The Athenaeum

Ortega - by Richard Sale

Ortega

 

By Richard Sale

 

The Revolt of the Masses is the English translation of José Ortega y Gasset's book La rebelión de las masas. The Spanish original was first published as a series of articles in and as a book in 1930.

I read this at college and was a great admirer of the lucid, factual well-reasoned prose of Ortega. I have been reading it again, and am forwarding some of the arguments. I don’t agree many of them, but wanted to have the comments of those on the site who may see this topic more clearly.

The text begins below.

Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined

without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the

presence of one individual we can decide whether he is “mass” or

not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself- good or ill based

on specific grounds, but which feels itself “just like

everybody,” and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact,

quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else. Imagine a

humble-minded man who, having tried to estimate his own worth

on specific grounds- asking himself if he has any talent for this or

that, if he excels in any direction- realizes that he possesses no

quality of excellence. Such a man will feel that he is mediocre and

commonplace, ill-gifted, but will not feel himself “mass.”

When one speaks of “select minorities” it is usual for the evil-minded to twist the sense of this expression, pretending to be unaware that

the select man is not the petulant person who thinks himself

superior to the rest, but the man who demands more of himself

than the rest, even though he may not fulfill in his person those

higher exigencies. For there is no doubt that the most radical

division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits

it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on

themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who

demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to

be every moment what they already are, without imposing on

themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on

the waves. This reminds me that orthodox Buddhism is composed

of two distinct religions: one, more rigorous and difficult, the other

easier and more trivial: the Mahayana- “great vehicle” or “great

path”- and the Hinayana- “lesser vehicle” or “lesser path.” The

decisive matter is whether we attach our life to one or the other

vehicle, to a maximum or a minimum of demands upon ourselves.

The division of society into masses and select minorities is, then,

not a division into social classes, but into classes of men, and

cannot coincide with the hierarchic separation of “upper” and

“lower” classes. It is, of course, plain that in these “upper” classes,

when and as long as they really are so, there is much more

likelihood of finding men who adopt the “great vehicle,” whereas

the “lower” classes normally comprise individuals of minus

quality. But, strictly speaking, within both these social classes,

there are to be found mass and genuine minority.

As we shall see, a characteristic of our times is the predominance,

even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar.

Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and

presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of

the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their

very mental texture, disqualified. Similarly, in the surviving

groups of the “nobility”, male and female. On the other hand, it is

not rare to find to-day amongst working men, who before might be

taken as the best example of what we are calling “mass,” nobly

disciplined minds.

There exist, then, in society, operations, activities, and functions of

the most diverse order, which are of their very nature special, and

which consequently cannot be properly carried out without special?

gifts. For example: certain pleasures of an artistic and refined

character, or again the functions of government and of political

judgment in public affairs. Previously these special activities were

exercised by qualified minorities, or at least by those who claimed

such qualification.

The mass asserted no right to intervene in them; they realized that

if they wished to intervene they would necessarily have to acquire

those special qualities and cease being mere mass. They recognized

their place in a healthy dynamic social system. If we now revert to the facts indicated at the start, they will appear clearly as the heralds of a changed attitude in the mass. They all indicate that the mass has decided to advance to the foreground of social life, to occupy the places, to use the instruments and to enjoy the pleasures hitherto reserved to the few. It is evident, for example, that the places were never intended for the multitude, for their dimensions are too limited, and the crowd is continuously overflowing; thus manifesting to our eyes and in the clearest manner the new phenomenon: the mass, without ceasing to be mass, is supplanting the minorities.

No one, I believe, will regret that people are to-day enjoying

themselves in greater measure and numbers than before, since they

have now both the desire and the means of satisfying it. The evil

lies in the fact that this decision taken by the masses to assume the

activities proper to the minorities is not, and cannot be, manifested

solely in the domain of pleasure, but that it is a general feature of

our time. Thus- to anticipate what we shall see later- I believe that

the political innovations of recent times signify nothing less than

the political domination of the masses. The old democracy was

tempered by a generous dose of liberalism and of enthusiasm for

law. By serving these principles the individual bound himself to

maintain a severe discipline over himself. Under the shelter of

liberal principles and the rule of law, minorities could live and act.

Democracy and law- life in common under the law- were

synonymous. Today we are witnessing the triumphs of a

hyperdemocracy in which the mass acts directly, outside the law,

imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material

pressure. It is a false interpretation of the new situation to say that

the mass has grown tired of politics and handed over the exercise

of it to specialized persons. Quite the contrary. That was what

happened previously; that was democracy. The mass took it for

granted that after all, in spite of their defects and weaknesses, the

minorities understood a little more of public problems than it did

itself. Now, on the other hand, the mass believes that it has the

right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the cafe.

I doubt whether there have been other periods of history in which

the multitude has come to govern more directly than in our own.

That is why I speak of hyperdemocracy. The same thing is happening in other orders, particularly in the intellectual. I may be mistaken,

The same thing is happening in other orders, particularly in the

intellectual. I may be mistaken, but the present-day writer, when

he takes his pen in hand to treat a subject which he has studied

deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never

concerned himself with this subject, if he reads does so with the

view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of

pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with

the commonplaces that the said reader carries in his head. If the

individuals who make up the mass believed themselves specially

qualified, it would be a case merely of personal error, not a

sociological subversion. The characteristic of the hour is that the

commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the

assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose

them wherever it will. The mass crushes beneath it everything

that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified

and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not

think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is

clear, of course, that this “everybody” is not “everybody.”

“Everybody” was normally the complex unity of the mass and the

divergent, specialized minorities. Nowadays, “everybody” is the

mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times,

described without any concealment of the brutality of its features.

The sovereignty of the unqualified individual, of the human being as such, generically, has now passed from being a juridical idea or ideal to be a psychological state inherent in the average man. And note this, that when what was before an ideal becomes a component part of reality, it inevitably ceases to be an ideal. The prestige and the magic that are attributes of the ideal are volatilized. The leveling demands of a generous democratic inspiration have been changed from aspirations and ideals into appetites and unconscious assumptions.

Now, the meaning of this proclamation of the rights of man was

none other than to lift human souls from their interior servitude

and to implant within them a certain consciousness of mastery and

dignity. Was it not this that it was hoped to do, namely, that the

average man should feel himself master, lord, and ruler of himself

and of his life? Well, that is now accomplished…You want the ordinary man to be master. Well, do not be surprised if he acts for himself, if he demands all forms of enjoyment, if he firmly asserts his will, if he refuses all kinds of service, if he ceases to be docile to anyone, if he considers his own person and his own leisure, if he is careful as to dress: these are some of the attributes permanently attached to the consciousness of mastership.

 

To-day we find them taking up their abode in the ordinary man, in

the mass.

"When the Evening Dim, Draws Round Us" By Richard Sale

                                                                         

      The car door thumped shut, and he got out at near his room at his hotel. The scarlet sun was sinking quickly in the west, lighting up the undersides of the low clouds.  He went and walked down a broad cement walk. Before, him, to the east, the dimming hotel golf course offered long vistas of gently rich green, with palms and leafed trees standing solid at the distant fringes. There was a restful peace all around that touched the heart and produced gentle relief. In the middle distance, a cluster of players had stopped while a caddy with a heavy bag, handed a club to loudly dressed male player, then took out the flag out of the cup, waiting while a fat player bent and made a final put. Closer to the hotel were two other players, both men making final shots on a green as the caddy stood by holding both bulging, heavy leather bags sprouting clubs. Summerbee could hear their voices floating across to him faintly on the air.

     The dark quickly deepened. The scarlet forge in the west was growing faint, streaking the sky with a dying scarlet fire. As he walked down the paved path, feeling relief from crushing cares of the day, he saw a figure standing by the side of the path ahead. The reporter, Mike Summerbee was spending a month in the Arizona State Prison, taking notes for a book and instantly recognized the man. The black man standing there was short; squat and powerful in outline. Lewis, he thought. Iron Man. The sight instantly refreshed his drooping spirits.

     “I’m surprised they still letting you out,’ Lewis said with a small, white grin.

    “Me too.”

    They talked for a bit. Iron Man’s real name was Lewis Adolphus. He had earned the name “Iron man” because he had always carried a piece of iron when he fought opponents in the Yard. Men feared him.  He had been out of prison for three years now, working at this hotel, moving heavy furniture or old refrigerators.  His body was built like refrigerator that had a large head placed on top. The two had come to like and trust each other.

     Iron Man was talking about a friend in the prison: “We were cement tight.  If ever there was partners, we was it, you dig? We sat up all that night…”

   “What night?
   “Huh?”

    “What night? Before your release?”

  “Yeah. All night we was talking, and he say to me, and Eddie say to me, `Iron Man you got out and forget about this place while you’re out there, learn to like the free world when you’re out there. He say to me, ‘You’re a strong man. Go out now and do them things you been telling me you can do. Only you know what you been telling me.  Now go out there and live right,’ he say. Eddy McCloud his name was.”

     Lewis looked out and sighed, then turned to him.

     “I’ve did it all too, but for one thing. He told me to get my wife back, but whatever she got going, I don’t want to interfere with. She’s a nice woman, a good woman. No, it was all just me.”

      “What did you do?” Mike asked him.

    “I slapped her, and she turned me in.” Lewis said and stared gloomily, and then turned to Mike Summerbee. “You’re really okay in there?”

     “I’m fine, why?”

   “I think you maybe got friends in their now.”

   “I sure hope so. I need all the friends I can get.” 

     He grew thoughtful “McCloud, Eddie McCloud, his name as, we celled together for thirty five months. We were cement-tight, man, you know?” he paused. “So are you done?”

     “Done? Done with what?”

     “Your book. You got what you need?”

    “I’m getting there.”

      Lewis simply stood there in the dark, not moving, plunged deep in thought, a bulky dark shadow. Finally, he said quietly, his voice very subdued and gloomy: “You know I buried one of my best friends in there.  He was executed. ”

    The startling words just hung there inj the darkening air.

    “This was when you were out at the prison?”

      “At the prison?”

   “A friend. Yeah.”  Lewis voice came out of the near dark.  Mike couldn’t no longer see the features of is face. “See, there’s a grave yard there. Out by the chicken pens. He’s buried there. He was a good friend of mine.”

     “Who was he?” Mike asked.

     “Him? He was a fighter. Professional boxer.”

     ‘No kidding!”

     “Good boxer too. He was middleweight champion of the state,” Lewis said. “Yeah; good-looking, strong guy, really strong. His name was ‘Blackjack,’ His real name was Walt Hay. I buried him in the graveyard myself. There's a graveyard out there at the prison, near the chicken pens. The graves there don’t have names, only inmate numbers. A priest was there. Not Father Murphy, but another guy.  The ambulance brought his body out at 7:15 in the morning.

     “See, the doctors had to wait forty-five minutes up to an hour for the gas to clear the Gas Chamber, because that stuff is so goddamn deadly.  If you open a cut in that Gas Chamber, you would be dead in seconds. When they carry a dead man out, the doctors, they always wear rubber gloves.”

     “I didn’t know that.”

     “You can smell that gas in there for a week after a killing,” Lewis said. “You can smell it. It takes ten to twelve days before they let an inmate in there to go in and clean.” The black shadow continued to talk to Mike.

     “Yeah, old Blackjack his name was. He was a good fighter – middleweight boxing champion of the state. Only defeated once. Yessir.”

     Mike Summerbee fixed his troubled gaze on the squat figure in the deepening dusk.

“Yeah. Famous man in the state,” Lewis said. “Good puncher; had a great left hook. He hit a man, and he’d crumble and curl up.  I knew Blackjack real well. I even knew the pretty little wife that he killed.”

     An inexplicable dread seized Summerbee. A chill swept down his spine.

      “Why did he kill his wife?”  

     “She was beautiful.  Man, she was beautiful. He shot her, see. She wanted to divorce him, and she had cheated on him, and he got into this rage and shot her in the head. I went to her funeral.”

     Mike didn’t know what to say. “That was good of you,” he said.

     “One day, I went to the jail while Blackjack was there?”

     “You mean in Phoenix?”

    “In Phoenix. Yeah. See, I had slapped my wife, and she turned me in, and I did thirty days in the same jail. When I got out, I got out I went to see Blackjack. You see, in the old jail in town, there was this fishpond, and if you stood there in the courtyard and looked up, you could talk up to whoever was up there in them cells. The inmates would press their faces to the bars to look down to talk. Later, Blackjack was transferred later to Death Row at the prison out here. Yessir.”

     Mike waited.

     “Blackjack could stand up at the window of his cell and could see out to where he and his wife used to live. He could see their house from his cell.

    “He was real upset, Blackjack was. He was crying real bad. He couldn’t stop crying.  So I stood by the fish pond, and I looked up and could see him crying,” said Lewis. “He was real upset because he’d killed her. He called down and told me to go and be at the funeral for his wife, and he told me to come back and tell him what it was like.  He asked me to take a bunch of flowers over there to honor her memory. He was real upset, just bawling like a little boy does, you know?”

    There was a pause.

     “It was hard for him to believe what he done, killing her.  I remember him once saying, `Iron man, I got no right to go on living, after doing what I done.’  I remember him saying that over and over.. See, to him,  there was no one like her, and he had done killed the only thing he ever really cared about in life, and he didn’t want to live any more. So me, after I got off my work, and I went and bought some real, nice flowers, real pretty ones, and took them and put them where her grave was. Her family was there, standing around, grieving.t”

    Mike waited in silence, hoping to remember it all.

     “So they transferred him to the main prison out here.  One time, up in his cell on Death Row, I saw him sitting on top of the bed with those red trunks on that he used to box in. He just sat up there in those trunks. He didn’t say much. On the day he went to the Gas Chamber to get killed, he had dressed himself up in that fancy robe he wore in the ring for his fights. It was a big, loud red color with white trimmings.

     “The day of his execution, he got dressed in his red trunks and that fancy robe, and as went to go down the walk to the Gas Chamber, old Blackjack, he threw punches all the way there, jabs and hooks, jabs and hooks until they strapped him down and closed the door and he lay quiet.”

     Mike could feel the weight of  iron Man’s sorrow even though he could barely see him in the thickening dusk.

     “When was this?” Mike asked.

     “When?”

     “Yes.”

    Iron man took thought. "It was five years ago. Doesn’t seem that long. Yup; five years. Seems just like yesterday, five years. Yessir.”

    A group of colorfully dressed golfers went past, talking loudly.  The hotel had turned on the lights of the golf course. People could be seen up in the dining room, eating and drinking.  Lewis just stood staring out at nothing, remembering.

     “Was that the last time you saw him?”  Mike asked.

      “Pardon?”

