The plausible connection between a predator priest and a convicted killer
I remember the Preppy Murder case quite clearly. It happened at the end of August, 1986. I was a 26-year-old aspiring actor/singer, working in Manhattan five days a week at a Murray Hill restaurant, The Back Porch. The Mets were tearing up the league, and one of their star pitchers, Ron Darling, who lived in the neighborhood, occasionally dropped in for a meal. Then on August 27, the news came that a pretty uptown girl, 18-year-old Jennifer Levin, had been strangled in Central Park. Her alleged killer was 20-year-old Robert Chambers, an Upper Eastside teen with movie star looks and the cold, dead eyes of a psychopath.
Chambers claimed he had accidentally killed Levin during “rough sex,” but forensic evidence indicated a vicious beating and strangulation. The press painted Chambers as a bad seed, a privileged youth from a broken home, who gravitated towards drugs and supported his habit with burglary. Chambers came across as a soulless psycho who threw Levin’s life—as well as his own—away like so much trash. I remember seeing him on TV in an infamous video clip after he’d been released on bail. He was partying with friends. Looking stoned, he grabbed a small doll and twisted the head, while diabolically groaning Levin’s name. When the doll’s head came off in his hands, he muttered, “I think I killed her.” I was thoroughly repulsed; to me, Chambers was the epitome of the spoiled brat of the Silk-Stocking class.
I was tangentially familiar with his ilk. I had attended high school on the Upper East Side, at Regis, an elite Jesuit institution with a difference. It had been founded as an all-scholarship Catholic school for the academically talented sons of working class and immigrant families. My classmates and I commuted to the Upper East Side daily, most of us knowing we didn’t belong there. The Preppy Murder Case, as it was called, reinforced my notion that Robert Chambers and I came from different worlds. However, a recent video investigation from Church Militant reveals there were several points of intersection: Irish heritage, the Catholic church, and the lurking presence of pedophile, predator priests. Please watch the video below. (Here’s a link if the video doesn’t appear.)
I want to be clear that I have never been assaulted or molested by a priest. But I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who were. While at Regis, I was aware of one priest who groomed boys for sexual violation, and punished boys who rebuffed his advances. He just happened to be in charge of admissions, which enabled him to corrupt the selection process to meet his grooming goals. I have since learned of one more priest, who was credibly accused of sexual assault and was later laicized. The Jesuits knew the second priest was a problem before posting him at Regis, because he had been credibly accused of sexual impropriety with male students at McQuaid high school in Rochester, NY. But instead of drumming that predator out of the Society of Jesus, Jesuit mucky-mucks from the provincial hierarchy, those in the know, attended the ceremony at Regis when this predator priest took his final vows.
My life has not been directly affected by priestly misconduct, except perhaps that I didn’t get the guidance I needed in my formative years, because too many of my would-be mentors were distracted by their pursuit of sexual gratification from my peers. My reason for writing this post is compassion for my wounded friends and my still-simmering anger at a corrupt institution that not only turned a blind eye towards sexual predation, but knowingly promoted the worst of the worst to positions where they could do lasting harm to innocent young people.
Christine Niles reporting for Church Militant makes a compelling case that Theodore McCarrick’s abuse of a youthful Robert Chambers inflicted psychological pain that erupted, resulting in the death of Jennifer Levin in 1986.
I encourage you to watch the Church Militant video in its entirety. The circumstantial evidence forms a compelling case that Theodore McCarrick, while a priest and bishop of the Archdiocese of New York, abused Robert Chambers, setting him on a path of self-destruction that ruined his life and ended the life of Jennifer Levin. The sins of the father were visited upon the son. The Bible says this phenomenon can last for three or four generations. Various organs of the Catholic Church have acted corruptly to ensure that intense pain would pass down for generations. It needs to end.
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As Ian Sheehy crept down the rain-washed alley, scratchy music played from a kitchen radio. Dinah Shore—or was it Jo Stafford?—sang For Sentimental Reasons. In the black of the narrow passage, light from apartment windows shone in white circles in the puddles he stepped over and around, almost like votive candles. He reached a spot below the fire escape and gently pulled the ladder down. The metal structure ached and rattled up to the roof, and gonged like a church bell. The pressure that had been building all day in his temples and behind his eyes thundered briefly, then eased as the echo died away. Ian expected the noise to draw dark silhouettes to the lighted windows, but none appeared.
Carmella’s bedroom window was dark. In the kitchen, the lower curtains were drawn, but the shade was up, and soft light leaked out of the living room, turning the cream-colored walls orange like a Mediterranean sunset. He climbed, careful not to shake the ladder. His head couldn’t take the rattling right now, and he didn’t want Carmella’s family to discover him. He only wanted to talk to her, quietly, alone, at her bedroom window, not cause a scandal, sneaking around like a thief.
He’d thought of telephoning. But she might have told him, “Not tonight. Wait ‘til tomorrow or Thursday.” He knew he couldn’t wait, and he’d press her ‘til she said, “Okay, come.” But would she wait for him? Or would she deliberately leave the apartment, go out with some other guy, any guy, so she wouldn’t be home when he got there? Snippy as she’d been, she might do that to embarrass him. And to escape the prying eyes of her family. Ian could understand that; he had prying eyes at home, too.
He wanted to go back to when they’d met. That corny church social to welcome home the GIs. Already back six weeks, Ian had got his uniform pressed and finally put on the ribbons. Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was an Italian parish in South Brooklyn, a trek from his Irish-German enclave in Bushwick. But the dance would have Italian food, and most importantly, Italian girls.
Ian wondered then if they rinsed their hair with rosemary water or lavender. Did their skin glow from olive oil and chamomile? Were their teeth straight and white as ivory? He’d practically broken into a sweat as he entered the auditorium. For a lightly freckled, rusty blonde, this was uncharted, if not hostile, territory. He offered to pay at the door, but a full-figured older woman told him, “Gratis per i nostri eroi!” The band was just settling in, so Ian lined up for a plate of chow. The garlic and tomato fumes made his head swim and his gut ache. He chose the stuffed shells with a side of sliced sausage and peppers, then looked for a seat in the corner of the room. He wanted to eat and observe, unobserved.
It was from that corner, his mouth full of ricotta, that Ian had spotted Carmella, dressed like an Andrews Sister. Broad, padded shoulders tapered in a sharp V to a narrow waist, then a wondrous pair of hips curved deliciously outward and down the sweetest set of gams this side of Betty Grable. She wore a pillbox hat jauntily off-center, on a dark, curly mane that framed a perfect heart-shaped face. Warm opal eyes were separated by a classically sharp, yet delicate, aquiline nose. A man could search every town from Sicily to Tuscany and never find a more perfect specimen of bellezza femminile.
Ian stepped off the fire escape ladder to the landing and crouched low. Shadows on the curtains told him someone was in Carmella’s kitchen. He could hear a woman’s voice: Mrs. Battaglia.
“Why you stay home, Carma? With you sad face? You Irish boy, he no come ‘round?”
Now he’d hear it. Truth from her own lips. But Carmella’s voice was muffled. Sob choked, maybe. A shadow thrown on the wall crossed, and Carmella’s figure appeared in the window. She looked out, as if searching the sky for a sign.
“I think things changed,” she said, “when I saw Johnny Sketchy. I got a feeling then, of what I really want from a boy.”
“Augh, you too dreamy. But, what you feel, you need tell him.”
“He wouldn’t understand.”
Johnny Sketchy. Ian could picture the punk with that name: some skinny Wop who dodged the draft. Parades around in a zoot suit, hair slicked back with olive oil. Maybe a gold tooth. Well, Ian was going to find this Johnny Sketchy and set him straight. Carmella was his girl. His head pounded. His whole body felt heavy. A spell was coming upon him. He knew the feeling and knew he was powerless to stop it. So, he’d better go now, but he’d be back.
Morning dawned in a flash, and the Myrtle Avenue El train rattled Ian’s window. Seized by panic, he pressed the pillow to his face and ears, blocking light and sound. The train passed and Ian was himself again. He rolled to a sitting position, waited for the room to rebalance, then stood.
In the kitchen, his father and his uncle were reading the newspaper over coffee. As his mother placed steaming plates before the men, Mr. Sheehy sighed. “So, it’s yourself, is it?” he said, as always when, in his opinion, Ian had overslept. Ian mumbled, “Good morning.” He pulled a chair out to sit. Before his haunches even settled, his father had passed him the section of want ads. “Thanks.”
“Rheingold’s hiring,” his father said. “Preference to vets, it says.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“Less noisy than the docks, prob’ly.”
“’Til they blow that five o’clock whistle,” his uncle Bernie laughed. “Hey, they lookin’ for drivers? You wouldn’t be pent up inside.”
“Don’t be too particular.”
“I’m not being particular, Dad,” Ian said. His mother poured him some coffee and he nodded thanks. “I just gotta be where I can concentrate.” He reached for the spoon in the sugar bowl.
“You concentrate too much. All’s you need is something steady, then night school. Put that G.I. Bill to use. Pretty soon, you got a CPA and a nice quiet office.”
“I can’t think three years ahead, okay, Dad?” He knocked the bowl of the spoon on the lip of his cup, spilling the precious crystals onto the table.
“It’s a’right, Ian,” his Ma said, smiling gently. “Rationing is over.” He slid is cup aside and she wiped the table.
Ian looked at his hand, checking for tremors.
“You can’t think three seconds ahead with that Itie girl on your mind.”
“Leave her out of it. Please.”
“Plenty of girls at St. Barbara’s,” his Dad said. “No need traipsin’ ‘cross town for the hot-blood types.”
“Got Italians almost to Broadway,” Uncle Bern noted. “Six blocks away.”
“Be coloreds next,” his Dad said. “Soon’s the old Germans move out, you get Ities, then coloreds.”
“So what?” Ian said bitterly. “Their blood’s red. I’ve seen it.”
“Yeah,” his father said, folding his newspaper. He wiped his chin with a napkin and dropped it on his plate. “You fought your war, like a man should. Me and Bern, we fought our war, too. But we didn’t come home an’ lounge for a month and more. We went to work.”
“How many times do I…?”
“I know. You got headaches. I got ulcers. Bern, what you got?”
“Osteo arthritis.”
“The world doesn’t care.” His father rose and pushed his chair into the table.
Ian leaned back as his mother heaped his plate with eggs. “Enough, Ma, please.”
“Your mother cares,” his father said. “I care. The world doesn’t.”
The men plucked their hats and jackets from the hooks at the door. Ian stared out the kitchen window at a lemon sky and listened for the door to close.
After a few seconds, his mother asked, “Do you love that girl?”
“I don’t know, Ma.”
“Dolores Desmond asked about you.”
Ian let the remark pass. He tried a scoop of eggs. The headaches suppressed his appetite, but he knew he must eat to keep up his strength.
“I hate to say this,” his mother said, “but you’re wasting your time with that girl. She might be nice; she might be wonderful. I’ll admit, she’s beautiful. But, first, people prefer their own—”
“Ma—”
“And, a man needs prospects, if he’s going to win a girl.”
“I just won a war,” Ian said. “I can win a girl.”
She refilled his coffee. “Well, there you weren’t alone.”
I just won a war. That was a crock. The guys who spent weeks in field hospitals, then moved back to the front after the heavy fighting was over, after Mussolini and Hitler were crushed, they didn’t win the war. But Ian had ribbons on his uniform; he didn’t have to go into details. Carmella had been so proud to bring him home in unform to meet her father.
“You fought in a Italy?” Mr. Battaglia had asked.
“North Africa, then Italy.”
“Africa? You thinka they senda the coloreds. Their country….continent anyway.”
“Papa, be nice,” Carmella begged.
“I’m a just askin’, why they senda you there? You look a like a good sunburn a kill you.”
“Papa, no!” Carmella laughed, and music filled the room.
“Army never tells you why,” Ian shrugged. “But it was hot alright. Lots of sand.” He never understood what there was to fight and die for there in the desert. He nearly suffered heat stroke. Then Sicily, then assaulting the beach at Anzio. Before the war, Ian used to love Coney Island; now beaches meant combat, and he couldn’t even look at the sand.
“Well,” Mr. Battaglia tossed up his hands. “You gotta Mussolini out, da rat, and Hitler.”
Thus, he’d gotten the old man’s grudging respect. He’d asked about the ribbons, pointing to the red bar with narrow white and blue stripes.
