March 24, 2006
Synopsis - New York, 1986. Jacky hopes to enlist the help of Bogdan in getting him an apartment in Bogdan*s uncle*s apartment building. In order to achieve this, he wants to set up Bogdan with Inch, a female friend of his.
Now the trick was to get Inch interested. Bogdan wasn’t her type at all---Inch only liked guys who had money. She was tall (hence her nickname), blonde, and not too graceful. Her body, which has been spectacular as a teenager, was lately showing signs of compromising with the law of gravity. She had a warm, sentimental nature but was an uncouth, sloppy drunk. By the time you got her drunk enough to do it with you, you didn’t want her anymore. It was conceivable that she might be attracted to Bogdan, though she would have to be pretty heavily anesthetized first. Bogdan could be considered decent-looking enough, I suppose, in an atavistic kind of way.
Inch lived in the building at 888 Eighth Avenue and worked in the coffee shop downstairs. You don’t live in that building by holding a waitressing job, so it was safe to assume that she was serving up something other than club sandwiches on her own time. I went over to see her when I knew she would be working. Depositing my gym bag in an empty booth, I slid in after it. Inch waved at me from behind the lunch counter and brought me a cup of coffee. The dark wraparound sunglasses she was wearing did not fit in with her pink waitress uniform. “I’ll tell you later,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Just come in from the gym?”
“Year, I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop in and say ‘hi’.”
Inch looked around warily to see if she was being watched. She was. Nick, the owner of the place was staring intently at us from inside the kitchen, through the little opening where the dishes are passed through. “Geez,” she squealed petulantly, “I feel like I’m in prison! He watches me like a hawk!”
“What’s with him?”
“It’s ‘cause I have this friend staying over with me for a few days.”
“What friend is that, Inch?”
“This guy Kelly. He’s a comedian who just got in from L.A., so I’m letting him sleep on my couch until he finds a place to stay. I keep telling Nick that nothing is going on with this guy, but he won’t believe it. Look at him, will you?”
I snuck another look in Nick’s direction. He looked like he wanted to come over and throw me out of the restaurant. He sensed that we were discussing him and moved away from the window, embarrassed.
From my point of view Kelly was just as much of a complication as he was for Nick. Nick was married, with a family in Astoria. He only saw Inch more-or-less during working hours (nice set-up he had with her right upstairs from the restaurant. That, I could respect).
Kelly, however, was living right in her apartment, a living, breathing impediment to the budding little romance I was trying to promote between her and Bogdan. Any progress I was to make would be contingent on Kelly’s precipitous departure.
Inch jumped to her feet and went to take an order. I also left the booth and walked over to the soda fountain where Nick was standing, smoking a cigarette. “Nick, baby!” I greeted him. He was middle-size, out of shape, in his forties, with a thick moustache. There was nothing remarkable about him. “Hello, Jackie,” he said, preoccupied.
I made an effort at conversation. “Inch sure looks funny in those wraparound sunglasses.” Nick shot me a disgusted sideways glance and remained silent. It was evident to me that they had had words and that he had smacked her hence the sunglasses.
I decided to be a little bolder. What was he going to do, kick my butt? “Inch tells me that she’s got a guy sleeping on her sofa.”
“I buy her that sofa,” he seethed. “I give her everything she wants. She wants to go to Florida? She goes to Florida. She wants a fur coat? I get her a mink coat. Not fur, mink.”
A mental flash of Nick fucking Inch in her new mink coat momentarily came to me.
“And now she disrespect me. She throw that bum right in front of me. I go up there and find his shit all over the place.
“A comedian,” he growled, demonstrating the New Yorker’s utter and depraved contempt for levity. “Don’t worry,” he promised ruefully, “I fix them both. I kill them. I cut off his balls.”
I almost laughed in his face. “C’mon Nick, you’re a respectable guy, a businessman. What do you want to get your hands dirty on this guy for?
“I know a coupla guys who will remove him from the scene spotlessly. Like a dry cleaner, no muss, no fuss.”
He blew smoke in my face, “How much?”
“Five hundred, and that includes my cut.”
