snapped my fingers,
Hand it over…it it it. Did someone slap you hard in the face. It was me, stupid.
My reputation precedes me; people are so afraid I’ll steal something—even if it’s a piece of
crap thing. Sometimes I hate the reputation I have as a kind and giving person.
Stupid, I’m talking to you. Just a note: pretending I’m not here, standing right in front of you,
really doesn’t work. What is it?! Some kind of bitterness, resentfulness? Some ego trouncing
you can’t get over—did I strike a note that didn’t ring true—has it ruined the entire concert for
ya? Do you have a weapon? Let’s go let’s go let’s go—weapon here now you! Arm up! Out
with it! I don’t have all day…it’s inmate poker night!
He stared blankly. There’ll always be one thing that tears it, just as one keeps it whole
Look! I’m in the disreputable thieving bastard business!! I was secretly glad I’d had the
presence of mind to close the door. I initiated a search. His mouth stayed shut.
I began to coach: I want to…..
His arms were up, and he looked like he wanted to run, but he didn’t move a muscle.
I want to kill you, he said tentatively.
I want to kill you and…..
And watch your smashed brains bleed, he added.
So that I can…..
So that I won’t feel like this anymore, he said. And we began moving inside, around.
Because in all my life…..
I have never felt so empty—angry, he said, and he began to shake. They always do.
There was a long thin knife taped to the inside of his left arm. Rip.
I have felt this way since…..
Since forever, he said.
Forever is…..
What I want to get done with, he said. And then he began to move, physically. I’m not just
some hateful bastard! When I was a freshman at Duquesne, I was Christ. I wanted to save the
world, I wanted to do great things. I was expansive. You’re like a candy cane. You are ruining
everything! You’re weak, insignificant, inconsequential …twisted, and that’s why I hate you.
You! And that’s why I wanted…to...to...
You want to kill because you want to…..
His body turned one way and his head turned the other, and he was caught, in a very odd pose,
staring at me.
Live. he said.
Hand it over! You you you you! Right now now now now! Let’s go! Out with it.
 He pulled out a little metal box from the pocket I hadn’t searched yet. And placed what was
advertised on the outside of the box as “lively mints” in my hand.
I opened the box. Just as I suspected: it was a collection of what appeared to be bolts.
What do these do? I asked. That was a dumb question, and I regretted it almost immediately.
He began to explain the many uses of who knows what, and I cut him off.
Miscellaneous nuts and bolts go in the tool drawer over there, I said, pointing to the drawer I
haven’t closed in ten years.
Those are mine, he said.
Yes, and those are mine. Put them in the drawer anywhere, and if I need a nut I’ll know where
to go. You never know when you’ll need to screw something back together.
I don’t want.. he began to say.
I want to…..
I want to give you one of them, he said.
May I choose it?
Yes, he said.
I took the box and looked closely at its contents. I moved the symbols around with my finger.
Some of these are bigger than other ones, and this one looks kind of rusty. You know, sometimes
we hold onto things that we just don’t need, because we want everything to make sense, and it
just doesn’t. You know, hold together.
I’d like to keep them all, he said very quietly.
That’s why I’m glad you’re giving them to me. So I can keep them.
I like that you’re talking to me, he said. I was afraid you wouldn’t. I’m not gay but, I
understand you had to search me…and I didn’t mind.
This whole thing about how they want to be searched inside and out, top to bottom, and what
that means, is truly confounding. And why do they always start the same?
You need to turn yourself in to the police, because you came here carrying a knife with the
intention to kill: I added parenthetically: Sometimes people think that if they’re alive, and
everyone around them is dead—that they’re lucky.
I’m not leaving, he ventured.
I knew I shouldn’t have felt around the inside of his pockets, but I don’t know what I’m
feeling for on the outside. It always feels like broken cookies.
“That’s why you’re going to walk backward all the way to the station.” I’m keeping the knife.
Just take High or Why to the Pike of indifference—make a right, or for you, a left, and there it is,
on your right. Your right. If they can’t help you, ask them who can, and then go there. I’ll get
the door.
I made him walk backward more than a kilometer, unbolted, figuratively naked, with some
story about trying to kill God, and how God’s keeping the evidence.
Listen, just so you get it: my masculine side is very good at protecting what’s his, making
something out of nothing, and then taking what he needs, and all that, but it’s my feminine side
you don’t ever want to mess with: she’ll slice you up one way and down the other and you’ll
wonder why it’s so hard to move—nothing’s attached, that’s y. If she wants to be called the
Commandant, the Colonel, the local Principality, call her. Call her that. Call her it, whatever it
is, call her. She can fuck up your ride. You can keep the parts that work together, together and
leave me at so distant a distance. How’s it feel? Her son might have to find out for himself
what a bad mushroom is, and what he can and cannot do. But, if you ever go to her door with
some story about motherhood, fatherhood what’s what, and who’s who—she’ll throw buckets of
hot vomit in your face so fast, that it’ll end that conference pretty damn quick. While the men are
still heaving on her lawn —like it’s a drain, she’ll just spin some of your little symbols around
with one finger, and that’ll be that. Whoof. She’s the first one to say, “You can shoot me if you
think it’ll help,” but you’re goin’ down, and you’re going now right now.
 He looked at her like a very sorry five year old, who might end up with a permanently
furrowed brow, who just forgot his grammar, or just remembered his grammar, and was trying
not to gulp or blink. Gulp.
She’s the one who sent him packing, walking backward, to the station, with clear instruction,
specific direction, afraid to turn around—and right to be. And when he gets there he’ll be
speechless, un-afraid to tell the truth. Holding up his ah, pointing to the underside, a foot-away
from where one usually holds a knife, where it was, but where it isn’t now. It’s not so red and, all
herheard was your right going all thru his brain, which is her brain, and in and out all over
everything, without even ever asking.
The police found him holding up one arm, staring at his hand. “Oh, you’ve met her.”
“I liked their motor home, it sa all yellow, blue, purple, and it has an amazing view…”

