The Book of Jerry Maya

In 1010, so sayeth the prophet:

● In a stunning medical breakthrough, doctors perform a testicle transplant on a California man who lost his in a skiing accident. The donor is a deceased sex offender who had himself vouluntarily castrated in 1972 to avoid a lengthy prison term and had his testicles frozen by scientists who believed they might come in handy someday. A month after the transplant, as a result of a much anticipated paternity test, the recipient is arrested for serial rape in several cold cases. As a consequence of DNA testing, nine black men and two Mormons are released from prison. When asked by a newsman what he was going to do now that he was free, one of the men, ninety-five years old now and serving a twenty year sentence already for shoplifting baby aspirin at the same time that the offense he was tried and convicted for occurred, says bitterly, “I’m gonna go to Disneyland. And f--k the first heterosexual I see.” Rush Limbaugh says, “We might have jumped the gun here a little.”

● In an Ultimate Fighting Championship match, James “Kimura” Korne goes to the mat in an incredible tangle with Collie “Flair” Eere, and grabs an arm and applies a twist to it— the hold for which he is nicknamed—and it is so vicious that he fractures it. But it is his own arm, and he submits himself! He has to tell Flair to lend him a hand and tap himself out on his own shoulder! In the greatest Solomonic decision ever inside the octagon, referee Felix “Frank” Furter, declares Kimura the winner.The crowd is so incensed that even Flair’s parents leave in disgust. Dana White rushes the ref and yells, “What the f---k made you come to that decision? I’ll have your license for that!” And Frank says, “Jimmy cracked Korne; and I don’t care!” Says Flair sadly, “My mother’s gone away.”

● Under pressure from the NRA, President Obama signs a national concealed weapons law. As a consequence, incidents of gunplay hit an all time low—but the casualties from pistol whippings surpass those from car accidents and heart disease. At a Starbucks, In response to a complaint from a rabbí that his latte cóchon tastes funny, the counterman tells him that there is a little bacon in it, and when the rabbi angrily reaches in his breast pocket to pull a handkerchief to puke in it, five customers draw guns and start blasting away. Passersby, viewing the mayhem inside, draw their pieces and join in. The firefight goes out into the street. There are two hundred and seventy-nine casualties, all from friendly fire. The rabbi escapes without a scratch. An NRA spokesman says, “If there had been more guns there, this never would have happened. That Jew was lucky. Some people just won’t arm themselves.” A representative of The Guinness Book of World Records waits and takes notes outside the ICU.

● Ammóna “Ruca” Peón, a Latina with dual citizenship, is forced to sell her estates in Mexico and the U.S. because of the economy, and petitions President Obama for a bailout, which the President grants. She is the owner of several banks in the Cayman Islands, and has been considered for a spot on the Forbes list. In answer to criticism that Ruca is the U.S.’s biggest importer of drugs and that her banks are laundries for drug money, Obama says, “To quote Ronald Reagan: ‘Well. There you go again.’ My legacy shall read, (pause) that my policies, (pause) are both culture and gender blind. A latino woman now sits on the Supreme Court. And the Chinese built an empire on laundries. How else can we infuse cash flow into a troubled economy, (pause) if we don’t have anybody to clean it? And if we, (pause) allow the trade in illegal drugs to dwindle, we’ll have to lay thousands, (pause) of DEA agents off. What kind of Americans, (pause) would that make us?” (applause).

● Susan Boyle and Keith Richards colloborate on an album which becomes an international sensation. They write the theme song, called “The World Needs Me Like I Need It” for the film biography of Janet Reno called, “I Fought the Law, and The Law Lost,” which, both the song and the film, are nominated for academy awards, and while performing the song at a Command Royal Performance, Keith falls asleep at the guitar and the screech from the tone control knob straightens out the frizz in Susan’s hair. The Queen is heard to say, “Are they British subjects?” The episode puts a bitter end to Keith and Susan’s partnership. Susan sniffs, “I took him to church, and he took his own bottle of wine to the communion.” When interviewed by Rolling Stone, Keith blows his nose into a white handkerchief that takes on a sooty look, and says, “th bi wen its hap omey! Ah roe ah theh gu so fa th ca, an ssh tur a me!. N o fa in wa I go na pu ah wi sshi la tha. Ah bra ma obahl th d pahee. I own nee at ska!”

● A friend of Tiger Woods sues Tiger for “alienation of affection", because he says that his boa constrictor won’t eat and just sits coiled up by the phone after one of Wood’s visits.

