Adventures in Babysitting

Adventures in babysitting. My granddaughter, Puck had a diabetic issue this week. I touched on this in my article, “The Pink Dragon.” Well, in the sweet by and by I ended up at her bedside at Baylor Scott and White Children’s Hospital down in beautiful Temple, Texas. Now I love my granddaughter, please understand, but have you ever seen the movie “Uncle Buck?” Make a note of that, there’ll be a quiz later.

The second day Puck was there the CPS showed up,. So, my ex calls and I find myself locked in with Puck watching endless episodes of “Adventures In Babysitting” on the Disney Channel. Puck thought it was fantastic. Have you ever noticed the little girl who’s hair looks like Minnie Mouse? Other than that all Disney girls look alike.

Ever try to get a smoke in a children’s hospital? I know, I know, I should quit, but my people traditionally live to their nineties. When my ninety sum odd year old uncle died his older sister told me drinking and smoking finally killed him! So I had to endure the stares of the nurses as I negotiated the maze required to smoke. Did I tell you I like cocktails at night? Uh, I haven’t found the lounge here yet. I’m also eating hospital food. My body is in full withdrawal!

On most nights I fall asleep in my Lazy Boy around two after lubricating my liver. Here they turn the lights down around nine. More “Adventures In Babysitting! Now, that’s not a series, which would be mundane enough, that’s a movie Puck likes . . . A LOT! Little girls are easily bored, especially little girls who live in Austin, Salt Lake, LA, etc. Get locked in with that. And doctors and nurses. It’s like being with a bunch of Temple Mormons. The only good thing is within a generation or two they’ll all be gone because since they’re scared of everything else they’re probably scared of unprotected sex and the birth rate will not sustain their race.

They are all liberal democrats. Children’s hospital, planned parenthood; connect the dots. There was one real cute Baylor co-ed, but she got all upset when Trump threw all the Trannies out of the military so I don’t know about her. She always wore a smock so I couldn’t tell, if you know what I mean. I guess you’d have to grab her. . . well, you know.

One day became two, became three, and Puck and I bonded. She got me so much coffee I could feel my hair growing. Every night I could see a flashing sign downtown reading, “LITE, LITE, LITE!” Beside it was one reminding me that Jesus saves. The food? Forget about it. I could see a Whataburger in the distance too. I was in hell.

Then , the day of freedom came. Lots of forms, doctor talk, doctor talk, doctor talk and we were out! Puck looked like she just made parole, and I’d memorized that babysitting show. Oh, I’d become infatuated by one of the Disney chicks, but all the cops and CPS I saw in the lobby dispelled that. Got home, my dog peed on my leg and bit me. Nice to have my priorities back in line.

The Pink Dragon

Childhood diabetes is a pink dragon. Diabetes in and of itself, but when a child begins life with no candy and cake it rears its ugly head on several fronts. As I sit here waiting the results of my granddaughter’s second hospital visit in two weeks I reflect. First, and foremost Puck has shared her entire life with me. In 2007 her mother handed her to me in Georgetown on the day of her birth, and said, “Here, hold this,” and a darling little girl came into my life.

Her first word was, “chicken.” She’d be playing on the porch in Berry Creek. I’d ask if she wanted me to run to KFC and she’d say, “Chiiiiiicken!” Sometime around two years old we found that she was a type one diabetic. Little Puck had to eat veggies while everyone else ate cake. Pricks and shots became part of her life and by four she could take, and read her blood. An eighty reading meant it was a good day, a six hundred meant the ER, and perhaps coma.

Puck had self control but hunger was a big hazard. A salad for dinner left her starving as she would fight a high number. We could always tell when it was going to be a bad day from the dark circles around her beautiful blue eyes. When her readings fell low she’d go into seizure, scream, and arch her little back. She couldn’t control her bladder. Wet beds in the morning would humiliate her, and many mornings I’d hold her as she cried and asked me, “Why?”

There were good times. I took her to Austin, just she and I, we attended a rally, and she met Doc Greene. Due to the activity her blood was on the low end, and on the way home I took her to a Japanese Grill. Her hair stuck straight up when the chef lit the onion volcano. The cook felt so bad when she leaped from her chair that he gave her a free order of shrimp. She asked why his eyes looked funny.

Recently, as the “Puckster” began to turn into a little lady her body rebelled and the insulin she’d been on all her life became useless.  A salad with tuna gave her an”Hi” reading and it would not come down. Three days in ICU, and one day in a regular room brought her down to normal. For four days she read from the eighties to around one twenty and suddenly she was back in the hospital again. She looked at me as she left, and again asked, “Why?”

I don’t know why. I think God sends us special angels to remind us how precious life and health is. Exceptional so they can endure. Innocent so we can understand that there is no sin that needs to be paid for. Puck pays it forward for the rest of us as she slays the pink dragon.