If she gave you a fraction of what she gave her own son, you’d be dead. And you just now
realized that. Whatever you think you got—just go.
“Father, Son and Holy guh gho…That’s a nice family. I especially liked the father.”
Whatever—go. Do the next thing on your list.
“The motor home appeared to be thousands of years old, or maybe it was the view.”
Whatever—go. Be kind, give of yourself—you’ll never run out. The view’s all sand, that’s
why the house’s on pontoons. Just go.
“Is Billy sick?”
Somedays Billy doesn’t feel too good, and he can’t come out to play. He’s fine. These are
growing pains. He’s becoming everything. You might want to tread lightly, and walk around
softly, and do that thing—but not after 2100 or before 0700, he needs his sleep—I don’t wanna
hafta call his dad.

His masculine side and feminine side have always taken care of him. He’ll never stop being
their little boy, and they love him, more, than you, could ever, possibly, imagine.

God sent a crazy man to deliver a crazy message to a bunch of people who are just trying to do
their job——And they still think he’s a kind and giving soul. Life is funny. God nodded his
head, as if he were taking a bow. Then he was gone (again).
If he doesn’t shape-you-up while he has the opportunity, how kind is that? Take what you got
and go.

I know the role of The Christ. I know what it feels like inside to be this. I guess you’d call it
liberating. And of course, many people with incapacitating mental and emotional challenges
have, for centuries, claimed the same thing. I’m not sure why, and I’m not asking. There’s the
obvious: The Christ is an enormously powerful symbol of the self, enrapt in inexpressible non-
self. Speaking—thru the whole thing, right up to the very end of time—one to another, intimately
one. Refusing to give-up, as I have, because I’ll never give up. And of course…some people are
just crazy.

One day
One day I was walking Over, and someone yelled: I love you Billy. I smiled. They call me
Billy sometimes. Keep going, she said. Go for it! Turn it upside-down. She clapped. They
sometimes do. Go! Keep going! She held her hand to her mouth, moved her legs involuntarily,
and began to cry. She was a young black woman: Do it! I believe in you. She choked, became
just barely audible: We love you; I mean it. I know why God loves you, because I friggin’
fuckin’ love you; you’re unbelievable, impossible! You make me cry. No one like you. You can
do this! Please…please! She didn’t cross the street… Is that Orderve? Yes. Ahh, he’s nothing
but a little bit of a thing…so cute, like a baby lamb…Don’t cross over. I couldn’t stand to be any
closer to you than I am now. Tears fell. I hid them behind my shades for blocks…all that
practicing...I turned a corner, and someone said, You must be under tremendous pressure. I was
still crying, but, you know, I’m not under any stress, hardly any, no pressure whatsoever, except
when I feel weak. I cry sometimes because I’m happy — This is already written.
You will come to me or you won’t. What you know, you almost-completely understand—
same as always.
Sometimes very unexplainable things happen. Physical things seem to line up with
metaphysical things, and I’m in the equation somewhere, directly in line to see it, I guess. Reality
seems to dance. I was walking thru town, and people stared like they never saw anybody walk
and make love before. I saw a man, who was driving south on Why, just stop when he saw me.
There was a red light, but he stopped 20 meters in front of it. Why? A car went by, and someone
yelled, Bless you my son. It’s possible they were just singing along to the latest hit song: Bitches
got my money, but that’s not what I heard. Is it just a coincidence that songs that extol the virtue
of riches & acquisition got no tune?
If you said it’s about skewed perceptions and fulfilled expectations, I just can’t agree. I think
sometimes the relationship between sense and Awareness is so pronounced, it’s visible. I assign
meaning (Awareness) everywhere to everything, but especially to things that make no sense. The
harder I try to make sense of the world, the more Awareness I get. It’s like an opportunity,
because it feels like one. I’m willing to squander this on people I don’t really know, because I
think they would do the same for me. I think this, because I found in this thing, a generosity of
spirit that made me rush off to get married when getting married was (before I met Him) the
furthest thing from my mind. What I think, doesn’t make it so, but I was right there at the time,
and that’s how I figured it. Description fails: this is the most truly amazing thing in the world,
but that’s what I said about my weekend with Amanda in Oswego. A man’s sexuality has a
‘catch,’ and you can’t make someone vulnerable to it, until you first make yourself vulnerable to
the pleasure of it. Life goes on, measure for measure, like a clock you can stop. But u don’t.
God said, Wouldn’t it be funny if the ones who were the most lost, the most trapped— the
ones who had turned their ridiculous past, into their ridiculous present, came to be the first to
make the whole world laugh, clap, and smile from ear to ear. And when all eyes were turned on
Indo-Pakistani Kashmir, no one was looking for coverings, just answers?
That was the day God told me about the trouble with the soul: When it’s troubled, trouble’s
everywhere. I didn’t know what to say. I love him so much, I couldn’t speak.