● An eleven year old seventh grader is caught writing “hearts and flowers” graffiti on St. Valentine’s day with a red crayola on the wall of his teacher’s classroom, and is expelled for life. In the ensuing battle for reinstatement between the mother and the school, the mother argues that it’s not the boy’s fault—that he’s just seeking love after being moved around to so many schools. A reporter, smelling a story here, investigates, and finds that the boy has had sex with every one of his teachers from the third grade on. Asked by the reporter what he was trying to put on the wall with his crayola, the boy says, “I was trying to say, ‘Mrs. Jones has a nice pudendum’.” The reporter says, “Why would you write something like that?” The boy says. “My fifth grade teacher said it wasn’t nice to use the “p” word.” And when the reporter says, “But pudendum is a “p” word,” the boy says, “Oh. Man, I can’t wait until I learn to read so that I can write a book telling other guys how to tell which teacher’s gonna be a bum f---k.”

●The legalization of marijuana has all but made road rage extinct in Los Angeles. The freeways go into gridlock for eight days while drivers chill out in their cars. The skyhigh demand for onion rings has brought the Mexican mafia into the market for Vidalias, and McDonald's french fries are being sold on the street for a c-note a pop.

●Oprah returns to TV with her show. Her first guests are Brett Favre, Lance Armstrong, and Kim Clijsters.

● In a dazzling remake of Frankenstein, James Cameron creates a modern age laboratory centered by the new version of Windows called “The Prometheus” and which infuses the monster with life- giving gamma rays trapped from the asteroid Apophis which Cameron, in colloboration with the Russians has deflected to a flyby through a gravitational keyhole over the earth close enough to throw sparks. The monster, played by the exhumed body of Leon Trotsky, awakens and says, “”Who the f—k threw that ax?” while Doctor Frankenstein, played by Snoop Dog, cries, “Man! It zizzlin’ like a thizzl’ thru’ a whizzl’! Man! It ’zizzlin’ like a thizzl’ thru’ a whizzl’!” The bride, played by the corpse of Carrie Nation dressed in Versace leather and chains, approaches the monster saying, “There’ll be no drinking in my house!” The monster takes his revenge on the doctor and his family by making them sit through repeated screenings of “Citizen Kane.” The audience is required to wear special lead-lined over-alls to the premier. The popcorn pops in the bag by itself close to the screen. The movie is nominated for twenty-five oscars, including one for best whore on the set, the leading contender being Ron Jeremy, who is an anatomy consultant for the picture, and says, “Man, putting a Trojan on something that’s been shriveled for a hundred years is the greatest challenge I’ve ever faced in entertainment.” The flick is rated “R.”

Noe.

Tonto

But many first shall be last;

The bay that the Mexicans call Corpus Christi is two days behind us now. The winds are coming from our right shoulder, following us south, and in the morning, I rise first out of a cold sleep among the tall grasses; then the men rise and stand motionless, like burnt trees, smelling something in the air that is not man. They have not eaten since we began. They spit out the corn cakes and beans that the old one calls friar food—that makes them weak. The five children are forced to eat them by the women: the two that are left.

The riders following us gave up the chase. We are as far inland as we have ever been, away from our beloved sea, forced to take cover against armed men on horseback. The days are getting colder, and there has been no fire in two nights. It is dangerous now to try to take an animal from one of the ranches. There are only four warriors left, and they cannot risk another chase, or fight off men carrying the long guns.

The men walk in a line abreast but separated from each other, and the rest of us remain until the old man, walking between them and us, gives us the signal to follow. We will not start running today, since there is no one behind us anymore. Still, the men continue straight, walking south. But they have sensed something. The sun feels warm as it comes closer through the morning. When the old man turns and gives the signal to be quiet, I see it first because I am in front: the oldest of the boys—and soon, I see him turn again, and I signal for the others to stop, too. The group falls to the ground quickly.

There is no mother to son, no sister to brother, husband to wife, father to daughter here. This is what is left from the Tejános’ guns. The women pass out scraps of food, but the two other boys refuse it, as I do. The girls are forced to eat.

One of the men runs back to the group and motions for me to follow him. At the front, the leader tells the rest of us what we’re to do. The old man wants to take the point, but he is told that I will. The old man says that I don’t even have the hair above my horn—although I am starting some stubble. One of the men says that I will grow it today.

I circle downwind as I’m told, and I make no more sound than a snake. When I am far in front, I turn to see over the grasses from a squat, and the first sight of the horses makes my heart beat inside my chest like a caged animal. There are more horses than there are what’s left of all of us. It is I who will break first.