     “Was that the last time you saw your friend?”

      “Uh huh. The very last time. Uh huh. Yessir.”

     They talked a bit, and then parted. Iron Man was off to Phoenix to party. Mike went to his little room on the motel off the main hotel building. He went in and sat down on the bed, trying to imagine a man throwing punches as he entered the Gas Chamber.  Blackjack had met death with no recoil, no shrinking, and no hesitation. Acting bravely in the face of fear -- that was courage.

     The reporter always carried a picture of his wife in his bag, and when he arrived there, he had unpacked it and put it atop his nightstand.  He looked at the picture every morning as he got up to get dressed. Now, settled in bed, his jeans still on, his back against the headboard, he thought of all the precious things he and his wife had shared: the thoughtfulness, the consideration and respect, the thrilling sex, the wonder of their little boy – all the treasured delights of a close and caring marriage.  

     When their little boy died, Summerbee and his wife had felt the deep grief we all feel at the loss of a friend or a child or even a pet -- that terrible sorrow that comes from the knowledge that in every bond and attachment, there is something that no words can express, something which is peculiar only to that attachment, and the loss of which is irreparable.

     He gazed at the photo for a long time until he felt his heart starting to fill.  When he got back home, he and his wife would go and place fresh flowers on their son’s grave. To honor him. To remember. And then he reached for the phone to dial her.

Hunger Games by Richard Sale

                                                  

We see life through the lens of our personalities, its interests, and our passions our gifts of sensibility. We experience life through the lens of rules, guidance and principles. We get a sense of our own character and abilities by observing how others react to what we do. If we turn out well, it is because our parents and elders displayed to us a good example of human beings who are intelligent, honest and upright. 

Yet how and what we see is dependent on the depth and subtlety of our intellectual and emotional endowments. No person can see over their own height. If those endowments are severely limited, the conduct and ideals it produces will be severely limited as well. The extent of people’s gifts, their depth and functioning, mean everything. For example, if an individual’s soul contains no warm temperature in it, the chances are that such a soul will turn out to be a heartless human being.

 

Moral Sensitivity

 

Moral sensitivity is a gift, a gift that should be cultivated and developed. It enables us to detect genuine similarities to what we experience and what we are and what others experience as well. It acts to end isolation, and it lessens conceit. A morally sympathetic person takes the suffering of others to heart, at least to some degree. Another’s pain is your pain. Moral sensitivity demands you sympathize with the suffering of others and try to comfort them in the belief that kindness can work wonders, and it usually does. The novel, To Kill a Mockingbird has one real lesson: that to be decent, you have to place another person’s pain and welfare on a level with your own. You have to walk in another person’s shoes in order to experience what they are experiencing. But you have to have some softness in your soul in order to do this.  Above all, the feelings of others have to be real to you in order to sympathize with them. 

I was once friends with Terry --, a senior in high school, suffered a green sick fracture his wrist doing Lacrosse. He was all bandaged up when I saw him out in the field, seated, gazing on at the game. He was an extraordinary kid: high scorer, soon to rise to the top of a very large high school class, perceptive and quick-witted.  He had a girl friend, Bethany, a blonde, showy, who was always occupied with something, and she took no notice of Terry’s distress. But I saw that when Terry moved, he would wince and make tense, grimacing faces each time he changed his position, so I sat down, talked with him. We liked each other. 

Today, he tried to very cordial, but his pain worried me, and a few minutes later, I went up to the girl friend. I told her seems to be in a lot of pain. 

She replied with enthusiastic gush, “Pain. Oh, my God.  Don’t talk to me about pain! I was cleaning out my garage over the weekend, and I can tell you my pain is bad; it’s killing me. I mean, I guess it’s self inflicted, but my shoulders, my arms, my back – they’re just killing me,” and quite oblivious of my purpose, she continued her elated babble. 

After a short while, I returned to Terry. “I’m sorry to be you are hurting.” 

“No,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”  A pause, and then he learned over a said in a low, resentful voice. “At least not to some people.” 

I raised my eyes, and he tossed his head over in his girl’s direction. “I had a really bad day yesterday, and every time I told her I was in a lot pain, she said, ‘Well, you should tell Dr. Sheldon that the next time you see him,’ and then she would rush off somewhere.” Terry was vexed and unhappy. 

The afternoon wore on, I came back a couple hours later, and Terry was still there, He told me that he had gone through another couple of hours of really bad pain, and he told her that his wrist as killing him to the degree that he was biting his lips. Seeing that he was worse and expecting some comfort from her, and he again she told her of his pain, and once again, she said, ‘Well, tell Dr Sheldon the next time we see him.’” 

He finally had interrupted and asked her angrily. “Is that all you’re going to say? Tell Dr. Sheldon when I see him? When you see me like this, don’t you have any reactions? Don’t you have any ideas?” 

“Like what ideas? What do you want me to do?” she challenged, her manner still very defensive and hard boiled. He just stared at her for a moment and said only, “Express some sympathy.” 

That girl friend had the makings of a politician. 

A heartless human being does not feel the reality of another’s suffering nor can they fully believe in it. When other people express sorrow or sympathy for a tragedy, they heartless believe those things mere pretenses, a form of playacting which the actor does not really feel, but pretends that they do. I once knew a husband who scorned his wife for being lazy when later tests revealed she suffered from a serious disability. That is true heartlessness. 

Busybodies and Meddlers 

No human being can tolerate being constantly humiliated. All bosses humiliate their employees, who are their subjects. When we get ordered around, our soul slightly tightens in resistance. Commands of others place a sore point, a splinter, a tiny scar in our souls.  The more we are bullied, the more splinters our souls accumulate over time. 

In any sort of partnership, there may emerge a partner that likes to order, to meddle, to supervise, and who had a compulsion to be a busybody. They put pressure on their partner to do what they do rather than allow them to do things on their own, following their own impulses. Only by doing what the busybody does is any peace to be obtained. Such people worship conformity above all else and they harbor a quiet desire to enslave another. 

Such people are insecure and suffer from their own grave deficiencies. Micromanagers put their own pleasure first. Their pleasure consists of arranging things according to their own personal liking, as if their own personal preferences have universal validity. The effect of needless instructions and meddling does nothing but estrange the people being ordered about, yet the busybodies seem oblivious of this. “Why does Adm. Nelson keep signaling?” exclaimed one of Adm. Nelson’s exasperated admirals. “We all know what we are to do.” 

The more stable personality grants wide latitude to differences among the people they know. The fact another person has a new or unorthodox approach to doing things should provoke no alarm.  Every individual has his or her on way of doing things. It is a gift of their unique and unrepeatable temperament. To create a likeness of yourself by dictating to others is a form of insecure fear. It is jittery and timid. When the difference in method arouses anger or punishment, it means that insecure person has to turn to unpleasantness to enforce his or her pet ideas and methods. The offender is punished by being put at a distance because isolation makes them suffer for their disobedience. 

The chief truth is that no one wants to feel subsidiary. Every act that is corrected or overruled deposits a little splinter.  Being ordered about by others, make us feel incompetent. The commands of others place us on the defensive. No likes being constantly overruled.  Said Lincoln, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” In the “ordered-around,” their sense of grievance constantly builds. The victim develops a hostility to the wrongs done to him deepens until it become implacable. Some tipping point is reached where the enslaved suddenly defaces a book or breaks a dish, simply wanting to be free of al those splinters inflicted on them by another. 

Dictators are the supreme busybodies. Nothing escapes their magpie scrutiny. Every act is prescribed.

 

The Hunger for Power

 

What kind of person worships power?  One of their chief defects is that they are extremely self obsessed; the Earth doesn’t revolve around the Sun; instead the Sun and the Earth revolves around them and their uniquely gifted personality. The dimension of their self-importance hides the sky and skewers any objectivity. They have extremely grandiose ideas of themselves.  Their defects do not really count against them. They are minor blemishes on their unprecedented excellence. They don’t overcome difficulties, they bargain their way out of them.

 

Political Thralldom

 

It is a sad truth that the ability of some leaders to hold people in thrall is largely due to the ignorance of their subjects. Think of Trump. Politically, their followers are hollow vessels waiting to be filled, eager for slogans that flatter them and promise a better future. Despots quickly recognize the mental inertia of the common man.  It gives them an opening. They realize that public inertia is their path to power. The ordinary man learns nothing and soon forgets everything under a leader. Power rules a multitude of empty heads. 

Leaders craved to be admired, but the desire to be admired at any cost breeds widespread corruption among a leader’s followers. Trump is the hero of the frustrated and poorly educated, but the dismal truth is that most oordinary people have very empty souls. This does not mean that they aren’t decent and hardworking. It simply means that the scope of their lives is increasingly cramped. Their lives lack events.  There is no way for them to escape the uniformities of their destinies, and only a forceful leader can disrupt the sameness of their existences. Ordinary people will endure a great deal as long as it is new and exciting and presented to them with authority. If a person is nothing in themselves, there is a kind of servile gratification in finding oneself embraced as a tool of unscrupulous power. The empty public mind lacks the critical capacity to analyze the worth of what they are told.  For the despot, ordinary people are simply targets, a vacant keyboard waiting to be played on.  Corrupt leaders are not interested in others except to obtain their praise and endorsement. To a leader, the ordinary person provokes no interest in them because of who and what they are. 

Another key factor is mental contagion, the desire to be part of a growing bandwagon. Mediocrities yearn to belong. They yearn to be part of a group, forgetting that every group is a home for mediocrities like themselves.  The solidarity of a party is always stronger than the individual’s sense of being of what he or she is apart from it. 

It is a proven rule that despots draw submissive natures to them.  Power seekers are narrow and intolerant of mind, but they can convince. However, any sort of resistance draws out their worst qualities. They do not confront opposition; they are too impatient. First, they mislead it, then crush and murder it. To succeed means using secrecy to escape reexamination, questioning, or exploring alternative theories. They do not have the confidence to be open in their dealings. They work in secret in order to escape debate and examination of their claims.  By nature, they are unilateral and high handed, and they do things in secret because they skirt and evade any sort of open discussion. They create little deserts of uniformity around them. They succeed by deceit. Think of Lenin’s funereal, and Stalin telling Trotsky the wrong date for the funeral, so that when Trotsky doesn’t show up, it will offend the populace, and it is Stalin who will then make the funeral oration for Lenin. Is there anything more commonplace than ruthlessness in politics? Think of Hillary Clinton. 

Many leaders come from obscure backgrounds and rise because of their skills and talent. They have gifts above the common. Such people want power so that they can carry out their projects without interference from others. Democracy is, after all, very cumbersome. But why do so many choose to be unscrupulous?  Because they lack respect for their followers. Because they are heartless characters. Because they think that to have scruples is a form of weakness. If you would be bold, you must trample or deceive others. To them, promoting what is dubious and false is fine as long as it results in your obtaining ever greater power. Such leaders have no integrity. They had no need of it. 

By contrast, scrupulous people don’t like power; they don’t like the trappings of power. Don’t like being waited on, recognized bowed to, feted and flattered.  They regard being ferried about in a limousine as being trapped in a bubble that separates you from local life. They want to experience life first hand, which means seeing things with your own eyes. 

Unfortunately, truly depraved leaders don’t want to be admired -- they yearn to be adored.   This is a truly obscene desire. They want to see their picture adorning even the simplest of walls; they are determined to see their name highlighting any structure. 

Is any human being really so important or talents and good hearted that others should bow down to us? Shouldn’t a decent person blush at this idea? Shouldn’t a balance mind be skeptical of any attempts at idolization?  Despots see the life of the ordinary life as something lacking in value.  They see their subjects as vermin, diseased rats cockroaches, yet leaders constantly extort praise from the subjugated.  This is baffling. 

You despise people, you kill them at will, yet you want them to praise you. Why would the opinion of people you despise be anything of value? Is that not insane? You despise people was worthless and kill them like bugs yet the dictator never asks himself what their praise is worth? If they are vermin, who prize their praise? The despot’s greed for applause is entirely senseless and illogical. 

Despots have no need of ethics. If you want to find out what someone is saying, ransack their files and possessions and spy on their conversations. Make up discrediting stories. What they cannot stand is competition in which they can be bested. They fact they act on the sly betrays a lack of self confidence. Self confident people look forwards to tests of their ability. They believe that can prevail in a fair contest, 

So think carefully about today’s political candidates. To what does the adoration of their followers lead?

"Splinter" by Richard Sale

 

  People of like disposition are quick to get on with each other, but in the case of Babs and Chris, both women were amazed that, in spite of enormous dissimilarities, they were drawn together by a feeling of admiration and sympathy.

     Barbara Hershel was a socially polished, intellectually adroit and very articulate woman. She was well-read.  As the expert for the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging, she made it clear that she enjoyed the trappings of power, seeing them as a necessary part of working on Capitol Hill, a form of advertising and intimidation. Thanks to her close relationship with Democratic Senator Ted Backhoe, she enjoyed being met at airports and being whisked in a shiny limousine to some formal dinner with the local hosts fussing over her, happy to sit at the head table. Babs was only at home with people who knew the extent of her influence in the Congress and who acknowledged her place in the power structure.

     Chris Seabridge worked for The Washington Express-Tribune, and lived by herself except for an affectionate cat named Pythagoras. She claimed that cats could read people’s hearts. Pythagoras had a sweet, gentle and affectionate nature except when you had stepped on his tail. 

     A loner by nature, Chris was happy to spend hours by herself reading, learning, thinking, and judging. When she became curious about something, she became totally absorbed by it and disliked thinking of anything else. She would live, work and breathe the object of her interest. In addition, Chris was reluctant to act until she was in full possession of the facts of a situation.

     She was suspicious of people like politicians, whose ambition was to mount step by step up the ladder of promotion in the hope of obtaining the topmost rung. That goal had no charm for her. Chris believed that people who didn’t fit in, people like her, were likely to be more receptive to new ideas and information. She believed that it was people like her who had the knack for spotting trends, the first to hear a new melody amid the background noise.

     Her friendship with Babs had developed quickly. They had been introduced by mutual friends, and now saw each other often. She and her boyfriend would go up to Babs’ townhouse near the Capitol to have dinners with her and her husband, and those gatherings were always pleasant and friendly. Babs’ husband, Howard, was a big wig for some advertising firm, but to Chris, his was a meager fire. The couple, married twenty years, had two young children:  Zera, an old Hebrew name, thirteen, and Tom who was 10 years old.

     It was the way Babs talked about American politics that had first won over the reporter’s admiration. On one busy Friday night in April, the two of them sat outside in a sidewalk café near the Capitol, having vodka martinis together.