“That’s for the bronze star,” Ian said.
“That’s a for a hero? Mama, we got a hero in the house!”
He made Ian tell him the story of Anzio. How, under enemy fire, Ian had picked up a fallen comrade and carried him forward twenty yards, fireman style, to drop him safely into a bomb crater. How he’d gone back ten yards for his lieutenant and dragged him to the same spot, easing him into the ad hoc shelter. He left out the part about being late to duck; how a shell detonated just yards away, knocking him unconscious for two days. Ian was never a soldier after that. For weeks, he was a patient. Then, just a working stiff, laboring in a support role, at one point assigned to a colored division. Those were facts he’d take to his grave.
He didn’t have to talk about the war to Carmella. She’d walked proudly through the neighborhood with her arm linked in his. And not just when he was in uniform. Even in his civilian clothes, a charcoal gray, single-breasted suit from Robert Hall, she’d said he looked like Gary Cooper. She’d been patient then. She loved to dance, but it was hard on him. The loud music, the crush of people, the frantic, boogie-woogie steps. When he’d had enough, his head splitting, she’d happily take some air with him.
One night, he got her to take a stroll through Prospect Park. Under the thick canopy of an old elm, he moved on her. They started to nuzzle. But he wanted to bury himself in her. To press into her hair, her cheek, her breasts, and rub the war away. She pushed and batted him off.
“I thought Irish boys were supposed to be nice,” she said.
“You like me, don’t you?”
“Sure. But I like me, too.” And she laughed that musical laugh of hers and tumbled into his arms again. He’d behaved himself the rest of the night. But the next time he’d seen her, she’d changed somehow. She didn’t explain and he couldn’t ask, but now he knew. It was Johnny Sketchy.
Ian went to the Rheingold Brewery that morning. Shouting to make himself heard above the din, he learned they wanted floor workers, not drivers. “You could ask at Schaefer,” the hiring man yelled. Ian walked the quarter mile to the competing brewery, where a fellow told him, “I might have something in a day or two.” He left his name and address, promising to check back tomorrow.
Ian spent the rest of the morning in Irving Square Park. He had a book to read, The Dangling Man by Saul Bellow, that the librarian had recommended, “for a boy in your position.” But the pressure behind his eyes made focusing on the small print impossible. He dozed on a bench until the tap of a cop’s nightstick on his thigh roused him. Then he walked. He visited a few more businesses who’d listed positions in the newspaper, but that was incidental to his path, due west, to the Italian district just below Brooklyn Heights, known inaccurately as South Brooklyn.
Ian arrived outside Carmella’s building just as the sun was dipping behind it. He wiped the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief and was suddenly self-conscious of his vapors. A day of walking, suited up in the warm sun, left him feeling rank. No matter; he wasn’t planning to get close to her. He only wanted to catch Johnny Sketchy.
Ian crossed the street and walked down the alley just far enough to see the Battaglia’s kitchen window. The curtains were open to get air flowing, and he could clearly see a slim, young man in a sand-colored suit. He held a broad-brimmed, whitish fedora in his hand. A thin mustache garnished a toothy mouth. Ian backtracked and trotted across the street. There was a coffee shop on the corner. He’d get a seat in the window and wait for Johnny.
It wasn’t long before his quarry emerged from the front door of the building. He donned his sharp fedora, and Ian noted the two-toned feather in the ochre band. Ian pitched his paper cup and went out to meet him.
“Hey,” he called while still some distance away, “you Johnny?”
The young man stopped and smiled, then looked over his shoulder, as if Ian meant someone behind him. He pointed to himself for confirmation. “John? No, no. Raphael.”
“You been to see Carmella?”
“I don’ think I need report to you my comings and goings.”
This guy was a weak sister. Skinny, hollow faced with the air of a fruit. What could she see in him?
“Listen, pal. Carmella’s my girl. Least up to a couple days ago. Now she’s got another guy on her mind. Johnny Sketchy?”
His mouth broke into a broad grin; the flimsy mustache faded as his upper lip stretched. The teeth looked too big for his mouth. He laughed briefly then waved Ian towards him. “Come, we go.”
“Where to?”
“I feel I am to blame,” he explained. “Because I introduce Carmella to who you call Johnny Sketchy. Now, I introduce you.”
Ian grabbed him by the lapel and wrenched him around. “What’s this, a set up? I don’t go for that, Joe.”
“Please,” he said, tapping a dainty finger on Ian’s clenched fist until he released his suit coat. Raphael smoothed his lapel and fluffed the kerchief in his pocket. “I’m a no Joe. Raphael. An’ I’m a help you. You see.”
They walked north briskly, though their progress was interrupted every few seconds, as this character encountered someone or other he apparently knew, prompting blessings and well-wishes for various family members before he could pry himself away and continue their trek. Eventually, they caught the Broadway Line east along Fulton Street. Still, Raphael greeted passengers getting on and assisted old ladies off. As the sun burrowed behind them, movie palace marquees lit up the distance. In his grandparent’s day, this had been vaudeville. Then in his parent’s time, silent films and early talkies. In Ian’s youth, technicolor was born, and he had sat transfixed before The Adventures of Robin Hood and Drums Along the Mohawk.
“Here is our stop!” Raphael said, pulling the signal cord. The streetcar screeched to a halt, putting Ian’s temples in a vice. He followed Raphael out the side door to the ticket booth of a stage theatre. A framed poster declared “The Sons of Italy of Bedford Stuyvesant present Giacomo Puccini’s one-act comic opera, Gianni Schicchi.”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Ian asked.
“Well, is a comedy.”
“That’s Johnny Sketchy?”
“Ski-key, mio amico. Is Italian.”
“Yeah, I got that.” But what Ian didn’t get was how an opera had suddenly turned Carmella cold towards him. The girl behind the glass slid two tickets forward. Ian reached for his wallet, but Raphael waved him off. “No, no, what is give free to me, I give free to you.”
“You’re connected with this outfit?”
“In a small way,” he answered, measuring a miniscule distance between his thumb and forefinger.
Things started to make a little sense. Him being artsy explained his dainty manners. He wasn’t anyone Carmella would fall for; probably a cousin, who had a theatre to fill. Ian followed him up a side staircase to the second level.
“Usu’lly, Puccini’s Il Trittico has t’ree parts. But we a small company; we only do t’e last one. Hope a you don’ mind.”
“Not at all.”
Raphael extended his left arm and lifted a black curtain, revealing a balcony box. He held the curtain as Ian stepped down, then they took their seats in the front row.
The floor seats were maybe half occupied. The orchestra consisted of two grand pianos, facing each other and pushed together ‘til their cabinets spooned. An elderly gent sat on a stool behind the far piano, shouldering a violin. The lights dimmed and two men in dark suits came out from the wings. They sat at the piano benches and rested their fingertips on the keys.
What proceeded was a lot of loud, thumping, dissonant nonsense. The curtains opened on a scene of ridiculously dressed villagers, all apparently mourning a corpse laid out in the center of the stage.
“T’ey are sing of t’eir grief,” Raphael whispered.
Me, too, Ian thought. Apparently, the dead guy had been very rich, and these were his relatives. They ransacked the stage looking for the old codger’s will. The kid who found it then seemed to want a favor from the rest, which none wanted to grant. A portly man entered with a young lady. While she made eyes at the kid who found the will, the portly gent seemed to offend the mourners. They flew into high dudgeon, and he wrenched his daughter from the boy.
That roused the sleeping violinist who sawed his bow across the strings, buzzing like a low flying plane. The cast froze, like waiting for bombs to drop. Instead, the girl opened her mouth, with a voice like the morning sun.
“O, mio babbino caro…”
Her breath brought a breeze into the room, lifting the thin, white curtains, so Ian could see the church steeple across the piazza. He was delirious again, hanging somewhere between sleep and waking, gripping the straw mattress, as Alba bent over him.
“mi piace, è bello bello, vo’andare in Porta Rossa, a comperar l’anello!”
Enchanting tones teased the air, defying the earthbound scratches of an old Victrola, inviting celestial light to flood the space. And Alba stroked Ian’s forehead with a cool cloth. His eyes focused, and her perfect face took form.
“Si, si, ci voglio andare!”
Her olive skin, the sunlight shimmering off her bare shoulders, black tresses tumbling, and her sculpted, pink lips pursed in sympathy.
“E se l’amassi indarno, andrei sul Ponte Vecchio, ma per buttarmi in Arno!”
Ian hadn’t forgotten Alba, but neither had he remembered her so vividly as now, in the throes of this aria. She had played it repeatedly on her father’s Victrola, during the weeks Ian had convalesced at their farmhouse. He’d never asked what the words meant, but had understood them as a plea for love unto death.
“Mi struggo e mi tormento…”
The girl’s voice soared and glided, lightly as a feather on the wind. And Ian saw Alba for the last time, from the back of a jeep, as she left the church after morning Mass and the breeze lifted her chapel veil. She’d swiped her hand after it, but the white lace kite had flown. Towards Ian, he thought at first. What a sign that would have been. But it sagged and came down where a sergeant grabbed it and gallantly returned it to her. Alba thanked him, then searched the departing soldiers until she caught Ian’s eye. In a movie, or an opera, they’d have run to each other, thrown themselves into ready arms. But somehow there was a gulf between them that swallowed up all emotion. All impetus. Ian felt the Jeep lurch and it rolled away, expanding the distance between them until their connection snapped.
The soprano’s voice diminished, the airy stream holding her hopes aloft dispersed, and she slumped at her father’s feet.
The crowd erupted. Ian clutched the heels of his palms to the boney rims of his eyes. He pitched forward, rose from his seat and staggered through the exit.
Out on the street he could breathe again. Yet, still in the dark, he felt Alba’s presence. Her scent of lavender. Her light, cooling touch, wiping the war from his burning brow. “My angel of mercy,” he’d called her. “No,” she had smiled. “You not see the angels for some time, I hope.”
With that, Ian noticed Raphael standing beside him.
“That song affect Carmella, too,” Raphael said. “Same way, I think.”
“You think? What do you know?”
Raphael shrugged, politely conceding he didn’t know anything. But that didn’t stop him from talking.
“She like you, but she no unnerstan’ jou.”
Ian smacked him in the shoulder. “Can you quit it, huh?” He needed time to think. And quiet. Which of these girls was he in love with? Either, really? Was he stuck on Alba and trying to make Carmella into her? And when Carmella couldn’t … couldn’t wipe the war away, he’d… he’d felt distance between them, the distance of a Jeep pulling away into oblivion, and he’d forced that distance to close, he’d pulled her to him, and…. What had he done? He’d handled her like some brute.
Raphael was still hanging around. Ian reached over and patted him on the shoulder. “Sorry. Maybe I don’t understand myself either.”
A dark cloud of shame enveloped him. He’d thought he was fortunate, that his wounds weren’t visible. Nobody seeing him on the street would show pity in their eyes. But a visible wound was at least tangible, comprehensible. He couldn’t explain how he was to himself; how could he ever make Carmella understand? She wanted a hero, and he felt hollow.
He searched Raphael’s eyes. Dark, walnut orbs, they were too large and sensitive for a man. At once, they begged to be trusted and warned of a trap. If this guy was queer, anything Ian told him would be all over the borough tomorrow. Still.
“You said Carmella likes me. You mean maybe she loves me?”
His lower lip bulged upward, drawing the corners of his mouth down in a clownish mask of ambiguity. “She might, I think, but she…”
“What? What did she say?”
“She say you, uh, sketchy.”
It took a moment, but Ian began to quake, not in anger, but with laughter. Uncontrollably, his insides shook, and he pitched his head back as wave after wave escaped. He almost lost his balance, and would have staggered into a passing couple, if Raphael hadn’t pulled him away. He didn’t know why it struck him so funny, except it was true. Ian Sheehy was Johnny Sketchy. An insubstantial man, drawn of lines, missing color. Without substance.
“But jou know,” Raphael mused, “all the great masterpiece, they start with a sketch.”
Ian clapped Raphael on the shoulder again.
The war had robbed him of color. Alba had washed away some darkness and let some light in. But clouds had crept back and maybe always would be there. Now it was up to Ian to restore the color, maybe with sunlight and music. And love. Maybe with Carmella, and maybe not. He would see about that. He’d go to her and explain. And if it didn’t work with Carmella, there were other girls, who might be patient and kind, and he could be a good man for one of them. Today he was Johnny Sketchy, but someday… there would be color and shape and substance. The stuff of life and love.