And I do. This has not been done within my memory. Two men will run toward the herd on each side of it, and the old man will hold up the rear. I must tell from the thunder of the hooves when they are close to me, and then I must turn and run across them to suspend them for that heartbeat when the men can bring one down. If any man can hang on to a horse, the man next to him joins in to help him bring it down. In their weakened condition, it will take two.

The horses are too fast for me, and when I can no longer keep myself from turning, they are right on top of me. I was told to get away from them to keep from getting killed, but I turn again and run with them, and now, as a mare comes alongside, I have only one chance to grab her, and I do. Now I am being spun around, and as my head goes black, the last thing I see is two arms going next to mine around the mare’s neck. The feel of the ground when I hit it, is like the feel of the bed of rushes that I have not slept on in so long.

I wake to muffled laughter, and a fire. At first, I think that the woman who comes forward with cooked meat is my mother. But I saw my mother die. My father saved me from being dead with her. And one day, I saw him die, too. One of the men comes forward and pulls down the cloth around my waist and says, “Yes. There is a little bit.”

After two days, We come to the river with full bellies, but the men say that it will not be enough to take us to the west, where there will not be many people. We will follow the river for the water.

And in the morning, the men kill two cattle and all of us help to cut them up and skin them. The women start a fire when the men go out to scout, but when the men return, they put the fire out roughly. It is dusk.

The woman comes toward me with food in her hand when I see the flash and puff of smoke coming from the dark, before I hear the bullet hit her and the boom of the long gun. She is thrown into me on her knees, and I try to raise her and pull her along, but the leader grabs me by the arm and swings me, saying, “Run!” and I see him pulling at her before I turn amid the crackling of the guns and the yelling of the men in the language of the priests..

I run alone, and when the guns stop booming, I can hear the shouts of men and the pop of the short guns now, and again. There is one horse behind me and its sound pushes me beyond my strength, until I see the open door, and I go to it like a rabbit to the hole. Dogs bark outside, and the horses in the stalls rear and snort when I run to the far corner to hide.

Fear is a river in my head, and the darkness comes again. I awaken to men talking in strong talk.

“Get out of my barn, Bernárdo!”

“There is one of them in here!”

“He is welcome! But you’re not! Coming like a thief in the night!”

“I’m not the thief! Look! There he is!”

I get up and run and hit my head on the crossboard of the stall and fall. I get up and try to run again but fall again from the blackness in my head.

One man says, “¡Míra! ¡Está tónto!”

Another says, “No. He’s not crazy. He’s a fucking Kronk!”

There are six men standing over me. Two of them are holding torches. One of them wears no hat. He says, “Don’t touch him! This is my property! Get off of it!”

“He’s a fucking Kronk, Rubén!”

“He’s on my property!”

“Aw, hell! Let me cut his fucking throat!” He moves toward me with a knife in his hand.

“Hold it right there, Bernardo!” Ruben says, and points a gun at him that he pulled from his waist, that makes one clicking sound in his hand. “There is one ball for each of you in this Colt pistol. Now you get off my land, or I will drag your bodies off of it with ropes and mules!”

“It was your property he stole!“ one of the men says. He throws a rolled-up cowhide in front of Ruben.

“There is a difference between a man who’s hungry, and a thief. This one is neither. He is a boy. Get off my land!”

They turn to walk away. Bernardo says, “This here’s the only one of them left. I hope you’re the last man who gets his throat cut in his sleep by a murdering Karankáwa.”

“I’ll make sure that I know where he’s at all the time, and that neither of us ever turns his back on you.”

I feel the strength of my father in this man, and of the leader’s. I rise when he motions with his hand for me to follow him. He says, “¿Háblas Españól?”

“Sí.” I have understood the things that he said to the other men.

He says, “Well, I am the first of my kind and you’re the last of yours. We have much to learn from each other,” in a language that I don’t understand. Then, in Spanish, he says, “We have much to talk about. I need a drink of águardiénte. You can have buttermilk. I wish you were old enough to drink something stronger.”

“I took a horse down with my bare hands. And I have stubble on my horn.”

…and the last first.

Noe.

What came ye out in the wilderness to see?...