You’re going to fast

When the world… B
Yes, Billy. G
When the world dies. B
No, Billy. G
When the world falls into senseless depravity, utter disarray, from blameless… B
No, think positively. G
When the world comes to its senses… B
Yes, Billy. G
Oh…Well, will they know…you know, what to do? B
I’m not following. To fast. G
Am I talking too fast? B
God smiles. No, Billy. You mean, will they know how to stop fouling their nest. Yes. Will they
know how they want to be treated, yes. Will they know how to fast. Yes. G
I’m not following you. B
Billy, you certainly hear what you want to hear. They must fast…Go without…stop indulging for
a time…move beyond…What are you tilting your head for. G
You mean some kind of a diet? B
Oh, Christ no! I’ve seen how you diet…..Let me have one piece of cheese…no, not that one, that
one. Can I have an extra 2 jars of dipping sauce…I survived another Friday! G
God did a very good imitation of…of…well, me…us. B
Billy, everyone, not just you, can read these signs. Sometimes you have to go slow, sometimes
proceed with caution, speed up, change drivers, switch lanes. G
Oh. B
Billy, switch lanes. G
Oh, what? Who, me? B
Now, pull over. G
Where’s Delbert when I need him? B
Please don’t start with poor Delbert. G
Billy, Mankind is headed for a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. They must apply the
brakes very hard, right now. There’s no other way. Increasing drag won’t work. G
God smiled. Putting your window down and signaling, won’t work. And taking your foot off the
gas won’t either. You’ve been gaining momentum for thousands of years, and now the gates are
up: People have more freedom than ever, more leisure time, more need for love, more knowledge,
more will, more value—more reason to want children—more of everything, and less pain. This
car’s gonna crash. G
Billy verified that he was in park, and looked out the window for a speed check. Whew.
They do know that they have to apply the brakes as hard as they possibly can. Billy, the car’s
stopped. Look at me. Mankind must not try to stop freedom, will, knowledge, choice, happiness,
nor any of that—this must be done right. Life is fragile, and going. G
Now I have a headache, which I didn’t have before. Don’t tell me any more. B
Fast, for one year, all at the same time. it will make all the difference in the world. You’ll save
the children. Fast for a year and you won’t have to fast again for many years. The world won’t
end, but you might learn something important: Without love you’ll die.
Billy, I’ll drive. And Billy…I do know of your concerns. I know how you feel. When you’re
done Work, call me, I’ll come pick you up. G
I spent a year doing The Work, and so far, a year trying to stop doing The Work. B
… im, whenever you say you’re done, you’re done. Get out of the car for a minute… please.
Close the door. G
You have time, because I just told you you do. But you can’t spend the next 100 years staring at
the car—arguing over who gets to sit up front—you have to get in now. That’s why Billy’s here,
to jump-start this thing. He knows how...he was poor once. He could jump-start a Plymouth. He
also knows how to make the most of what you got…and that’s you. Get in…please. G

Billy
“God is air. One of the gods is air. At least one god is air…whatever…just get out of my light”---Diogenes---Greek Philosopher---340BCE

Billy had always had a sarcastic sense of humor and God, an ironic sense of humor.
Billy took a deep breath and said to God:
I believe in the truth with all my heart. B
God did not fully appreciate the truth. He found it angled toward the floor, flawed, almost
unrepeatable.
That’s nice, Billy. So do I. G
Billy turned to God and looked Him in the face, that was all the face that he had, and said, You
want the truth? B
God wavered like a few leaves on a tree, moved slightly west, like a perfect image in a perfect
cloud.
Yes. G
I may be one of the very few who understands what you’re trying to say. B
I have made it very clear. G
So you have, Billy said. B
You are my Messenger, God said. G
You have stood by my ignorance and you’ve brought me each time into the light. B
Yes, yes I have. G
Do you want to know the truth? B
I am all things. He said without wavering. I cannot be added to. G
Billy took a deep breath for purposes of slow exhalation, as God had taught him.
Do you want to know the truth? B
God said nothing. He doesn’t play that game.
The truth is that you will die, Billy said. I believe in the truth, but I didn’t marry the truth, I
married you. If you don’t stop playing these games you’ll die, and you won’t be able to play your
games anymore. B
God stared at the little black holes that attempted to stare Him down.
I never married you, that was a Ceremony of Divine Transference. It doesn’t go forward like a
marriage, it goes backward like an identity. You are my Son. G
Billy thought a bit, watched the next cloud go by—it had the face of a bear, a fish, and then a
standard poodle. It’s sa same thing, he said. B
God knew Billy’s issues with his first Father, imperfect as he was, and the competition he
engendered—the love he inspired in his son, and the impossible expectations that stood between
them. Billy, you think you have a job; you think you’re married with a baby on the way. You’re
your own father. You’re your own son. You’re the unbreakable bond. You’ve come full circle.
I will never stop loving you, even tho you’ve got it all mixed up. I cannot kill. G
You can’t kill, but you can die. You can die this way::::: B
By putting so much of yourself into your work, and then watching it dissolve because it cannot be
held in constant appreciation…..even by you. B
God filled the silence with a sound Billy had never heard before. It was the drum of his stomach,
the rush in his ears, and a word that begged not to be interrupted. Billy cleared his throat, it was
early morning.
Okay my son. Okay, whatever you want. Whatever you say. Whatever you say you want, you
may have…I know you aren’t selfish, I don’t say I follow you. But…what is it you want. G
Being blind, and not having the depth-perception that allows this…If it must be, take me with
you. That’s it. That’s what I want. B
This is what I wish: that if it must be, let it happen fast. If it will not be, if they come to their
senses all at once—If by some miracle, awareness parts, as they come up for air. Let them know.
Tell them. Don’t let them worry, or fear—fear the discovery of their child, so long hidden. Let
the sun shine brightly into their lives. Take away pain, as you build them back up, brick by brick.
Make it plain, so that they can all understand, as tho they heard the very voice of God tell them
this. And then tell them what this is all about.