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This week Anthony Fauci did America and the world a great favor in announcing his resignation from NIAID. Forty years too late, but I’ll take it. Thus ends, perhaps, the career of one of the most destructive scoundrels in the history of U.S. public service. That may seem like a rash statement. There’s certainly passion behind it, because I, like many other Americans, have good reason to despise the man. But I’ve compared Fauci’s career with other American scoundrels, and his stacks up pretty well.
Benedict Arnold ran up a lot of debt while the Continental Congress struggled to keep summer soldiers in shoe leather, and he hatched a get-rich-quick scheme that would have been devastating for the patriot cause. But he failed. The only true harm was to Major André, who wound up getting his neck stretched. General James Wilkinson was a paid Spanish agent while the highest-ranking military officer on the frontier. He feathered a nice bed for himself, but he didn’t turn Memphis over to Castile. Aaron Burr (after killing Alexander Hamilton) might have been plotting to separate some of the Louisiana Territory from the United States and found his own country, but he also failed. The Secession, which plunged the country into bloody Civil War, was a group effort, so we can’t hang all the blame on Jefferson Davis.
My favorite in the running is the Communist traitor Alger Hiss, who convinced FDR at Yalta to give Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union after WWII, and not only got the U.S.S.R into the United Nations, but got them a permanent seat on the Security Council, thereby guaranteeing that the U.N. would be a force for worldwide corruption and utterly useless at everything else. The toll of human misery that worthless parasite caused is truly incalculable.
The proliferation of dastards in our contemporary times is hard to assess. There’s much we don’t know about the rampant corruption of the Clintons, Obama and Biden. When that comes to light, if ever, it’s likely to dwarf the malfeasance of any heads of state since the Roman Empire. But limiting this discussion to lower-level public servants, none of the aforementioned comes close to Fauci, in the amount of damage inflicted, not just on this country and its people, but to the entire world.
Fauci succeeded in thoroughly corrupting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making the agency that should have acted in the best interests of the American people a tool of Big Pharma. Under Fauci, public health policy bowed to the altar of corporate profits, and totally ignored efficacy. In partnership with Bill Gates, Fauci also contributed to the total corruption of the World Health Organization. (Even though, as a U.N. agency, it was going to get there eventually even without his help.) Fauci crushed the careers of promising researchers, as he grasped for total control of the government health apparatus, subverted real scientific research in favor of a rubber stamp for potentially profitable drugs, and, in our latest “crisis,” suppressed cheap, effective and readily available remedies in favor of an experimental “vaccine” that proved ineffective and dangerous.
In the early days of COVID, I, like most Americans, listened to Dr. Fauci, who seemed to be a voice of reason and authority. It didn’t hurt that he had gone to my alma mater, Regis High School, which has a reputation for turning out intelligent, Jesuit-educated professionals, who are “men for others.” But Fauci lied. And he admitted he lied to influence our behavior. That tipped me off that he was not to be trusted. He was a manipulator, who trafficked in appearances rather than truth.
The fact that he had been in the same job for 40 years also raised a serious red flag, that he was the most loathsome type of bureaucratic detritus: the empire builder. These are the egomaniacal weasels who get into an organization and subvert its mission to serve their purposes, growing their little office or department to a point of dominance, until the entire organization revolves around their fiefdom. It’s no surprise that even though Fauci was the head of NIAID, a department within the National Institutes of Health, everyone looked at him as the de facto head of NIH.
As someone who believes in staying in his own lane and doing the job he signed up for, I hate empire builders. Fauci’s empire building made him a cozy bedfellow of Big Pharma, and I’d really like to know more about the financials in that relationship. But first there’s the matter of how Fauci began his empire. For this, and a detailed examination of Fauci’s nefarious career, I heartily recommend Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s meticulously researched book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
I realize invoking RFK, Jr.’s name is going to cue multitudinous eye rolls. He’s been pilloried as an “anti-vaxxer” and a crank. But it’s clear to me from reading his book, that he is neither. He’s a citizen with questions that threaten powerful interests, so they, and their colleagues in our supine media, have disparaged him to silence his message. Pharma’s libelous response to Kennedy’s legitimate concerns recalls the old adage, “When you cut out a man’s tongue, you do not prove him wrong; you only prove you fear what he might say.”
Kennedy begins by saying that NIAID was pretty much a backwater of NIH when Fauci took over. Small pox had been eradicated, polio was under control, and the flu was simply a seasonal visitor, thus infectious disease was not as sexy as cancer or even heart disease. NIAID was the type of post where you’d expect to find a mediocre mind satisfied with a steady government paycheck, rather than a research scientist of any stature. Fauci was never much of a scientist, but he was an ambitious and grasping bureaucrat with an instinct for self-promotion. Yet for all his ambition, Fauci knew he wouldn’t go anywhere without an outbreak of a deadly infectious disease. Then came reports out of New York of a mysterious “gay cancer.” That malady would form the cornerstone of Fauci’s empire.
Like many people my age, I lost many friends during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s. Reading Kennedy’s book opened old wounds for me, because Kennedy makes a credible case that Fauci’s mishandling of AIDS turned an outbreak into an epidemic. One comes away thinking that hundreds if not thousands of men died who did not need to, because of the poisonous protocols an incompetent, ambitious quack dictated to the nation and to the world at large.
Kennedy explains how Anthony Fauci, desperate for a disease that would give his department relevance, seized on the unsubstantiated notion that a retrovirus called HIV was the cause of AIDS. Retroviruses are generally benign, and even Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who discovered HIV, has never claimed it causes AIDS. But, as Kennedy explains, the virus theory allowed Fauci to claim the exciting, new disease—and the subsequent billions in funding to combat it—for NIAID. Capturing AIDS was a coup for Fauci, but there was no science to support the HIV theory. No research since has proved a causal connection. And in making his premature and perhaps erroneous declaration, Fauci cut off inquiries into other possible causes of AIDS. One of these was poppers.
Poppers were a party drug for the gay sex scene of the 1970s and 1980s. They were capsules containing amyl nitrite, a substance that relaxed the lower digestive tract to facilitate male-on-male intercourse. Amyl nitrite has the unfortunate side effect of making the human immune system collapse, allowing wasting diseases and cancers, such as Kaposi’s sarcoma, the signature AIDS condition, to take hold. The first AIDS patients were, according to Kennedy, all hard-core users of poppers who were hyperactive on the gay sex scene. In this context, Fauci’s declaration, which cleared poppers of suspicion and put the focus on a possibly benign retrovirus, reads like a negotiated settlement with AIDS activists. Fauci promises that NIH will not criticize the gay lifestyle, if its militant arm will take government money and get on board with Fauci’s program. (We see this same arrangement playing out again in our current monkey pox “emergency.”) If this distillation of appearances is accurate, the consequences have been calamitous.
As Kennedy explains, the determination via fiat that HIV caused AIDS was followed by an explosion of cases. But was that a natural progression of a rampant infectious disease, or the obscene consequence of a titanic blunder? Let’s imagine for a second that Fauci was wrong. and that the poppers were the real problem.
If poppers caused AIDS, telling gay men to stop using them would have arrested the disease. But that message didn’t get out. At-risk men were encouraged to be tested for HIV, so they could receive early treatment that might possibly save their lives. This strategy allowed activists to keep the lifestyle alive, while sacrificing actual lives. Ad campaigns assured gay men that the only behavior they needed to change was to use a condom as a barrier against the dread virus. And if you caught the virus, even if you were still in peak health, you needed to quickly avail yourself to Tony Fauci’s remedy: a brutal concoction known as AZT that was so toxic it obliterated the human immune system, causing a wasting disease that was indistinguishable from AIDS.
If poppers were the true cause of AIDS, tens of thousands of perfectly healthy men with a benign retrovirus were given a useless yet lethal drug that caused them to waste away. Meanwhile their treating physicians assured them it was the HIV, suddenly enraged, that was killing them, and that stopping their AZT treatment would only mean a quicker death. If poppers were the problem, Tony Fauci has committed medical murder on a Pol Pot scale. Yet even if HIV was and is the root cause of AIDS, the known toxicity of AZT should have disqualified it as a treatment. Kennedy asserts that Fauci chose AZT because the drug had a fresh patent, and there were royalties to be had. It strikes me as no coincidence at all that people started being able to “manage their HIV” as soon as they were given less toxic alternatives than AZT. HIV is no longer a death sentence, but maybe it never had to be.
After the crisis in America waned, the HIV killing spree continued on the continent of Africa. Fauci convinced Pres. G. W. Bush to pump billions of dollars into HIV medication to stem the tide of African AIDS, though still, no causal connection or even a consistent correlation between HIV and AIDS was ever established. If Kennedy is right, couldn’t the wasting disease afflicting the poor on the African continent have been caused by foul water and malnutrition, and better remedied by agrarian infrastructure than by highly toxic pharmaceuticals?
Fast forward to COVID. This time we have the advantage of knowing a virus is the root problem. But once again, Tony Fauci started by offering up a toxic remedy, remdesivir, which had failed testing for efficacy and safety. Remdesivir is so toxic, it was ruled unsafe to treat Ebola. Yet, Tony Fauci declared remdesivir to be THE protocol for treating COVID, and banned the use of safe, effective and cheap remedies, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Fauci banned off-label use of those approved drugs, ostensibly because they haven’t been double-blind placebo tested for this particular ailment. But he exempts remdesivir, a known threat to human life, from that same requirement. Remdesivir has been shown to cause kidney failure, which in turn causes the lungs to fill with fluid, so the patient cannot breathe. In this way, remdesivir toxicity mimics COVID, the same way AZT poisoning resembled full-blown AIDS. But remdesivir has a patent, and in Tony Fauci’s calculations, royalties matter more than human life.
On December 11, 2021 The Epoch Times reported that Colleen DeLuca, 62, died of COVID-19 on Oct. 10, at Jefferson Washington Township Hospital in Sewell, New Jersey. Her husband, David DeLuca had secured a prescription for ivermectin from an out-of-state doctor and was seeking a court order to compel the hospital to administer the drug when his wife passed away. Dr. Fauci’s suppression of remedies had claimed another life. And, perhaps, Mrs. DeLuca’s passing from COVID was actually a disguised case of remdesivir poisoning. In this age of thoroughly corrupted health practices, we’ll never know.
In addition, Fauci pushed an experimental “vaccine,” which was not proven scientifically to be safe or effective, and has racked up a record number of adverse incident reports on the VAERS system. Myocarditis, blood clots, heart attack, stroke, and Guillain-Barré Syndrome are just a few of the common complaints. And a new acronym has entered the American lexicon: SADS, for sudden adult death syndrome. Once again, thousands of perfectly healthy people may have had their health destroyed because they listened to Tony Fauci’s medical advice. And that’s just in the first year and a half of the “vaccine” rollout. The long-term effects of Fauci’s potion are unknown and unknowable.
Kennedy explains that one of Fauci’s tactics for covering his misdeeds is to eliminate placebo groups. In one vaccine trial, when he didn’t get the results he wanted, Fauci vaccinated the placebo group, so the vaccine’s long-term consequences couldn’t be measured. Might this be the reasoning behind his aggressive push for universal vaccination, despite the general belief that widespread vaccination during a pandemic will only cause a rash of variants? Yet, this serial destroyer of medical evidence appears on television and arrogantly declares, that in criticizing his directives, “They’re really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”
Fauci no more represents science than he embodies medical ethics, in which the primary rule is “First, do no harm.” This time, he’s not going to be able to eliminate the control group. Thanks to Bobby Kennedy, Jr. and others who have blown the whistle on Fauci’s infamous career, too many of us are on to him. There are millions of “vaccine” refuseniks who will be the control group. God willing, Anthony Fauci will finally be held to answer for the carnage his quackery has caused.
Sadly, Fauci’s culpability may run even deeper than hack medicine. There is mounting evidence that COVID was, in fact, developed in a gain-of-function lab secretly funded by Tony Fauci, and that Fauci conspired to suppress investigations into the lab theory. We can only hope that the walls are closing in on Fauci and that he’ll leave NIAID in December without destroying all evidence of his misdeeds.