The church at San Salomón is small and remote—as is the village itself—and would be unworthy of its designation except for the figure of la Vírgen on its altar. Legend has it that She was carried two hundred miles on the back of the priest who was tied to Her and forced out into the wilderness after his church was burned by rampaging regulators from the Lincoln County Wars on their way south fleeing Pat Garret, or the army either one. The skeptical say that Salomon had not even been a priest, and that he’d carved the Figure himself. The faithful say that the outlaws forced el pádre Salomón up the Guadalúpe Mountains at gunpoint after tying a wooden cross made of two rope-bound aspen logs to his back; and that on his descent down the southern slope of the Guadalupes, the cross transformed itself into the Virgin. The rope was the same one now coiled seven times around the waist of the cassock that She wears. Salomon, naked except for leather sandals and a loin cloth, built the altar and the room that houses Her out of adobe bricks that he molded himself by hand and around which succeeding generations of the folks that came to pray to Her from the surrounding farms and ranches built the church. Salomon appointed himself chief caretaker and pastor, and performed his version of the mass until he died at a very advanced age, but not before he had selected his successor.

Salomón García, named for and baptized by the padre himself, was a pious boy, so much so that he would cover his own head the way his mother did when they entered the church. He was seven when old Salomon died. The villagers started calling him Sally and that was how he became known. It was a happy time for everybody. The village never grew much, but it got along. Sally was taking care of the church without his mother’s help by the time that he was ten years old. A priest would come from El Paso twice a year and marry those that needed it, baptize the new children, and perform confirmations and communions and what-not. The Church itself never did make a decision about the miracle at San Salomon. Sally left for the seminary when he turned eighteen.

He returned four years later in white collar and black robe, a fully ordained priest. But the church came and took him, and gave him a different assignment. A year later, he returned to San Salomon drunk and in mufti. The church keeps secrets from the people that some men can’t bear; it never bothers itself with learning much about men except the best ways to make them heel.

That day, Sally spent maybe an hour inside the church before he came out, and put a chain with a padlock on the front doors and left San Salomon on the road leading west. His mother spent half the day on her knees in front of the locked church praying, before she made her decision to follow her son. She did not think that he would survive without her.

But she never caught up to him. One day, two years later, she abruptly began the trek back home. It took the woman, alternately known as la lloróna, la lechúza, la brúja, la hija del diablo, la curandéra—and sometimes just Crazy Maggie—three years to take the long way around from Seattle to San Salomon. They say she cured a young boy of seizures in Fresno, and a little girl of paralysis in Thermal, and restored the sight of an old man in Tucson. They also said that she turned a man into a pig in Las Cruces. She was rumored to have answered, “It requires magic to do that?” It had been a learning experience for her, too.

Because Sally woke up in Denver one day to a vision of a man saying, “Go home and take care of my mother.” Sally asked, “Who is your mother?” and the man said, “Who is yours?” Sally’s attempts to temper his own soul into a more perfectable clay had left him sick and torn. Some say that he enlisted and fought in the war. By now he could hardly remember whether he was seeking forgiveness or revenge, or understanding.

But now he made what he intuited to be a beeline to San Salomon, and it was a hard enough task, but nothing as formidable as the Guadalupes Mountains, at the foot of which the same man appeared to him in a dream and said, “Take this cross. It will help you climb over. I would give you a bigger one if I thought you could carry it.”

On Sunday morning, In San Salomon, Sally turned onto the street leading to the church, and for all he knew Maggie might have been kneeling in the dirt since the day five years before, he had turned for one last look and seen her there.

Maggie had gotten home at dawn that Sunday and gone straight to the church where she had knelt down in the dirt to pray. A man helped her up and said, “Go inside.” The doors were open.

Maggie said, “Who takes care of the church now?”

The man said, “Your son has never let anyone else but him take care of it, Doña María. He is coming up the hill now to say the mass, the way he has done every Sunday since you’ve been gone.”

Noe.

afliction is a treasure...

when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language;

John Donne.

Rudólfo Verdádes lived what the most charitable among us might have called a useless life, if we called it a life at all. He abrupted as a young boy into the conciousness of the small Southwestern community in which, for all anyone knows, he spent his whole life, emerging from one alleyway and disappearing down another, collecting—so they say—odds and ends of things people discarded so that he could sell or trade them for food and drink. No one knew where he slept, or where he changed the ragged but clean clothes that he wore, except for Doña Oliváres, who was as much a mystery as Rudy was, showing up in town already widowed but with five daughters whom she detested, and who ran off one by one with the first man who would have her.

The old woman washed and ironed people’s clothes and cleaned their houses to provide for the family, and even after all the girls were gone, they would still drop their clothes off for Doña Olivares to do for them. It was the price she paid for keeping them at arm’s length. But she would look for Rudy, and say, “Come by the house. I have some shoes for you.” And he wasn’t too proud to wear them. Nor the pants that didn’t always fit just right.

