fromanyalley

My father was, among other things, a pro-gambler. He liked his choice of professions and pursued it through many houses, some shady deals with some guy named Monkey Monahan, and approximately one hundred cars, whose pinkslips he’d thrown down as “security.” We were flush for a while and then I’d go to my grandparents’ place in Delacroix until my old man could “heal up.” I was used to all that. My dad refused to bring real big-assed trouble into the house, except for Monkey Monahan, who, like my father, was a mathematical genius and a pro-gambler.
The nearest I came to a real mobster was some moke who was a member of the Cajun Mafia. He showed up in the yard of our rented shotgun shack, got out of a very nice highly polished Packard and hitched his pants up around a huge gut. He wore suspenders, and I saw he also had on a belt before it disappeared beneath the avalanche of his belly. He looked big and ridiculous, but not particularly dangerous. I kept digging a hole. I dug holes back then. The yard looked like an entire mine-field had blown up all at once.
My father was suave. He truly was. He dressed in custom suits and loved the best shoes money could buy. He got tears in his eyes over a new pair of Florsheim two-tone wing-tips. He had a handkerchief folded origami-like into peaks and flourishes in the breast pocket of his English-cut suit coat. His hair was always combed and cut, his fingers clean, his nails manicured. He had been an OSS officer in China during World War II and carried a little thirty-two belly-ventilator when he had important things to do. He was no thug. As far as I can tell he did not actively break any laws, or at least any major ones. He was a professional. He was no criminal.
My father came flying off the porch of that shotgun shack and slammed the fat man to the ground. I stopped digging my hole. I learned then that violence is not a ballet, it is not beautiful, and it is hard to see, if the man producing the violence knows what he’s doing. My old man apparently knew, because I could see his shoulders and arms working and I could hear the fat man gargling and whooping, but I could not tell what exactly was going on. My dad could have been kneading bread dough for all I could tell.
My old man had longish hair back then. It was strawberry blond and he combed it back in natural waves. When he stood up, which was just a few seconds after he’d body slammed the fat guy, his hair was messed up. It was in his eyes and he was sweating. I sank into the hole I’d dug.
The fat man rolled over, slowly, cursing, cursing in Cajun so it sounded like a song. He hauled himself up and stood heaving and shaking. Finally he threw-up on the hood of his shiny root-beer brown Packard. My old man pulled a black pocket comb from his hip pocked, waved it over his head, and his hair obediently went right back into place, perfectly.
With the exception of mud stains on his suit pants and a welt on his left eye he look just like my dad.
The fat-guy in the bad suit with a broken nose and a split lip and blood coming down from one ear crammed himself into the beautiful, puked on car and slowly drove away.
That is the true story of what happened. My father denied it. His version was that he had politely but firmly escorted an over-zealous insurance salesman off our lot. No hitting or blood or Cajun Mafia. No little thirty-two suddenly showing up in my old man’s hand and then disappearing like part of a carnival magician’s act. My father would shake his head when I would tell him I had over-heard him in conference with Monkey Monahan about the goddamned sonovabitchin’ Cajun-thug driving all the way from Gulf Port just to get his ass stomped. That if the boy hadn’t been a Cajun my dad would’ve put his lights out, but the sonovabitch was probably related to us somehow. (My mom was half-Cajun, so the old man was probably right.) When Monkey asked what the goddamned sonvabitch thought he was doing my old man said, Well, I couldn’t afford not one more dime of his protection. Which is what my old man told me, except this was the end of his story about the overweight, overzealous insurance salesman. My old man would always shake his head and say, Why do you remember things in such a lurid way? He blamed it on my early exposure to Faulkner. My old man thought Faulkner was crazy.
My dad has been dead for a long time now. I miss him. I loved him. He was a good man. I did not know every single one of his faces, but no son truly does of any father, and mine died when I was 17yrs old, so I had very little time with him.
It is now the very end of September, 2008. Criminals have again come to the house. There is not one, stupid, fat man squeezed into a cheap suit. There are many, many criminals in the front yard. One of them is the President of the United States. There are others, ghostly figures, dressed so well that my father would have had tears in his eyes to see their shiny $10,000 shoes and elegant hair-cuts. With them are members of both legislative houses, both parties, and a pack of minor functionaries that would make Adolf Eichmann look like a saint.
I have no idea what the stupid, brutish fat-boy Cajun wanted from my old man. It may not have even happened. It is important only to me. I do know what the pack of jackals clawing and yipping in my yard wants. The pack wants seven hundred billion dollars. It wants to save arrogant, avaricious, selfish, criminal motherfuckers from their own black and stinking sins. The pack does not even know why it wants seven hundred billion dollars. According to a Treasury spokes-person they just wanted a really, really big number. Seven hundred billion dollars is a HUGE FUCKING NUMBER.
The neocon criminal Nazis who have destroyed the Constitution and abrogated all laws are right out front, begging to be fed, begging to have the perfect world they have been allowed to create propped up on my hard work, the hard work of my wife, and on the lives my two sons who are fighting the dirtiest and most damnable war imaginable for the very people who want even THEM to chip in and save their soul-less, vile, evil selves from the reality of their own lewd and lascivious lust for everything they see.