The Voice of America

The Voice of America

The Last Picture Show ( To Date)

The Last Picture Show Chapter 1

Don't Ever Date A Colored Girl

“Don't ever date a colored girl. They’s all got the clap. They get it from they mamas.” My grandmother’s sage advice to me at five years old.

In spite of all the glamour shots of Spanish moss, and cypress trees, Louisiana is about as shit out of luck as one can get when it comes to being from somewhere. It's hot, muggy, racist, and nobody's family tree has a fork in it. Mine was no exception. My grandparents were first cousins, and I guess that's why we all look alike, have every health condition known to America and some third world countries, Louisiana being among that group in spite of it being positioned at the asshole of the Mississippi River.

Long about the time I was three years old God decided it was time to kill me so I contradicted polio and something called the “sleeping sickness.”   I lived, no thanks to the medical care of the day, and the following year they gave me a polio vaccination. You can't make this stuff up folks. So at five I was deaf in one ear, which still rings till this day,  blind in one eye and walking like a duck, but by golly I was white and that counted for something I guess.

Being white in a Klan based state had its perks, the main one being there was a whole race somewhere just a below white trash, which is what I was. What that amounted to was we could vote without getting lynched. Now we couldn't marry a girl with all her teeth because that meant she'd been to a dentist and obviously was a blue blood, not capable of sexual satisfaction ‘cept niggers raped her. Then, of course then there's the hanging, and Scarlet grows a new hymen just perfect for her fiancé Buddha Montgomery, heir to the gas station and thirty second degree Mason to boot.

All of this meant nothing to a kid growing up in a shotgun shack, living on liver gravy and bread with a flea bitten dog and a yard full of chickens, even in town. The difference between our “neighborhood” and “Nigger town” was the distance between the shacks. Theirs were closer. My most vivid memory was my uncle and dad “gigging” frogs and butchering them in the kitchen sink. All they'd eat were the legs, but they had to cut their heads off anyway, I suppose for the entertainment factor, and I'd watch them eat the frog legs while the heads blinked at them from the counter. They'd actually position the heads so they could see that. And poor old Martin Luther King tried singling “We Shall Overcome” to these guys. He's lucky he wasn't blinking from a sink.

I really did end up in a hospital when I had polio, but for minor ailments like nails in the foot,  cut throats or pneumonia, you'd get taken to some camp in the swamp where a voodoo woman would blow smoke up your ass (literally) or put a penny on the wound so the spirit of Mr. Lincoln could draw out the poison, I crappith thee not!

I went to an all white school, but let me clarify. There’s white, then there's white. The whitest kids had clean clothes and smelled good. I had neither. I usually wore a flannel shirt, and blue jeans with iron on patches. Iron on patches were the rage of the age. We was proud of iron on patches. I'd sit by the ironing board and watch in snake amazement as the patch cleaved to the fabric as if by magic. I really didn't understand the social structure in school, only the fact that certain kids could hit me anytime they wanted to. There was this spoiled brat, Vance, I still remember him, who'd seek me out and beat me up during every recess. One day, in a moment of clarity, I hit him back and he fell, crying, so I hit him again. The teachers had to pull me off, but I think that was possibly the most memorable day of my life, that is until Velma Prigmore took off her blouse under the football stand years later, but I'll save that for later.

We were surrounded by family but none of us liked each other. I remember that every time there was a get together it ended up in a drunken fight with the kids all screaming, followed by that wild ride back to Shreveport across the Red River bridge with the car bouncing off the rails. The only good thing was at that age when you life flashes before your eyes it doesn't take long. I know because every time I got my ass beat my life flashed before my eyes. Usually involving blinking frog’s heads.

My life flashed before my eyes when my grandmother got a hold of me once.  I think I was five. We had this fat little dog named Maybelline. One day I had to pee, and couldn't make it so I peed on the wall in the hall. My grandmother came along, saw the pee, then me, then the dog, picked up a stick and beat puppy shit out of Maybelleline. Wow! Remember, this was the days before internet. Next day, pee a little higher, bigger thrashing for Maybelline. Finally, I decided to kill the dog. I peed about two feet ABOVE my head. Now Maybelline was about the size of a fat possum. I have to give my grandmother credit. She did everything she could to match that dog’s ass with that pee before my life flashed before MY eyes!

Louisiana people will eat just about anything, steak, road kill, all manner of guts, small negroes, you name it. After the frogs I realized my dad was crazy and I generally stuck to liver gravy at home. Wonder Bread was safe. Rice. Beyond that was pot luck. Crawfish. Oh my LIVING God! Etched into my still developing mind was the image of huddles of inbreds sucking crawfish asses. Now, I'm not saying that's wrong, some of you might suck crawfish asses, just not me. And Boudin sausage. I think there might be an FDA warning on that now. For those of you who do t know what that tastes like, take a dirty sock, piss on it, wring it out and stuff it in your mouth. There you go. Don't forget to wash it down with some of dat good ol’ Jax beer.