He started drinking early. Booze was cheap then. When he was fifteen, he already looked old enough to buy it himself, and it didn’t take but a few pop bottles for the refund, a bycycle tire or chain, or some other found bric-a-brac to net him enough coins for a bottle of “Sweet Lucy.” People might have suspected that Rudy stole, but he was never caught at it. During the “50s” when rock and roll became king, and it blared out of every souped up heap in town, business was brisk with hot rodders always on the lookout for a fancy hood ornament, a radio, or a nice set of hubcaps, and Rudy had the knack of always finding the right item for you. In later years, it was said that Rudy was the only one who could come up with that very special set of spinners that were so rare that you never heard of but one rod ever sporting them at any one time. Rudy gave that business up before more than one furrowed brow ever came to more than that.

He started selling blood when he was eighteen. He didn’t really have to, but it was easier than scavenging, and they gave him an extra five dollars because he had a very rare blood type. In fact, one day, Doña Olivares came to find him and took him to her house where a big car picked him up and took him to the hospital. It seemed that a very important man in the state had a very rare blood disease and a very rare blood type: Rudy’s type. He was more than willing to help. They gave him a few dollars and enough food to last him a week. And he might have been the first to wear scrubs on the street, although nobody ever mistook him for a doctor on a cigarette break. It wasn’t the last time this happened. People came for him to escort him to the blood bank on a regular basis. Food and a little money would be left for him at Doña Olivares’s house. Rudy became the healthiest drunk in town. This was more or less his life except for the couple of months that he disappeared and came back sporting army fatigues and combat boots. During a brief period, he even mowed a lawn now and then, but gradually he metamorphosed back to his old self. The boots lasted him two years.

Rudy lived through the upheavals of the 60s, the moaning and groaning of the seventies and the numbing blare of the 80s and the 90s without changing one bit. There was just something about the world order that never appealed to him. But except for Doña Olivares, he outlived all his sources. His externals weren’t the same. There is just something utterly disheartening and futile about crushing aluminum cans for money to buy alcohol with. The world had dragged him along as an adjunct to its purpose. Now he was just the equal of any sixty-eight year old man who was judged not for his aspirations or lack of them, but for his years: the age at which the world looks at you as a liability.

One day, walking through the city dump, he found a velvet painting of a famous rock and roll star, and a spinner. He knew where to sell the painting. He didn’t know why he kept the spinner. When he reached the tavern where a young man that he knew would be a sure buyer for an item of this sort, the young bartender was already dead, shot through the heart by the same fellow who was stuffing money from the till in his pocket and aiming the gun at the young son who had just brought his father some fast food for his lunch. Rudy cracked the hold-up man's head with the spinner, and the thief returned the favor on his way down by shooting Rudy.

In the hospital, the doctor told Doña Olivares that Rudy wasn’t going to make it. He had a bullet through his head.

“You know, you have the same blood type as he does. You could use some of it yourself.”

The old lady had cancer. She said, “Haven’t you sucked out enough of his blood already?”

“Rudy has a living will, Mrs. Olivares. We’ll keep him alive as long as we can, but every one of his internal organs is of great value to some individuals who are of great service to this country and who have the same blood type as he does. Rudy won’t awaken from his coma.”

Doña Olivares went home and locked herself in and never went outside the house again.

Rudy’s liver is somewhere in Washington, his heart is in the state capital, and his marrow is inside the bones of the son of a drug dealer in Mexico. The young boy whose life he saved in the bar joined the army. And somebody somewhere is looking through Rudy’s corneas right this minute at the shit we’ve made out of this planet.

He never got around this good before he died. He wasn’t worth a damn—but you know, he could always come up with just the right item you were looking for.

Noe.

...but, whose friend are you?

“Such is thy recompense, friend of mankind, for thyself a god, and not reverencing the anger of the gods, thou didst endow with humans not their due.” Aeschylus

Cuáte was around nine years old when Don Juán Arelláno and his wife, Doña Lola adopted him, a little old maybe, but so were they. They had not been able to have children in their twenty years of marriage. The man from the agency said that he didn’t know where Cuate’s name (which is either short for Cuauhtémoc or else means “twin” or “buddy”) came from, but that that was all that he was ever called since he was found on the front step. Juan and Lola were happy to have him, and they decided to call him Quetzalcoátl Deo Arelláno, for which Cuate could very well be short for. Juan was a secret wag of sorts.