ENV`Y
 Epilogue (after the work)
The symbols are alive all around me—for me. Understanding is passive, changes with trying—into understanding, and all is completely
knowable. When you want it to stay, it goes. When you wish you understood it, the next wish will be about fear, and the one after that
will be untrue. My life is my life. Separate. Alone. Then I choked. He’s a mess… Why can’t He just say Good Morning, like everybody
else?—last diary entry 5-7-08-9:01:23 year-month-day-hour:minute:second

This is never to be repeated, never spoken of, ever. This is not for idle gossip: More than
anything, Billy wanted a ring. People heard what he said, and they wanted him to have his ring.
It was not to be. The ends were not clear—as much as he wanted—it never happened. Billy
digressed, considered, loved, but no ring. The Everything that was everything refused. He loved,
and desired, cared even, but in all of time there was no ring. He, Billy, never gave up hope. He
challenged every obstacle. The ring was a thing he’d never get. This is Billy’s business. He
could wander all the Earth. No ring.

What did he need to do? Don’t think he didn’t wonder, he did. God stayed, and removed every
obstacle from his path. God even said Billy was the path, but nowhere could the answer be
found. It was in his life, the answer to his life.

Stay, speak, be all of this, and when you’re done, we’ll talk.

God had spoken many times, so what was left for him to say? Billy wanted to die to hear the
word, to get the ring. But even then it wasn’t given, even then he’d have to wait. Billy was
plenty pissed off. God smiled. Billy stood his ground.

I’ve done everything you asked of me, I’ve sacrificed, and shown nothing when you said
nothing…I look like a fool! Billy said. God smiled.

I’m so glad you’re happy. Go catch this. Billy threw a ball into the grass. God looked, and Billy
said, Please, I’ve done everything you asked…I’m your Son, you said it yourself ..What is this all
about?

You know, was all he said.

I know practically nothing. I make it up as I go along. If I didn’t have help I’d be useless—I’d
have stopped years ago. This is so unfair!!

God said, There, you’ve said it. I speak and you think you made it up. You believe that
preserving the past is the way to the future. One idea, any idea—They’re great. I love ‘em. They
speak for me. You are my Son… You are impossible—I couldn’t love you more. You told them
where to start. But how’d you know? Thank you.
Yes, I love you too, I always have. No. I’m n`ot sorry…..When you’re done. G

Well, that’s never. ‘B’

Some secret
This is a map. A map of words doesn’t go anywhere. Maps don’t go anywhere. They’re about going somewhere. So
are your words. One man learns to speak thru all that stuff about how you know everything, because you’ve been
talking for years... The one who races up the gang plank, and jumps to the ship at the last possible second, may have
the clearest understanding of all, where this ship is going. This is that. If you think you can go, and not take your
confusion…well, you’re wrong. But you’re wrong only if you’re confused. This is that. It leads onward. When you
get there, you’ll say: I knew it! It’s really about being in love–—JDS