     Pedestrians with intent, tired, harassed faces passed by their table. Out on the broad avenue, the ceaseless, noisy traffic was rolling down Capitol Hill, as white collar workers headed off to their homes in Georgetown or the Virginia or Maryland suburbs. The noisy café today was full. Everyone was drinking to relax; Capitol Hill staffers worked long hours. 

     Babs was saying, “I truly believe that our time requires reform, instead of everyone scrambling to get rich off of other people’s vices.” Babs had a husky, throaty voice that Chris envied and found attractive. 

     “So you want a revolution?” Chris asked, smiling from ear to ear. A revolution was not Babs’ style.

     Babs tossed her chin at that. “We’re too sunk in comfort for that. Any eruption of discontent would interrupt the workings of the giant American business machine. The result would be widespread horror.” Babs gazed at the street with her keen, gray eyes. “When it comes to the money machine, you can try to beat them or join them, but you cannot ignore them,” Babs added.

     “Which means what?” Chris was puzzled.

     “Well, for most people, the idea of gain is the only goal of their lives. Amassing personal wealth. Everything that doesn’t contribute to it is pushed aside or thrown overboard. Wealth is always held in greater esteem than honor.  The idea of honor stirs nothing in ordinary people.”

     Chris was silent. She disagreed.

     “It is no use complaining about the low aims of ordinary people – they rule the world,” Babs said, taking a prim sip of her drink.

     And each secretly rejoiced in having found a friend whose character and intelligence was equal to her own.

 

********

     Babs was extremely handsome, a well-kept woman of beauty and social position, who, at 48-years-old, had been asked to endorse a beauty product that she never used. The makers of it offered her $5,000 and a photo in Washington Weekly Magazine, but Babs dismissed it as a cheap bribe and had refused.  She could still boast of being beautiful.

     Chris, 33, had light brown hair which she wore in bangs, and she was always brushing it back from her eyes with a quick swipe of her right hand.  Her striking face displayed creamy skin, shapely black eyebrows set above deep, thoughtful, penetrating brown eyes that mirrored whatever was passing in her mind.  She was a slender woman who stood at five eight, two to three inches taller than Babs, but she didn’t draw men’s eyes to her the way Babs did. Babs had the better figure, longer legs with thin ankles, plus she stayed in splendid shape by playing tennis all the time. Chris worked out, but did not play tennis. When the two of them went out together, the consensus was that they both were “awfully good looking.”

     When her six-part series exploded on the pages of The Washington Express-Tribune the next month, Chris suddenly found herself the center of attention. She had unearthed a network of former U.S. Army sergeants who had set up a system of bars through Vietnam, Thailand and Southeast Asia, using U.S. military flights to smuggle heroin into the continental U.S.  Since The Express-Tribune was the news powerhouse in the Capitol, the series got a lot of attention, and Chris, a modest, earnest person, suddenly found herself admired and pointed out. She disliked personal attention, and preferred being ignored rather than being noticed, even for praise.

     One day in her office, Babs had called to congratulate her, “My God, you must be thrilled. I read your first article in the airport.  Your name was all over hell.”

     Chris, very touched, thanked her.

     “Hey. I’m not surprised. Not in the least.”  A few days later, Babs invited Chris up to The Hill for lunch.  The mood was celebratory and jovial. They two of them gesticulated with their forks as they ate, nodded, shrugged their shoulders, laughed heartily, and talked with their mouths’ full. Then, suddenly, Babs grew serious. Spearing a piece of food with her fork, she said, “Health care fraud is becoming a hot topic on The Hill. The senator has been an outspoken advocate of the elderly. He has taken a strong stand, in fact. But the fact is that the American people are aging. They are aging very rapidly in great numbers, and many of them need to live in nursing homes where they will be cared for with compassion, and get good medical treatment.

     “Instead, we have a growing national scandal mainly because greedy nursing home owners are getting rich by exploiting helpless patients and extracting huge sums of money from state and federal governments. It’s a system that doesn’t seem to care for either the patients or the taxpayers.” It was then that Babs offered Chris a job on The Hill. Babs wanted to hire Chris as an investigator for a new set of hearings on health care fraud.

 

********

     Bill Orchard, the chief of staff of the Senate Committee on Aging, had a fleshy face with small, cold eyes like grey stones set closely together. Right now, they were fixed steadfastly on her face. He was a dour man ruled by making his subjects feel uneasy and uncertain in his presence. His cold, remote manner, verging on hostility, made people self conscious by trying to have them lose their poise and self-command. She felt that he measured his own personal power by his ability to produce this effect and took some deep rooted pleasure in it.

     Bill, of course, had barely greeted her on her arrival, seeing the interview as another tedious task.

     They were seated at a table in the Senate across from each other. Bill had asked her to shut the door.  Probably to prevent her from escaping.  Her brown eyes watched him alertly. He was a dumpy, laundry bag of a man.

     She had dealt with drug dealers and other infamous characters and she would deal with Bill, but it was already costing an effort.

     “I’m glad to see that you are finally able to join us,” he said.  His voice was a disagreeable, frigid, hoarse baritone. 

     “Thank you,” she said.

     “I thought we were expecting you last week, on the tenth,” he said.

     “I’m sorry?” she said, quite taken aback

     “Weren’t you due to start here on the tenth?”

     “Not to my knowledge,” she said. “Babs said I was to begin today – the 17^th.”

     Bill sat back and watched her with no expression.

     “I’m almost positive it was today,” she said sincerely. She had already stopped staring into his eyes. Staring into his eyes cost too much mental energy. Instead, she had fastened her eyes on his cheek just below his left eye. It was a trick her editor, Peter Fielding, had taught her, who used it when talking to spies and other people who listened with their eyes. It would make her gaze look as odd and coldly focused as his. Meeting the spiritual force of another drained yours very quickly. 

     “I must have gotten confused,” Bill said coldly. “In a few minutes Susan, one of our staff, will show you to your desk. If you need any supplies talk to Allison.” Allison would prove to be very pretty and about 18 years old.

     “Thank you.”

     He tried to fix her eyes with his. “I spoke with your supervisors at The Express-Tribune. They seemed to think you were more than adequate in your performance there, they said. They appeared to think you would, at some point, develop into a major performer,” he said.

          “More than adequate?” she was very touchy when it came to matters of self-esteem.  So he was going to undersell her reputation in preparation for giving her less salary, she thought.

     She had switched her eyes from his cheek to his eyes, boring into them with all her might.

     “First, there are things I must make clear,” he said. “In return for taking our money, you will give us your talents, but in return, you have to carry out our plans and designs, and our programs. Is that clear?”

     “It’s very clear.”

     “We welcome ideas, of course.” There was a sudden noise outside in the long hallway.

     “I said, we welcome ideas,” he repeated.

     “I wasn’t sure I heard what you said because of that noise.”

     “I’ll repeat,” he winced and said condescendingly.  “Ideas are always welcome. But they must be ideas as to how to best advance the interests of this office. How best to publicize and strengthen the accomplishments of the senator over the years. Our job is to avoid mistakes or misstatements or any errors of fact that could allow his intentions to be…misinterpreted. Are you following me?”

     She wanted to say, “Yes, but only the little words,” but didn’t. She was inwardly tapping her foot, but tried to look attentive.

     “There is a reason that I go into all of this. Are you listening?”

     “Oh, I’m listening,” she said.

     “I only want to go over this once, so please pay attention.”

     She stared.

     “Because what I am saying must be said, so I only want to say it once,” he said.

     That makes twice, she thought.

     “Well, let me make clear to you the basis of your employment.  You are our employee.  That sounds simple, but many people do not understand what it means. It means that in return for our paying you money, you will give us your effort and your time.  You will place your aims and programs and goals subordinate to ours.”

     She waited, listening, alert with caution.

     “So what will matter here, with us, is how well you fit in, how smoothly what you do meshes with what we need to have done, how well your colleagues consider how you blend in and augment their efforts.  There aren’t any stars here. There is no time here for a one-man show.”

     “I’m not a man, of course.”

     This flustered him immeasurably. “No, of course you’re not. I apologize. Of course, you’re not. Pardon me. I meant a one-person show.  One person. In any case, it will be the opinions of your superiors, not the public that will decide if your performance is adequate and pleasing. You will be serving our priorities not yours. Can you do that?”

     “Yes. I think I can.”

     “You think or you know?”

     One of those, she thought. “I know I can.” 

     “Are you okay with that?”

     “Yes.”

     “And that appeals to you? Placing the committee’s interest above your own?”

     “Yes.  I am prepared to advance the committee’s interests.”

     “Once you know what they are.”

     “Once I know what they are. Yes.”

     “Well, you strike me as an unusual young lady. So then let me welcome you to your position. You will get $42,000 a year to start. And I think, maybe you’ll do well.  Unfortunately, we need results promptly. The senator wants us to look good at these hearings. We want to appear to be hard-hitting. This is an issue with a lot of public appeal.”

     “I have no idea yet of what the case is about.”

     He looked up and stared.  “Babs told me you were quite well-informed on health care fraud issues.”

     “I’m afraid, she flatters me. It’s not a field I’ve read much in.”

     “Oh? Perhaps I misunderstood her.”

     “Well, I don’t want to mislead you.  I am very much at sea in this area.  Aristotle once said that to ask the right question is half the right answer. I don’t know which questions to ask yet.”
     “Then I suggest you spend the good part of today reading a committee document on health care issues and campaign spending practices.  I think you might find it quite helpful.”

     “Thank you. I will.”

     “And if you need anything please inform me. I will try and make sure you have it,” Bill said. 

     He stood up. He was short and squat. His white shirt was badly wrinkled.  His big belly hung over his leather belt. He gave her a hand that had long, off-putting black hairs growing from the back of it. He tried to look benign and she tried to look deeply respectful. She had a sense that neither was successful.  They shook hands.

     “Then I will see you at the meeting this afternoon.”

 

********

     The smell of brewing coffee wafted gently through the alcove.  The Pyrex pots were warming on the two hot plates. Chris stared down at the memo spread across the top of her desk. It said:

“U.S. Senate Committee on Aging

“By: Barbara Hershel, Associate Counsel

“Re: Alleged Trading of Campaign Contributions for Political Influence in California Involving the State’s Pilot Program for Nursing Home Patients”

In the upper right corner a stamp proclaimed in bold letters of black alarm: “CONFIDENTIAL: FOR COMMITTEE USE ONLY”.  The sight of it made her feel involved in something very important. 

     The target was one Gerald Mahr, who had headed the California State Department of Health and had run for the U.S. Senate but was defeated in the primary. The document alleged that bribes were paid to obtain approval for five pilot projects meant to improve the welfare of the developmentally disabled including those with cerebral palsy, epilepsy or other neurological handicaps.  The program was passed on “an emergency basis” which meant no public hearings, but it was law.  

     The document also said that Mahr had received bribes from nursing home owners to pay off his campaign debts. One of the chief witnesses was Herbert Dreizer, a pharmacist who had laundered a bribe to Mahr. Two owners of nursing homes were highlighted: Glen Kelso and Harold Roost. The homes of each were listed. There was also a list of names which had no meaning for her, mainly employees at the California State Department of Health. 

     Greg Prewitt was the chief witness for the committee. He said he had seen an effort to collect bribes for Mahr.

     Then at the end of the document Chris saw: “San Diego DA’s office is holding back a report that claims that campaign contributions to Mahr’s campaign for the U.S. Senate allegedly used corporate funds which is a violation of federal law. The San Diego DA said it uncovered no supporting evidence.” Babs’ document ended: “Regarding these allegations, there are only two individuals who have first hand testimony. Unfortunately, we have been unable to advance beyond hearsay.”

     A little while later, Chris sat at the long, central table with her staff, Ellen, Tom and Susan. She looked at them and thought, my God, they were young. She had shoes older than they were. They had just graduated from college. Ellen was very refined, very Westchester County, very Junior League.  She wore a nice blouse with a sweater.  She had been to Vassar and had done very well there, majoring in art history. Susan, dark-haired and energetic, had gone to Bryn Mawr. Both of her parents had been heavy supporters of Senator Backhoe. Tom was attractive, gangly but sincere. He was from Brown University.  All were children from well-to-do families, and all were well spoken and polite.  Their magpie scrutiny was now fixed on her.  To her, there was only one rule when you talked to a staff: be brief and be gone.

     If she believed in anything, she believed in her own success, and that belief acted to put fresh heart into the people around her. So she said to them,  “We are going to succeed. This will be a cooperative effort. We rise or fall as a group, but we will succeed,” Chris said, glancing at each curious, rapt face. “But please coordinate. What we don’t want is to overlap each other. No one wants to talk to a source of ours only to hear them say, ‘Oh. I just talked with Susan or Tom or Ellen in your office. What the hell goes on back there?’ Nothing makes an effort look more asinine than that.”

 

********

     A few minutes later, Chris was at her office desk studying the names of the nursing home owners: Glen Kelso and Harold Roost.  Napoleon had said that saying things aloud speeds up memorization, and staffers could soon hear Chris in her office, saying the names aloud. They exchanged looks.

     Fielding, one of her editors, had told another editor at the paper that Chris was better than all the other reporters using the phone; she was almost a magician with it. Her mind was quick and her fingers were quicker; as she ended one call, her fingers would flick across the phone to start a new one. Her voice was smooth and slightly husky, and she was extraordinarily articulate, knowing that she could rewrite and rephrase in an instant. She would call people other reporters would never think of calling. She had the gift of friendship when she called people, and many of the people she interviewed would indeed be her friends afterwards.

     At the beginning of a call, she would lay back, unassertive, listening, but carefully measuring. To Chris, her real strengths lay in her ability to do an instant assessment of what lay in the responder’s tone. She was a master of instant readjustment to the personality she was talking to. What was the psychology of the mind behind the talker, what was the psychology prompting his remarks? If he were irritable, she would retreat gracefully, hastily reframing her questions; if he were truly rude, she would instantly become belligerent. She also knew that you skirted strong points and embedded obstacles, and you had to find new avenues of approach, wildly different from the first one, attacking at the topic at flanks or the rear to gain your object. She knew that the subject of health care was unfamiliar to her but her gifts had never failed her before; why would they now? 

     She sat in her office, stewing, reluctant to begin. To investigate meant living with the unresolved.  What did she know about Mahr? Friends, contacts, associates, background, career, military service?  Who was the writer that advised that when accounts of an event differ, don’t think that both might be true, rather think that both might be false. She had to be suspicious of all sources and information. Did the people she was interviewing harbor hidden agendas meant to mislead? Were they dupes? Was she? Her focus had to be the California Health Department: each unit, each department, its functions, its personnel, its channels of command.  Her head began to spin.