And as usually happens under these circumstances, three months later, Lola became pregnant. Cuate took famously to the baby, José, when he was born, and rather than jealous, became very protective of him. Happiness reigned in the Arellano household. But outside, happiness is an unholy grail. Many people (for whom maybe Gerónimo Séis, Juan’s brother-in-law, might have appointed himself spokesman) were not pleased with the attitude of the Arellanos.

“It is as much as blasphemy to name a foundling such as that for the god of our ancestors,” Geronimo said.

“And which ancestors are those, Jerry?” Juan said, “the ones that lined defenseless people up for miles and tore their beating hearts out of their chests, or the ones that brought guns and horses and sucked the land dry of its riches and installed eternal poverty and forced an alien religion on the native-born that keeps them hopeless and humiliated and hungry?”

“Our great heritage should not be brought down to such a trivial and cynical form,” Jerry said.

“And which heritage is it today, Jerry? The Aztec, the Mixtec, Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican?” Juan said.

Because Jerry was an activist, and a member of every group that carried a banner for Hispanic (or Latino, or Spanish, or Chicano, or the Téco du jour) causes. He wrote “tracts” and “treatises” and “treatments” on ‘the Honduran issue,” the East L.A. issue, “the Puerto Rican issue,” (et cetera) for La Gente Unida and La Rasa Unida and La Prensa Unida (et cetera) and such things, using such statements as, “Under threat of pocket isolation by the forces of hyper-colonialism, the Latin descendancy must form a Pan-Hispanic ethno-methodology to prevent the fragmentation of our peoples into splintered threads of techno-induced cognitive dissonance,” whatever that meant.

Juan said, “You shouldn’t take life so seriously.”

Jerry said, “Our traditions shouldn’t be allowed to become a joke that allows for the names of our ancestral gods to be given to curs.”

Juan said, “Jerry, you don’t know a real cause when you see one.”

Jerry’s brother, Arnúlfo, got drunk one day, and while Juan was at work, went in and tried to rape Lola. Amid screams that nobody responded to, Cuate jumped to Lola’s defense, doing the best he could, and sunk his teeth into Arnulfo’s thigh. The bastard took his gun out and shot him and ran off. Nobody came, neither the police nor a concerned neighbor. Bárrios like this are common through Pan-Hispanicism. Later, they said that Arnulfo had run off to Mexico to escape prosecution. Evidently, the Séises didn’t know a real joke either, when they saw one.

Lola recovered, but Cuate’s leg never set right where it was shot, and it became just something that he dragged beside the good one.

But that scar of sacrifice became the badge of honor that warmed the home of the Arellanos.

One day, Lola left the house for a minute to run to the store quickly for flour. The baby was asleep on a blanket on the floor with Cuate curled up beside him. And as houses do when nobody is looking, the house caught on fire. Lola saw the smoke as soon as she came out of the store, and she dropped the bag of flour and ran, her instincts telling her whose house it had to be. Nearing the house, she saw Cuate moving backwards on all fours dragging the baby out the door with his teeth clamped on the blanket. And as she came up, Cuate hobbled back into the burning house, and the house collapsed on him; it became his funeral pyre—as is worthy of ancestral gods. There was little trace left of him, nor of the stuffed tiger—the baby’s favorite toy—that Juan and Lola figured Cuate must have gone back in for. Because the fire department never came, and not one person on the block threw even a bucket of water on the blaze until it spent itself out.

Two days later, in response to a neighbor’s complaint, Animal Control came to serve a warrant on Cuate for being unvaccinated and unlicensed in a high rabies area. Juan and Lola still have the paper. It is the only proof that exists that Quetzalcoátl did once walk among the people.

Noe.

The hell you say...

Phield was so smart that almost everyone who knew him figured (as maybe Phield did, too) that success was going to overtake him at some point without much of an effort from him. But although he had an answer for just about everything else, he couldn’t figure out why after dropping out of one private school and one public, two colleges, and a couple of marriages, he was working as a counter man in an auto supply store and barely making the rent. His second wife, incensed at the divorce court’s refusal to grant her alimony, called the judge an idiot and Phield a loser, whereupon the judge threw her in jail for contempt, to which Phield remarked when he came to bail her out, “Prophecy fulfillment is your version of serendipity, Jesse Bale; that’s why evoking damnation on everybody else will always get you what you want, self-abasement being not the least of it,” to which Jesse replied, “Fuck you, Phield! I’ll stay in jail!” Phield walked paths strewn with mysteries, and trailed enigmas in his wake.