I hate them. I hate them with every fiber of my being. I hate them because they have crushed and demolished good people; they have killed the sons and daughters of good people; they justify and rationalize and minimize and sit before us in suits and clothes and jewelry that cost more than any four of us make in an entire month and they say they need money. I fucking despise them. They are the pestilence of their own beloved Bible which only tells them they are good and we the poor are bad. I detest them because they are hypocrites without conscience given authority over us by virtue of their secret bank accounts which exist in fact in the Caymans, in Sweden, and in China, for the love of god. I hate them because they have sold the Chinese government ONE TRILLION dollars worth of treasury bonds. I hate them because they have sold my country, the country my father fought for, I fought for, and my sons now fight for. I hate them because their children are protected, their children have ample and world-class health care, their children do not know and will never know the true meaning of hunger and despair and fear, the kind of fear that will eat a ten year old boy’s heart out of his chest and cause him to sweat poison for the rest of his life. I hate them because they are the plague that cannot be stopped and will not be defeated. I hate them because they walk the earth and breath the air. Fuck them all and their seven hundred billion dollar blackmail scheme.
If any of you crooked goddamned sonovabitches would stop and listen you might figure out that if you took just one half of that figure you so conveniently pulled out of your fat asses and divided it among the people who really need it, the people who make less than five hundred thou a year, we might be able to pay off some debts, we might be able to own our own homes free and clear of your terrible and horrible banks and their bottom-feeding, duplicitous, appalling excuses for human beings who have conned and seduced us into mortgaging ourselves into the next seven lifetimes. They are a waste product of this garbage heap of decadence and deceit they call a Free Market Economy .
Just give us half, and then gorge yourselves on the other half. You have no idea of what you are doing with this nation’s wealth. We, the poor, the marginalized, the no-longer-middle-class know exactly what to do with it. We will save it and pay down debts and maybe take the kiddies out to Six Flags over FuckYa’ll. We’ll use it to prop up our very small businesses and to hire workers and we will begin to reconstruct the crumbling infrastructure of our blocks, our towns, our counties, our states. Give it back to us. Just half. Half of it to those without health care, to those who don’t have the money to drive the thirty miles to a job that is now costing them to work there, charging more and more for health care, fighting workman compensation claims, and hiding the money which should be going back into the company and into raises. Give it to us you corrupt conniving pigs. Your villainy is epic. Your rank arrogance is that of the aristocracy on the eve of the French Revolution. You tax us and tax us without representation, you lie and steal, rape and plunder, you own the very justice system which is supposed to protect us from monstrosities such as you and still you demand more and more and more. You murder our children in your sickening wars. You demand our daily sacrifices to feed your greed. You are Caligula come back alive. You are every monomaniacal tyrant returned to feed on our blood. Is not even God Himself sick of you yet? What must be done to rid ourselves of you? Take all your capital and all your possessions and your half of the seven hundred billion blackmail and LEAVE THE COUNTRY to the CITIZENS.
In five weeks there will be an election. Neither party deserves to win. Neither party deserves to swagger into office filled with glad tidings and bonhomie. Both parties have fouled the country to the point that President Wen of China, that is Communist China, is not only prescribing ways and means to fix our economy, he is offering his condolences.
He is telling us on national television that he is gravely concerned and hopes he will not have to redeem the ONE TRILLION dollars in T-bonds unnamed and unknown representatives of this country’s government sold the nation of Communist China. Does no one see the extreme irony here? The Communist Chinese Government will wait until the traitors and despots and petty demagogues of this country have bled it dry, and it will then OWN US. The Neocon-Jee-the-Cold-War-Was-Peachy will hand this country over to the Communists. And they will undoubtedly dun the poor Chinese with a finder’s fee. Both parties are to blame, no one who holds office is innocent. Graft, cronyism, corruption at every level, enough to make Grant’s Administration appear pristine.
The Speaker of the House now speaks of “protecting mainstreet.” She and her party and members of the other party are poised to throw enough money at Wall Street to fund free healthcare for every man, woman and child in this country for four solid years. It is ready to reward the most outrageous criminal acts perpetrated upon this nation since nine-eleven. Just as the terrorists rocked our country on that date, so now our own government pays internal terrorists to go back to doing precisely what they have been doing throughout this miserable administration’s mishandling of every facet of government
Speaker Pelosi, you have a fine fashion-sense, and you present yourself with all the gravity of a seasoned politician. You appear in the photo-ops with members of both parties and both houses. You are steady and reassuring. You are even polite, in a cold, distant, aristocratic way, which is to say you reek of noblesse oblige.
But here’s the thing, lady. I want you and your pack of craven politicians off of my yard and out of my sight. You have the entire swag. Give us, the poor, the REAL owners of the swag just a piece of the action, fifty-percent. Then you go where you have to go, as quickly as you possibly can, and for the love of Christ Himself give us room to breathe and live and raise our families as well as we can. If you would protect me, Madam Speaker, and the various Honorables who stand behind you, then protect me and mine from you, and those such as you.
For Madam, I have seen the enemy. God help me, the enemy comes rushing, waving the Stars and Stripes.