And Jesus? God DAMN did they have Jesus. My grandmother on my mother’s side, you know, the one who married her cousin, well, when we was living on Laurel Street, she would drag me down the the Baptist church and sit me right up there in the amen pew while this crazy old man screamed that me, and practically everyone else there was going to “hayell” and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it except put something in that plate he had passed around. Jesus scared the piss out of me until I was twenty-eight years old! I was just glad I wasn't Catholic, and double glad I wasn't black, or God forbid a black Catholic. Hell, if I turned out to be one of those I'd have just jumped into the Red River and been done with it.

I was told, when we lived Kaywood Apartments  in Bossier City, to never go near the river.  Now this is how much common sense we had at that age, and survival skills. With God, mosquitoes, teachers, the Klan and your parents all trying to kill you, you knew damn well not to go surfing on the Red River. This factor wore off by the time you got to high school because they were forever fishing teens out from under logs where the gators had stuffed them for seasoning. Oh yeah, we had those too. See the contrast; kids these days don't know any better than to eat a dishwasher tablet and we used to play among the gators. We knew better than to eat a dishwasher tablet, one, because there weren't any, and two, if there had been we'd have ended up down on the bayou with some old black lady blowing smoke up our ass. That's called preventive medicine.

Not all things were bad. School lunches were a bitch. Till this day I have a prejudice. You see, all the school  cooks were big, fat black women, and the result was whatever they come up with. Liver and onions, fried chicken, chicken and rice and courtesy of Huey Long you could eat all you wanted. They all had them Aunt Jemima wraps on their heads, a big smile, and even bigger spoons. They would throw mashed potatoes on the plate and it would drip over the side. Even today I have a hard time eating white woman cooking to the point of giving it to the dog when she looks away. Then you'd come home on the Good Ship Reality and find your uncle and dad in the kitchen with a case of Jax beer and a croak sack full of unfortunate frogs.

Louisiana weather sucks like a French whore, and I know something about French whores because Louisiana is full of them. You can't see the tornadoes for the trees. I still remember the alert coming on the TV, the one you had to slap on the top to get reception from the station five miles away, and a very serious voice saying, “This is a severe tornado alert!” As opposed to the more mundane kind I suppose. Now, you didn't know where it was, couldn't see it, I'm told you could hear it, but that's hard from under the bed. If you lived you'd stay up all night anyway just in case it had babies on the way through. Then the next day, in school, you have a bomb drill because everyone just knew the Russians were gonna bomb Barksdale Air Force Base at any given moment. All of this and the grown ups were worried about the blacks drinking out of the wrong water fountain. But . . . they all had Jesus!

Long about ’56 or ’57 or so my dad took a job in Lake Charles.  I think I was still an only child, in fact I, sure of it because I was alone in the back yard. My sister was born later back in Kaywood Apartments. I don't really remember when my brother came along. On Milton Street I just looked up one day and he was there. Anyway, I remember everyone spoke French. It was muggy, and there was this guy called Uncle Adam who had a new car. There wasn't any air conditioning and that made the ride to school hell. Hurricane Audrey had come roaring through, and dad was a roofer. Seeing as most of the roofs were now out in the Gulf of Mexico  there seemed to be a pot of money to be made so we moved down there. The one thing I remember was driving along the coast where the hurricane came in. You could smell the dead people, and some of them, or parts thereof were stuck on barbed wire fences with crabs crawling on them. Took me forty years to eat crab after that and still only eat Alaskan crabs. I figure they have more moral fiber than Louisiana crabs.
Miles and Miles of Texas

By the time we moved to Texas I was ten years old, and pretty much bat-shit crazy. Had a permanent ringing in my ears, constantly looking over my shoulder for bombs, blacks, and bloody crosses, and the scary part is I left an entire state behind that thought just like me, and they're still THERE! Well, the ones the gators didn't get. Texas was a whole new deal, and I had to work it, which has only taken me fifty-five years, six wives, ten houses and three fortunes.










The Last Picture Show Chapter 2 The Last Picture Show

There was a movie back in the seventies, I think, The Last Picture Show. It was in black and white. A lot of people thought that was for effect, but the truth of the matter is that format exemplified the Texas that I grew up in. Our lives were black and white, both politically and physically. Color movies were rare, and rainbow life was even harder to find.

We had the old pickups, piss warm beer, skinny, smelly girls, and, of course there was one hottie. Ours was Sharon. Sharon even looked like the blonde in the movie, and she had breasts, a bonus for white chicks because uually only Mexican girls had a set of those. She even ended up on the cover of Playboy years later as part of a spread called, “The Girls of Texas.” I never did get to first base with her because I was scared of girls, but she had a horse! I'm not kidding. Right there in the middle of town in her back yard.