***
In 1990, I moved into an apartment in the Sunset District of San Francisco. One of my neighbors was tall and rail thin, with a clear and shiny pate. He had a quick smile and a hearty, volcanic laugh. The first time I met Chris in the hallway, I mentioned that I enjoyed hearing his piano in the evenings. I told him I sang. He nodded politely and promised not to play too late in the evenings. A couple of days later, I was doing dishes. As Chris started pounding out show tunes, I sang along. After a few minutes, the piano stopped and there was a knock at my door.
“You really do sing,” Chris said, gleefully, and proceeded to recruit me for his choral group, which I joined for a season. Shortly after our spring concert, the piano went silent. Chris had gotten sick. He started carrying a backpack of supplemental oxygen. Eventually, he was hospitalized. I visited him after work and, because he couldn’t focus his eyes, I read to him. After a few weeks, Chris was transferred to another facility, nominally a hospital, but functioning as a hospice for young men like Chris. I went to visit him there, and found him in physical pain and emotional distress. Before I could return again, I got word Chris had passed.
I’m thinking a lot about Chris these days, as well as Steve, Robert, and Paul, all men who died of AIDS but maybe didn’t have to. They should have gotten better answers 30 years ago. They and we need to get justice now.
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The man pushed through the double doors onto the landing above the atrium and immediately felt his head and shoulders lift. Off was the weight of another day of corporate servitude. The fresher-by-comparison air of the three-tiered court filled his lungs, and the fading light of another expiring day beckoned from the exit doors below. Eight hours of squinting at code had taken a toll, he conceded, as he blinked to adjust to the soft twilight of early October. In a week—or was it two?—they’d turn the clocks back, and his six o’clock exit would be met by pitch darkness. Sunlight would be a weekend luxury until Spring.
At the first landing, he heard the elevator doors jar open and, flicking his eyes rightward, thought he saw the brunette. If he timed his descent, he could intercept her on the atrium floor. Perhaps hold the door for her, exchange pleasantries, and have her vanish again for weeks on end. Weeks he would fill with scenarios in which he actually spoke to her and she to him. He tried to recall some of the banter he’d drafted, all of which was probably absurd. Anyway, it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t meet her, casually, on the floor, and he couldn’t decide whether to speed up or slow down to make that happen. And anyway, again, she’d probably have a colleague with her, engaged in conversation, and either not notice him or worse, act politely dismissive. And, finally anyway, that might not even have been her on the elevator.
His foot hit the tile surface as the elevator doors rolled open. He dared not look, but maintained his moderate, deliberate stride towards the door. From the corner of his eye, he determined it was she, his brunette, and that she was alone. He made a quick estimate of their relative paces and determined he’d be two steps ahead of her at the door. Perfect. He shifted his tote bag to his left hand, freeing his right to open the door. He pulled the door inward and stepped aside for her to pass.
Say something or not? Her brown eyes met his and warmed at his gesture. Would speaking spoil the moment? Should he just leave it alone, a cornerstone to build on?
“Apres vous,” he said stupidly.
Her mouth curled into an involuntary smile. “Uh, mer-cee, Monsieur?”
“Je vous en prie.”
He stepped behind then quickly around her to grab the outer door, holding that open for her, then joining her on the concrete portico.
“Well, that’s impressive,” she smiled. “Uncommon gallantry for Union County, New Jersey. But, what if I’d said ‘muchas gracias’?”
He shrugged and babbled, “Yo te respondería, ‘De nada,’ y probablemente comentaría en tus ojos o tu sonrisa.”
Her jaw descended just enough to fit her tongue into her cheek. “So, you’re a man of the world?”
“Via the Internet.”
“Well, you get a break from the computer now.” She looked at him uncertainly before nudging, “Friday, time to cut loose!”
“Ay, si, si. With the Salsa and the Meringue!” It had been ages, but he executed a few quick Salsa moves. He might have gyrated like a complete dork, but at least he wasn’t standing stiffly like a complete dork. She laughed, whether with him or at him was unclear.
“Well, that’s a start,” she said. “And not half bad.”
“A couple of lessons,” he admitted. “Ancient history.”
They step down the concrete steps onto the asphalt of the parking lot.
“You should try that with a partner,” she suggested.
Which would have been the time to close the deal. And he was ready to, but his eye caught his car, stark and white among the black and silver vehicles, and he saw the green sweater, and knew she was there. He nodded in that direction, signaling the brunette that he had to go, and that she shouldn’t follow.
“That’s mine over there,” he said, apologetically.
“Okay. Well.” She turned a shoulder in the opposite direction, then held. “You ever go to Fusion? For the Latin dancing?” she asked.
He stared coldly at his car, the green sweater, the plaid skirt, the head of caramel blonde hair.
“Used to. Kind of, I don’t know, I kind of fell out of it.”
“Well, tonight. You could fall back in.”
He pulled himself back to the brunette. “I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks.”
She headed out, and he marched towards his car, directly to the driver’s door that he clicked open. He addressed the girl over the roof.
“Brigid. We discussed this, didn’t we?”
“I need a ride home.”
“From my office?”
She pouted. He hated that pout. “You’re not going to make me walk, are you?”
He drove through the suburban streets. The setting sun added flame to the changing leaves. Trees burned without being consumed. He burned, as Brigid went on an inane rant.
“And my teacher is so lame. He thinks Roosevelt solved the Depression when everyone knows…”
“His policies only made it worse.”
“Yeah. When he was inaugurated for his second term in 1937, the Depression was worse than it had been in 1932. Five years of worsening depression, you’d think a smart man would have changed his approach.”
The man huffed. “I feel like we’ve had this discussion before.” He jerked the car right, towards an open stretch of curb.
“Here?” she whined.
“Have a good night.”
“It’s like three blocks.”
He gripped the steering wheel in tight fists. “I’m not driving up to your parents’ house.”
“Why?” she asked, suddenly earnest. “They don’t blame you. Me. It’s my fault. Keep saying they taught me better. Maybe they blame themselves.”
He shook his head. “Whatever. This is as far as I go.”
She pleaded, as she always pleaded. “Look. What happened with us happened.”
“Brigid,” he said firmly, “I really need you to get out of the car right now.”
He stared down the opposite side of the street. A woman walking her dog. Would she recognize him? Would she tell the neighborhood watch? He heard the oddly distant sound of the car door popping open and slamming shut. He jerked the wheel left and pulled away from the curb.
Back in his apartment, the man poured a generous tumbler of bourbon onto rocks and carried the drink to the living room. Sitting on the couch, he picked up the TV remote and aimed it at the screen. Then he picked up his home laptop, opened it and waited for the screen to light up. He sipped his drink and typed in his password. Then the doorbell rang. It was she.
“Are you going to help me?” Brigid asked, then just pushed past him, brushing him with a huge backpack crammed with textbooks. She made a beeline for the dining room table. “You said you’d help me with trigonometry.”
“I don’t remember trigonometry.”
“You said — ‘I’m a Math guy, whatever you need.’ Well, I need trig.”
“I know what I said,” he answered. “I wanted to sleep; I would have said anything. But I don’t remember trig.”
“Selfish bastard.”
He closed his computer and clicked off the TV. “Y’now, I’m not doing this.”
“You have to.”
“No.”
He strode to his bedroom, and Brigid followed. He slid open the door to his closet and fished for a fresh shirt. He found a rayon print, palm trees and sand against a dark blue sky.
“I know what I did. What I took from you.”
“That’s an interesting way to put it.”
“I didn’t want it to happen, but it did.” He changed his shirt quickly, his back to her. “And it’s over. And dealing with your craziness; that’s over, too.” He slipped off his sneakers and donned some loafers he could dance in. He didn’t look at Brigid as he marched to the door. “When I get back, I want you gone.”
He vaguely remembered where Fusion was, but after cruising up and down Route 3, he broke down and consulted Siri. The mechanical voice told him to make a U-turn and proceed a quarter of a mile. Of course, he now saw familiar signs and storefronts his eyes had been blind to. You’d think he’d know better than to drive in a rage, and Siri’s voice gave him gentle reassurance. She told him to make a right turn, and he saw the nightclub’s façade.
In the backroom, the Salsa lesson had already begun. He took his place at the end of the leaders’ line, surreptitiously scanning the line of women, his heart pounding slightly at the prospect of her being there. As usual, the crowd tended towards middle-aged divorcees. But as the instructor called for followers to rotate, he saw her, his brunette. Their eyes met, and he smiled slightly. No big deal. He’d keep it casual.
He knew the sequence from a lesson long ago, and was able to lead it smoothly and in rhythm. The followers’ line rotated a few more times, until she was standing in front of him.
“You made it.” Her tone was welcoming, maybe a little teasing.
“You were right about ditching the computer.”
They took their turn through the sequence and broke off, but not before she gave his hand a playful squeeze.
Class ended with a burst of applause, and the music cranked to a deafening din. He saw her immediately dance with someone. Which was okay; it was customary to dive in with whoever was closest when the music started. He offered his hand to an awkward girl who’d struggled and really needed the practice. She seemed reluctant to accept; maybe she’d already had enough. He hadn’t meant to pressure her. Just trying to be gracious. And leading her was tedious; her steps were too big, which threw off her rhythm, and she rocked back on her heels, so her weight distribution was all wrong. She was ponderous in his arms and the song went on forever.
But he was able to maneuver her nearer to the woman he actually wanted to dance with, hoping to catch her for the next dance, if this song ever ended. Which it didn’t, exactly. The DJ just mashed the next song in on top. But the mix was abrupt enough that partners took the clashing chords as a cue to thank each other and move on. He caught her eye and extended his hand, in which she placed hers.
So much was coming back to him. The hammerlock to inside turn to cuddle. The Hurricane. Miami Special. And this lady was pretty good. She followed well, turned sharply. He’d taken her for Italian, but maybe she had a drop or two of Cuban blood.
“Uh-oh,” she cried, and stopped, clinging to his arm as she perched on one leg. He thought she’d twisted an ankle. But she held up her shoe in her other hand. It was missing a heel. “And they’re a week old.”
He spotted the three-inch black spike and scooped it up. “Well, there’s a bar,” he suggested. She nodded agreement and limped along at his side to the other room.
But just because there was a bar didn’t mean there was service. Patrons stood three deep, one remarking that he’d been waiting fifteen minutes. “Imagine all the money they’re not making, because they couldn’t put one more fool behind the bar.”
Someone jostled the woman from behind. She hopped closer to him, holding her hands up nervously, as if trying to create a force field.
“I know where there’s bourbon,” he whispered. She tilted her head, as though she were open to suggestion, so he hiked a thumb towards the door, and they made their exit. He gave her his address in case their cars got separated.
It was a bold move. But maybe not. Maybe it was just survival. The crowd was oppressive. He never felt as alone as he did in a crowded place. Even standing next to her, he didn’t feel like he was with her. She must have felt it, too, so it wasn’t just him being weird. Or phobic. And he had nothing to worry about back at his apartment. He kept it neat, almost compulsively the last few years. So, he shouldn’t be embarrassed to have a woman drop in. Anyway, he didn’t expect anything much, at all, to happen. Except, maybe he might learn her name. That would be something to build on.
“I don’t know yours either,” she said, as she curled her legs up onto the couch.
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell,” he suggested. He went to the kitchen to pour drinks. “Savor the mystery.”
“Oops, too late,” he heard her call.
Returning with two tumblers of bourbon, he found her holding his master’s diploma she’d lifted from a nearby bookshelf. “Mark B. August. What’s the B for?”
The man blushed slightly. He handed her a tumbler and crouched to sit beside her. “There is no before, there is only now.” He clinked her glass and they sipped.
“I love that photo,” she said, pointing to a framed print on the wall. The man stood before Fuente de Neptuno as streams of water gushed high into a cloudless summer sky. “I love Madrid.”
The man nodded, and a patch of color on the white carpet caught his eye.
“Barcelona. Sevilla. I’ve been to Spain maybe half a dozen times. I can never get enough.”
A Kelly-green knee sock.
“You seem to favor France,” she said, waving at the wall of his Paris photos.
“I-I did,” he said. “When I was traveling.” He pointed to a random image, and when she turned her head he grabbed up the sock. And another. He balled them up and thrust them under the cushion.
“When you were…? Don’t you still…?”
“Not for a few years. Excuse me. Be right back.”