     Her first call was the Orange County Register. No one was in. The reporter, John Bell, was on vacation. She called the Sacramento Herald and the Sacramento Telegraph, starting with the public health and medical reporters. 

     Chris finally got a reporter there. Yes, they knew about Mahr: he was a heavy-hitter. President Bush had recently picked Mahr to head the Veteran’s Administration. The rumor was that the heads of nursing home chains had given bribes to Mahr for his U.S. Senate campaign, but the press had no proof. Chris then read the names from the document into the phone. No go.

     Then a reporter at the Sacramento Bee told her, “I’ll bet they’re near LA. Why don’t you try there?”

     Chris went back and called Peach Tree Manor, their chief witness Prewitt’s nursing home. It was based in Los Angeles.

     “Yes?” said a harried voice. It was Prewitt. When she finished introducing herself, he replied, “I have already said everything I plan to say on this matter.” And he hung up on her.  When she called back, he wouldn’t come to the phone.

     She was mystified – Prewitt was supposed to be their major, hotshot witness.

     Nettled, she called his nursing home again. A secretary answered.  Chris asked the woman if she had a number for Glen Kelso.

     “He’s a friend of Mr. Prewitt,” the secretary said.

     “Does he own a nursing home? I don’t mean Prewitt, I mean Mr. Kelso.”

     “Well, of course, he does. Mr. Kelso owns Bluff’s Edge Manor and several others.” Then, “Wait a minute,” she said. “Who is this?”

     Before she hung up, Chris said to her, “Please tell Mr. Prewitt I’ll call him right back.” A sharp needle for his backside, she thought.

     She went down the hall, past the staffers and men in suits and entered Sen. McKatchen’s office. He was from California and an aide of his gave her California phone books that had 714 area codes in them. She found Glen Kelso’s number.

     When she got back, she called the San Diego papers, and found a reporter from the San Diego Telegraph, Bob Hayes, who told her that Kelso was not only a nursing home owner but a prominent Republican Party fundraiser. Hayes had a pleasant voice, and he told her that Kelso was in very tight with Mahr. He also told her that Roost likes to pal around with shady characters, and the name of a bank came up, The National Bank of Oxnard. He told Chris that his paper had written articles about Kelso. Did she want them? She did.

     “I need everything about him, family, associates, his kids, everything,” Chris said cheerfully.

     “Don’t I know your name?” Hayes asked her. “Didn’t you do a series about veterans who operated bars in Southeast Asia that were used to transport heroin into the U.S.? That was a great series, outstanding,” he said with enthusiasm. “So you resigned to go to the Senate?”

     “I did. Yes.”

     “Well, I hope they know what they’re getting. Anyway, nice to talk to you. I’ll send this stuff right away. If you break an exclusive on this, can you promise me a head start?” 

 

********

     Babs took a week off.  Some incident in the family.  Chris fretted, vexed. Babs had earlier promised Chris that she would call the Federal Election Commission to alert one Bill Mamet of their probe. Three days passed. Finally, Chris called Mamet, but she was abruptly surprised: he was sour and disagreeable. He no longer did investigations, and he couldn’t help. Chris was stung, then called the FEC office and asked for the chief of investigations. It wasn’t Mamet. The man’s name was Duane Peterson. He was a suave black man, sure of himself, polite and clearly full of ambition.

     She took a taxi to his office. They discovered an instantaneous liking for the other.

     She asked Duane if he could send her the audits of the Kelso case in San Diego or anything else about Roost.  He happily agreed. As she was leaving, they shook hands with real warmth. He asked her to stay in touch. He’d send the documents.

     For the next three days, she found herself plunged into a bewildering jungle of dead ends. The case was stalled. Then one night, Chris was alone in her apartment, feeding Py, when the phone rang. She thought of letting it go to the answering machine, but suddenly picked up.

     “Do you know a guy named Bill Hayes?” She didn’t like the voice. It was coarse and unpolished.

     “He’s a gentleman.”

     “He told me to call you. This is Jonas Kyd.”

     “And you called me at home.” Chris was very touchy when it came to her privacy.  Unwanted calls were an invasion of it.

     “I don’t trust phones,” he said.

     “You seem adept at using one all the same,” she shot back.

     Early the next day she called in sick and, just after dawn, flew out to Los Angeles where she rented a car and drove down to Long Beach. Apparently, Hayes told Kyd that Chris was the real thing.  He had urged Kyd to talk to her.

     Chris and Kyd met at the Velvet Whale. It was noon time, and the place was busy and noisy. No one approached her. She sat annoyed and impatient, in a bright red settle, gazing impatiently at the array of plastic flowers and the huddled packets of mustard and ketchup. Kyd finally showed up and came over. He was a middle-sized man, wearing a bright, imitation tweed jacket. He had sandy hair and full, ugly lips in a crude, commonplace face. Distaste sank her spirits. They had Bloody Marys and then ordered lunch.  

     Kyd had just stuffed his mouth with a huge clot of hamburger when he said, through his food, “See, I used to work for Roost,” he said. He told Chris that Roost had been approached by two state investigators who had him solid on laundering a corporate check from a pharmacy to one of his nursing homes.

     “Dreizer,” she said.

     “Good for you.”

     She glowered silently.  

     “Anyway, Roost asked for immunity. The state told him he’d get immunity when water ran uphill,” and then Kyd explained that two years ago last August, the state said it was cancelling the Pilot Program, which left a lot of the owners sucking their knuckles. Then Roost got this phone call. It was from Mahr. Mahr told Roost that if he didn’t come up with the money within 24 hours, he would be out of the program. So Roost got busy, and a day later, a staffer at his facility at Bluff’s Edge, discovered that a $12,000 bonus had been paid to Roost’s wife.

     Instantly, she grasped the meaning of this information.

     “You told this to Bob Hayes?”

     “Hayes is okay. No, I didn’t tell him. Anyway, Hayes thinks you are hot stuff – no jokes intended.” He had blushed fishily.

     “How do you know Mahr got it?” She pretended a sudden interest in her food.

    “Because Roost turned to the staffer and pointed to the bonus, and he said to him, ‘do you see this? It means we have that prick Mahr off of our backs.’ Another staffer told the same story. ‘We have that prick Mahr off of our backs.’”

     Chris stopped. “So it was facility money that Roost gave.”

     “It was.”

     “You said two staffers. Were you one of them?”

     “Nice try,” he said. He took a huge bite, spilling a piece on his lap. “Then the FBI got involved.”  His lips had a shiny gloss from his burger as he chewed. “I’m telling you what I told the FBI. The FBI also interviewed Roost and Kelso. 

     “The FBI interviewed you?” she tried acting very casual, but her heart had tightened in her chest.  She realized that she was going to be the hero of the office if this worked.

     Kyd turned to one side to smother a quiet belch in his napkin. “Talk to Joan Michello. She was the head nurse of the facility.  Talk to her, and then call me later.  Where are you staying?”

     “I have to leave tonight.”

     Chris left the lunch, elated, because at one stroke her investigation had gone from a $2,000 laundered bribe from a pharmacist to a $12,000 bribe paid by Roost for Mahr’s campaign debts.

     Back in her room, after putting her notebook in her lap, she got Joan Michello on the phone.

     “Yes, I saw it,” the nurse said. She had a kindly, grandmotherly voice. “Jonas showed it to me.”  Then she told Chris that the bonus had been listed under “Operating Expenses,” under the subtitle, “Employee Benefits.”

     “But Mahr had lost his Senate primary, I thought.”

     “He lost, but he owed big debts. Something like $700,000. Roost had political aspirations, and Mahr traded on them. Mr. Roost made a lot of trips to Sacramento. With Mahr in the U.S. Senate, Mr. Roost knew he would have it made, and so he collected money for Mahr’s primary.”

     “What can you tell me about Roost?”

     Michello told her that Harold Roost used to be a preacher at the Pentecostal Church.  He was thrown out of Seattle. His nursing homes had a tendency to catch fire and burn or go bankrupt. Roost, she said, was very close to a man named Glen Kelso, a developer, who at one point owned his own construction company. Mr. Roost had two sons, Marvin and John. Mr. Roost worked in construction with Kelso at some point. They sold out to a group of bankers. Chris asked if she remembered the group’s name, but she didn’t. She would look for it.

     Chris’ pen was flying over the pages as she took notes.

     Michello said that Martin, the father of Harold Roost, had a bank holding company and a mortgage company and a consumer finance company. John, Marvin’s younger brother, also worked for it. “In fact,” she said, “I think that’s where John got the money to construct nursing homes. The Roost and Kelso families are very close,” she said.

     “Who were Roost’s contacts in Sacramento?”

     “Some man named Peter Churchill,” the nurse said, adding that Churchill was the puppet head of the Health Department for Mahr at the time.  His name was in the memo, she realized.

     “How long did Jonas Kyd work for Roost?”

     “A year and a half. From October to the next year. Jonas accused Roost of skimming profits from the facility. He was fired on Jan. 14. I was there for six years. Roost and Kelso were raking in sky high profits. Roost was making over $10,800 a month, I knew that for a fact.”

     “Have you ever heard of the National Bank of Oxnard?”

     “Certainly. They gave big loans to Mr. Roost and Mr. Kelso. If I were you I’d dig into some of those odd groups scattered around San Diego like Edison, or HMS or The George Mason Group.” Chris scribbled notes.

     Chris worked up her nerve and asked had she ever seen a copy of the bonus.

     “Jonas has a copy. When I saw it at the end of the year, it was listed differently. Roost had moved it. The print out showed the maiden name of Mr. Roost’s wife.”

     She could barely contain herself. “Do you remember what her maiden name was?”

     “Oh, sure.  It was Kent. Jenny Kent. I knew her parents too, Bob and Agatha.”

     “So Roost moved it?”

     “He gave it a new title. Jonas knows.”

     “Can you think of anyone in state Facility Licensing I could talk to about Roost or Kelso?”

     “Talk to Sherry Kendrick. She was number two in the Licensing Division. She knew what was happening. She tried to close their places down.”

     “Roost’s places?”

     “Mr. Roost and Mr. Kelso’s places. She was furious with them. People like Roost and Kelso make the patients feel they are a failure in life, but they are merely old. Many have a life of accomplishment stretching behind them. Living in a facility should be a time of their lives when they are feeling joy at the good luck that has taken them this far. They aren’t finished. Of course, it’s hard to feel sympathy for people you feel no affection for, isn’t it?”

     Chris asked who else knew what she did? Who could she talk to about Kelso?

     Michello said that she knew a comptroller there, a man named Jack Varner who worked for Kelso. He finally quit, he was so disgusted.

     “How you spell it?”

     Michello said she would call back with Varner’s number. Chris warmly thanked her. “Well if you find anything, anything at all, no matter how insignificant it looks, will you call me?”

     “I’d be glad to, dear,” she said.

     “Well, thank you so much for your help,” Chris said.

     “I really hope that some good comes from this, dear. I really do,” Michello said. 

     Chris quickly phoned Kyd. He answered at once. “Joan Michello says you’re a straight shooter.”

     “You sound surprised.”

     “Michello said that when you saw the bonus, it was no longer listed as an Employment Benefit but as something else.”

     “Correct. Roost had changed it.”

     “What was it listed as after that?”

     “Just a second.” She waited, hearing a sound of rustling.

     She was impatient. “Can you recall what it said?”

     “Just a second. Hold the line a second.” She heard rustling then more rustling. His voice came back. “On the print out, the bonus was listed as ‘ancillary (NET) – 412,141 – minus revenue.’”

     “You’re reading from the print out,” she almost yelled. Pouncing excitement seized her all of a sudden, releasing a fresh, rushing cascade of energy in her soul. “You have a copy of the goddamn thing don’t you?”

     “Yes.”

     “Why didn’t you give it to me?”

     “I didn’t know if you were honest. Congressional staffers are people with eight faces. They are beyond two-faced. Your office in Washington leaks like a strainer. No one trusts it. I had to make sure you were honest.”

 

********

     The overweight, old guard at the door didn’t ask to see her ID. He knew her face by now and gave her a gracious, respectful greeting which she returned.  There were a few staffers trooping the long, hard, marble Senate office building corridor, and she passed endless rows of shut doors. A plump woman went by carrying a hefty wedge of papers crooked in one arm. She was out of breath and acted put upon. She didn’t return Chris’ smile. Her own steps clacked loud and briskly down the echoing corridor.

     Chris put her big purse on the desk top, and then went into the next room. Babs was there, and the kids were seated around the table studying papers. They looked up when they saw her. Chris exchanged warm greetings with them.

     “How are you?” Susan asked. “We were told you were sick. You must have eaten in the cafeteria.”

     “I’m fine,” she said, grateful for the concern.

     Babs’ face looked brightened and relieved at the sight of her.  “Can I talk to you for just a second?” she asked Chris.

     “Ah, oh, here comes the interrogation,” Tom said. The group tittered. The three of them went out.

     Babs was dressed in another stunning outfit. “So are you all right?” Babs asked. “I was worried about you. I left messages for you at home.”

     “I wasn’t sick,” she said. “I went to California.”

     Bab’s eyebrows shot up. “You went to California? When?” Babs was entirely bewildered, almost suspicious.

     “Yesterday.”

     Babs was baffled. “How? Did you fly on your own money?”

     “Yes. I went to see this guy, Jonas Kyd.”

     “You are nuts,” Babs said, partly in admiration and partly in fear.

     Some instinct held her back from naming Hayes as the source that had set it in motion. “Listen, Kyd knows his stuff. Did you know about the big FBI probe?”

     This seemed to confuse Babs. “What probe? What was the FBI looking at for God’s sake?” she seemed rattled.

     “Federal monies. And listen to this, Babs.” Babs froze. “We have evidence of a new felony.”

     Bab’s face suddenly widened in surprise and dismay. Chris quickly took her through the new information about the laundered bonus. Chris was telling her more about Kyd, but Babs’ reaction began to puzzle her; she didn’t look pleased.

     “Yeah, but he was fired,” Babs said.

     “So?” Chris found this petty.

     Babs shrugged, “Disgruntled ex-employees don’t make the most credible witnesses.”

     Chris bridled.  “The chief nurse at the facility supported his story, and she wasn’t fired.  Anyway, that’s a defense attorney’s argument!”

     Babs gave her a long, hostile look. “It may be, but not everyone who gets fired is fired for being too good at their jobs.”

      “Getting fired doesn’t mean they were brain-dead and blind on the job, either,” she said. “And by the way, Prewitt is becoming a pretty murky witness.”

     Babs frowned. “What’s wrong with Prewitt?” she asked.

     “Some witness! He was part of a group collecting funds for Mahr,” Chris said. “He’s refusing to cooperate.”

     “Will you take it easy?” Babs said, observing her anger. “We’re all friends here.”