Anyway, I digress. I wasn't born in Texas, but I got there as quick as I could which was the morning I woke up, at ten years old, in Texas, and the first thing I noticed was that it was flat. I was in central Texas. This place is like five states, and about the only thing they all agree on is they don't like Yankees i.e. anyone outside of Texas! You can be a wetback and you'll fare better than a New Yorker down here. It's a little better now with the interstate and all, but there's still some lingering resentment to people who talk too fast and and wear sneakers. All but Austin, they wear sneakers there but we have to accept that because we can't move the capitol.

So here I was, in September, looking out of a motel window at hotter than hell Texas!  Texas is hotter than chicken grease. Now, bear in mind that most of the population had to go to a movie to sit in air conditioning. Water coolers were the norm. Your state of the art water cooler had a hose keeping the pan filled, with this toilette bobber turning it on and off, and this little pump thingy pushing the water up, sprinkling the hay filters on the four sides, yeah, you heard me right, hay, and at least in theory that would cool a house. Well, that was a crock of shit, and it smelled like shit. Horse shit! Well, nobody had one of those! What they had was no hose, no pump, second hand, rusting gadget with several tow-headed kids running out with a pan pouring water over moldy hay when granny started wheezing.

It would cool you if you sat right in front of it. Consequently everyone drank beer. Dad drank beer, Mom drank beer, the kids snuck beer, the dog drank beer, EVERYONE drank beer. You could drink beer all day, with sweet tea, tons of water, and never piss. I missed Shreveport.

I had to get into school. Killeen had so few schools we went a half a day. It was totally integrated because there were no schools so I saw my first black kid in school. Didn't affect me. No, I mean it. Made me no difference at all. It was so damn hot nobody cared. We were all just trying to live. There was another tribe there, too. Mexicans. There were aspects to that phenomenon I appreciated.

Back in Louisiana the physical education was recess, maybe a little baseball IF you were up to it, and it wasn't very challenging because we were all white. But TEXAS! You ran until you puked, played baseball with Willie Mays third cousin and then took a shower with some kid named Santos, who SHAVED! By the way, this was the same Santos who slept with your wife years later when you were in the county jail. You'd be in there, and some guy would say, “Hey man! Santos is crawling up on your wife right now!” Well! I went to school with Santos.

In short order I was in Junior High. I was dumber than a box of rocks. I was eating a little better than back in the states , but the heat cancelled that out. Had to walk to school. There were guidelines. If you, say, lived in the next county you'd get a bus, any closer than that, and you were on your own.

In Shreveport if you misbehaved you'd get a stern talking to with a note home. Of course, I was always stupid enough to take the note to my mom, and she'd chew on me, quoting the note, emphasizing the wording as she went, but TEXAS! They got around all that crap, just dragged you out in the hall and beat your ass. Every morning sounded like rifle shots from a firing squad. I must admit it was entertaining when you got a “crier,” and if you got a begger, oh my GOD! We'd hang out the door to see that, and if it was Santos, well, my heart would actually skip a beat.

Now, education. Let me gauge the quality. I didn't learn a God Damn thing in all my years of Texas public schooling except typing, lunch, and how to avoid getting my ass beat. They were actually stupid enough to put a clock in every room so we all learned “clock” real good! Long about the ninth grade I discovered girls. Oh, they were always there it's just that they all had to wear dresses below their knees and looked like Olive Oyle. I fell in love with a girl named Grace Barnes. She looked like Olive Oyle, too, but she had a cute face. It wasn't a torrid romance. She gave me her cake at lunch once, but then I came upon these new creatures we didn't have in Louisiana. MEXICAN GIRLS! When you consider the separation of the races in Louisiana you must understand that Hispanics were not the issue. Everything was black and white. That, and I never saw a Mexican before I came to Texas, except on the John Wayne version of the “Alamo.” But, Texas was completely different. And Mexican GIRLS? Viva Zapata!

For the record, Mexican girls are born fully grown. Just thought you needed to know that. They had to wear the same dresses as the other girls but I'd trade one Mexican calf, even half a calf, for a butt naked Anglo girl any day, all except Sharon, of course, but they all have a brother named Santos.

I didn't excel  in high school except one time. We had this fountain in the commons. Kids threw coins in it. Ok, do the math; fountain full of change, poor white trash, yeah, you get the drift. Anyway, me, Joe Leeth and some other numbnut came up with a plan. I mean there was a lot of money in there, just sitting. So, Joe was gonna hold my belt and I'd brace my feet against the edge of the fountain. The plan was to ease me down and once I was close enough I'd just reach in and scoop up the loot.

We should have paid more attention in physics class and we would've understood the laws of Leverage better. At about forty five degrees my weight increased exponentially, combined with the chickenshit that was holding my belt, and in I went.