“Make a good job and I give you a thousand. But she don’t know nothing!”
I smiled cheerfully. “That’s understood, Nick.”
Nick regarded me with a distracted air and said paternally, “You’re a good boy, Jacky.”
Frank the Cop was flat on his back on the bench press at the Universal World Bodybuilding Gym in midtown. There looked to be about a thousand pounds of weight on the bar. When I walked up, he gave a look of “Oh God, what does this asshole want?”
“Whaddaya say, Frank!” I stuck out my hand, which he didn’t shake. Frank was a very large, swarthy Italian with a fleshy, passionate face. He had about a sixty-inch chest. His arms were bigger than my legs. Just to make sure you got the point, he was wearing a torn N.Y.P.D. t-shirt about five sizes too small. I’m surprised he wasn’t wearing his freakin’ gun in the gym. “I was just in the neighborhood and I decided to drop in in case you might be here,” I offered.
“Well, now you seen me,” he growled.
“C’mon, Frank, lighten up a little. What happened, happened.” This was referring to a situation where his sister had gone out with a guy I had introduced her to in Queens and they had unfortunately gotten into a car crash. And died.
“Look, if you want, I’ll beat it.”
“No, you can stick around.” He sat up on the bench and offered me his mammoth hand. It was like shaking hands with a catcher’s mitt. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, same stuff…” I surveyed the gym. It was a purely bodybuilding gym. A bunch of serious players sweating and grunting. No kind of neon lights or video monitors. The equipment was all chrome and in excellent condition. Over in the corner a really huge guy about seven feet tall was doing lunges with about 400 pounds on the bar. I admired the calf muscles of a girl doing squats in front of the mirror. “No, really, I was just passing by.”
Frank asked me, “You still working out much?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Sparring too?”
“For sure.”
“You better watch out. You were never good enough to go pro. One of these days you’re gonna get your brains scrambled.”
“You know, it feels good.”
“Haw haw haw, ‘It feels good.’” He laughed malevolently. “What feels good, getting your head smashed in, you dumb schmuck?”
“Frank, even when it hurts at least you know you’re alive, which is more than most people can say. What about you? You look great, Frank. Whaddaya, on steroids?”
“Hey, this is all natural! I haven’t missed a workout in six months.”
“Your wife must be thrilled about that.”
“Haw haw, I always gotta tell her, ‘Not tonight, honey.’ Haw haw haw. Anyway, I promised her when the baby comes I’ll cut it down to three workouts a week.”
“You’re a prince, Frank. Congratulations about the kid. I didn’t know about it until now.”
“How could you know unless you been helpin’ me and I didn’t know it?”
“You gonna name the kid after me, Frank?”
Frank ignored that. He said, “We might build a house in Staten Island or Jersey.”
“That’s great. The city’s no place for kids to grow up today.”
“Not with freaks like you runnin’ around, Jacky,” he joked. Just to show he didn’t mean it, he slipped out his hand and I gave him five.
I said, “It’s funny seeing you like this. I just saw Inch last week.” Frank, Inch and I had all grown up together in the group home.
“Yeah? How is she?” he asked with an air of sincerity.
“Oh, you know Inch. She was wearing a mink coat when I saw her. She’s got an apartment up on Eighth Avenue. I would have to say she’s doing great. But when she took off her sunglasses, she had a black eye and a big bruise on her face.”
Frank frowned. Aside from knowing Inch, this was Serious Police Business. “Did she tell you how she got it?”
“Well, she didn’t come right out and say it, but she’s got this guy staying with her, and I think he gave it to her.”
“No shit!” He stood up and stuck his face in mine. “You know this guy?” he inquired ominously.
“His name’s Kelly Shine. He’s a nightclub comic.”
That really got Frank worked up. New Yorkers hate anything to do with humor. They are on principal dead set against the notion of frivolity, and nothing gets them riled up more than the idea that somebody might be having fun somewhere when their lives are so grim and lacking in imagination. The national bird of New York should be the seagull, who only thinks about eating and stealing the food out of other seagulls’ mouths. When was the last time you saw a seagull laugh? The concept of Inch getting beat up by a worthless, useless, piece of shit comedian got Frank so bent out of shape that his face got all contorted and he started breathing heavy, like a snorting bull enraged by a red flag. “You know where this guy works?” he asked in dead seriousness. So serious that I started to get cold feet, but it was too late now.