     “Well, it pisses me off,” Chris said. She hated to find a lukewarm response when her own internal furnace was raging at full power.

     Babs made a mocking face. “I know – we all must feel whatever you feel.” It was a bit snide, and Babs looked a bit ashamed after saying it.

     Chris exploded. “We’ve got copies! This isn’t a personal opinion! We’ve got documents!”

     “Okay.”

     “And the head nurse confirmed it. She wasn’t fired.”

     Babs absorbed that patiently. She watched as Chris calmed down.

     “So what’s next?”

     Chris told her.

     Babs had turned thoughtful. “We have to be careful of that copy. The bonus stuff. It won’t stand up in court if it’s a copy.”

     “Why?”

     “It won’t stand up in court, that’s all I’m saying.”

     Chris stared and then said, “We are not going to trial. I thought this was a hearing.”

     Babs blushed. “Of course, I don’t know what I was thinking.”  Then, she exulted: “We've got a case.  We’ve got fresh evidence. I told you we needed you. Remember: don’t tell any of this to the Republicans. Not a word. Stay clear of a guy named Peter Churchill especially. He ran the California Health Department after Mahr left.  He’s a Republican. He was a total tool of Mahr.”

     “What’s his name again?” Chris asked. Babs repeated it.

     “I thought we had to keep them up-to-date,” Chris said.

     “Not yet we don’t. Let’s get a case first.” Then Babs asked her, “How fast can you pull all this stuff together? We are very constrained by time.”

     “The kids are getting stuff from state auditors and the FEC. It’s all weird, Babs.  The whole campaign is laced with illegality.”

     Babs said excitedly, gazing at her. “This is dynamite. You’ve done wonderfully! I can check with the courts in San Diego to see if the DA’s office issued any subpoenas. Then we ought to go to the FEC and see what you can find there. I’ll start to call some of my contacts in California.”

     “We are already talking to the FEC.”

     Babs looked off balance. “You talked to Bill Mamet?”

     “He was of no help at all. I’ve got a new source over there in a senior position. He’ll send us FEC audits tomorrow.”  She didn’t name Duane.

     “Wow!” Babs exulted, but then a frown crossed her face.

     “Are you mad about something?”  Chris asked.

     “Not mad. Just tell me first before you run off. I don’t mind reimbursing you for your flight, but Bill at some point will want to look at the trip report. I mean if he asked who you were seeing, what would I tell him?”  

     Ah yes, Bill, she thought.

     “I told you I am willing to pay for it.”

     “You won’t have to, sweetie. I’ll see to it. But you see my concern.”

     “I see your concern.” She didn’t, really.

     Then Babs brightened again. “Do we have a copy of that bonus?”

     Chris showed her.

     Babs now seemed aglow. “What a downfall for Mahr! The promised child of the Republicans. Did you know that President Bush wanted him to head the Veteran’s Administration. Mahr is filth; he is utterly corrupt.”

 

********

     A few days later, Chris talked to Sherry Kendrick in Licensing, a woman in her mid or late forties, a personality of unrefined gusto. Kelso, she said, was nothing but “vulgar, shit-sniffing filth” and a “venomous little hemorrhoid.” She told Chris that Kelso’s facilities ran up 185 violations in two years. His homes were among the very worst in the nation. “We tried to shut Kelso down, but Kelso had too much power. No, his facilities were dumps.  A doctor at one of Kelso’s places wanted to pull eight healthy teeth of an old woman patient and give her full dentures because he was too lazy to repair partial bridgework. A nurse there stopped that doctor. Later, she was fired.”

    “The nurse was fired?”

    “Oh, because she had integrity. No, it was horrible,” and Kendrick went on to air grievances as Chris busily took notes.

     “Where is Mahr now, since he’s out of office?” Chris asked her.

     “He may be out of office, but he still controls the department. Plus I heard that he got offered some big job in Washington.”

      It took Chris a week to get to Varner. He had a nice, earnest voice except it sounded very worn out.  He had the same story to tell as Kyd. “Kelso was on the phone, I started to leave when he started beckoning at me to stay, and I went in and sat down, and suddenly he hangs up the phone. He had this look of triumph and says, ‘We just bought Jerry Mahr.’ Those were his very words. ‘We just bought Jerry Mahr.’”

     “Who was he talking to on the phone?”

     “Harold Roost. He’s a nursing home owner.”                                   

     “What methods did he used to make payments to Mahr?”

     “The same as in the earlier case,” said Varner.

      The room was still as a corpse.

     “What earlier case?” Chris asked in a faint voice.

     “These violations occurred in May two years ago. All Kelso’s employees were reimbursed in advance by Kelso’s secretary, Arlene Walker.”

     She waited.

     “See, the money was given to the campaign of a San Diego county supervisor, Juan Peterson, who was running a tough campaign urging reform of ‘despicable conditions’ in some San Diego chains especially those of Kelso. Publicly Kelso threatened to sue, but privately, Kelso had bought him off. Peterson was re-elected.

     “How did Kelso get caught?”

     “The state caught him. Kelso pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of violating state election code rules. He was fined $1,500 and placed on three years probation.”

     “Were there other election code violations?”

     “Oh, yes.”

     “State?”

     “Federal.” Again, her heart tightened. “See, in San Diego, there’s a county ordinance that says it’s illegal to make political contributions to a single candidate in excess of $500. Kelso wanted to give another $2,000 to Mahr, so he divided up the amount again. He disguised the ultimate source and misrepresented who the real contributors were.”

     “Like last time.”

     “Just like last time.  Hal Kune distributed it.”

     “Who is Kune again?

     “Kune is Kelso’s son-in-law. There is a little circle at Bluff’s Edge Manor that was very loyal to Kelso because Kelso stood on their necks.”

     “Why did Kelso plead guilty if no one was talking?”

     “To quell publicity. Kelso wanted it all to go away. He had been nailed, and he was afraid that if more violations were found, it could affect his standing. At bottom, he was afraid that other illegal payments he was making around the state might surface. You have to understand that Kune bragged to me and others that there were a great many illegal payments being made, not just to Mahr.”

     He warned her that Kelso and Roost were both prima donnas. “Do you know what you get if you put two prima donnas in the same bag?” She waited. “Not an instant’s peace.”

 

********

     The next Monday, Chris and her staff sat down and began to sort the audits and memos that the FEC had sent. As a team leader, Chris was not harsh or demanding. Instead, she inspired and listened very carefully to what her team was saying. Chris was a driver, and she had begun to infuse that relentless drive in her staff.

     “They sent us the fucking Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Tom said, annoyed.

     “Or Warren Beatty’s address book,” said Susan. They all sat there in a cramped room in the office around a long table surrounded by tightly shelved beige law books with their red and gold backings, making new files.  Excitement was in the air.

     By now, they all knew that not completely filling out documents accurately was illegal under state and county laws. Under existing campaign laws, nursing home reports must have the full name, address, city and state, occupation, employer, and  amount of donation for each individual contributor. They now had five employees who listed themselves as businessmen while one was listed as a banker. One employee gave no address, but listed a local bank, The National Bank of Oxnard.

     “What the hell is that?” asked Susan.

     They kept studying the documents.

     Chris paged through the FEC Schedule A document, brushing her back. Her staff had already been briefed on her Varner interview.

     “What are you looking for?” Tom asked her

     Ellen found it first. May 14. Except none of the employees Varner had named could be found in FEC lists. Chris and Ellen and Susan went over it twice. “Shit!” Ellen said, her face vexed.

     “What’s wrong?” Chris asked.

     “They’ve laundered the whole list,” Ellen said.

     Chris looked again at the list, extremely annoyed.

     All of them began frantically turning pages.

     Then Tom said excitedly, “Here they are.” There in the list they found the employees of Mar Vista: Kune $350, Paul Kessler $250, Ethel Block $250, Yeltzin $450, Walker $425, Ken Myles, $300.

     Then Susan found one “donor” who told of reimbursement. There was a photo of Walter, “Bud” Yeltzin, the staff director at Coast Vista, a Kelso facility. He was listed as a consultant to the facilities, a violation of state law right there, she pointed out.

     Suddenly Chris jerked to full alert. On an FEC document she saw, “Roost, John, Seattle, Washington. Excellent Eldcare.” There was nothing else on the document.

     “What the fuck?” Susan said, reading it.

     Chris said. “Who owns this Eldcare?” Michello had mentioned it. None of them knew. Chris dialed information in San Diego and asked for Excellent Eldcare as the rest returned to study the audits. Eldcare didn’t answer. It was not yet nine in California.

     At nine, she called the California Golden Gate Nursing Home Association. They kept records of all the chains. “Where is Excellent Eldcare based, please? I need their number.”

     It was located in San Diego. When Chris got the number, she called and a young woman answered.

     “Mr. John Roost, please?”  Chris said.

     “Can I please tell him who’s calling?”

     “I’m Beverly Huff from the National Bank of Oxnard. Can you give me Mr. Roost’s direct number please?”

     “Hello?” said a voice. It was a harsh, deep and grating voice, a farmer’s voice. It was hard to guess its age.

     “Mr. Roost?”

     “What do you want?”

     “Is this John Roost, the owner of Excellent Eldcare? This is Chris Seabridge with the U.S. Senate.”

     “Why are you calling?” The tone was heavy with distaste.

     “I have before me a record of a contribution of $2,000 that you gave to Gerald Mahr for his Senate campaign.  Is that the correct amount?” She was running a dangerous bluff, and she knew it.

     “I thought you were with some bank. And you, young lady, are a liar. Anyway, I never gave to Jerry Mahr’s campaign.”

     “But your employees did.”

     The click rang sharply in her ear. He had severed the connection. She was stunned and outraged. She redialed in a cold fury.

     “Yes?”  Impatient, nasty.

     “This is Chris Seabridge again.”

     “Look. Get lost.”

     “How long have you been in southern California, Mr. Roost?”

     The question took him by surprise. “Me? Hell, I don’t know. The last fifteen years Why?  Anyway, what business is it of yours?” It was a poisonous sneer.

     “And you are from Seattle.”

     “I was from Seattle,” he condescended. “Now I live in southern California. Please stop bothering me.” Click! He had hung up on her again.

     She redialed.

     “Look – take the clue, bitch.”

     “If you live in southern California, why did you give your address to the FEC as Seattle?”

     “So what if I did? I used to be from Seattle.”

     “Did you know that misidentifying a donation is a violation of federal law, Mr. Roost?"

     A violent click! She had pulled her ear away in time. But she had caught him in two violations. The FEC record had him down only as a “businessman, retired,” plus he’d misstated his address.

     When she finally got Varner, she read him several names, but they meant nothing to him. Suddenly she read out the name, H.L. Newman, and he said abruptly, “Those are Arlene’s parents.”

     “Kelso’s secretary?” she couldn’t believe her ears.

     “I’m almost certain.”

     She continued to read down the list until she reached one “George Rodgers, businessman, owner of Rodger’s Rangers, retired.” Varner snorted. “I know a George Rodgers,” he said. “He was a patient at Bluff’s Edge Manor. A retired janitor. I’d check the date of his gift.”

     “What do you mean?”

     “What date was his contribution?”

     “May 14.”

     “I think he died there in March. Listen, Kelso once had a facility closed because he was using dead people to give contributions,” Varner said.

     She asked Varner if she could call him right back? She called a Roost facility, Bluff’s Edge Manor. She gave her name as Edith Millson, clerk at Grammercy Insurance. They were working on a death benefit claim, and Chris said that she needed to have the exact date of Mr. Rodgers’ death. The young woman quickly came back. “I’m afraid that Mr. Rodgers passed away on April 3.”

     Chris walked exultantly from her desk into the room next door with the big table. Ellen was on the phone, and Tim and Susan were bent over documents like trolls with hunchbacks.

     “Well, that’s astounding,” Chris announced. They turned; Ellen put her hand over her phone. “At Bluff’s Edge on May 14, one George Rodgers gave $350 to Mahr.”

     “Why is that astounding?” Susan asked.

     “Because he died on April 3.”

     The staff was on fire now. More violations piled up: two $10,000 bonuses given in the maiden name of Roost’s wife, a $450 contribution in the name of his stepson, and $1,000 in the name of his mother who was 92 years old, suffering severe Alzheimer’s, and who could no longer handle her own affairs. By the end of the day, they had 15 new violations.

     The results of the four-week effort led by Chris and her staff were stunning. The FBI had launched a full field investigation into the new violations, and the San Diego DA was also doing a new probe of Kelso, while Duane over at the FEC had launched a new investigation into the two nursing home owners.

     One day Chris was talking to the San Diego DA, Addison Wills, an earnest, pleasant young man who gave Chris the name of one Judge Graham Fuller of San Diego, who had presided over the earlier Kelso case. Chris heard the voice of a soft-spoken but firm old man.  “You realize that you have painted Kelso into a corner,” he said to her.

     Chris asked him why.

     “Well, Kelso is still on probation.” Her breath froze: she had forgotten that fact. Judge Fuller told Chris that he was willing to swear out a bench warrant for Kelso’s arrest, but it required her boss to call him to okay the warrant. “Have your boss call me.”  Chris assured him that Babs would call. She was pursuing the case with energy. After hanging up, she forwarded to his office the list of new violations plus notarized affidavits. Unbridled joy surged through her.

     That morning she went into Bill’s cramped office where Babs was sitting. Chris was beaming. Fresh resolution had filled her sails. When she told the two of them about the bench warrant, she expected congratulations or joy, but she had entirely misjudged the mood. Babs and Bill sat gazing at her in stunned silence.

     Exhilarated and overjoyed, Chris ignored their glum mood. “This is good news all the same,” she said and left.

 

********

     Chris continued to interview Kendrick, Kyd and Michello. The more they talked, the more she learned. One morning, Bob Hayes sent her an article that claimed that old man Roost, Marvin, had looted American National Bank in San Diego a decade ago. A federal court charged him with self-dealing, giving special loans to companies he owed, and the documents explained how Roost bribed an auditor to get good audits, and when the Feds grabbed him, they found that several big holders of the bank’s stock had made huge withdrawals just before the Feds froze the monies. Marvin was dragged into court, and pled guilty of plundering $3,790,000, but he got only a $95,000 fine and probation. Then he suddenly died.  She could imagine the Earth sending up loud shouts of rejoicing. 

     It was a hot day in late May, and as it was nearing noon Chris was seated at her desk, needing to eat. She was about to leave and have lunch when Bill’s squat form appeared in the doorway.

     “Could you please come to my office?”

     She went in and sat down, docile.  He closed the door. She was expecting compliments on her work, when suddenly, Bill cleared his throat, and said, “It’s not working out. I’m afraid we are going to have to let you go.”