I made a perfect human shape in the green slime on the bottom of the fountain. Didn't get a dime.  Came up, and as the water drained out of my ears the laughter rolled in. Well, we all got taken to the office. Of course you know they had to beat all our asses, my wet ass being first. Then they marched us out to the football locker room, because that's where the clothes dryer was, and they beat our asses, then back to class. Life was so much simpler back then. I'm just glad I didn't have hemorrhoids.

I began writing in high school. Don't know what drove me to it, I hated school, and everything that had anything to do with it, but for some reason I could string a story. Beginning in the tenth grade I'd buy a two hundred page spiral notebook and jump right in. When the notebook was full, the book was finished. The first was a collection of short stories. I got my ideas from dreams. Now in old time Texas you dreamed a lot because we had those old timey gas space heaters. They were free standing with no outlet to the outside, just this hot box at the center of the main room. I guess that constituted central heat. Anyway it beat freezing, however, it did put out a fair amount of carbon monoxide, but them old timers weren't worried about that shit. You got thirteen kids what's one, more or less. So, during the school year in your sleep, hovering between heaven and hell, you'd dream, and I wrote it all down.

My first book was a hit. Now this was the sixties and my stories were right up there with the Beatles. Next year I wrote a gangster story, but my best seller was in my senior year. I came up with a plot about this pissed off little nerd (it was autobiographical) who planned to bomb the school cafeteria. God, it was good. It went hour by hour as the bomb ticked away, kids milling around, teachers watching, then BOOM! First responders, last kisses, and lots of drama.

I passed it to my school mates, and all went well until someone gave it to Miss Hornbuckle, who never had a date in her fifty-six years, and she gave it to the principle, Mr. Patterson! From there I went to the office. Patterson had read it, and, of course, first things first, he beat my ass, but then he called the cops. There was an issue with my book. Uh, the bomb was functional. You see, I'd spent the first ten years of my life in Shreveport, Louisiana, with oil drills, dynamite, blasting caps, stuff like that, and it wasn't very hard to run two wires from the bell and striker of an old alarm clock, throw in a lantern battery, run the two wires down to a blasting cap that was tucked inside six sticks of dynamite, alarm goes off, striker hits the bell, sends sparks to the blasting cap, lunch is over. It was a good bomb, too. Blew my ass up!

Well, there I was rubbing my ass in Mr. Patterson’s office when the cars rolled up, the boys got out, and the room filled up with laws. Now, to be a cop in 1960s Texas you had to own a gun, and and your training was not pull it on folks like Bonnie and Clyde. But, a kid with a Big Chief notebook and a bruised butt? Shut the front door. You gotta remember, Killeen was a boring town. In the sixties we couldn't even muster a race riot. I must admit that Mr. Patterson was a tad bit smarter than the  cops. They didn't have a clue so he clued them in. Old bastard! Well, to make a long story short, got my ass busted, missed lunch, and they kept my book as “evidence.” Oh, and Miss Hornbuckle told me I'd never be able to communicate in the English language. What did she know about English? She taught school in Texas!









The Last Picture Show Chapter 3

The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas

What do you do when your whiny son gets cleaned out by a domineering ex-wife, loses his ass, hat, and all his cattle, ends up sitting around crying all the time? Well, my mother got me a job in a whorehouse. My first wife, Charsha was half Navaho, half bitch, and I was one hundred percent stupid. Uh, she was also my first, if you know what I mean.

I'd been injured in a car wreck, and a settlement was looming on the horizon so she fell in love, well for two years at least, then cleaned me out, took my settlement, and ran off with her sister’s husband. Ever see a set of Legos fall apart? Well, that was me.

I went to work in a pool hall. Hey, it's Texas, ok. What did you expect, a nuclear plant? By and by mom got me a job working for Finis Patrick Anderson. Now Pat wasn't, like, Mafia, or anything like that, but he had his ways, ok? He made me the door man in a dance club. It was called the My O My Club, derived from Memorial Yoke of Military Youth. Young soldiers, Vietnam, naked women and beer, yeah, you get used to it. The women were real, but the beer wasn't. Killeen didn't allow bars back then so the GIs were served a beer called Metbrew, which was near beer. The girls would chide the kids into buying them “cocktails” which were five dollars a pop, and were a lot of Seven Up with a shot of Coke, giving the illusion of champagne. These bitches would gulp down the fake cocktails until they peed their pants, or the soldier ran out of money, and then they'd move to the next table. For the uninformed this was a rip off.

And there were dancers. Now they couldn't go totally nude, but topless was cool. Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, YEAH. Dollars in the G String, the whole nine yards. Mom figured this would sober me up but wanna know how stupid I was? Never got laid! I was a good employee. I worked the door for about six months and ended up being a bag man.