“The Yuk Factory on Second Avenue. Lissen, Frank, he’s got a routine about cops that he does.”
“Yeah?” he said, dripping venom.
“Yeah, about how they’re dumber than gorillas. He said we should replace all cops with gorillas. He said, then we’d only have to pay them bananas.”
Being a cop was a holy mission to Frank. Never mind that he used to sell me drugs in high school. We live in an age of instantaneous forgetfulness. I shouldn’t complain. Better he should forget who was feeding him all this bullshit.
It’s like he was reading my mind. “Lissen,” he hissed, “Forget we ever had this conversation, you hear me? If I hear you told me this from anybody, I’m gonna’ come looking for you! There was no mistaking his inflection: the whole emphasis of the sentence was on the word you.
“Told you what, Frank?”
“That’s better. Lissen, you gotta go now. It’s late, and you’re distracting me from my workout. Take it easy,” he turned his back on me and went back to the weight bench.
“Bye, Frank.” I wheeled around and made my way past the straining, steaming bodies to the exit.
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Posted on 3/24/2006
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March 20, 2006
There’s plenty of blame to go around for who created the mess in Iraq, but to blame a gang of addle-brained right wing Jews for that mess plays into the hands of the war’s true instigators.
As reported in the New York Sun, which I respect for its cultural coverage but not for its idiotic right-wing political perspective (in the interest of clarity, The Sun leaves free copies at my doorstep. I would never pay for it, but I do read it) a couple of Harvard professors have circulated a document blaming the war on the “all-powerful pro-Israel lobby.” This paper has been seized upon by every garden variety anti-semite imaginable as proof of a Jew Conspiracy to destroy the Arabs in the service of Israel.
Anti-semitism is a virus that lays dormant in every social organism, waiting for that organ to weaken, then, like a disease, it attacks the organ. That it now sees an opportunity to do its ugly damage demonstrates the extent to which the destructive folly of the Iraq war has weakened this country’s social stability just as I predicted it would since before the war even started.
Iraq is not in a state of civil war – it is in a state of free-for-all chaos that was to be expected in the wake of the American invasion, but it precedes even that. Saddam Hussein, who is a moron, understood that and his repressive brutality kept the lid on it. The fact that he is an animal, and the progeny of actual Nazis (the uncle who raised him was an activist in the Muslim Brotherhood, which was formed by one of Hitler’s most trusted advisors) should not be overlooked.
Clinton had the right concept for Iraq: keep in under embargo and control it from the skies. Clinton, who had a lot more Jewish representation in his cabined and his circle of advisors than Bush has ever had, was a lot more even-handed in his middle east policy than the current administration. That right there blows apart the theory of the Jews pushing Cheney and Rumsfeld around to do their nefarious bidding.
The real impetus for this war is the Halliburtons and General Dynamics gang, people we never heard of. In any imperialist adventure, only a small clique ever benefits, like the British East India Company in India, or the Dutch monopolies in Indonesia. The rest of the imperial entity just pays the taxes and runs the errands for the fat-cat interests who take none of the risks, pay none of the expenses, and just rake it in.
That is what we have here now – same all same all – an imperial adventure run for the benefit of a small group of highly-placed economic interests represented and spearheaded by Bush, who is one of their own and whose family is also raking it in through their private capital entities like Carlyle Group. Only in this case, these big-shots have found the perfect patsies to deflect blame for the war – a group of dim-witted strivers who flatter themselves that they are formulating policy, when what they really are is a lightening rod set up to take the blame.
Are Jewish people smart? Sometimes. But the smartest ones are not always in political leadership. Israel could have avoided a lot of problems if their intellectual class had had an interest in running the country instead of leaving it up their political class, bozos like Yitzak Shamir, with his boneheaded concept of “Greater Israel,” which poured hundreds of billions in resources into the West Bank settlements, making it now impossible to abandon all that expensive infrastructure and withdraw to defensible borders.