His boss, the cheapest man in the county, would give the employees a set of windshield wipers and a lottery ticket each for their end-of-year bonus, and one year, Phield won $100 thousand dollars. Naturally, Phield became a self proclaimed fiscal authority: an oracle no less. People didn’t as much seek him out to ask for advice as that he sought them out to give it. But he needed his bona fides, so he enrolled in a correspondence school (because he felt that he was too mature for the campus crowd) and in six months had a doctorate from the University of Fernburg in a discipline called psychastronomy. Phield ran his diploma off on his PC.

But Phield was more than your everyday princox. He had a genuine empathy for the less fortunate, the indigent, the homeless, the oppressed. His emotionally charged letters to the editor (which he signed Dr. Phield Downe Lohr, Phd.) decrying the lack of public charity towards life’s (and the economy’s) victims were of such literary quality that the newspaper offered him a job. Phield began by taking sports scores on the phone from stringers covering games in the outlying towns, a system crying for modernization on a newspaper fighting not only for black ink, but for its very life. But as the spokesman for the local literacy council and the fair housing authority, Phield got to write an occasional column outlining the problems of not only the outer fringe’s economically challenged, but of small businesses fighting for survival. People began writing in to Phield for advice in almost every aspect of life. And the newspaper was compelled to let Phield answer them in print:

Dr. Phield:

My husband and I have been married for ten years and have eleven children all boys, who have been driving me crazy, and lately, Ursus has been ignoring me romantically. I feel so used and abandoned. What’s the answer? – Empty in Fostoria

Dear Empty:

If you hadn't emptied out by now, I'd be really worried. But anyway, while he’s sleeping, check behind Ursus’s head just above the hairline, and if it feels like he’s got an implant there, give it a tweak. His libido just might re-awaken. And don’t worry about the kids; they’ll be abducted pretty soon. If you don’t find a nodule, count your blessings! And sign the boys up for midget football. – Dr. Phield

Dr. Phield:

I am a Jewish man married to a Gentile. I love liver smothered in onions, but she keeps giving me liver with two strips of bacon the way she eats it. Should I divorce her? – Unclean in Newark

Dear Unclean:

You’re worried about a little bacon in Newark? Eat the damn thing! And you can’t smother liver in onions or anything else anyway. It’s already dead! – Dr. Phield

Dr. Phield:

I’m a white woman married to a black man and we have two children ages one and two. What should we call them? - In Limbo in Lakeview

Dear Limbo:

Don’t call them anything but DeJuan and Brittany! And get them out of Lakeview where they’re liable to be called things you’ve never heard of in your life. Take them to LA and audition them for the movies. With any luck, they’ll be called to play the roles of the children of Will Smith, who people don’t think is all black, or of Angelina Jolie, who people don’t think is all white. – Dr. Phield

The circulation of the paper went up five hundred percent and they bought some computers and raised the newstand price and their advertising fees. But they fired Phield for giving a bad tip in his column on a Chinese stock, Soon Ghat Lei, that made IUDs with lead content. The stock fell to near zero, and on top of losing his job, Phield felt compelled to buy as much of the stock as he could from the people who had been foolish enough to buy it on his advice.

Living in total dishonor, and abject poverty, holding nearly worthless paper, Phield came back—miraculously—into his own, as everybody knew he would. Life was made for men like Phield.

The Chinese improved their salesmanship, and Soon Ghat Lei surged in sales and value with its popularity along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, the India/Bangladesh border, the Mexico/USA border, Darfur, Somalia, and East LA. The population of those areas have become immune to lead poisoning.

In time, even a man like Phield, will have trouble (maybe using the five degrees of Kevin Bacon?) relating the horseshit pride of a gangbanger in the bárrio to the holocaust in Mogadishu.

Noe.

Think Tank…

The guys are playing round robin euchre four to a table but the games break up when Jap and Meg come to the door and she kisses him on the cheek and leaves. Jap says, “Please continue, gentlemen. Don’t let me insurrect. I harpoon no desire to be the friar in the annointment.”

Freddie says, “Nah. You’re alright. Games don’t feel right tonight. Clay just got laid off. Ray’s got to leave on account of his kids, and I got a bitch of a headache. Get you a beer and pull up a chair.”

When Jap comes back, Freddie said, “Jap, meet Oliver. He works with Jefferson down at the warehouse.”

Jap says, “The pressure is all mine,” and bows in the Oriental manner.

Oliver smiles pleasantly and nods his head politely.

Colby says, “My car’s rattlin’ and smokin’ worse than ever, Jap.”

Jap says, “My friend, you’re in dark need of a new convenience.” Jap is a wizard with automobiles. He’s helped Colby out before—and he wouldn’t be giving up on a car if it weren’t past saving.