There was a division manager who came up from Austin to make deposits at about three in he morning, and my job was to carry a shotgun under a long coat and shoot anyone who approached him.  I crappeth Thee NOT! Never got to shoot anybody, but it was nice to think I could. From there Pat moved me over to his “Head Shop” which sold all paraphernalia required to service the expanding mind. I ran a cash register and carried a Colt Peacemaker under my sport coat, which was my real job. In addition to that I was a driver bringing booze up from Burnet into Killeen for the  City Council to enjoy and that got us a free pass for the completely obvious speak easy adjacent to the head shop that Pat provided for the well heeled of Killeen society. Long about then I couldn't remember my ex’s friggin’ NAME!

Long about this time I fell in love with a sixteen year old girl, ran off to Mexico, married her and it took Pat to save me from hanging. My son, Wilbur came along a year after that, and one of my bonuses was cases of baby formula so you can say that Master Chief Wilbur Witt began life on payoff from the mob.
Now, just because I was moved to a new job didn't mean I could neglect my previous ones. On a typical day I'd count opening cash at the My O My, open the bar, run to Burnet, come back with a load, work the store, and end up dropping the combined deposits at night. The up side was I worked for Pat and if I walked into the Blue Bonnet Café and there was no seating someone decided they were done, pay their check and leave. You know, thinking back, I had a good life. Sometime after this I decided to go to school. I must have been out of my mind.

Killeen was a Wild West Show in the seventies. There was a shooting gallery in the space between two buildings where there were .22 rifles using “shorts” for target shooting, and naturally the soldiers would line up to demonstrate their skill only to be out done by a pimp using a personal .25 automatic. I considered automatics to be for queers so my peacemaker was a single action .357 magnum, and brothers and sisters, I could use it! My stripes never really changed.  After owning several autos from cheap 9’s to Smith and Wesson 40’s, I settled back on the same old 1880’s revolver I carried in 1974. I've heard all the “firepower” arguments, and seen cops shoot some guy five hundred and seventy times for having an expired driver license, and my advice is learn to shoot, bitch!

I learned from the best, pimps, bagmen, contractors, whores and an occasional cop who knew what he was doing. The cops knew we were all packing, but there were very few shootouts. An armed society is a polite society.

Got arrested one time for running the speak easy. The cops had to bust our balls every now and then to please the electorate, and convince everyone that the police chief was honest, which he wasn't, he was gay and Pat owned him, but I got busted. Ended up in a holding tank, and the company lawyer, the right honorable Joe Barron showed up drunk in his Dingo boots and got out in the cell with me. His partner had to spring us both. Eventually he whole thing was dropped for lack of evidence. Joe represented me in my divorce and showed up in a pair of Bahama Shorts and a straw hat and Judge Black made him stand in the corner for ten minutes for contempt of court. You can't make this stuff up, folks.

















The Last Picture Show Chapter 4
Wives, Ex-Wives, and a few Bitches I'd like to forget

I ain't even gonna lie to you, I've been married six times with divorces between them . . . mostly. I never did figure women out, that's why I quit getting married. I hate winter divorces. The days are longer in the summer, and them nights don't  close in on you near as bad. Only married one Texas girl, Charsha. She was half Apache, half black, and all bitch. I was in love. Like a told you, she was my first. Had to try twice before I got it right, but after doing the deed I considered that if I could pull this off everything was gonna be alright.

Charsha was a cheat. She screwed everybody but the milkman, and the only reason she missed him is because we didn't have one. She was tough as a boot, thin as a rail, and she could step to the Cotton Eyed Joe. I think she still had her baby teeth because they were still falling out. She let me have sex with her on Tuesdays and Fridays because those were her bowling nights, and that meant something, I guess. I think she had an orgasm with me, but she may have been faking that night. I was snake amazed when she left me, and she really packed it in my butt. I came home, and she calmly told me, “I'm leaving you in twenty days.” That was on December 5th, 1973. She timed it so as to leave me on Christmas.

I took it well. I cried like a little bitch. Oh, I mean I cried! Got a nose bleed over it. Of course she zipped the panties up. I didn't expect that. So each day I'd get an update. She tell me she was leaving me in nineteen, eighteen, seventeen days, and so on, I’d bawl like a baby, and she'd laugh in my face. Millions of gay men can't be WRONG! Finally I snapped, and pitched her out the front door, regretting it almost immediately as she laughed at me through my own teeth, the ones I'd bought her, stripped my house of everything including the Christmas Tree, took the dog and left.

So, there I was single. I was totally lost. I was never cool, but even less cool without any balls, yeah, she took those too. I moped around the house for about two months. Considered suicide, but Charsha took my gun. She left the pet chicken, Henrietta for some morbid reason, and I'd cry on the bird’s shoulder every night. I'd talk to Henrietta, she'd say, “Buck buck,” and shit on the floor. Hey, it's Texas, ok?