Plenty of patriotic Israelis were against that madness, but they were too busy pursuing their business, scientific or artistic ambitions – or just living their lives – to go to the mat over it. Now the next generation has to keep formulating convoluted excuses why the country has maintain a state of permanent mobilization to keep places like Ariel, which are too expensive to abandon.
Americans will never develop the kind of emotional attachment that would motivate them to fight for possession over a period of decades or generations like the French did for Indochina or Algeria. They don’t have that kind of mentality, and Iraq doesn’t possess that kind of charm. But that doesn’t mean the deep thinkers in Washington are not designing contingency plans for just that eventuality – with all its attendant domestic scenarios for internal repression of dissent and non-conformity. Who’s to say that future pent-up expressions of frustration and anxiety that might erupt as a result of these contradictions will not target today’s designated patsies, the Jews?
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Posted on 3/20/2006
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March 17, 2006
In this dream Havelock and Paulette were sitting in Smuckley's Bar on Second Avenue, having their usual fight. Every time she got drunk, she would accuse him of being high on drugs, which he always was — if you consider pot to be a drug, which he didn't. But this accusation drove him mad with rage. He was a Canadian, and pot was legal in Canada. Everybody from the Prime Minister on down smoked it, and he didn't feature being preached to by a moralistic American Republican twit about doing what was his absolute right.
Paulette knew this, and she wouldn't let herself get trapped in that reasoning, so she had invented another rationale which put her in the right: it wasn't the reefer she was enraged about, it was the other stuff, the secret stuff that he took on the side, the secret little pills he was always scoring in the bathrooms of bars from seedy-looking guys and secreting into his mouth when he thought she wasn't watching. She didn't know what these pills contained, but they were the things responsible for his mood swings and his frowning and becoming cross at her when she would recount to him the normal occurrences of her life in their conversations. She never considered the concept that he might think she was being a boring, spoiled reactionary overweening twit. It was the drugs.
"You're on something and I know it!"
"Every time you get sloshed on wine, I get turned into a drug addict! Why don't you go soak your head?"
"I'm going to tell Pops and he's going to fire you!"
"Tell Pops anything you want. He knows what an idiot you are!"
"I am not and idiot," she said, adopting an attitude of arch self-righteousness, "I'm a very intelligent woman!" Paulette had a gift for accepting the middle-brow clichés of the day as unassailable verities.
"There's a contradiction in terms!"
"I'm going to tell immigration and get you deported back to Canada, you drug addict!"
"That's your typical New Yorker for you. All you do is spend your time on your fucking cell phones calling the cops and ratting each other out. Go ahead, you'd be doing me a favor. I can't stand you, and I can't stand your fucking friends and I can't stand your fucking people!"
"I won't let you talk about America like that," Paulette screamed. She made a fist and threw a perfect punch like she had learned at the gym, smashing Havelock square in the face.
Havelock just laughed.
Beside herself with fury, Paulette collected her possessions and made her way unsurely out of the bar.
Havelock turned to the blonde at his right. She was a petite, slender German with short , curly hair and green eyes. She was chic, amusing and effervescent - everything that Paulette, with her elephantine nature was not. Her name was Rita, and there was a maddening physical magnetism between herself and Havelock.
They were in Germany now. Havelock was wearing black leather pants, a soft leather pullover with a silver gray fleur-de-lys stitched onto its front and a black leather motorcycle jacket covered with nailheads. He said to Rita, "Let's go somewhere else and drink a bottle of wine."
They went out into the frigid night air and across a deserted town square into an inn which, due to the disagreeable weather, was mostly empty. The staff, which was extremely gay, seemed to be very busy and bustled around them, rushing through this door and that. Havelock and Rita stared across the table into each other's eyes, and he kissed her hand. At length, a waiter came and uncorked a bottle of red wine.
The place was badly heated, and they were still wearing their coats. Havelock suggested that they move to a small table which was free in front of the fireplace. Once there, they became unbearably warm and removed their coats.