It’s not a secret, the way Mankind gets back into Heaven. If you want to think it is, that’s fine to:
People ignored Billy, and chastened him about being to this or too that, thinking bad thoughts
about this good thing, or good thoughts about that bad thing. At first they thought he was too fast
or too slow, too small or too big or too smart or too dumb. This went on and on. Then when
things got really bad, they started to do what he told them to do. They began to show him
respect, and while they were at it, they began to show respect for themselves, respect for their
own self, and the selves of others that didn’t belong to them—those selves—your selves—your
self. The self. You. Things got better right away. Many people took-off in the direction of
Heaven as if it were a race, and they were never heard from again. Billy said, Walk to the right of
that tree, many people did, many did not. Some said, “He’s been right about everything so far.”
Others pointed out that he hadn’t been right about anything yet. Those people were very
unpopular and no one talked to them. Billy said, Now stop fighting and I’ll move you closer to
Heaven. They did. They put down their guns, knives, spears, bombs, heat seeking missiles—all
of it. Go that way. They walked, shuffling up a very small hill. The ground was hard, the grass
was brown, and they couldn’t believe it. Everyone remarked how small a hill it was. Many said
they could see Heaven from there, but they couldn’t—It was a very small hill. Many ran. Billy
said, Don’t run, you can still get lost. They t o l d Billy to g e t l o s t, and they were never
heard from again. Billy led them thru a woods—Now apologize, he said. Tell others you’re
sorry, why, and wait for forgiveness. And I don’t want to hear: “I’m sorry you’re so stupid that
you had to start this!” When the clouds parted, he said, Tell the truth, and that means details.
That means clean up. Suddenly they were in a dark and desolate woods. It was very slow going,
but as they walked, they picked up everything from the ground that didn’t belong there. Then
eventually the woods opened up to the most beautiful valley—huge green mountains on either
side. Be very careful here, he said. Anything you drop will grow. Don’t even speak, in case a
word should fall. They walked in silent wonder, and left no mark. They were beginning to trust
Billy, and they started to listen to what he said. Protect, above all, your own ‘children’ from these
horrible times. The times in which we live. Here. Now. No one fell. Nothing got disintegrated.
No one got gobbled up. Everything that was already growing growing grew. Nothing changed.
Many were still confused, some stumbled. Others decided to build houses there, even tho Billy
said not to; it was a Wadi, a dammed river bed. Hurry. He pointed out the pass when they were
close enough to see it, but not before. Go there. He pointed to two tiny peaks, way up high.
They began to run. He said, Don’t run, you’ll scare ‘em to death—you look like hell, and you’re
a complete mess—Walk slowly. That’s how Mankind got to Heaven—on foot. The idea’s not
to make it a secret, or keep it a secret, but to have one voice to listen to—to tell the story, instead
of 50,000 all of a sudden instant experts. It’s three rights, and a sharp left, not necessarily in that
order. Many think life’s not funny—but still immersed in sorrow.
*
God chose Billy for a reason: Billy’d never say: virtue makes you you, it doesn’t. Or order
makes you wise, it can’t. Or all you have, is all that matters—of course, it’s not— You’re not
even 50% matter. Billy’d never say he cared, when he was all-about making you walk every
single solitary step, by step by step by step by step to Heaven. Billy wasn’t about to change, had
no reason to. If you think Billy never looked to these words for inspiration, you’re very much
mistaken. He was right here, writing every word, polishing, practically, more or less, every
sentence, yet he still didn’t know. Making your world strong, your life strong, impenetrable,
doesn’t make you strong, it makes you weak to discovery, weak to upset, weak to understanding,
because you’re so done trying. That’s always the first thing overboard. If you ever knew
yourself to be approved of, perfected, most real, how well would that stand-up when the winds of
changes shift?

Billy was The Christ for a reason: He could walk thru a dichotomy as if it was nothing. He could
step on you, and over you at the same time. He was going no where, so you’re not in his way?
He cares twice as much as you do, or not at all. He knows you, because he is you. Billy’s One.
He could be diametrically opposed to the idea that all ideas were fixed, and then hold on like grim
death. Billy learned as a child, that he could make smart people talk backward. He could make
impossibility look easy: he loved who he couldn’t love; he spent time on people he’d never spend
time on; he cared if he did, for any reason he chose or for no reason at all. Billy’d only stop being
Billy, if the time ever came that he could.
Consider: no paragraphs. God chose someone who saw no affront to insult; someone who saw
‘lowness’ as ‘pinnacle’—reputation, as something that needed way too much protection to ever
show ‘Profit’—one who wasn’t about to drop what he was doing unless God Himself showed-up,
and even then. That’s who God chose… offered the job to. Billy could stand or dance between
Heaven and Earth, or in Heaven, or on Earth. Or dance, and then stand, and never walk away.
Know this, if you’re ever really ready ::::: God prevents bad people from going to Heaven, Billy
does not. Your idea of bad, is all too often the thing you would have done if you’d been given the
option. He’s been called every name in the book … Many times he thought he was the only one
who loved him, and even then he went on. He came to love being alone—‘outside.’ He’d
learned about being right, because he was never allowed to be, unless he stood in a blind. This
hunter knows the forest very very well. If Mankind can’t suspend its desires, as Billy had, in
order just to Be…to Live…to Continue…well …death awaits. And you have to go… So long…I
love you ….We’ll meet again some Sunny Day….. Goodbye.