As luck would have it I met Sandra. Sandra was from the same neighborhood, and by that I mean literally born a block away. She had her own teeth, and could cook. We hooked up. Unfortunately I was seeing Brenda at the same time. Well, Brenda ran away from home, HEY, she was almost of age, and came over, hence Sandra and I were a thing of the past, but she DID leave her blue jeans as a reminder.

Like I said, Brenda wasn't exactly street legal, but it was Texas, and Mexico was just around the corner so . . .  We took off to Mexico and got married. I think I'd divorced Charsha by this time, no, I'm sure of it because she married one of the guys she was seeing when we were married. I called Joe Barron, my lawyer and told him what I'd done, and he said he could cut me a deal. With taking an underage girl across an international border, changing my citizenship, and getting married, if I'd turn myself in he could probably fix it to where I'd could be buried somewhere that they wouldn't desecrate my grave. I took the deal.

I didn't understand why Brenda’s father didn't kill me, indeed fronted a Texas marriage, but seven years later I saw it clearly. Now, I'm not going to run Brenda down because she died, leaving me two sons, but I will say that during this time I partnered up with Ted, we went in with his grandfather on a trailer park (hey, it's Texas) and after brief instructions from Ted on various ways to collect rent in a white trash trailer park we screwed everything that didn't have a husband on top of it. To say my marriage was strained would be putting it lightly. Enter Mary!

Mary was a whore. What's more, she was a New York whore, and that's about the whoriest whore you can get. Still, she had her ways. I was in love! God DAMN was I in love. I was plumb stupid I was so in love. Plane trip to New York, eight hundred dollar phone bills, you name it. I decided to go see her in New York. Brenda waited, packed my bags, saw me off at the airport, and then left the SHIT out of me! Bye bye wife, bye bye kids, bye bye dog.

Now I was upset, but not at losing Brenda. Upon returning to Texas, Mary hooked up with some guy from Long Island and put the wood to me too. I drove my truck as far into the woods as I could, walked about a mile, and sat down to die. I might need to see a doctor about that part of my personality, but anyway, after an hour or so, I went back to town, moved into a double wide (hey, it's Texas,) and shacked up with three dancers, or rather, three dancers and a short fat dyke who was madly in love with all three. It was then I began to believe in polygamy.

I must say we had a beautiful relationship(s). They weren't the least bit jealous so long as the rent was paid, there was food in the fridge and the air conditioner was forever on. My only problem was that Brenda slammed me with child support, and Judge Black didn't see eye to eye with my lifestyle. When I told him I could barely afford a place to live he assured me that the following Monday I'd have three hundred dollars or he would find me a place to live. I really didn't like his tone so I split for Mexico.

Eventually I had Joe strike me a deal so I could pay support weekly. As luck would have it my ex, Brenda, fell on hard times and my sons came to live with me. As luck would have it I was allowed to gain custody, BUT I had to be married, so, I married Barbara, an old barfly, (hey, it's Texas.) Barbara wasn't too bad. She took care of the boys, and cooked quite well. She had this jailhouse tattoo of an octopus with its tentacles extending up her inner arms and down her inner thighs. I decided to become celebrate. This was also the time I picked up my drinking habit that I nourish to this day.

After two years I met Pam. We were roughly the same age, had two boys each, she liked to cook, and we became friends. Oh, I ran Barbara down the road. I was getting schooled at this by now and we both took it well. She was happy to be rid of my boys, and I was happy for her to move on.

Pam was my last. We raised our boys, had careers, bought houses, wrote books, lived on a golf course, two actually, and she left me in 2010. Hey, it’s Texas!

What It Takes To Be. Writer

In case you haven't noticed it, I'm prone to melancholy moods. You don't have to be crazy to be a writer, but it sure helps. To begin with you have to convince people that you are a writer, especially family. I mean all those chowderheads who can't compose a grocery list, but they have all the advice on how to write a best seller. If you survive that you can move on to phase two. 

You'll never make any money being a writer. It's not in the cards. The house always wins. The best you can ever hope for is to etch out an existence where you pay the bills and then lie to your family. I hate it when someone asks, “How much MONEY have you made?” Nobody asks a plumber that. Think about it. How much? Since when? This year? Since I got out of high school? To the penny? How much money have YOU made, not counting what you borrowed from me!

So why do we do it? There's something about expressing yourself that is therapeutic. When you pour your heart into words your heart doesn't hurt so bad, and just the act of putting it all down explains things to YOU! The public be damned. What to they know. That's why I edit so much. It's not that I screw up, it's that the point I'm trying to make becomes clearer until even I can understand it. Then you publish. 