     Her mouth opened as if to gasp for air. The words were a sharp blow to the stomach. She felt like an eviscerated fish. She felt a weakness flooding her senses, a vacuum opening in her mind. Surprised pain had left her helpless.

     “What’s not working?” she said, inane.

     A little while later, her angry face full of sullen shame, Chris began packing her personal things into a cardboard box, her office door shut.  She packed the copies of the Senate memo, plus interviews and the new affidavits that she and her staff had obtained. Babs was out of the office. When the office staff went out to lunch, Chris left, clumsily carrying her box down the long row of locked doors and out into the bright street and called a cab.

     The next day, when the two friends met at lunch, Babs tried to console her. She said vehemently, “The fix is in! It’s not you, sweetie. It’s the fucking Republicans in the Senate! That fucking Churchill!” She made a woebegone face meant to pity and shook her head. “The fix is in.”

     “What ‘fix’?”

     “What do you mean what fix? The Republicans are trying to screw us.”

     Then Babs had leaned across the table to grab her friend’s hand. “Look, I think it’s fair to say that we can’t really point out where you end and I begin, we are that close.”  Chris was looking away, distraught, when Babs said to her, “I know you – you just want to hole up in your apartment, don’t do that. Promise me.” Chris raised her grieving, pinched face and wet eyes to her. “Don’t despair. I’ll find you a new job. Keep going, that’s all I ask,” and Chris impulsively kissed her friend’s freckled hand.

     But Chris didn’t keep going – she was inconsolable. By the end of each day, she was half-drunk from red wine, listening to somber music, and only left her flat to buy groceries. She knew that what gives most of us courage and ambition is the knowledge that our friends and associates regard us with respect and admiration. Alone in her flat, dressed in pale pink PJs, Chris felt the deep grief that one feels at the loss of a friend or a pet – a sorrow that comes from the knowledge that in every bond there is something that no words can express because that bond contains feelings that are unique to it and the loss of them is irreparable. Even Py seemed to sense her inner agony; he incessantly climbed up into her lap to be held and stroked. She also sorely missed her staff; she had grown fond of them.   

     Dismally, she realized she had lost two jobs.

     But her firing by Bill had stung her so deeply that it felt like a painful splinter lodged deep under the skin that never went away. Chris knew that she could only dislodge the splinter when an occasion gave her the chance to inflect on the splinter a force equal to the one that had put it there in the first place.  Quietly, she vowed that day would come.

 

********

     Four weeks later, Chris, dressed in her PJs, was idly paging through a Wall Street Journal when she, by chance, saw an article about an international pharmaceutical company that was fighting a takeover attempt. She was rapidly scanning it, about to lay it down, when her eyes almost leapt out of her head: the man leading the takeover was no other than Gerald Mahr!

     She immediately got the phone number of ICC Pharmaceuticals which was fighting the takeover. The company was based in Newport Beach, a town south of Los Angeles. It had hired a law firm, Hall and Demetrious, and she finally got a company lawyer, David Hall, on the phone.  His voice was craggy, deliberate and acute. She told him that the documents she had showed Mahr was corrupt. She had no car, but if Hall and his attorneys agreed to pay for a round trip taxi fare and a six pack of beer, she would deliver the Senate documents to Dulles airport.

     After enduring three days of torturing suspense, the call came: ICC had hired her on the spot, Hall said. She could name her own price. Chris hurriedly packed her bag, got a friend in her building to take care of Py, and left for Los Angeles. Hall met her at the airport. He had a head too big for his body, was handsome, dressed in an expensive black suit and gold cufflinks. He had brown hair, pale, piercing eyes, and a red chap-bitten face, as if he habitually drank too much. But he had charm and was penetrating and direct in laying out what ICC wanted from her.

     ICC had booked her a room at the Newport Beach Inn. At the end of her first day, as they were going down the company corridor out to the street, David had offhandedly asked her, “How many people did you interview today?” She had replied, "Nineteen,” and he had looked extremely impressed.

 

********

     David’s speech was logical and concise, plus he had a phenomenal memory.  He had a fly paper mind. To test each other’s memory, she and David both read the same Wall Street Journal articles and then one would put in what the other had left out. She also discovered that David liked cocaine. One day, she met him at the John Wayne Airport after he arrived from a flight from New York. He looked tired, and quickly went into the Men’s Room. When he came out, he was a different person; his fatigue had vanished, and after he picked up his car, he wanted to race her back to her hotel. What followed was the most hair-raising drive she had ever had in her life. She never used drugs. Red wine was good enough.

     David and his stunning blonde wife lived nearby. She and Chris soon became friends.

     One early morning, Chris was studying Gerald Mahr’s résumé. She paged through the pictures of him. Mahr had a handsome face ringed by full dark hair. His brown eyes were interesting; their gaze held you.  She paged through the photos, Mahr posing with President George W. Bush;  Mahr posing with Donald Rumsfeld. She glanced through his speeches, all full of references to a brighter future and a more hopeful and prosperous America. His speeches were so bemired in clichés and common-places, its promises so old and still undelivered, she stopped reading. Mahr cloaked his greed for power in idealism.

     She laid the documents down, disconcerted. Something was missing. It was a feeling she had harbored for days. What had she overlooked about Mahr? She felt alarm. Something was missing.

********

     Two weeks later, she came back to D.C. to pick up Py and to have a farewell lunch with Babs. They went to their favorite outdoor café. It was noisy and busy and seated eaters were in the shade of patio umbrellas. Taxis and cars were passing by in the street. Babs was in rare form, talking about the philosopher David Hume: “What you don’t want is a general, colorless, unimaginative view of life. Hume uses cat-like touches of malice, hinting at claws beneath the velvet,” and on and on she went. But suddenly, Babs grew serious. “So how long will you be gone, sweetie?”

     “I don’t have any idea.”

    “Well, I am sure you will do well in LA. Remember to stay away from Mahr’s men like Churchill.  Remember, honey. The fix is in. Don’t forget. ”

      Some wayward impulse led her to return to the Senate building for the last time. She timidly entered the wide, cavernous, circular room. It displayed drab orange walls and seven double doors. The spindly, dark mahogany desks were arranged in a semi-circle in four shallow tiers. They looked old-fashioned like school kids’ desks. The floor was covered by some sort of worn, dingy gray carpet. Above them rose dark galleries of dark wood, and just above them, set in niches, were the sculpted busts of the first twenty-one U.S. vice presidents. The sight flooded her with awe and respect.  She gazed raptly at the huge ceiling, a white oval ceiling pierced by small black holes  So much history, so many struggles here.

     Some senators in their suits and ties were out of their seats talking or else were standing against the walls while onlookers gawked from the galleries. The mood was one of apathy. The pace of the place was drowsy, unenergetic, the interest slack and desultory.

     She stepped outside to leave when she ran into none other than Peter Churchill, Mahr’s supposed bag man. He was tall, well built, nice features including amazing deep, blue eyes. She hated him on sight and was trying to get past him, but he called out her name.

     “I heard you were fired,” he said. The expression on the face was sympathetic.

     “Thanks to you,” her voice was utterly venomous. She brushed her hair back.

     Churchill acted with startled surprise. He was wearing a nice blue blazer and gray slacks. “Why thanks to me?”

     “You know what I mean,” and again, she tried to get past him.

     “Why thanks to me?” he stared at her with keen, piercing eyes. “Are you really telling me that you have never looked into Babs’ background?”

     “Why would I? She’s a friend,” she said hotly. But the question surprised her.

     “Why?” Churchill seemed dumbfounded. “Didn’t you ever wonder why your lead with Prewitt never panned out? Or why Bill Mamet at the FEC refused to help you? Don’t you ever think?”

     Fury rose in her. She could have hit him.

     “In case you didn’t know, dear old Babs is mad for money, in case you don’t know!  Dear old Babs is always talking to anyone who has ears, about how ‘low aims rule the world,’ but, in fact, she’s completely in the grip of them.” Churchill’s blue eyes snapped angrily. “She banks in shady places. She has offshore accounts. She owns a lot of property under her mother’s name. She contaminates everything she touches!”

     “And why should I believe you?”

     “You mean, because I am a Republican?” He gave her a pitying look. “I thought you were the hot shot investigator.”

     Chris had frozen, but then Churchill told her how Babs had alerted every source in the California Health Department and the nursing home owners about every new discovery she and her staff had made.

     Churchill was shaking his head in amazement. “You are very gullible.”

     “Why should I believe you? You worked for Mahr.” She had to hit back with something.

     Churchill simply shook his head in disbelief. Both of them were blocking the corridor, talking, and they moved to one side to let people pass. “Don’t you understand? Babs wanted you to fail,” he said intensely. “Babs gave you a weak case and having a good reporter on it was going to lend credulity to a weak effort. Did she give you a competent and experienced staff? She had a vested interest in your failure.  But your success surprised her, so dear old Babs went and asked Bill to fire you.”  

     His words struck her mind like tiny hammers.  Chris was glaring hatred at him. She stood, pale and confused, and Churchill stared back at her. 

     “For all of your drive and commitment, you are very credulous,” he said and walked off, head down, shaking his head in rue.

     But his words had changed everything. Like a twist of a kaleidoscope, she suddenly began to see Babs differently.

 

********

     One day sitting at her desk in the ICC office, she realized that one of the chief mental errors rests with the mistaken conviction that one knows familiar factsinside and out. Now, she had to overcome her laziness. She realized that she had to start to review all of her interviews to see old information with new eyes. That is what it would take to succeed.

     So she began to reread all the notes of her interviews, starting with the early California reporter interviews. Mahr, heavy hitter, in tight with the Republicans. Then suddenly there it was. The sentence was by one of the first reporters she had talked to.  “President Bush had nominated Mahr to head the Veterans Administration.” She had read this at least twenty times. She sat back. Why didn’t Mahr take the job? Was this the big Washington job Kendrick had alluded to?

     They met at a restaurant near San Diego. The former California state investigator’s name was Henry Keep. He was a thin, dark-haired man who stood over six feet. His face was handsome enough, but it displayed broken-hearted brown eyes: acute suffering sat in them. And clearly he wasn’t pleased by her presence, but she quickly saw that whatever else he was, he was a good and careful listener. As she talked to him, he would avert his eyes to the side, gazing into the distance with an absent-minded air, then would suddenly fix her in his gaze and ask her penetrating questions. You did not lie to such a face, she thought.

     Keep was saying, “A pickpocket is a bad character. A guy who loots the Vatican of its art treasures, is not only a bad character, he is a monster. But how do you classify people like Kelso and Roost who pay bonuses to their cooks if they feed patients on seventy cents a day? They are obscene.”

     Keep told her that Kelso’s and Roost’s organizations including Eldcare, Edison Bank and the National Bank of Oxnard were “a rat’s nest” of illegal accounting, off the book accounts, and slush funds. Roost’s and Kelso’s banks swapped funds with companies they owned, and many were front companies led by made up characters. In one case, a Kelso company, Excellent Eldcare, turned out to be located at a filling station, yet they got millions of dollars a year in state contracts. He sounded very bitter and disillusioned.

     Keep was staring out at the street across the sunlit tables with the seated eaters and the café had sprouted with umbrellas. Finally, he said, “I assume you know about the Mob in the industry.” She became very alert. He went on: “See, the Mob has quietly been infiltrating the nursing home industry for years. I assume you knew that.”

     “Only vaguely,” she said. That was a lie.

     “Well, no case is worth ending up permanently mediating in the trunk of someone’s car.”

     “Meaning what?”

     “My partner was Walt Cooper. He was a state investigator like me, and he had sources telling him how the National Bank of Oxnard was entirely crooked, and Mob guys banked there. Then after Walt was killed in a car crash, I started looking into it. One night at home, a guy with a boorish, gruff voice called me up and threatened me to lay off. Fuck that. So I kept working and he called again: ordering me to back off, or it was going to end badly. It was chilling, let me tell you. Later I tried to convert him into a confidential source, but it didn’t work.”

     “Did he give you a number?

     Keep shook his head. He sipped his drink. “Talk to the FBI.”

     “You can’t give me a name?”

     “No. He’s a source. If he agrees, then you can have it.”

     “Did your guy name other mobsters?”

     “Boy, did he!” Keep came alive. “One was Guy Flabbert; he’s a mob lawyer. Kelso uses him, but Flabbert had clients like Danny Ceililo, Tony Ratzmin and ‘Donkey Dick’ Mazzuto. Mahr was palling around with them. We heard that Mahr had a secret interest in some sleazy Las Vegas nightclub Ratzmin and Mazzuto owned. We suspected that was why he didn’t get the VA job, but we couldn’t prove it. We tried.”

     “You never found out why he didn’t get it?” Chris knew that any potential senior federal official had to be investigated before he accepted the job.

     “We could never find out. Lots of rumors, but no facts.” Then he asked her, how did you find out about the Mob angle?”

     Chris told him a heavily redacted version of how one night at the Newport Inn, she ran into a man in a Hawaiian shirt who had looked unattractive after two glasses of wine, but who looked like Brad Pitt after seven. They had gone up to her room and had sex. He left early, and she was so hung over, that she had to drink a beer and take two aspirin before she was able to endure the needlings of the shower. By noon, she still felt utterly ravaged, and to resurrect her spirits she ordered a double scotch. There were three men up at the bar, one wearing a burnt orange turtleneck, the other two in leisure suits. The burnt orange turtleneck offered to buy her drink, and then asked her what she did for a living. She told him that she was a writer for the National Geographic which was doing an article about the California health care system, one of the best in the country, thanks to Gerald Mahr.

     The face of the burnt orange turtleneck clouded over.  “Mahr was doing real well until he got mixed up with the wrong people.”

    The words just hung there. “You mean organized crime,” and the man nodded. Her answer occurred out of nowhere. It had no place in logic.

     Keep was impressed. “Well, you certainly have good instincts, but be careful with these guys. They are bad news.”

     Then, gazing at her, he said, “You have to understand,” and his voice dropped to a tone of deepest conspiracy. “This whole setup is designed to be impenetrable. To fool experts. These owners see honest people as obstacles, dangerous obstacles.”

     “What whole setup?”

     “All of this. It’s a bunch of dummy companies, fake accounts, front men. The aim of its operations is to escape detection and any sort of regulation.”

     “What whole setup?”

     “This whole thing!  The bribes, pay off monies going under the table.” It was very intensely said.

      As they were leaving, they locked eyes. “I’m sorry about your partner,” she said sincerely, gazing at him.

     He looked terribly sad. “Thank you. Walt would have appreciated that.”