Billy brought his fiction to God. The fiction they’d been working on for months. God said,
Well…that’s good, fine, but…what if you use your sense of contrast, humor…..
The wrap-up
Bidden or unbidden, God is present. –Carl Jung/Swiss/founder of analytical psychology ~1875-1961

I gave two minutes to a person who asked me politely for one. HS (he or she) said: You took
me into your showroom, and sold me nothing. You moved me a minute at a time, then stopped
time. You catapulted mindlessly, thoughtlessly thru the air—from your old life into a new and
totally incomprehensible life, landing right there...Spoke honestly of gay fantasies, confusion,
disbelief, intimate conversations with God, prayers, greed, selfishness, mistreatment, forgiveness,
and dreams that I understood, yet wasn’t going to get anything from. You helped me suspend my
negativity, which was close as I ever got, to love. You took me to rehearsals…..backstage,
behind closed doors, and into your own private thoughts. You took labels off and put labels on,
like you were trying on new clothes, right in front of me. Like old friends do. You said God
can’t tell a story. You talked to me—Me! Then you told us where to start, in a world gone so far
off-track there’s no place to start, and you’re right about that, there wasn’t. You talked openly
about your fears, about sex, drugs, death, politics, religion, depression, truth, faith, belief, and
even Heaven—about sense we can’t make, and Awareness that’s knocking on our door. And thru
the whole thing, you sang and did whatever you felt like doing, even this. You played your own
tapes, and tapes given you, like I should care. Nothing’s taboo to you. You’re not “slavishly
devoted to the form”… Isn’t that right? All is knowable; and understanding grows into
understanding. You did imitations of people I know, and me, for all I know. You spoke in other
voices, and I don’t know why. You laughed at yourself, laughed at my worst nightmares, gave
yourself an award hand-delivered, while criticizing its founder, and ignored God’s advice. You
told me more than I needed to know, tapped and snapped-out King of the Road, and then
suggested I should mind my own business—Kindness…..talked of past present and future all at
the same time. Told me you never learned to fight, then landed a couple good ones. You spoke
sometimes thru free association and I could see one idea bounce off another. You treated me like
a child, talked to me all the while, about hopes, aspirations, and the important things in life.
About freedom of thought, like I didn’t know; about being rescued, which I never did. You even
said how your mind almost works, where your house is, and how sometimes we can’t forgive.
You said that a person’s perspective on the world is rich, proprietary, demanding, and can
actually change the world. You said you’re Christ, which I don’t believe…then let Billy be no
one, and, give his own-take on Truth: ‘Life is fictional,’ but perhaps only to fictional characters.
Then I saw that one’s truth about the world can truly change the world—not unlike a new idea.
And that if I don’t think my own self-centered perspective changes my world, and the world of
the people around me…maybe I’m more fictional than I know. You told the truth, and when you
were incomprehensible, n child-like you were being you. You described practically nothing,
while giving me insight into Everything. Then, before you stole one more thing from Heaven’s
Keep, you gave me something real, and told me I had to share, that it wouldn’t be any good if no
one helped or cared. Then you showed me the way out. And regarding your conclusion at the
very end—that without gay people this would be one of the dullest, deadest, driest planets in the
Universe…Well…I should have seen that one coming. I don’t know why I love you like I do… I
don’t mean… you know, about… Oh… you know what I mean… I just do …..Thanks.
…..You’re welcome.

God felt
How could I forget that I had given her an extra key. All this time she was standing there, she never look her eyes off me—Shaggy.
It wasn’t me.
I became drunk with the the beauty, and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment, lost myself—The ‘Silent
Soliloquy,’ Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

Billy allowed God to swap with him many times. He transcended all the petty labels in his own
life, one day, in about an hour. No one had ever done that quite so publicly before, or with such a
mischievous grin. Well, they were his labels—Let him do it his way. That was the day Billy
climbed up so high he got to a label he couldn’t transcend. God said Hello, Billy said Hello
back—All the conditions Billy’d put on love, disappeared.

Billy lived as a seeker, his whole life, practically. He lived in a world of questions with no
answers. He lived for twenty of his most formative years in a dichotomy: gay inside, strait
outside. It prepared Billy to live with one foot in Heaven and one foot on Earth. It became, for
him, as easy as falling down stairs. Billy didn’t find answers where others had: He didn’t find
answers in doing what everyone else was doing or doing nothing anyone else was doing or sex or
drugs or marriage or children or work or healing or putting out fires or arresting the bad guys or
adding up other peoples’ money or teaching or praying or watching things grow or setting an
example or concocting lucrative sting operations or marching or fighting or struggle or success or
music or any of that. Billy loved the seeking part; I guess he was looking for an answer to be as
good as that. But then God felt that maybe Billy didn’t care about the answers so much. But, if
that were true, why all the questions. When Billy became The Christ, he looked at his hands, to
the mirror, felt behind his shoulders, thought about his back, and No, he did not understand.

Billy knew from his mother, that, often, even amazing things, sometimes, you just know what you
know. You don’t know where it comes from. And he knew from his brother and sister that
brilliance has its limits, especially when you can’t see the shiny thing racing toward you, any
better than you can see the shiny thing bouncing away. Billy also learned from his own father
that when you don’t accept your own son—how smart could you be. Intelligence has its limits.

Billy described the entrance to Heaven many different ways. I think he saw it many different
ways. And there are many entrances, of course. But he called it an ending that was not an
ending, and then he always said what I had never said: Being is everything—How could he know.
I’m Everything.