They drank the bottle of wine and became very hungry. Havelock stopped a waiter and asked if he could order some food. The waiter, whom he had not seen before, snapped at him in an effeminate voice, "You should have asked me before. Now I'm tired, and I'm going to sit down!" The kindly waiter who had served them the wine came by, and Havelock asked him if he would serve them.
"The kitchen's closed now."
"Well, where can we get something to eat?" asked Havelock. By now, he and Rita were ravenous.
The waiter said, "At this hour everything's closed. You can go to the Pleasantine Motel. It's about fifteen kilometers outside of town on the autobahn to Hanover. You have to take a taxi."
"Let's go to the motel," said Rita.
The prospect of going to the motel with Rita exhilarated Havelock. He asked the waiter, "Is the taxi ride expensive?"
"You have to buy a ticket. Elvis Kreuzfeld will sell you a ticket."
Rita said, "Let's get out of here." They put on their coats and went out through a wrought-iron glass door onto a darkened patio with steps that led down to a barren garden. A frigid night wind was blowing.
A man ran up the stairs toward them. He was wearing glasses, a black cotton sports jacket with pins and buttons all over it and a black peaked cap, like a tour operator. In his hand he clutched a sheath of tickets. "Are you desiring tickets to the Pleasantine Motel?" he asked politely.
"How much do they cost?" asked Havelock.
"Quinze ans."
"Quinze ans de vie?"
"Oui, monsieur."
"Take the tickets and let's go!" insisted Rita.
"Et vous êtes…..le diable?"
"Oui, monsieur," said the inoffensive-looking tour operator.
Havelock turned to Rita and despairingly told her, "We can't go."
"Why not?"
"Because it's the devil, and he's asking for fifteen years of our lives as the price."
Rita pleaded, "Please, I'm cold and I want to go to the motel!"
Havelock was in despair. More than anything else, he wanted to get out of the cold and go to the motel with this delightful woman. But the price, fifteen years cut off their lives by the devil, was too high. Havelock turned to the patiently waiting devil and informed him politely, "Ce n'est pas possible."
"Très bien, monsieur," responded Satan with equal civility, and he let himself through the glass door, disappearing into the building.
As Havelock's dream faded, the last thing he saw was she, her arms outstretched to him, imploring, "I want to go…"
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Posted on 3/17/2006
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March 09, 2006
They call me Osama from Alabama
Don’t you know I’m a camel drivin’ man
Haulin’ a load of manure
From Houston to Tulsa and back again
My faithful camel Ahab got twenty-six gears
And a radar detector between his ears
Smoky can see me but he can’t catch me
The Highway Patrol can’t arrest me
One day they stopped me on Highway One-Oh-Eight
They said they had to investigate
They said ‘your rig looks a little overweight’
While they was checkin’ my documentation
I jumped up on Ahab and took evasive action
I said ‘I got to get back to my girl’
The Exotic Fatima of the Seven Veils
She got rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She shakes her big belly and blows smoke out her nose
I don’t need no virgins in Heaven
Just Fatima and a six-pack from Seven-Eleven
The cops chased me and Ahab over hill and dale
They swore they was gonna’ put me in jail
I jumped off Ahab and preyed toward Mecca
Chanting ‘Please get these flatfoots off-a my neck-a!’
Then thunder and lightning rang in my ears
It rained more than it had for twenty-six years
The cops and their cars all floated away
I picked up Fatima and we moved to LA
Now I got me a real fine job
Making shish-kebob for big fat slobs
Ahab the Camel is real happy too
He poses for postcards at the San Diego Zoo
On Saturday night we drink beer and lie on beds of nails
And Fatima does the Dance of the Seven Veils
But we still drink a toast and shed a tear
For the good times we had transporting manure
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Posted on 3/9/2006
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March 03, 2006
[Scenario: New York, 1986. Jacky O'Shea has just learned that one of his friends from the gym, Bogdan, is working for his uncle, minding a building full of vacant, rent controlled apartments]
An eighteen year-old black kid sat next to me on the park bench, alternatively taking swigs from a pint bottle of wine in a paper bag and lacing his skates, while philosophizing to nobody in particular, “A lot of people think we racing ‘cause we skate so fast, but we not racing. We just skating fast. Not like some mothers who shoot around banging into people, knocking them over. I don’t do that shit. But I’m ready for it if it happens.”