********

     A few days later, she called one of her sources in the FBI office in San Diego. They had exchanged several calls during the committee probe, but so far, whenever she brought up the Mob, she ran into blank silence. Chris liked the agent, who had a deep, interesting voice and a thoughtful manner, but today when she mentioned the Mob, his whole manner changed. “Your sources are right. Mahr is vomit, a stink in heaven’s nostrils.” She could hear him blush. “Pardon my language.”   

     She could care less. Then she asked him, “Have you ever wondered why Mahr didn’t get the VA job?”

     He didn’t reply. Chris quickly told him, “One source told me it was because of organized crime, but there is no proof beyond hearsay.” She was silently urging him: “Come on, come on.” She was about to burst, when, he said to her, “I’ve watched your work. You can analyze. You are all tenacity.” He paused again. Another pause. She was about to climb the walls.

     Then, “Ok. I am going to give you the number of someone who might help you. He was with the Bureau but left to become a Catholic priest. He lives in San Francisco. His name is Paul Johnson. He was one of the two Bureau guys who did the background check on Mahr.”

     She could not believe her ears or her good luck.

     “Wait. What happened to the other one?” she asked.

     “He died of a heart attack. Call Johnson. I’ll give Paul a heads up.”

 

********

     The next day she called Johnson, but got no answer. She called him twice more, waited, hung up, and called again. This time, he picked up.  He agreed to be taped. He told her that Mahr had no chance of getting the VA job. Johnson and his partner discovered secret ties between Mahr, who had a hidden interest in a Las Vegas casino and a Mob bank; the casino owners were Ratzmin and Mazzuto. “The IRS finally got Ratzmin, who was sent to prison. They got Mazzuto on tax evasion. He got three years. But once we discovered the connection, Mahr was out of the running for the VA job.”

     He added, “We had phone taps and interviews confirming this. Not enough to charge him, but enough to block his getting the job.  Do you want copies?” 

     Johnson then promised to send Chris a notarized affidavit of what he had told her. She put down the phone in an exhilarated daze.

     The next day, she played the Johnson tape for David Hall who looked as if he were trying to grow wings to fly. He hugged her for a long time. It was the only clinch they had ever had.

     Within days, the takeover attempt collapsed. Mahr vanished into Israel.  Chris had never met him.

     Seized by jubilant gratitude, Chris began to call people and thank them. First came her staff, then came Kyd, Michello, Varner, Kendrick, and next came Duane at the FEC, the sources in the State Department of Health, the San Diego DA’s office and then the FBI. Lastly, she called reporters, beginning with Bob Hayes.

     A few days later, she packed up Py and her belongings. She was sitting back at her desk, about to leave her room, when, on a sudden impulse, she paged through her address book and was able to get the San Diego Judge, Graham Fuller, on the line.

     He didn’t recognize her name at first, but then said with genuine warmth, “Oh, I remember you. I remember you very well.  I was terribly disappointed that your office never phoned me.”

     “What do you mean?”

     “Well, I was all set to approve a bench warrant for Kelso because he had violated his probation, but your boss never called me.”

     Why was she not surprised?  “You mean Babs Hershel?”   

     “What’s her name?”

     Chris told him.

     “Hershel, yes. I waited and waited, and then one day she sent me a letter, and I responded. I told her that ‘per your request, we will not swear out a warrant for Kelso.’  I have a copy of her letter, if you need it. Later I was told she had canceled the hearings,” he said. The last twist of the knife, Chris thought.

     After they hung up, she just sat for a moment hearing Py cry.

********

     She and David Hall hugged, and his eyes in hers, he promised to use her on other cases. Then, she sent off all of her notarized affidavits and documents to a prominent Washington columnist.

     Chris returned to Washington and set up a Tuesday lunch with Babs. Babs was sitting at a table at their usual café, superbly decked out, in a lovely sweater, droplet earrings and grey slacks, a foot crossed. Babs was poised to welcome back her friend, her bright face displaying a warm look, but when she saw the look on Chris’ face, her spirits retreated. By now, Chris’ soul had become a storehouse of festering wrath. As soon as Chris sat down, she began to hurl questions at her friend.  Babs turned as white as candle wax. Chris didn’t care: “Is it true you have shady banking connections? Is it true that you own a lot of properties under your mother’s name.  Once you told me that friendship comes into being because of likeness and similarity, remember? Isn’t that what you said?”

     Babes suddenly turned loud and offensive, “You’re so smart. What is my mother’s name?”

     “Jopheson.” Then, speaking rapidly, between clenched teeth, precisely enunciating every word, Chris said, “You are vomit.” But as Chris, white-faced, started to leave, Babs yelled at her back, “Yeah, well I have a good record, and I’ll stand on it!  I’m proud of it! And who are you anyway? You are just someone I fired!” Her smile had become a little malicious flame.

     Chris stopped and came stomping back. Her mouth was a tight, seamless line, and she spoke with untempered bitterness.

     “It wasn’t the first time you fired an investigator was it?” she hissed. “You hired another investigator just like me, and you told her to her face she was doing outstanding work, but then you told Bill the exact opposite. And Bill fired her at your urging.  Isn’t that true?  Chris’ tone was coldly lethal, and then Chris stormed out of the restaurant as the pale and startled faces of the patrons looked up because of the shouting.

     “Yeah, well I have a good record and I’ll stand on it” Babs kept yelling as Chris was leaving.  “President George Bush once called me an extraordinary human being!” 

     But the splinter in Chris’ soul was gone.

 

********

     Two years passed and Chris and Babs hadn’t traded a word. Henry Keep was now Chris’ boyfriend. He would fly into Washington, and she would fly out to LA. They were in love.

     One morning Chris read in the San Diego papers that the National Bank of Oxnard collapsed, allegedly looted by Kelso, who had fled the country.  Three months later, Chris read in the newspapers about a lawsuit and she called the law firm handling the bank’s liquidation on behalf of the investors who had been ruthlessly victimized.  One of the lawyers was puzzling over a $230,000 certificate of deposit issued to Zera K. Tom. There were several complex financial transactions involved, but the attorney said that he couldn’t make heads or tails of the name. Who was Zera K. Tom?

     Chris didn’t have a clue.  The attorney left his number.

     She had gotten over Babs’ betrayal. Chris knew that she misjudged Babs because, out of affection, she had added qualities to Babs that the older woman did not possess. To hate such people was like condemning a stone. The stone wasn’t  going to change.

     One day, reading a newspaper and seeing a photo of Babs and her husband, Howard, featured in an article, she went to her file on Babs. Suddenly it struck her. On the third card, carefully printed, were the names of Babs’ children, Zera and Tom.

     Chris reached for her phone.

     It took months, but Babs was indicted on 19 counts of bribery, conspiracy, and perjury. A year later, she pled no contest to three felonies and income tax evasion, plus admitting she had paid $20,000 in kickbacks. She was ordered to pay $53,000 in reparations and was sentenced to seven years probation.

     Babs disappeared. She had changed her name. She had dumped her husband and children. It was rumored that she and a rich, younger boyfriend were living somewhere near Las Vegas.

 

###

13735

"The Awakening" by Richard Sale

                                            

 

There was once a pretty, delicate, lively girl with a beautiful and touching face who was loved by two boys, but she was aware of only one of them. The girl’s name was Angelica. The boy she liked was handsome, popular and had lots of friends. He had a warm smile, and he was good at sports, and all the girls liked him; everyone wanted to be his friend. His name was John. 

The other boy was shy, chubby, short, with unkempt hair, and was the kind of person no one looked at twice.  His character was dreamy and ineffectual. His pants sagged in the back, and he wore spectacles. He had once seen the girl walking along a country road, and his life and world were never the same again. 

His name was Eric, and the only person he trusted was his father who wore glasses like his and who was short and a bit chubby like himself. He once told his father of the girl, Angelica, and how deeply he loved her. His father asked if the girl had loved him back. “She never looks at me,” Eric said, disheartened. “I once tried to talk to her, but I was shy, and she began to look very bored, and I stopped and went away.” 

His father paused a bit then said, “You can still love her, even if she does not love you.” Eric asked how? “Be as kind as you can. Give her whatever you can. She doesn’t need to know you are giving it, but you will know and someday maybe she may come to love you as well. In any case, give to her.” 

In the meantime, John and Angelica grew more and more fond of each other, saw more of each other, and one day Angelica’s world was unexpectedly brightened. She kept an old wicker basket out at the front porch of her house, the one she sometimes put things in, and one morning she began to find new and lovely things in it, simple things like a polished stone, a wood carving of a bird, twine twisted into the shape of a flower, or an old arrowhead.  Almost every week she went out and found something new in the basket, and she instantly knew who the gift giver was: she knew it had to be John. Angelica knew that no one else was as sweet and thoughtful person as John was. No one else was that thoughtful and generous. She was certain that John was her giver of gifts. What had escaped her was the fact that John, for all of his good looks, was a dull, awkward talker. One day, as they were talking together, Angelica’s heart overflowed, and, in a rush, she tried to thank John for all the gifts. To her dismay, he only looked confused and tongue-tied, so she stopped, thinking, “He’s modest, that’s all.  That’s the kind of man he is. He’s modest.” 

One day she and John were walking along the road. It had been a lovely, sunny day with few clouds, and now the sun was slowly sinking in the west while high above was a red, high, fading beautiful sky, the slanted rays still shining on the green, tended fields with lonely tufts of trees studded among them. The fields were brightly green, and wild flowers grew curving and thick by the side of the road. All of a sudden, Angelica and John came face to face, and for a moment their eyes met and then their lips touched gently, and John kissed her and then suddenly nestled his mouth in her hair, satisfied. It was a moment of enchantment. They just stood there like that for a bit, and then they walked home, separated to go to their own houses. 

Angelica’s spirits were soaring. It was thrilling to be kissed. A sleepwalker’s smile was on her face the next day. And during the next week, she found a new gift in her basket, a little silver bell, a rabbit’s foot, the remains of a bird’s egg, bright, little silver cross. She hadn’t seen John for a while, but she had certainly seen enough of Eric. She often found a pudgy form larking by a tree or by a hedge, and it annoyed her. “Honestly! What do you think you are doing? What do you want? Go away!” she shouted. 

Eric, his face horrified, had fled scuttling out of sight. 

One day, at home, Eric’s old father gave the boy a gift. It was Eric’s birthday, and when the shy, overweight, blushing boy opened a box, a slender gold coin glinted deep in its bottom. It was beautiful thing, and it was also priceless, an authentic old coin from an ancient shipwreck. 

“Oh, Father,” said Eric, very moved. “But this is yours.” He moved to take it back, but his father raised his frail, freckled hand. 

“I am not well,” the old man had said, “I want you to have things of value from me. You must keep this for your needs.”  

Eric was deeply touched, but mainly he was very sad, for he deeply loved his father, and couldn’t bear the thought of him not being on the earth. He simply put away the coin for safekeeping. 

Time passed. One day Angelica was walking alone out on the road, lost in thought. She was dreaming of John. She saw less and less of him, but her feelings were as strong as ever. Then ahead, she saw a form, and her heart quickened, but as she came closer, she frowned. Someone else was with John.  It was Betsy, who was a pretty friend of hers. Angelica came closer, and then she saw, yes that Betsy was with John.  Angelia watched as John and Betsy stood face to face, and the two kissed, and then John held Betsy in his arms and slowly allowed his mouth to rest in her hair, just as he had done with her. Sickened, Angelica turned away.  She walked for hours. She felt her heart had broken into painful pieces. 

John tried to see her, but Angelica would not see him. By now she knew that John was false and had a bad heart. He could not be trusted. The only thing that puzzled her is that she kept finding gifts from John in her wicker basket: a chicken’s egg carefully decorated in dainty colors, the pearl inland handle of a parasol. And on her birthday she was astounded to find a tiny package, and inside was a beautiful coin made of glinting, solid gold. But as she lifted her eyes she once again spotted the old, odd, pudgy form of Eric lurking out in the yard by a tree. “Get away from here. Go away! Can’t you understand I don’t want to see you! You are ugly and useless!” 

And she never saw Eric again. As time passed, John had moved away, and her life simply went on. She never saw the skulking form hiding by the crooked tree again, but as the days went by she often took pleasure I taking out her coin and to hold up to the light where it glinted and gleamed and warmed her heart. At least she still retained that precious memory of John and their good days of friendship. 

One day out on the road she met an old man walking painfully with a cane. He was kind and friendly, and the two stopped to talk shyly. He was sad, he said. He had had a son, a boy with a tender and kind nature. He was commonplace-looking and chubby, but he was sincerely good at heart, but the boy had died suddenly from what had begun as a cold. It had happened only recently. 

Angelica saw how grief-stricken the old man was, the great sorrow in his face, and she comforted him. The old man dried his eyes. He looked at her. “Your kind words mean a great deal because they come from you, you -- whom my son loved with all his heart.” 

“Me?” She was appalled and flabbergasted. Her face had turned dead pale. 

“Oh, how much he loved you. He talked of you all the time.” 

She was stunned. “Who was your son?” she asked. He frowned and sighed, “You would never look at him, I don’t blame you – to people he seemed odd and awkward, but he loved you, and every day he tried to give you a gift. His name was Eric.” 

She felt a profound pang that pierced like a sharp pin, and said at last, “Did you son like coins?” The old man nodded. “I once gave him one on his birthday but I don’t know what happened to it. I can only say it is very beautiful, and it’s value is priceless.” 

When the girl got home, she went to her room. On a shelf was a stunning, touching array of the treasures she had found in her basket for so many months and in a special place she saw that the coin gleamed and glinted.  And then she knew that in Eric’s kindness, she had had a brief glimpse of what true love was, and she thought, “If only I could speak to him.” And she wept, full of regret. 

She made a friend of the old father, and together they often went to Eric’s grave and left bunches of lovely flowers leaning against the modest stone headstone with his name. 

Years went past. The old man died. Angelica fell in and out of love, but she never married. Now and then she thought of John, wondering how something that had promised so much had amounted to so little. 

One night she fell asleep, but deep in the night, she dreamed that she had awakened and went in her nightgown out onto the porch where the old wicker basket still sat on the floor. The night was still, almost expectant, and the sky sparkled thickly with the bright silver dust of the night sky. She stood staring out into the darkness when a pair of strong arms gently closed her in their clasp. She had an instant of real fear, but only an instant, because she also had a quick sense that in those arms that held her were strong and kind. And she suddenly yielded to the sense that she and her soul were completely safe in their grasp. An unheard of comfort enveloped her: never in her life had she felt so preciously admired, so appreciated, so treasured and adored. And then she felt a man’s mouth come to rest in her hair, and she closed her eyes, held firm by arms that locked her in such deep and imperishable love. And like a hand unclenching, her soul slowly opened wide, and, full of happy release, she gently sank into the depths of thankful gratitude. 