I swapped with Billy for longer and longer periods each time. Billy was able to stay open to the
opinions that were not his, that floated by, that required no answer. And the ideas that came and
went, like events: the imperceptible, leading to others, and ultimately to the ones he recognized
that turned themselves over and over like falling coins, for a kind of inspection. And I was able
to really see what his world was like: self expression when there’s nothing to express but ideas.
Then Billy did a funny thing: He wore the labels he’d just, and finally, after all that suffering,
thrown off. He took back ‘gay,’ ‘failure,’ and ‘un-seen writer.’ He used them, wore them, so
others could see him, and see what he was doing: Fa put him darkly on display for others—And
those who forge their own chains could also see themselves: foolish, selfish, hateful, false, and
easily mocked. You all wear labels. And when he could be seen and heard more clearly—he
showed you the way out. Of course, he kept the prince label—Who would give that up.
One more thing: walking the edge of reason is the edge of reason. I know you know that. But
maybe you don’t know: reason changes all over the place, but never on its very edge. It can take
a hundred years for the edge to move one foot; all he knew, was, he had room.
Billy did another funny thing: When he fell in love, he didn’t do what most women do, and begin
reasoned plans toward an end (become simple and fleshy), nor did he do what most men do, and
start the wheels in motion (put the balls in play). He just waited for the ceremony. I was almost
afraid to move. I shut everything down, but I forgot the ants. It was all done with Formic acid,
leave it to Billy. He even walked thru crazy to talk to me. It took him three trips to realize you
can’t pass thru it so easily. It’s like a revolving door: a man hits it, and can’t pass, then a man hits
it, and can pass. It takes a kind of talent to ignore all that encircling motion, and just walk
forward, especially when there’s no one to show you how. Billy broke his leg once, so he knew.
You think you can slide backward on the floor for the rest of your life to avoid the pain, but you
were built to walk forward. Walk.

I was starting to come to the same conclusion Billy was starting to come to: Mankind couldn’t be
an ugly, greedy, hateful mistake. He wouldn’t destroy anything for any reason, including
himself, just because he couldn’t have everything. The day was approaching when they’d envy
the dead, and if that day ever came, well…Blip. Or would it be possible…Could they use Billy to
end something-somehow— —constant self-justification, for example. Billy can end the world, or
any part of it, that’s what he’s here to do. I laugh, cry, choke, and gasp. When he speaks I
cringe. I love him so much.

Someone stopped Billy the other day, and asked, very seriously, why I sent him to Earth when I
did. Billy, who knew that I come to you. Billy, who knew that time is no issue. The Billy, who
knew that he was fictional. The Billy, who knew that he could only understand one subject at a
time. The Billy, who knew that his life was in his own hands. That Billy, said: “Someone had to
put an end to Film Noir.” Ha ha ha. I love that stupid kid. He knows why he’s here. What needs
to be destroyed will be destroyed. He is Life.

One day there was a group of young people in front of his house. Billy’d barely noticed. A man
within the crowd said, “I’ll agree when I feel moved, I’ll sleep with women if I choose.” Then
the long pause…and he said…“Line”… and all the people gathered there said, “I’ll bring no end
to what there is no ending to.” Billy tried to smile, but he cried.

Billy’s apology
Pardon the way that I stare, there’s nothing else to compare. The sight of you makes me weak, there are no words left to speak.
Can’t take my eyes off of you— Frankie Valli 1967
May God bless and keep you always; May His face shine upon you now; and may He be gracious everafter—The Aaronic Benediction
…Oh…and bring you Peace. Numbers 6:24-26 approx. 1440 BCE.