Colby says, “I can’t buy tires for the one I got and just barely gas.”

Freddie says, “I’d trade you mine only I wouldn’t be doing you any favor at thirteen miles to the gallon. With car prices in the shitter, I’d lose a bundle trading it into the agency and it’s only three years old.”

Ray says, “The economy as a whole sucks. It’s wheel-driven and the cost of fuel determines the cost of everything else. The big wigs are determined to drive the price up to an arbitrary profit level where it helps sustain the market. The people are supposed to spend and save money at the same time, money that they don’t have. Save, and businesses go broke, people lose their jobs. Spend, and you go broke, and lose your house. It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

Phield says, “Maybe the new president’s stimulus program will be of some benefit. It might take some time to work, but confidence in itself is supposed to have some impact on the markets almost immediately, and that loosens up trading, spending and lending reluctances as a consequence.”

Clay says, “Ah ain’t got no job w’at ta spend with, ‘r git a loan with, ‘r core ta trade, and Ah’d ruther git money th’n one ah tham thar reluctances.”

Nobody laughs.

Jefferson says, “I get the feeling that this president wants us all in Ivy league suits and wingtips. And he talks just like any other white man to me. I don’t get that he’s ever been through what the rest of us’ve been. How’s he supposed to help what he don’t know to help?”

Phield says, “Well, he’s a politician, and politicians all seem to believe that the solution to any problem is to throw money at it. Keynesian economics, they say, where the government is the chief instrument and guide of the country’s cash flow. This president is a great fan of Mr. Ronald Reagan, rest his soul, and Mr. Reagan believed that the more money people at the top make, the more trickles down to the rest of us.”

Jefferson says, “It’ll take a whore of a trickle to get down to me and Oliver over there working for minimum wage. And Colby.”

Colby says, “I don’t know half the time who’s president. It don’t make no difference. I finished high school ‘cause my mom supported me and made me do it so’s I could join the army and got took care of. When I got hurt, she made me try out for college, and she was gonna have to pay for it. Only I couldn’t make heads or tails out of them tests. All I remember is Lincoln was the first president and he freed some guy named Dred Scott.”

Nobody laughed this time either.

Freddie says, “How’s your mom doing, Colby?”

“She’s okay. She’s got some kind of killer TB and they sent her home sittin' down in a bag, but they’re still working on her in a hospital in Maryland.”

Jap’s cell phone plays Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and he goes into the kitchen to answer it.

Phield says, “You’re a thinking man. What do you make of the situation?”

You say, “I’m not much on politics or economics. The first and last time I ever voted in presidential elections, it was for Jimmy Carter. I won one and lost one. If I’d voted this time, I would have voted for Ralph Nader. Shit rolls downhill anyway. Anything trickling anywhere goes upward from the blood, sweat and tears—and taxes, of those at the bottom. Anytime anything changes, it’s mostly more of the same thing and maybe worse,. ‘The rich get rich, and the poor get poorer.’ I’ve heard that all my life, and I’m just now getting to believe it. I hate to sound clichéd, but if I’d known I was going to be asked that question, I would have written something more cerebral.”

Jap comes back from the kitchen and says, “Well expostulated, mon amígo. I have to disembark, gentlemen, but before I do, let me ejaculate these words of remonstration: The U and S of A has selected—and only time will tell if the choice was fortituous. We can assume that our commandant-in-chief’s intentions are to entrance the conditions of all men no matter whether they be Anglican, Afro-American, or of the Hispanic pervasion, and it dehoofs us all to be patients. Remember that no man is an Ireland. Irregardless, the dime is cast. We can only hope that Numero Uno can regress us to the Marquis De Soto’s philosophy of “Let’s eat fair” and depart from the former executioner’s Gregorian policies at home and his varicose activism abroad. We, as patrimonious citizens—and those in military servitude—must encumber a position of stonicism and fortitude, and euthanize our umblical sense of pregnantism, and gavotte emperor.’

‘With that, I bid you guy cabalists a fare-thee-well, and a bon mot.” He bows and exits.

After Jap leaves, the group stays silent, and Oliver, who has yet to say a word tonight, has a quizzical look on his face and his hands palms up and extended, as in a plea. The group, to a man, looks to you—as “pretender” and sole challenger to Jap for the crown of “wordsmith”— for comment.

And thinking about “reticence” as a trait of your people, like Oliver, you think you probably shouldn’t ever open your mouth again, but you say, “I don’t know. But I have a umbilical feeling that Japhet is right.”

Noe.