She’s here, he thought as he marched down the hall. Sure enough, she’d shed her uniform sweater, her white blouse, and her plaid skirt on the floor outside the bathroom. He gathered up the clothes. The door was slightly ajar, and he pushed it open.
Brigid was standing at the sink, brushing her teeth. Wearing only an oversized t-shirt that belonged to him.
“You can’t be here,” he said.
“You gonna make me walk home?”
He placed her clothing on the side of the basin. “I’ve asked you not to drop your things all over my apartment.”
“How else can I mark my territory?”
“This is my territory,” he whispered harshly. “My space. And you are to leave. As quietly and unobtrusively as possible.”
He left the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He padded quietly towards the living room. He found the woman standing at his photo wall, peering intently at a shot of him in front of an ornate eighteenth-century building.
“This one, it’s not France.”
“No, actually, that’s Quebec City. My French wasn’t ready for the big time yet.”
“Right, those Parisians can be snooty.”
He laughed, perhaps too freely. “I never had a problem,” he explained, “because I would, the first thing I’d say was, ‘Je suis un Americain touriste ici en vacance. Je parle Francais terriblement, mais je dois practiquer.’”
“Aw, that’s funny. Terriblement. So, they loved you after that?”
“They tolerated me.”
“Funny, these photos. No traveling companions?”
He took her empty glass. “Let me freshen this up.”
She held him in place with a touch of her hand.
“Odd how you can fly to France alone, but won’t drive to Fusion?”
He mentally ran through his usual list of excuses. He wanted to say something that wouldn’t make him sound bitter.
“He doesn’t like to drive.”
Brigid was behind him, fully dressed at least, with one strap of her backpack over a shoulder.
“Especially in the dark. I guess he didn’t tell you.”
He handed the woman her glass back and just threw up his hands.
“This is Brigid,” he huffed. “She was just leaving.”
“Yeah,” the girl taunted. “He’s kind of ashamed of me. And our relationship.”
“We don’t have a relationship,” he said. “Once and for all—”
“Maybe I should go,” the woman said. She placed the tumbler on the coffee table and grabbed her shoes. She cut a wide swath around him, and he didn’t dare move. She headed straight for the door, which Brigid was now blocking.
“Brigid, let her pass,” he demanded. Exasperated, he turned away from the scene, towards his haunted wall of yesterdays. Then, as the door hinges moaned, he turned back around to catch a final glimpse of her. Brigid, too, had vanished. She’d successfully defended her turf. Now where had she gone? He found her in his bedroom, on the edge of his bed, peeling off her socks.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Well, you need something to fill your night.”
“Stop it!” he screamed, clenching his fists to his temples. “Just stop!” He looked at himself in the full-length mirror that hung on his closet door. He had to end this now.
“How long have I known you, Brigid,” he asked.
“You need to ask that?”
“Five. Years? And you’re still in high school?”
“I’m a slow learner.”
“One of us is.” He laughed at himself, even as tears salted his eyes. “She heard me yell at you.”
“So?”
“And she walked out.” He paced before the mirror. He raised an index finger demonstratively, ready to present his case. “What kind of woman would leave a furious man alone with a sixteen-year-old girl?”
Brigid had no answer. She puckered her face in a bratty scowl as she so often had. But she couldn’t shame him. Not anymore. “She didn’t see you. Because. You’re not here.”
“Of course, I am.”
He put his head in the vice of his hands and tightened. “You’re here! And I want you out!”
“I have to stay here.” She tossed a sock on the floor.
“How many times do I have to say I’m sorry? Why can’t you forgive me?”
The girl wagged her head and threw in an eyeroll. “Try forgiving yourself.” She floated another sock through the air. It twirled like a falling leaf, even glistened as it caught the afternoon sun. And there were more leaves, and long shadows, and the glare you sometimes get in September when the sun hangs low, and the windshield isn’t as clean as it should be.
And there were kids, fresh from school, laughing and tramping under the weight of heavy backpacks. And a blonde girl, in a green plaid uniform, pulled a binder open to show her friends the unfair grade. But the wind took the paper, blowing it between two park cars. So, the girl pursued it, crouching to grab it, when the wind blew again and she lunged and she wasn’t between the cars anymore, but—
He hit the brake as hard as he could. He wasn’t going that fast. But the wet leaves. He skidded. He saw her face, pale in his headlights, and heard the dull thunk as her head struck.
He trampled white paper on golden brown leaves. She bled from the mouth and her eyes swam in the jelly behind them. He pressed 911 as her friends cried and her hand went limp and cold.
“Hey, it’s going to be okay,” he lied. “Hey. What’s her name?”
“Brigid,” a girlfriend said.
“Don’t leave me, Brigid,” the man begged. “Stay with me. Don’t you leave me!”
Monday morning saw the return of corporate servitude. The man parked in his usual spot at his usual time. But his legs felt leaden, as they had all weekend. So, when he reached the atrium, he headed to the elevator. Its doors were closing as he approached, and he called out for someone to hold it. He saw a hand reach for the panel, and knew he had held it as they’d danced.
As the doors sprang open again, he stepped back, not wishing to make her any more uncomfortable.
“Well, are you getting on?” she asked.
If you insist, he said, entirely to himself. Once inside, he crossed his hands and kept his eyes straight ahead.
“I found out who Brigid is,” she said.
He shrugged. “It’s public record.”
“Would seem the public doesn’t know the half of it.” The car arrived at his floor and the doors opened. “Did you ever… try to get help?” she asked.
He remembered how her hand had felt in his. How the touch of her arm made him want to stay with her. He gave a curt nod.
“But.” He extended an arm to hold the door open. “I just really wanted her to be alive. And, yeah, I know that’s crazy.”
“Not really.”
He lowered his arm and let the elevator go. The door closed on a pair of warm eyes, and a slight smile. He walked towards his office, stepping vaguely in Salsa time.
If you enjoyed this story, please explore this website for more fiction choices, such as The Wedding Routine, which Online Book Club calls an “amazing book” with “dynamic characters” who “produce nothing but comic gold.” Or visit my Amazon author page and consider purchasing one of my books. You can also support this website by clicking on an affiliate link and making a purchase. For example, the Product of the Week, featured below. When you click and buy anything at all in the next 24 hours, the website receives a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support.
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It was a muggy August, culminating in heat lighting, as my father called it. There was no thunder or rain, just electrum threaded through dark clouds and pulsing madly. My father raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Hardly natural,” he said, staring out the window from under a furrowed brow. “Very odd.”
And odd is what I thought when he first showed up, not long after. Baseball was our game then, in early morning or late afternoon, working around the heat. He didn’t say anything to any of us; he just gimped along until he reached the third base bleachers and took a seat a few rows up, his stiff, dead limb extending into the aisle. Despite his frail appearance, he seemed to have a fire inside that might erupt. He didn’t call to any of us as we warmed up, and we all hoped he’d just sit a while and move on, and not be one of those old men who rail angrily at kids, because they’re the only part of the world that hasn’t stopped listening.
But before even getting to the peglegged man, since that’s what he called himself, I should mention getting down to the park, and stopping off at Tommy Weir’s house first. He had gone in, saying he just needed a minute, and that minute turned to ten, so we rang for him, and his mother let us in.
Tommy was at the dining room table, packing up the Wonder Pen woodburning kit he’d gotten for his birthday. A noisy fan sat on the table wafting smoke towards an open window. Tommy’s bat and glove sat on a nearby chair. He picked up the bat and rubbed the barrel with a cloth.
“Check this out,” he said proudly. Stenciled along the barrel of his bat was the name Lou Brock. He’d done the same thing on the back of the last finger of his fielder’s glove.
I didn’t want to answer. It just wasn’t what I would have done, if my parents had given me a wood burner. It looked all wrong to my eyes. A name on a bat was always in handwriting, like an autograph. Tommy had done his in thick blocks, in 3-D, like the cover of a comic book.
“Is that Lou Brock or Superman?”
“I had to cover up Roger Maris.”
“Doesn’t look official.”
“Paddy, are you passing home?” Mrs. Weir called from the kitchen. “I have something for your mom.”
So, I went to the kitchen and Mrs. Weir was packing cherry tomatoes from a basket into a brown paper bag. “I know how she loves these, and we had so many ripen this week, they’ll just spoil. Here take them to her.”
She held out the bag, holding it, then tilting her head to prod me.
“Thank you, Mrs. Weir,” I said, and she handed me the bag, but didn’t let go.
“You know, Tommy worked hard on that bat. It would have been kind to say something nice.”
Why are mothers always spying? I thought. Maybe I wouldn’t have to “be kind” if her son knew how to draw. Give me a Wonder Pen and I’ll show you how it’s done. But she was one of these mothers whose kids could never do wrong. So, I didn’t say anything, just nodded and skulked out.
We picked up the other kids from the block and I dashed up my steps to my house to drop off the tomatoes.
“From Mrs. Weir,” I told my mother.
“I hope you thanked her. Maybe if you did a little work around here, our garden could grow. But it’s always baseball. The national waste time.”
So, I was not in a good mood when we finally reached the park and started choosing sides. The peglegged man seemed to take a keen interest in the choosing, as if he knew our abilities. I thought I heard him mutter the word “slaughter” dismally. Yet, the game kept his interest for at least four innings. That was when I doubled down the line in leftfield and saw him standing when I got to second. Tommy stepped up next, bringing his bat to the plate for the second time. Earlier, he’d struck out flailing wildly at a pitch in the dirt. That had triggered a round of jeers, how he burned all the hits out of his bat. As he took his practice swings, I could see a ferocity in his eyes; his pride was on the line. So, when Terry Sullivan left a pitch over the heart of the plate, Tommy punished it. The return drive nearly parted Terry’s hair before screaming into short center field.
I knew I’d have to burn home, because the ball reached the centerfielder quickly. I tried to slide past Jim Lundy, who was in front of the plate, but the ball came in perfectly on a hop for him to sidestep and plant a foot in my path. My foot hit his shin guard and I felt my ankle roll. Pain shot all the way up my leg. I rolled over on my back and gripped my knee to my chest.
“Time! Time out!” my teammates called.
Both teams gathered in a close circle.
“You think it’s broken?” Tommy asked.
“Dunno.” I had never broken anything.
“It’s not broken,” the peglegged man said, as he clomped down from the bleachers.
“Who’s that?” boys asked me, deciding then that I was connected to him.
“He just needs to walk it off,” the old-timer assured us. “Put this on.” He handed Tommy an ace bandage.
“Me?”
“You know first aid, don’t you?”
Tommy nodded, no doubt wondering how the old man knew or if he’d just assumed.
“Wrap it tight.”
So, Tommy untied my sneaker and peeled off the shoe and sock as delicately as he could. A grapefruit was starting to grow on the outside between the ankle bone and the heel. Then Tommy noticed something I was kind of shy about.
“What’s that, a tattoo?”
“Looks like a flock of birds,” Lundy said. Which wasn’t inaccurate. Inside my shin was a cluster of freckles in the shape of an open vee, like ducks heading south.
“It’s a birthmark,” I groaned, as Tommy tightened the wrap. He worked quickly, and when the bandage was clipped in place, he pulled my sneaker back on and laced it up. Then Lundy helped haul me to my feet, and I tested if I could walk. That seemed like not a good idea. I was done, but the game went on with unbalanced sides.
Lundy, maybe feeling a little guilty, hoisted me in a fireman’s carry over to the bleachers. He plunked me down where the old man had been sitting, but he was nowhere around.
I hobbled on crutches for a couple of days, but within two weeks, my ankle was pretty normal. Our game then was football. Fall was in the air, which not only meant a slight chill and longer shadows cast by a lower sun, but fragrant smoke wafting from one direction or another. Maintenance crews raked small piles of leaves onto the paved paths and lit them on fire. I liked to watch those fires, especially when the breeze would pick up, sending sparks whirling into the air. Sometimes after our game, I’d sit with one or two friends on a bench; breathe the smoke like incense from church and talk about what we were going to do in school the next day or when we grew up.
We wouldn’t meet at the diamond now, because the outfield grass was either too clumpy or bare and the infield was all clay, so you could get scraped up. We met closer to the park’s side entrance, where there was a broad, flat lawn with thick grass that cushioned the ground. We played tackle without helmets or pads, which we eagerly accepted as a test of manhood. We were fearless in the trenches and in the open field, throwing our bodies at each other as if we were invulnerable and immortal. The only thing anyone feared was holding for the kickoff.