God showed up one day and gave me everything. How d’ya think I felt? I know you don’t care.
I felt ill-equipped for about 2 seconds. How can my work be about how invisibly I care, if I ever
did care? You know that I don’t know, because I’ve told you so. And I’d love to say The Work
was my gift to God. But He drives me to the store, and says: Get this, this, this, that and that. At
check-out, I’d buy that yellow salty popcorn I like, and maybe some batteries if I was short. This
is His doing, all I did, basically was stay open. Doing things effortlessly and doing it great, are
two of my most favorite things anyway.
He loves life. I think he finds it fascinating (sacred). I loved to watch the opinions fly overhead;
the ones that weren’t mine, that required no answer. He’s so easy to translate, you have no idea,
but once your involved in that whole thing, I’m sure you’re bound to find that these little ideas
grow. When he says something, I nearly almost completely understand it. Don’t kill, he
says…like when do I run around killing? But maybe there’s more to it? And then all of a sudden
some strange, possibly deranged ant falls into my work. I became the last person in the world
who’d ever brush him aside. My work’s interesting to me, but very possibly only to me. He’s
ironic as hell. Love is all about letting it go, and holding on so tight. Everyone knows God’s
needy, ‘specially the needy.
As often as I’ve tried to end the work, it doesn’t end. I wrote it, but I always had help—help at
every turn, from every quarter, always—never not—From everything around me, from a
thousand people and animals, dead and alive, and partially dead, and partially alive, and from
God, who gets all the credit, and none of the blame. If you ever find yourself in a place where
there’s no one to blame but yourself, look harder. Being right, and having someone to blame, are
critical to your mental health. It can keep you stable when you need stability most. No one ever
created himself or herself by them self, themselves—whatever. I gladly take the blame for
having fun. I don’t take back a single word, and I didn’t do it for fun. I’m just saying it was fun.
I love words, and I love to play with you—I always have. I have offended many people in my
life, and they have, for the most part, offended me right back. Nobody ever cried. Few were
mortally wounded. Let’s put it this way: they took it in the spirit it was given, and everyone
recovered just fine. People always saw me as they see themselves; many just dismissed me as
irritating, strange. Whatever. Life is meant to be enjoyed. If I told a polish joke, or mentioned a
body part you’ve been struggling to forget—forget it. If you ever heard me tell a Helen Keller
joke, or one too hard to consume, I don’t ask forgiveness. I don’t need it. I know that I’ve said
something or written something, so subtractive and so dismissive of the soul you think you are,
that I will one day be relegated to the ash-heap of history. So be it. I didn’t decide not to change.
It was a requirement. How could I know? If you heard me say: You don’t mind doing it, just
talking about it—same thing. I’d take it back, but it’s not that kind of a dialogue. Being that it’s
in writing. Rest assured, it’s soon to become more and more imperfect, and ultimately breakable,
then forgettable. It’s meant to be. You can’t move forward unless you can make a break with the
past.
Many people think I wrote this, about The Becoming, I didn’t. I wrote The Work during The
Becoming, within. Here. The map was drawn on the journey…accounting, perhaps for its
occasionally circuitous amble. It’s so much more important to speak from the moment but I
guess I’m not much of an actor—wanted to be, but…without working at something it’s much
harder to make anything out of it, even if it came to you, all at once, like a car crash, or a book
that fell in your lap. I started out deep, dark, n highly unqualified, and just kept plodding the
course. It can’t, as far as I’m concerned, be put in order, but who am I to say? I had so much
help…..but I needed so much help. I suppose many people could put The Work in order. It’s a
simple thing I guess. To me, I never saw it that way, and it didn’t come that way. I paint it the
way I see it. That’s not an excuse, and it doesn’t make me Van Gogh—I just don’t have any idea
how to bring sense to it. I don’t know how to bring sense to you or I would, I swear I would. I
can’t even bring sense to the way you see me—I’ve never been able to. I just figure you see me
as you see me. Maybe that’s not right—maybe it’s something I’m doing, that I don’t realize.
Maybe I’m extraordinarily weak. Tasteless. Invisible. Opinionless—like a glass of
water…well…. not opinionless. Why doesn’t everyone see me as I see myself ? A Prince. God
only knows. You can’t really make someone see their own senselessness. It’s their life; they do
it that way for a reason. And I’m glad people use reason. I’m not really a Prince, I just feel like
one—I always have. That doesn’t make me one.
Consider: remove this. If I were ever to give a shout-out, I’d say Hi, to Mr. Mac. I don’t
remember his first name, but he helped me when I broke my leg; helped me stay in the band;
helped me get a nice send-off—a bronze medal at Graduation, and never took any credit. He’s
the man.
*
The other day I felt like I was moving thru the water about an inch at a time. I wasn’t
‘drowning,’ but I needed encouragement - there was a light rain. The front yard was full of
raspberries. Usually the birds get them all, but this year they were practically untouched. I really
hadn’t noticed, but there were hundreds, so I picked handfuls and ate them. I believe God was
feeding me raspberries as a way to encourage me—I do, and I took it that way. I also noticed that
they don’t come in order. They ripen in different places all over the plant, not in a line. Well
anyway, I picked the ones that were ripe, of course. The next day more were ripe. Some were on
the undersides of those funny shoot-like branch things. It took a certain amount of patience, but it
was worth it. The birds didn’t get many this year. I think when I cut the stalks back in the early
spring it made the plants bushier, more compact, and maybe the birds couldn’t get to them…..or
maybe it delayed their appearance….and the birds found something else to eat…I really don’t
know. As my first father used to say: He who hesitates is lost. The birds brought the berries to
my property—but they’re mine now. I didn’t leave many. I’m not worried about it. The birds’ll
be fine. If it bothers you that I speak in parables, and put myself in them…as if I were there. Or
that I put 5 dots here, then 4, then 3—it doesn’t mean anything. If you see a circle, you see me. I
like to make things more interesting than they really are. You see, everyone would know a ripe
raspberry when they saw one, even people who’ve never seen one, from countries where they
don’t grow, but not everyone knows what raspberries taste like, they’re indescribable, especially
when they’re directly from God, right in your front yard, right when you need them, already
washed, and just for you. It was really cool 2. Many people thought: If he wants to be The
Christ that bad, let him be—We’ll live in a world that for us, doesn’t change—Please do. I think
the things I like, other people would like—that’s all. 1. Wouldn’t it be funny if this was about
sex. I started off clumsily over-eager, imitative, then ended up confident controlled and kinda
comfy. I liked being with you. I liked knowing, when you didn’t; that’s not rape; it’s ironic: In a
time when people say fiction is dead, it takes one last gasp, and everything suddenly becomes
dream-like. I’m Billy. I’m The Christ. 0. Here we go.