Publish. What a joke. Any thirteen year old school girl can do that now. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, they all hold the promise of instant fame, but the song remains the same; How much MONEY have they made? So, there it is. Why do we do it? We do it because in fifty years, after we stop stinking in the ground, some schoolgirl will read it in some classroom, and while all of her classmates are staring out through the window, waiting on lunch, the muse will land on her shoulders and another writer will be born. She will step quietly into the melancholy world bequeathed to her by those select few cursed to walk with the pen.

Anarchy

Anarchy, A New Beginning For America

The future always has a way of asking questions about the past. A future that does not know its past is like a bastard child who wants to know who its father was. Later, when they start asking the tough questions about what happened to America, they won’t be about what happened, but why.

Looking back at my wonder years, I am astonished at the lawless place America has become. With our population skyrocketing, filling our cities to capacity, and turning our small to mid-sized towns into cities or metro areas, we have fewer protections from evil doers, both crime entrepreneurs, and corporate felons than we did 30 years ago. In the case of the former, there are an inadequate number of police, and even fewer who possess any real competence, so the cops lock up the stupid criminals of which there is no shortage, leaving us at the mercy of the smarter thugs, of which there is a similar number.

In the case of the latter, long drawn out court procedures result in those few corporate offenders unfortunate enough to have been caught with a smoking gun in hand and registered to them to pay fines minuscule compared to the profits gained from their crimes, and an agreement that they may admit to no wrongdoing. Looking backward at our past as a nation, we know what happened. It's not so hard to understand that a fledgling nation with vast natural resources, and a relatively small population would become a leader in world markets, and a magnet to overseas labor and investment.

The what and the why match perfectly. No real detailed history of that period is needed, because logic holds the whole premise together as seamlessly as a roman arch supports itself. Later in our history it was necessary for Presidents, then our undisputed leaders, to curb the power of those few ultra wealthy men who had become known as the robber barons. Teddy Roosevelt was arguably the first to truly challenge the threat of vertical integration by getting laws passed forbidding monopolies, as well as a raft of laws making it difficult for big money to grow so large that it threatened our democracy. During the tenure of FDR, a distant cousin of Teddy’s, it became necessary that president Roosevelt pass a series of laws prohibiting banks and investment houses from colluding to make a few people fabulously wealthy at the expense of impoverishing the rest of America. Income tax rose on the wealthy during this era as well, putting a healthy curb on the nascent fascism growing in the heart of the world's greatest democracy.

Despite an attempt at a treasonous coup, Henry Ford, Prescott Bush and some other notable billionaires were stymied by Snively Butler, and America continued to thrive. Again, form beckons to function, and this piece of history needs little explanation. Following these events, a period of discord fell upon us. Still our undisputed leader President Truman ordered the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why he did this is at odds with logic. Yes, it's true that the lives of American soldiers were saved by the bombing, but they accomplished nothing even close to the destruction wrought but Curtis LeMay and his technique of firebombing. So here, at this point some tough questions emerge. The “why” questions. Form and function seem to parallel rather than merge.

Later, during the Eisenhower administration, a shadowy but robustly powerful man by the name of Robert Moses emerged. Powered by big oil, and the big three auto makers, he blazed an unlikely trail across the landscape of the American future dictating that the automobile was to be the dominant, if not only form of transportation used by Americans. With no mandate, no referendum, indeed in secrecy, he insured that America would build a wildly expensive infrastructure of highways, city streets, and automobile pathways that would not just compete with, but virtually eliminate trains, subways, and buses. As far as self locomotion such as cycling or walking were concerned, citizens were, and still are invited to travel at their own risk. Now the connection between form and logic become fuzzy. These measures enriched the lives and furthered the agendas of ordinary citizens how?

 As we were to see, these were tough questions, and there was little appetite to unearth the why of these actions. After a brief squabble over who might be elected and allowed to live out their presidencies it became clear that our presidents were no longer our supreme leaders. Now shadowy figures prowled the corridors of power. King makers, and would be dictators. For a brief shining moment America united its leadership of religion and government under the single figure of President Carter. Vilified to this day by ignorant fools who do so because they read it on a bathroom wall somewhere, President Carter managed to integrate our future and our past, and came within an ace of solving the conflict in the Middle East. Walking the walk, instead of talking the talk, our great Christian leader was nonetheless deposed by a likable candidate whose entire administration was carried out by active CIA operatives, and Wall Street magnates. Logic broke down as far as the American vision was concerned, unless you were among those who profited by these maneuvers. But for every day workers, folks trying to get ahead, not just survive, it was poison. But we do have answers to the tough questions of why from this era. Maines electric and their financing partners, the activities of the economic hit men, and their CIA funded jackals make it clear that vested money, and vulture capitalism were in the ascendant.

Fast forward to 30 years ago. The libertarian party declared war against taxes, government regulations, government oversight, any and all government agencies, and assistance to the poor. Their platform even called for the abolishment of the military. For once, form was nowhere near function. At theosbranch we inform our bastard present as to who is our father. We name names, and explain why. Visit us soon.