“I’m not gonna kick your finger, Teddy!” Lundy roared.
The rest of us had seen this coming. None of us wanted to hold, because we’d be last to get downfield and miss out on the play. Still, you can’t take the most jittery kid in school and expect him not to flinch when it looks like you’re about to kick him. But Lundy seemed to figure if he could bully the kid into holding, he could bully him into holding still. After two tries, where Teddy pulled his hand away and the ball toppled over, Lundy was red-faced and ready to punish.
“Why don’t you use a tee?” a hoarse voice called.
The peglegged man took a hand from the pocket of his peacoat and hurled a piece of white plastic high into the air. It spiraled and fluttered, bouncing a foot or two from Lundy, who snatched it up and mounted the football on top.
“Thanks, mister!” he called, and several boys echoed.
The game commenced with abandon, but was scoreless after several possessions, until Lundy hit Tommy Weir on a short crossing pattern. Tommy grabbed the ball in stride and from there no one could catch him. He showed why even the older kids were starting to call him “The Live Wire.” A bunch of our guys ran to him in the endzone and celebrated. I felt like I was watching on TV, not really a part of it, but wishing. That’s when the county cops rolled up with lights blazing.
“How many times we have to tell you kids not to play here?” an officer barked from the driver’s seat. “Get down to the diamonds where you belong!”
“This grass is better!” someone yelled.
“Only ‘cause it don’t have you little snots running all over it,” a second cop said.
“Or cop cars!” Lundy yelled and some of the boys laughed.
“Now you wanna get smart? Move it, or we’ll run you all in!”
“Why don’t you just leave these boys alone?” Red-faced with fury, the old man gimped over to the patrol cars and laid into the cops. “You should be protecting these boys, not harassing them! They’re not hurting anyone! Why don’t you run off the glue sniffers under the bridge? Or those teen gangs spraying graffiti everywhere? These boys aren’t doing anything!”
“Look, Pops, they got no right—”
“They’ve got a right to be safe,” he insisted. “And you need to protect them!”
The cops eyed one another, not sure how to handle the angry codger.
“Where were you when I lost my leg?” the old man demanded. “Exactly their age, and a pair of teenagers pushed me into a pile of burning leaves. Right over there, under that oak. They thought it was funny! My pants caught fire and they ran away, leaving me. Where were the cops then?”
“Look, mister, that’s before our time. Take it up with City Hall. You kids break it up and move along.”
“Before your time. Hell,” the old man muttered.
It was almost dinner time anyway, so we grabbed our jackets from the sidelines and started off towards home.
“Paddy,” the old man called. “Paddy Seymour!”
I stopped and waited for him to hobble over. He shooed Tommy away and leaned in to speak quietly.
“Don’t play tomorrow,” he said. “Do something else. Friday you can come right back out here. But it’s going to be bad if you play tomorrow. Will you promise me, Paddy?”
Why me, I wondered, and how does he even know me? But a lot of old people in town knew kids by their families even if they never met. Plus, I saw the pleading in the old man’s eyes. They were faded blue with age, but spiked with veins of red, and I thought he might weep if I defied him.
“Okay,” I said. He thanked me and hobbled off.
“What was that about?” Tommy asked.
“I don’t know.”
I kept the old man’s warning to myself that night and all through the morning at school. Then after lunch recess, Lundy told us the other fourth grade class had challenged us to a game at 3:30 in the park.
“We need everybody to show up!” he barked. “No excuses!”
The room exploded with grunts and cheers and fists pounding on desks, until the teacher demanded quiet. Tommy leaned toward me across the aisle.
“You’re coming, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, forcing the words past a huge knot in my throat.
“Don’t be scared of the cops,” Lundy said on the walk home.
“I’m not.”
“What then? Can’t be Stranburg. I’ll handle him.”
“Why would I be scared of Stranburg?”
“Look, Seymour,” he said. “If we gotta play short, or we gotta match Teddy against anybody good, we’re done. So be there, or so help me, I’m gonna pound you the next time I see you. An’ every time after that.”
That settled my mind against going. I didn’t know what the old man meant, and I didn’t expect a run-in with the cops. But I didn’t like some bully telling me what to do, even if it cost a fat lip. Then I thought of the other boys I liked better than Lundy. They were counting on me, too. So, I changed into my play clothes and trotted down towards the park. I’d be a little late, but wouldn’t miss much.
When I spotted the stone gateway on Garrison Avenue, I kicked into a sprint and was about to break an imaginary tape when out of nowhere stepped the peglegged man. I skidded on my heels to a stop.
“I knew you wouldn’t listen, Paddy,” he said, “but I can’t let you pass.” His eyes were blue ice in a bed of hot coals. “Me being here is a gift. Don’t you see, I’m trying to save you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I looked past him and tried to skirt around. But he cuffed me by the hood and held me there.
“I need to show you something. After, you make up your mind.”
He let me go and stepped toward the gray stone post.
“One day, I came here to play football. The cops ran us off the field, so we took our game down to the diamonds. Along the way, a friend punted the ball off the side of his foot, and it went skipping down the path away from where we were heading. I ran the ball down and grabbed it before it rolled into a leaf fire. When I turned around, three bigger boys were blocking me. They demanded the ball, and I wouldn’t give it up, so they started pushing, until one pushed me into the fire. My pants leg burst into flame. I lost my leg that day.”
He lifted his wooden leg up with two hands wrapped around the thigh, and the foot rested on a ledge in the post.
“When I got fitted for the leg, a friend came over with his woodburning kit, and he etched this mark in it.” He rolled down a worn sock revealing a dark, wavy line scrawled across the shin, like an open vee, like birds flying south. “I’ve put it on every leg I’ve owned since.”
“Who did that?”
“You know who. Tommy Weir.”
“But that’s…”
“We’ve been given a gift, don’t you see?” he cried. “I prayed like a madman for this. And I had a vision; don’t know if it was an angel of God or Satan himself, but I got a chance to come back and warn you.”
“I gotta go,” I said, though I couldn’t move.
“You gotta go home, Paddy,” he implored. “You don’t want to know what it’s like growing up half a man. The pegleg boy. Nobody cares anything else about you; you’re the kid with the stump. While Tommy Weir gets a track scholarship and runs in the Olympics. Go home, Paddy. Come back and play tomorrow. Don’t waste this gift.”
I thought maybe I could be careful and not go near the fires. But I suspected if I crossed the threshold, I’d be daring fate, and I’d surely lose. I searched his face, studying every crease, every pore, the way the thin skin hung from the bones, and wondered if that really could be me. A thousand years of wind and rain and scorching sun wouldn’t so hollow my plump cheeks or thin my hair or sag my neck in folds. I was looking at impossibility itself. But if there was any chance that fire would melt my flesh and char my bones, that I’d lose a leg up to my knee. I couldn’t take that chance for anything. I backed away, and ran as fast as I could home.
I tried to act like it was a normal afternoon. I did some weeding in my mother’s garden. “It’s about time you did some work around here,” she said, “instead of always taking, taking, taking.” And I got my homework done, so I could watch TV: Daniel Boone, then My Three Sons and Bewitched. I stayed up for them all, even though I didn’t follow any of it. My mind kept going back to the old man’s prophesy. I had nightmares where I tore at my covers, which I imagined were flames. I felt the horror of being on fire, skin turning to ash and falling silently in powder off the bone.
I woke up exhausted, wondering if I should fake being sick and stay home. When I’d dressed and straggled into the kitchen for breakfast, my mother told my sisters to take their bowls into the living room.
“Sit down, son,” my father said. My mother wiped her eyes with a tissue; she’d been crying. “We have bad news.”
I sat and they lowered themselves into the chairs on the other side of the table.
“Yesterday, there was an accident,” my mother said. “At the park.”
“We don’t know exactly what happened,” my father said. “But the football got loose, and Tommy chased it over where some leaves were burning, and somehow he got too close to the fire.”
“No, no, no,” I kept repeating.
“He got burned real bad,” my mother said.
“He, um, they had to take his leg,” my father said.
I broke from the table and ran from the house. My mother yelled at me to get back, but for once I didn’t listen. Where was I going? I didn’t know. Just away from his words, ringing in my ears. ”Don’t waste this gift…I had a vision…an angel or Satan himself, I don’t know.” What didn’t he know? Did he know about Tommy? “Tommy Weir gets a track scholarship and runs in the Olympics.” He had to know.
I busted through the Garrison gate and the park seemed to leap back, startled. I ran again, but stopped as pale lightning rippled the sky. No thunder. Just one eerie flash after another. Now I felt alone and exposed, naked in my shame. I wanted to run again, but felt guilty for being able to.
“Are you happy now?” I screamed as I pounded the turf pulling tufts of grass up in tight fists. “Did you get what you wanted? Come out and show me!”
I wandered the park, crying and trying to pray, which I knew I had no right to do. The peglegged man, who was me, had bargained with the devil. Not ‘cause of a bad break, but ‘cause of some bad seed planted in him before it even happened. The seed that was growing in me. I felt it wriggling inside now. Tommy and his bat. “Swift,” Billy said. But not me. I was choking, as I cried, like vomiting up poison.
So, I just wandered the park. I found myself down by the running track, which seemed off somehow in the morning light. Sun burned off dew so the scene rippled. Some early morning joggers were finishing their laps. I leaned on the fence and saw something odd; a silver-haired man was running on what looked like a curved ski that hooked up to his knee. He was missing the lower part of his leg. But he ran with even strides at a strong pace. He sprinted the last length of the oval, then broke stride and wound down. He trotted, then walked, then left the track for a gym bag in the center of the oval.
I hopped the fence and walked towards him, where he sat, removing the curved appendage and replacing it with a metal post, like a mechanical leg. He caught me staring and smiled.
“Freaky, huh?” he chuckled.
“I’ve never seen a leg like that.”
“It’s a new kind of prosthesis. It looks all sci-fi, but it feels natural. Gives the way a real ankle would.”
“How long…?”
“Have I used the blade, or since I lost my leg? I think I was your age.”
He strapped on the metal leg, and I noticed there were etchings on either side. Lightning bolts running up either side of the shin.
“Like that design? Friend on mine did that on the first leg I had. It was wood and he burned it right in. He was the artist of my class. I’ve had the same image printed on every leg since.”
“What happened to him? Your friend?”
The man shrugged. “We lost touch. He could be doing anything. He was smart and talented. Just needed to believe more in himself.”
The man pulled a warmup suit over both legs and rolled up to a standing position. He shouldered his bag and set his eyes toward the parking lot. “Nice meeting you,” he said, and waved casually as he walked away.
“Nice meeting you, too, Tommy,” I whispered. As he evaporated with the morning dew, I was determined not waste this gift.
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I got this handy little device to clear some of the jungle growth in my backyard. Lightweight, yet powerful and relatively quiet. You can rev it up without feeling like you’re at the Daytona 500. Tore through the Carolina Creepers, thorns and all. A full charge lasts about 25 minutes, which is all the time I want to spend whacking weeds anyway. Great unit. Great price. Kevy says, check it out.
The short answer is I never wanted to live there. I was perfectly happy toddling around the Notre Dame campus, feeding the ducks, and watching the marching band rehearse. But Daddio couldn’t live the post-bach life forever, especially with a wife and four kids with one more on the way. So, PhD still pending (and it would pend until maybe a week before the statute of limitations ran out), he took a job at his alma mater, St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, and moved us all—Big Sis, me, twin sissies and Mom-with-bun-in-oven—to Bayonne, New Jersey.
I grew to love Bayonne, despite living for a time across from an oil refinery which seemed to catch fire every other Thursday. Bayonne was where I became a Cub Scout, altar boy, scholarship artist, Little Leaguer, Tenderfoot, and smart Alec. It’s where I almost fainted over Laura, hyperventilated over Linda, and nearly passed out when Pamela touched my arm. It remains today what I think of whenever anyone mentions hometowns. In sixth grade, I adapted to Jersey City, as our tribe moved out of our three-bedroom flat and into the ten-room house our family of eight required. Jersey City was not as tight a fit, and what I loved most was its proximity to New York City, where I went to high school, Mets games, Broadway shows, movies shown in actual movie palaces, Central Park, rock concerts and various Blarney Stones.