The sun shined brilliantly on the roller skating area in Central Park adjacent to Sheep’s Meadow. Crowds of people milled around the edge of the large tarmac oval bordered by Sycamore trees, enjoying the brightly-attired skaters who reveled at the sensation of gliding along on eight wheels. Suggestive disco and meringue rythems exploded from the giant boom box speakers set up at one end of the oval and the skaters weaved, danced, raced, gyrated, pirouetted in the air and bounded gymnastically in flying leaps. A muscular black guy danced a licentious lambada with a blond wearing purple lycra aerobic tights and cropped top as they rolled along. A lithe young woman sailed gracefully as a flamingo, one leg in the air behind her. Some, wearing Walkmans, practiced skating backwards, created fancy footwork, choreographed new dance routines. Hard-faced Latins sporting jailhouse tattoos on their arms hawked beer and marijuana without receiving so much as an admonishing glance from the cops who occasionally cruised by in slow-moving patrol cars.
I was oblivious to all these goings on, however. I had grabbed my skates and run off to the park not so much to enjoy the beautiful fall day as to get the hell out of that filthy, flea-bitten apartment. Geez, what a mess!
/> I had just about gotten the roaches under control using a combination of Combat, Raid and hideous white roach powder. Now, to my utter stupefaction, I was finding mouse droppings all over the kitchen counter and in the food shelves. They were even gnawing through the food packaging to get at it’s contents.
Aw, the apartment was just revolting in every respect! The diesel fumes from the trucks passing on nearby Second Avenue seeped into the apartment through cracks in the warped window frames, leaving a fine, greasy soot on all the surfaces. The linoleum floor in the kitchen area was faded with age and curled up at the edges, exposing solid concrete underneath. The refrigerator was stuck on “Freeze”, instantly turning into a chunk of rock-hard ice anything that was deposited. It had been so long since its last defrosting that the ice around the freezer section had grown to 3-4 inches thick and if not chipped away periodically, would actually force the refrigerator door open, melt, and re-freeze, creating the worst god-awful mess imaginable. The last straw was when I went to cut myself a slice of layer cake, and when I opened the box I found a swarm of fleas flying around inside.
Yuggh! For this I was paying $500 a month. I fumed. In Queens I could have had a beautiful apartment, a real bachelor pad like Hugh Hefner, for $500 a month.
But that would have been admitting defeat, that I was not good enough to live in Manhattan, that I didn’t have what it took! As though, like Roberto Duran, I had thrown up my hands and shouted “¡No más!” This is why I was so interested in Bogdan. Who cared if he had AIDS or not? He was working as a super in a rent controlled apartment building on E. 88th Street, a nice one. He had already told me there were empty apartments in the building. Maybe this goofy guy could help me find an apartment I could afford.
I got up off the bench and skated over to the pay phone. Looking through my wallet I found a folded slip of paper with Bogdan’s telephone number, which I dialed. I thought, “Oh, please God, let him be home.” That was the state of mind I was in that day.
After an interminable number of rings the handset was picked up, dropped, picked up again, and slammed down onto the receiver.
I unleashed a current of expletives, fished another quarter out of my jeans and dialed again. After about ten more rings, he answered:
“Who the freaking hell is this?!!!”
“Bogdan, don’t hang up! It’s Jacky. From the gym!”
“What time is it?”
“I dunno…It’s about four o’clock.”
“In the morning?!!”
“No, man! It’s four o’clock in the afternoon!”
“Oh, shit!” I heard a bunch of banging, rustling noises. He dropped the receiver again and picked it up. “I gotta get up and take out the garbage! What day is this? Call me later!”
BOGDAN, DON’T HANG UP! I GOT THIS GIRL WHO WANTS TO MEET YOU!”
Suddenly he seemed incredibly lucid. “Yeah? Is she nice?”