If I can make a crude analogy, which rubs against my Catholic morals, New Jersey was my dowdy wife, but New York was my sexy side-chick. Yet, when I was a struggling actor in my twenties, living in New York City was not economically feasible. Even though I was in The City virtually every day, working, going to acting and dance classes, and taking voice lessons, I opted for an onerous commute and free rent in Jersey, rather than convenience and indenture to a greedy landlord in NYC. Either way, I probably would have come to the same conclusion in late 1988: it was time to get out.
I was exhausted, and pre-Giuliani NYC was a cesspool. It was grimy, violent, and everywhere smelt like piss. Just to buy a newspaper, you had to do an Olympic triple jump over a trio of snoozing drug addicts. So, I went to California. San Francisco. In retrospect again, my entertainment career ambitions would have been better served in LA, but I couldn’t face another urban monster, and in those days, San Francisco was regarded as a very livable city, despite its high cost.
So, long story short, I spent 16 years in San Francisco before finally heading to LA, where I lived for five bi-polar years. They were the best of times and the worst of times, to steal a phrase. I never would have gone back to New Jersey, except that my Dad came down with prostate cancer. He made light of it, as was his way, but when I learned the true state of his health, there was no decision to be made. I jumped back across the continent, and together we fought the good fight for twenty-odd months. Then, as I was back in LA reacquainting myself with friends, he gave me the Irish goodbye, which I didn’t even know was a thing, until he pulled it. Alas, by that time—2012—I had a fulltime job in New Jersey, and there were no jobs in LA, so I stayed put, determined to bloom where I was planted.
But even as I opened an occasional blossom for the pollinators to tickle, I never felt like I was putting down roots. Nine years passed, and outside of a handful of friends, there was nothing keeping me in New Jersey. I needed a change. Then, the world changed, and I was in a place where I definitely did not belong.
The following is a short list of irreconcilable differences I had with the People’s Republic of New Jersey, which compelled the great divorce.
Yeah, it’s always good to lead with a joke. But New Jersey and New York City were becoming ever more dangerous in the wake of the BLM riots of 2020, and I was getting too old to either run or fight. Still, I couldn’t get a concealed carry permit, because I was not highly connected within the Democrat Party. The corrupt usurpation of my God-given right to defend myself from dangerous criminals was galling.
New York’s descent into madness.
I rode the NYC subways every day to school in the late 1970s. I was working in NYC when Bernard Goetz went from bespectacled nerd to dead-eyed Bronson. “You seem to be doing alright, here’s another” was the new “Make my day.” I knew the morass to which NYC had descended, from which no chorus line of celebrities singing “I Love New York” would ever rescue it. Help came in the form of an ex-federal prosecutor who knew that a zero-tolerance policy towards small crimes was the only way to prevent bigger crimes. I left before Giuliani performed his miracle, but subsequent visits opened my mind to the possibility of returning one day.
Then those morons elected a Communist mayor and all the hard-won progress of the 1990s and the stability of three subsequent Bloomberg terms were tossed into the dumpster and lit on fire. In the summer of 2020, BLM burned several neighborhoods, cops were assassinated, statues torn down and defaced, and lunatics were permitted to defecate on the sidewalk. All signs of progress from the progressive De Blasio administration. The BLM frauds ratcheted up the cop hate, and officers left the force in droves. Not only did this open the door for purse-snatchers and muggers; it couldn’t help but compromise NYPD’s antiterrorist work. The Big Apple was now a big palooka, punch-drunk, who’d dropped his hands, exposing his glass jaw. How long before the knockout blow?
Then Covid hit, and the Communist mayor was in his glory. He shut down the city that never sleeps, because that’s what moral and intellectual weaklings, drunk on power, do. And that city, the one Humphrey Bogart famously advised Nazis against invading, for their own sake, the one famous for toughness and resilience and moxy and grit, totally caved. De Blasio even shut down Broadway, and the actors’ union, which is supposed to protect the working rights of performers, totally collaborated. Because Communism is thicker than members’ livelihoods. “You vill do as the Party says, or you vill never work again!”
But, in fairness to the union hacks, the theatre rank and file was already slitting its own throat with woke nonsense and “equity” demands that would put race, gender, sexual orientation and gender delusion issues above any dramatic considerations, thereby ensuring that the only plays to be produced would be ones that absolutely no audience wanted to see.
As I watched NYC circle the drain, it occurred to me that this was, at best, a 20-year cycle. The city that I’d loved in my teens, had grown exhausted with in my 20s, and rediscovered in my 50s, would not be livable again in my lifetime. Why stick around?
Governor Phil Murphy.
Throughout the United States there were many awful governors. The sneering, entitled Abortion Barbie North in Michigan, the hideous and abusive Luv Guv of New York, the unctuous Getty dynasty darling in California, and the soft-on-crime-and-around-the-waistline Hyatt heir in Illinois. But when it comes to gleefully abusing decent, taxpaying citizens, no one comes close to New Jersey’s own Houndtooth Murphy.
Despite being very stupid, totally inarticulate, uncharismatic, not the least bit personable, and very hard to look at, Houndtooth somehow got himself elected governor, probably because he fit the vision for the Democratic machine: a corporatist determined to crush the middle class, thus clearing the field for oligarchs bent on monopolizing the economy, whose political power would be propped up perennially by teeming masses of the impoverished, desperately dependent on government handouts. In other words, a rich Communist who is too stupid to even know he’s a Communist.
Early in his tenure, it became clear that Houndtooth was also a despicable, sexist tightwad. The New York Post reported that a professional women’s soccer team co-owned by Murphy could not sign draft picks because of “deplorable housing and training facility conditions” imposed on the team. These allegedly included “showerless locker rooms, run-down lodging and pervy landlords.” Murphy’s team was later implicated in a visa fraud scandal, because, y’know, we need immigrants to do the jobs Americans won’t do. Like put up with Phil Murphy.
Then came Covid, which objectively was a threat to aged, obese, immune-compromised and Vitamin D deficient people, and a big yawn for almost everyone else. But the ruling class needed it to be more than that. They needed it to be an existential threat that would convince the objectively unthreatened to surrender their civil rights. To build a habit of surrendering civil rights that would pave the way for total statism. Plus, they needed to make a buck or hundred billion off of it.
Houndtooth was absolutely ecstatic! Imagine a Stalin-wannabe handed the perfect excuse to implement his five-year plan and crush his political opponents in the process! Houndtooth was giddy, as he shoved Covid patients into nursing homes—seizing the opportunity to kill off those useless drains on healthcare resources—and shut down every small business that generated revenue for the independent middle class. Houndtooth even shut down state parks. Of course, here he was just following the science, right? Because sunshine and exercise would certainly deplete the public’s immune systems and put them in greater danger of serious infection.
Throughout Covid, Houndtooth insisted he was doing what was necessary to keep the public safe. Y’know, like Stalin in 1932 kept those starving Ukrainians safe from all that grain in the storage bins. His intention was clear. Houndtooth wanted to destroy New Jersey small businesses so his corporate cronies could sweep in. His vision of New Jersey is one where all commerce goes through Amazon, every pub is a Buffalo Wild Wings, and every pizza parlor is a Little Caesar’s. Corporate oligarchs and their elected stooges rule the leaden-eyed masses, whose quality of life is finally equal, if only in misery.
One casualty of Houndtooth’s vindictiveness struck close to my heart. For nine years I belonged to a dance studio in Westfield. In fact, I was their first Prom King! When Covid struck, Houndtooth shut them down, and kept them shut despite mounting evidence the virus did not live long on surfaces or pass from asymptomatic carriers. Houndtooth was doing the bidding of the vaccine manufacturers who stood to make billions. They needed their cronies in government to add coercion on top of the already pervasive fear to persuade the credulous masses to accept an experimental serum, which was really truly totally safe, even though animal testing for it had been cancelled when all the subjects died. Thus, Houndtooth kept his boot on the throat of New Jersey businesses, y’know, ‘cause he cares, and as he told Tucker Carlson, even thinking about the U.S. Constitution was above his pay grade.
Who knows how many small businesses went bankrupt as a result? How many hung up signs saying, “Killed by Covid,” when they should have written, “Killed by Murphy’s Egomaniacal Lust for Power”? I know that the Westfield Ballroom no longer exists. Its proprietors are living in North Carolina and teaching private lessons virtually. But the watering hole that brought dozens of people from different backgrounds and age groups together for an hour or three a few times a week is gone. One less opportunity for friendly interaction with your neighbors, one less thread in the tapestry of community.
You can call it collateral damage, but it’s a necessary step towards totalitarian control, which is what Houndtooth and his ilk desire. I studied Hannah Arendt in high school, and remember her chilling description of the “atomization of the masses” in totalitarian society. People compressed one on top of another, but still feeling desperately alone. This is the end Houndtooth et al. are seeking, when they destroy those charming, distinctive small businesses that form the hubs of your communities. Clearly it was intentional; it was the cornerstone of his reelection campaign.
In his TV spots, Houndtooth recited his supposed successes and brazenly declared, “We’re not going back.” He was promising to kill more small businesses, to eradicate any remaining civil liberties, to stamp out any unique and inspiriting aspect of life that had not been vetted in a corporate boardroom. “You seem to be doing alright, here’s another.” And he promised to fund Planned Parenthood to the hilt. No surprise, because if his plan is to reduce half the state to abject poverty, he’d rather kill their kids than pay welfare to support them.
When the machine reelected this soulless tool of all things evil, I knew I only had a few months to get out. I was not going to enter 2022 paying taxes to my oppressors. At least not on the state level. And I wasn’t going to put my tax dollars into Houndtooth’s baby-killing war chest.
Now, they say buying a house online in a city and state you’ve never been to is a risky proposition. But they also say that fortune favors the bold. I decided to leave a place held captive by an evil regime, and I haven’t regretted it for a nanosecond. Yes, I miss my friends. But I was missing them already, because Houndtooth and De Blasio had destroyed the businesses that had bonded us in community. My choice was to keep being miserable as a captive of a Communist state or take the chance that something better might lie elsewhere.
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Lefties Pushing Sex Reassignment for Kids Are Betraying the Lefties Who Worked to Break Down Traditional Gender Roles.
The recent torrent of gender-fluid nonsense has provoked all sorts of emotions within me, mostly negative. But the bright light among those stirred feelings was a vague nostalgia for Marlo Thomas. For decades she’s been the face of one of my favorite charities, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, founded by her father in 1962. But almost fifty years ago, the erstwhile That Girl poured her heart into a television special entitled, Free to Be, You and Me. The program aimed at breaking down the rigid gender roles that marginalized kids who didn’t neatly fit the mold, including so-called “sissy” boys and “tomboy” girls. The program urged its audience to accept the individuality and non-conformity of unconventional children who had their own gifts. It also scolded upstart children for entitled brattiness. How times have changed. A new generation of Liberal activists are now isolating the children Thomas celebrated, declaring them unfree to be, until they subject themselves to puberty blockers, chemical castration, and ultimately the mutilation of their sex organs. If “William Wants a Doll,” he must surrender his penis.
Now, I confess I’m not the biggest fan of effeminacy in men. But neither would I savor a hunting trip with George Patton and Omar Bradley. I recognize that humanity exists on a spectrum; the leadership qualities that drive a charismatic Alpha male often come with an overload of machismo I find grating in large doses, and the artistic gifts I admire in male artists often come with a touch of the fay. So be it. As long as effete men are not constantly agitating and injecting deviant sex into every situation, I’m not going to get my hackles up. I’m certainly not going to suggest they cut their peckers off and go pee in the ladies’ room. Yet, that’s what the modern Left demands.
That Leftist activists are crueler to their own than any conservative would dream of being should surprise no one. The Left always eats itself. Whether it’s environmental extremists putting union laborers out of work, uber-rich corporatists colluding to suppress wages and otherwise creating conditions that prevent the working poor from entering the middle class, or BLM activists burning down Black-owned businesses, the clients of the Democrat Party are always at odds. What unites Leftists is an abiding disdain for America and their conviction that they are better, smarter and more forward-looking than their benighted political opponents, who are captive to ancient superstition epitomized by The Ten Commandments and The Golden Rule.
That Leftists always turn on each other is a principle I learned in high school, studying Hannah Arendt’s treatise on totalitarianism. As Ms. Arendt explains it, totalitarian systems, whether they be Fascist, Communist, Googlist, NOWist, BLMist, or just College Democrats, rely on access to large numbers of expendable people. This is because the totalitarian system, to survive, must expand to capture more adherents and purge to demand rigid ideological conformity. Most people are expendable within totalitarianism, in that the system either absorbs them, thus stripping them of all individuality, or murders them to instill fear in everyone else, to solidify the total control the system seeks.