“Yeah, nice. She’s a blonde, and she’s real horny. I just left her. She’s real hot, man. She was telling me how she loves to fuck, and how she loves big dicks!”
“Hey, far-out, man. Why don’t you bring her over now?”
“Now?!” Geez, what an asshole. “Lissen, Bogdan, I got a better idea. We’ll all meet at Molly McGuire’s Pub and I’ll introduce you to her. Howzat?”
“Far-out, man!”
“Awright, lissen, I gotta get back to her. I’ll call you as soon as I get it set up. Lissen, Bogdan…”
“What?”
“If I get you laid, you think you could talk to your uncle about renting me one of the empty apartments in your building that you told me about, just until he sells the building?”
“Hey, no problem! What’s her name.”
“Whose name?”
“The girl?!”
“Inch.”
“Inch? That’s her name?”
“Yeah, Inch.”
“That’s a cool name for a girl.”
I slammed down the phone and skated away.
Now the trick was to get Inch interested. Bogdan wasn’t her type at all---Inch only liked guys who had money. She was tall (hence her nickname), blonde, and not too graceful. Her body, which has been spectacular as a teenager, was lately showing signs of compromising with the law of gravity. She had a warm, sentimental nature but was an uncouth, sloppy drunk. By the time you got her drunk enough to do it with you, you didn’t want her anymore. It was conceivable that she might be attracted to Bogdan, though she would have to be pretty heavily anesthetized first. Bogdan could be considered decent-looking enough, I suppose, in an atavistic kind of way.
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Posted on 3/3/2006
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March 01, 2006
If you want to know what happens weeks or months (or even years) before it happens, YOU MUST READ THIS BLOG!!!
That is because I have a crystal ball, or two of them to be precise.
Months ago I predicted that Michael Long, the chairman of the New York State Conservative Party, would sue Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, citing criminal negligence for the injuries his son, firefighter Matthew Long, received by getting hit by a chartered bus during the chaotic traffic conditions which occurred as a result of the illegal and immoral transport strike called by union leader Roger Toussaint last December. Matthew Long is not expected to recover from those injuries, which include brain damage.
In addition to the TWU, the Long family suit named as respondents the bus company whose driver made an illegal turn, and Bear Stearns & Co., the brokerage house that leased the bus to transport its workers.
None of the big shots in the print or electronic media had the brains to predict that the suit would be filed. I am the only one.
Now I am going to go out on a limb once more and predict that this lawsuit is going to be even more socially divisive than the strike ever was. It is going to pit class against class and race against race.
It has to. The lines defining the racial and class distinctions have turned our society into the social equivalent of tectonic faults which are grinding against each other in anticipation of a huge social earthquake.
There will be winners and losers. The losers will be Roger Toussaint and the union’s executive board, who will be personally held financially liable for Matthew Long’s head injuries. Another loser will be the tenuous social peace we have been nurturing by keeping our opinions to ourselves.
The winner will be the state Conservative Party, which stands to expand its membership base by hundreds of thousands of voters if Michael Long quits dithering about which pinhead reactionary to support in the upcoming gubernatorial election and devotes his full energy to designing a strategy for pressing his suit against the union. It remains to be seen whether he has the intellectual capacity for a mission of this importance. It means deposing the members of the union’s executive board under oath, establishing a scenario for the days leading up to the strike, and devising a strategy for forcing hostile witnesses to testify in open court about the considerations and goals which led them to call an illegal strike during the freezing, icy pre-Christmas shopping rush.
This trial, with all its social and racial ramifications has the potential to rivet world attention like no trial in years.
Not least is the fact that amidst all the chaos rich companies had the means to rent private transit companies to ferry their employees to work, while ordinary schlemiels had to hoof it for up to twenty miles each way to get to their jobs as short-order cooks.
Add to that the fact that Toussaint pointedly defined the chaos in racial terms as striking a blow against the white oppressor.
Am I taking sides in this mess? All I can say is that I think Toussaint is a moron, and he deserves whatever they do to him. It’s surely going to be a huge mess.
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Posted on 3/1/2006
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