American Leftism is no different. It is driven to expand, since that is the only way to attain power in a democratic republic, and it demands ideological conformity through badgering, bullying and puerile name-calling. This is the basis for cancel culture, which, as anyone who has read the founding documents of the United States knows, is antithetical to American principles.
Perhaps the most aggressive and vicious segment of the American Left are its “trans” activists. These lunatics pretend to believe a litany of unbelievables, and seek to cancel anyone who tosses a nugget of reason their way. They respond to reason, as well as fourth grade science, much the way Christopher Lee overacts within gaping range of a crucifix. They have no rational basis for their beliefs, only intense feelings about the matter, which must be right, because they are theirs.
All of which would be well and good, if they weren’t preying on children. Imagine the level of depravity one must reach to decide that a child, in the throes of some whimsical fancy of being the other sex, needs to be hustled into a medical program that culminates in the irreversible removal of perfectly healthy organs. This is sadistic quackery from which Josef Mengele would avert his eyes.
There is a condition analogous to what the trans crowd is pushing, called Body Integrity Identity Disorder. With BIID, the sufferer believes he or she should be an amputee. It feels unnatural to have all their limbs or digits. Feeling anguish over their body integrity, they might request that a surgeon remove a hand, arm, foot or leg. Naturally, the surgeon recognizes this request as disordered, and knows the BIID sufferer is mentally ill. Yet, when the request is to have perfectly healthy breasts removed, as happened to the former Ellen Page, there are plenty of sadistic nuts, scalpels in hand, ready to assist with the “transition.” “Transition to what?” the sane mind asks, knowing that lopping off sex organs does not change a person’s sex any more than lopping off freckles changes their nationality. Ellen Page did not become a man by having her breasts removed, she became a mutilated woman, and no name change can disguise that fact.
When I was three, I wanted a doll carriage. My mother was pregnant with twins, so I had babies on my mind. My older sister had our mom’s stroller and pushed a doll around in it, and I wanted to give that a try. For some reason, my mother had another stroller, and she gave it to me with a doll to push around the apartment complex. I did that for about a half an hour, and then went back to playing with my trucks. Imagine if this had happened today and my mother was not a hard-boiled dame from Bushwick, Brooklyn, but a virtue-signaling, chardonnay sipping, avocado toast nibbling Liberal from Brentwood. My heart aches for all the perfectly normal kids who can no longer safely go through the many phases of childhood that children have always gone through, because maniacal vultures are ready to swoop down upon them, to sacrifice them body and soul to the god of this week’s agenda.
For five seasons, Marlo Thomas starred as aspiring actress Ann Marie in the hit sitcom.
And that brings me back to Marlo Thomas. She was a trailblazer, and in helping to break down rigid gender stereotypes, she delivered on the promise of “free to be, you and me.” But the push from today’s Left to gender-transition kids is the exact opposite. By hustling youngsters into medical and surgical processes that falsely promise to change their sex, trans activists are reinstating the rigid gender roles of old. Feminine boys? Impossible, they must be girls trapped in a male shell. Butch girls? They must be testosterone starved boys. It’s all utter nonsense, and of course, the proposed remedy is no remedy at all, as shown by the sky-high suicide rates of post-transition “transpeople.”
As a sensible liberal, back when that was possible, Marlo Thomas knew that even though “girls can be anything” and “boys can be anything,” there are limits. And that’s okay, because it’s kind of special that “Mommies can’t be Daddies” and “Daddies can’t be Mommies.” Today she would be pilloried for promoting that reasonable and self-evident notion. That axiom of biology and social order, which has stood unquestioned for 10,000 years of human civilization, is now “transphobic,” “hateful,” and “violent,” because a group of Leftist lunatics declared it so nine minutes ago.
Yet, what is truly hateful and violent is the Leftist transactivist prescription for feminine boys and masculine girls: rip out their genitals. I’m very glad I grew up in a time when we were free to be, you and me. For the sake of today’s children, I hope we get back there soon.
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“How strangely will the tools of a tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words.”
Samule Adams
We are all accustomed to the way Liberals manipulate language so that they can dictate the terms of debate. It’s not abortion; it’s choice or reproductive freedom. It’s not the destruction of marriage; it’s marriage equality. Homophobia. Transphobia. All phrases designed to talk about something other than what is at issue and to brand anyone who disagrees with them a moral reprobate. The Left’s refusal to use words with clear meanings, so a debate can be had on actual merits of their positions, was never so fully and ludicrously on display as on July 12, when Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri attempted to extract a straight answer from Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges. Seeking to demystify the professor’s convoluted language, the Senator said, “You’ve referred to ‘people with a capacity for pregnancy’ — would that be women?”
Sam Adams scowling at the verbal obfuscation taking place in the US Capitol.
The professor then gave a recitation of all the people who, in her mind, are not women, who nevertheless have the capacity for pregnancy. It is worth noting that all the non-women the professor cited are, in fact, women. But before the Senator from the Show Me State could demand empirical evidence of the male pregnancy phenomena now sweeping the blogosphere, but yet to appear in reality, the professor from the erstwhile bastion of free speech attempted to shut him up with the accusation that his line of questioning was “transphobic.” His insistence on calling women “women” would incite violence against transpeople, though the only type of violence she mentioned was self-harm. Apparently, the Senator’s denial that transpeople exists would prompt them to commit suicide, thereby proving his alleged point, in rather macabre fashion. My sainted mother would have called that, “Cutting off your nose to spite your face.” (It’s also worth noting that as I’m typing, Microsoft Word, whose Editor function routinely lectures me about using more inclusive language, is putting a red line under transpeople. So maybe the professor needs to sit down with Satya Nadella.)
Fast-forward a few days and the Internet is bursting with commentary about how the Professor of Doublespeak schooled the Neanderthal Republican for his crude and cruel attempt to cancel transpeople. (Oops, another red line.) It seems that all the best people are using the phrase “people with the capacity for pregnancy” this summer, and only the riffraff are insisting on biology. If only there was a turn of phrase the good Senator could have used to counter the charge of transphobia. Not to refute, but simply to deflect, as the Left does. A dodge and a turning of the tables. After wracking my brain, I think I’ve found (coined) the perfect word: ipsoverbophobia. I like that it has a –phobia at the end, because that automatically proves the targeted person is irrational.
So, let’s replay the hearing, picking up where the professor said, “I would like to note that your questions are transphobic..”
But this time, Senator Hawley cuts her off with, “And I’d like to note that your responses are ipsoverbophobic. You clearly have an irrational fear of the plain meaning of words. You should be aware that failing to honor the plain meaning of words does violence to language. Your responses are thus violent and encourage violence. You are stripping words of their meaning, thereby impoverishing language. By eradicating all meaning and sense, you commit verbocide and encourage linguacide. In your ispsoverbophobia, you seek to impose new meanings on commonly used words and phrases, which can only be described as conquest and colonization of language. You are imposing slavery, as you make words carry the meaning you want, rather than their indigenous meanings. Eventually, words that have enjoyed long and fruitful lives, prospering in discourse for centuries, might suddenly disappear from the dictionary altogether, replaced by nonsense terms, which mean only what an individual speaker intends, not what an audience of listeners can comprehend. Ultimately, when language is totally void of meaning, the only form of communication will be blunt force. Thus, your ipsoverbophobia is not only neurotic and ignorant, but dangerous, because when you do violence to language, you do violence to humanity. When language has no meaning, when verbal communication is futile, the only way to make a point is with a smack upside the head. Thus, every marital spat becomes an opportunity for domestic violence. That you could encourage a such a transition from spoken communication to brute force in the nuclear age is unconscionable, and shows your intent to hasten the destruction of the human race.”
The beauty of ispoverbophobia is that it has unlimited uses. Every time The Left comes up with a new convoluted phrase, and disseminates it through their talking points network to get the whole choir singing in unison, all we have to do is respond with “You’re being ispoverbophobic!”
We can even start 501(c)3s to stamp out ipsoverbophobia wherever we find it. Restore the language and we restore the debate. Restore the debate, and the side with the best ideas wins.
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It’s been many months since I’ve blogged on this space, so an explanation is in order. The short of it is, I moved. And the home I bought needed—and continues to need—a lot of work. Some of that work I contracted and some I’ve been doing myself. Making my new home livable has placed demands on my time, as have all the other changes that come with settling into a new community. But the lion’s share of the work is done, and I can continue at a moderate pace with what remains. That will allow me to get back to my routine, so I hope to be posting more regularly here. But first, let me catch you up on things in Rushworld.
The author outside his new home.
I’m now officially a Yankee carpetbagger, having left the People’s Republic of New Jersey for a Free State in the southeast.
My mortgage payment for a three-bedroom house on .4 acres of land is less than the rent for my dingey studio apartment in New Jersey.
An electrician discovered bats in my attic, so I took the necessary steps to evict them, tacking up steel mesh over the eave vents and placing a bat-cone there for them to exit. I don’t know if they’re gone, or if I inadvertently sealed them inside. I’m afraid to go up in the attic.
I painted my living room, hallway, guest room and office, an experience which has thoroughly convinced me that I hate to paint.
I bought a piano, a fabulous Charles R. Walter upright with a beautiful walnut finish. I’ve had five lessons, and am coming along nicely.
I invited the pastor of my new parish to perform a house blessing. Afterwards, I treated him and four guests to a sumptuous four-course dinner. Then we opened up for the neighbors to drop by.
My backyard has an enormous oak tree, which is home to various species of birds. I enjoy watching them fly around.
I got a phone app for identifying the plants growing in my yard. Virtually every one is a “highly invasive weed, very difficult to eradicate.”
I have not gotten a dog.
Finally, The Wedding Routine continues to be a hit with readers. Here’s an excerpt from a Four Star Out of Four Review that appeared at Online Book Club:
How will Celia manage her struggling business, her difficult relationship with her business partner, and the prospect of new love? Find out in this amazing book.
There are a lot of positives in this book. The book has a lot of dynamic characters, from the exotic heartthrob that is Janos to the lovable nerd that is Rupert and the wise yet savage Father Burke; each character is so distinct, yet their interactions with Celia produce nothing but comic gold. Also, I love the balance of romance to comedy in the book. It is not so romantic that it makes you cringe and, at the same time, not so humorous that it loses substance. I also love the author’s use of imagery, particularly in parts where Celia narrates the terrible dancing she is witnessing; it makes for a hilarious experience.
If you haven’t gotten your copy of The Wedding Routine yet, I suggest you drop everything and place your order. Kevy’s got a mortgage to pay.
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For independent authors, reader reviews are our lifeblood. Unfortunately, not many readers know this. I’ve had readers compliment my work sumptuously, but when I look on Amazon or Goodreads for a review, nothing! This dilemma forces us to take extreme measures, such as giving away 100 free copies through a Goodreads Giveaway in hopes that some percentage of those folks will read the book AND leave us a review (but only if they like it!). Since we launched The Wedding Routine in late November, and the holidays kept people very busy, now’s the time we’d expect reader reviews to come trickling in.
So, here’s our first Amazon Review, given Five Stars!
Delightful and satisfying comedy-romance
“Loved the pace and the immediacy of this relatable story. If you are a fan of screwball comedies with clever repartee, this novel is for you. Author Kevin Rush used dance sequences to good effect to reveal relationships between the characters. Vivid, well-crafted story-telling.”
Thank you, “Pomegranate,” whoever you are, and thanks to all who purchased and are currently enjoying The Wedding Routine. We hope to see your reviews soon. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, you can order by clicking the image below.
P.S. Sadly, another reason we need honest, favorable reviews is to counteract the effects of malicious reviews that bad actors post for their personal or political reasons. We all understand how cancel culture works. Some lunatic decides that your personal, political, or religious beliefs disqualify you from living peaceably in society, and they take it upon themselves to destroy your career. I’ve had malicious reviews posted on Goodreads and Amazon by people who seem to have opened their account simply to slam my book, which they obviously didn’t read. I’ve also had people list complaints about a book that had no bearing on what I had written, and must have been meant for some other book. It’s all but impossible to correct these matters, so we rely on our honest readers to restore balance. Thanks for understanding.
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