And the next morning when she awoke, the realized that it was not John whose presence she had felt in her dream. No. It had been Eric who had held her. 

And she used that coin, selling it at auction, and from its incredible value, she took care of the needs of the neighbors in her village for years, and she became a famous figure in the region, respected and revered. And as she grew old, she often thought of Eric and the true meaning of love – that love simply meant continuing to give in the face of indifference.

"The Fish That Wanted to Fly" By Richard Sale

     A certain little fish had always wanted to fly. It was kept in a very small, clear bowl, and swam round endlessly in circles during the day, and slept a bit at night, at the bottom of its bowl. The fish liked the clear water of his bowl, and he liked the flakes of the fish food which drifted down like tiny, dead leaves. 

      And he liked looking out through his bowl to see the dim outlines of trees and houses, and green fields. The little fish had seen birds, big ones and little ones, though the glass of the bowl and would watch them as they perched on a branch, or as they planed down to land on the grass, then flutter up in flight again. The birds endlessly fascinated the little fish. As it swam in his circle, the little fish believed one day he would be able to fly like the birds.  Of course, its life was content enough, but still the little fish wanted to fly. It believed that circling his small bowl was not the climax of its life. 

     As time passed, the fish still held fast to his dream as it swam endlessly round and round in his bowl. It would move in little spurts of speed, tail fins wiggling. But as time passed, its little bowl appeared to grow smaller and smaller, and as it swam, its disappointment grew.    

     Years dragged past. 

     The fish began to wonder that, if  it had been a different kind of fish, a stronger fish, a more intelligent fish, would he fly then? Was there some knowledge it could grasp that would enable him to fly?  With all its might it desired to fly, hoping that, hoping that one day it would turn into a mighty fish with wings. 

     More years passed. The little fish grew increasingly sad. What had happened to it in its life? Nothing. It always saw the same shapes occupying the exact same places, as they floated past it as the clear water. And the little fish began to feel that it was a failure. 

      Finally, one day the little fish fell sick. It stayed on the bottom of its bowl, feebly flickering its fins. It would try and swim, but the little fish was too weak. Now it felt that the days when he had been able to swim endlessly around its bowl had been great and wonderful days compared to these. How it yearned to have them back again.  

     The little fish grew weaker. And weaker. Slowly, the little fins of the flickered more and more feebly, and then one day, it died. 

     The little fish had died quietly, lying on the sand at the bottom of the bowl. Its fins were entirely still. Then, after a time, very. very slowly, its body began to lift from the sand at the bottom of its bowl. Slowly, very slowly, it floated up, belly first, rising, rising through the water, until his dead white belly broke the surface of his bowl. 

     It was its way of flying.

 

"Fallen Fruit" by Richard T. Sale

 

      The young man’s work had gone badly.  For three days, he had labored deliberately and carefully over the words. After three hours, he felt he needed a break and went to lunch. 

      When he came back, he saw it all was trash.  

     He stood looking out the window of his flat. From his window, the city of Paris spread all along the horizon. The sky was brightly torn. The distant hills were blue. Far off, somewhere at the outskirts of the city, black smoke was spreading form a lone factory stack, and it reminded him of a black stocking being stuffed back into a thin tube. 

    He tried to cheer himself up – after all, twenty eight is no great age. 

     It was late afternoon when the rain stopped, and he decided to go out and walk. The feeble sun was out now, the pavements drying after the spring rain.  

      He finally reached the Seine. What a beautiful city! He stood and looked out at the dull, dirty green river, a great garbage-flecked drift, watching a discarded tire wallowed weakly in the water. The broad banks of the river displayed the faces of quaint, crooked buildings or high narrow houses, most of them half hidden by the green blur of latticed trees. He watched a beateau mouche, full of sightseers, slowly go past, the banks of the river drawing together in the distance. 

    At last, he felt footsore and began to head back. The sun, as it sank, reddened the walls of the houses, tinting pink each pane of glass. He went past people with determined faces, walking with a purposeful air, the women carrying brass buckled handbags while a few of the men had a manila envelopes under their arm or who held sleek leather briefcase in their clenched hands. 

      Clearly, the day’s work was over.  

    . Ahead, he saw a low stone wall. The greening trees and black-green shrubs shut out the view from the street, but he saw an opening between the trunks. Passing between the tall gate posts, he looked up, letting his gaze wander easily over what lay before him.  It was a small city park, and, suddenly seized by wonder, he stopped. 

     Everything waited for nightfall.   

     In the empty, graying, silence, the statues stood still and mute. A trash fire burned quietly in the corner of the park.  No one was nearby. As he stood there, he couldn’t believe how quiet it was.  He stopped and listened.  The traffic noises of the town did not carry this far: you could have heard a petal fall from a flower. Nothing moved. No one was to be seen on the paths.    

     Then he saw them. 

    A few yards down, they sat as still as stones, old men, some who had big, wood canes slanted between their knees. Their bleared eyes looked weary and worn out. Their seamed, wrinkled faces had buckled like old tin. They dressed poorly. The April day had not been cold, but they were bundled up in worn out coats and scarves. 

     He carefully sat down on a bench at the front and stayed still. Minutes passed. A thin trickle of people suddenly walked through the small park, office workers, school kids, the school kids walking with a certain swagger, certain of having a special and exceptional destiny in life.  

     He sat still and watched them pass. The passing people never looked at the old sitting men on the benches, sitting with their meek shoes placed together on the gravel path. Then a young couple came in, two Americans, holding hands, and they walked slowly and carelessly. The pretty young woman was saying, "I want us to begin to live a unique life, our life. I know it’s difficult to do if you’re a nobody, but I just want us to go somewhere brand new. I want to live now." Her partner again quietly told her go talk more softly. 

     She began to whisper, but then said loudly, “They give me the creeps.” Her partner urged her to not talk so loudly. “Well, they do.” They talked some more and then she said again, “Well, they creep me out.” 

    He was still sitting after the couple left, thinking, no young person ever thinks that they will a draw a blank in life. It never enters their minds. He sat and thought for a long, long time, and then finally got to his feet. As he was going past the tall gate posts, he halted to cast a sad look back at them: each of them left alone with all they did not do.

 

 

"Problem Soldier" By Richard Sale

     It was November of 1944, and we had settled down to our long Winter Nap.  Unfortunately it was a season of surprises. By then, of course, we felt were too hardened or too smart for any kind of surprise. Boy, we were wrong.

    We passed through Melmedy then entered the woods to replace members of the 9^th Division. We were walking up one side of the road, and they were coming down the other side. They had tired, gray faces and their staring eyes were eerily expressionless. There simply was no life in those eyes. Few words were exchanged, except for this one stubbly, thin faced guy who yelled at us, “You’ll be sorry,” in a tone of mocking, bitter resentment.

     Going through a street through a village, it had been snowing. Now it was raining hard on our heads.

     We returned to their former fox holes or bunkers that they had dug in the frozen soil. The sodden snow was very deep, especially where it had drifted to one side of the road. In the woods were, the snow fell almost every day. It was bleak, dreary, and thankless duty. The woods had a Germanic quality, trees planted in perfect rows except where an artillery shell had torn things up. There was no activity to be seen. If you gazed out, and after about a 1,000 yards the country rose in a gentle rise, but there was no one out there.

     The snow kept falling. When I went to cross the road, I plunged into a snow bank up to my neck. I suddenly felt myself surrounded by colored lights, and got panicked and confused until my men helped me to climb out.

     I don’t know if you’ve spent a lot of time in a bitter winter cold, but it’s tough as hell to endure. At the beginning, the snow was creaking under foot, and the icy air made us catch our breath. The inside of our nostrils stuck together, and the cold made our teeth ache. You never got used to it. We devised a lot of tricks. Field jackets were useless against a cutting wind, so we learned how to sew blankets into their inner linings. We learned how to wrap sheets of newspaper around our bodies as a buffer against the bitter wind.  We would stuff newspapers into our socks and boots, to keep from getting trench foot, which you can catch easily if your feet are wet all the time. We learned how to heat pebbles in a tin can and dump them into our boots with our wet socks in order to dry both.

     But when we started, we didn’t know any of that stuff; we simply knew that we were living in teeth-chattering cold.

                                                    *******

    We didn’t believe the rumors. The weather was still miserable, snow falling, the bitter cold, and it was at four in the morning of Dec. 16, when a hellish scene sprang to life around us as virtually hundreds of dazzling searchlights directed their glare into the American positions, and the artillery and the rocket launchers unleashed an unearthly fire such as we had never before experienced.  The incredible whine of our own guns made clear we were firing directly at German forces in front of us. It was a terror-fraught attack, let me tell you. There were lights of all descriptions, lighting up the sky and the snowy ground.  The lights pointed up into the sky and some were directed on our positions. They beamed from German trucks, tanks, and pillboxes. They caromed off the low hanging clouds to light up the roads and open fields. They were meant to scare us, but they also made the German stand out better, and we fired out at them, and some of them fell.

    Then our hearts sank into our shoes.

     We heard ominous sound of creaking tank treads.  Of course those reports about a German build-up had been dutifully transmitted to division headquarters but were dismissed as unlikely because “the terrain was not suited for tanks.” Right. Except now we were hearing the mass movements of trucks, tanks, trucks and men. Conflagrations erupted near by, and we could hear piercing screams, the screams of death coming from those who had been hit. 

    We got a hurried radio message that said that the whole regiment was being hit by shells. We tried not to show it, of course, but panic began to set in, but we had to keep our heads down. We had to endure. The most dangerous thing came from the Krauts shelling the tops of the trees, and huge branches rained down and people were killed if they were out in the open, crapping.

     We tried to radio for help, then we then tried to use the phone, but the wires were all down. We felt frantic: I mean, all systems of fight or flight were going full blast in us. Then, hardly able to believe our eyes, vague figures in white suits began to appear several hundreds of yards away.  Initially, we in a shocked, stunned state. My unit had remained in place in the outskirts of Lanzereth, and we had earlier made contact with task force from the 14^th Cav., and they had machine guns and anti tank guns to cover our right flank, but the task force were from a different corps which meant that communication was sketchy. Our biggest fear was that other units near us had been outflanked and had fled.

     Suddenly our tank destroyers moved out. Just like that. No word. Not a word to us. They just left. A very abrupt exit to say the least. The walkie-talkie finally worked, and I contacted regiment to get instructions. A Col. Bridesworth told me to move some of my guys into Lanzereth to make sightings from a farm house a house that had been previously occupied by artillery observers. I realized that I was now basically commanding only a platoon of 23 guys, instead of a company of 120 men. Lt. Harris was missing, someone had said that he had taken a bullet; I realized we were not much of a company anymore. But the task was clear: we going to look for places to fight, a rock here, a depression there a ditch, a manure pile. You made use of anything you could, you see.

     I looked assessingly over the men I was commanding for this mission, especially Sgt. Oakhurst. When I first met him he acted as if he had never heard of fear.  Stories about him were plentiful. He was a big, burly guy. His hair was cropped short, and with his helmet off, he displayed a head shaped like an artillery shell. His head sort of sloped down into his huge shoulders, which also sloped down, which gave Oakhurst a look of bull-like strength. He was a nasty, boastful man who had a thin voice like a giggling chicken. But he was a bully. He would say things like, “I’ll jump up and down on the Kraut’s balls until they squirt like jelly,” and stuff like that.  He carried a small bottle that he claimed contained real human eyeballs.

Rescuer by Richard T. Sale

Dedicated to James T. Sale

 

 

The men stood like tiny upright bottles in the mournful, greenish gloom of the jungle path, while soaring a hundred feet overhead, the wide tops of the trees spread and entangled each other, shutting out any view of the sky.  From the thick, matted, tangled ceiling of vegetation, some thorny vines trailed down limply like rescue lines dangling over the side of a damaged, heeling ship. Back in the dim, green-black recesses of the jungle, a few sharp, yellow flecks of sun could be seen here and there.

The four-man party, flushed and worn out, had halted on the narrow path. On both sides of it there arose dense masses of bushes and thick, squat trees, and all around them the noises of the tropic birds seemed to intensify the jungle’s isolation. One harsh screech, repeated with the monotony of madness, seemed to say, “Play ball!” Play ball!” a cry that was answered raucously, near and far, by others of its kind. There was a chorus of other chattering and cooing birds as well, but they seemed fainter and farther away. The welter of crowding trees blocked out any hint of a breeze.

The young one with the mustache, clad in khaki, his rifle upright on his back, was haggling a pack of cigarettes free from his shirt pocket. A scratched match spurted into amazingly bright flame. The young man ducked his head. A gust of blue smoke hung without movement, until the man lazily waved his hand. The blue haze slowly stirred and writhed to thin and sluggishly vanish.

The swarthy, heavyset man, in wash pants and unpressed cotton shirt, blue in color, pawed and mopped at his face with a coarse, white cloth. His shirt had darkened as sweat had soaked it through. In his late forties and out of shape, his belly hung out a bit over his belt. His dark, tangled hair looked as if a bucket of water had been emptied over it. He exhibited a picture of complete misery. In fact, all four men were covered in sweat from head to foot.

“No, thank you,” said the foreigner to the crumpled pack extended to him. He was an American, his face red as a poppy. He had a pleasant, steady baritone voice, a bit out of breath.  Pablo, the one in khaki, knew better than to ask the heavyset man. He knew he did not smoke.

Bernardo, the talkative one, was younger than his heavyset partner by a decade, but older than Pablo. Bernardo had a young, alert, open face that expressed a look of manly candor. He threw a look of assessing sympathy at the foreigner. He was a tough one, thought Bernardo. Fit. He came prepared. They almost never came prepared, but this one had. Well, they had said he would.

Sipping water from his canteen, the American stood lost in his own thoughts. To him, the air was heavy, thick, humid, and standing in it was like standing in a sauna. Even as they rested, he knew how acutely he was suffering from the heat. His name was David Heartrik, and he had lost his craving for adventure a long time ago. Ambition to stand out had died out of him in the trek up here. In the old days, he delighted cutting a dashing figure in the eyes of his colleagues – ambition had driven him on without rest. Back then, he was in love with the glamour of the strange; he had liked risk, he had loved enduring the maximum of privation. But now he was 37, no longer invincible, and being thought brave by others had lost its power to incite. Now he did his job because it was what he was expected to do. As he gazed into the gloomy, steaming sun-dappled black-green of the jungle, he suddenly realized that this place was making him uneasy. It was so hard to see in here, and it was as if they had stopped in a darkened closet. But it was something else that was bothering him, something he couldn’t quite find the words for that troubled his mind.

He was thinking about how, if you came up along the twisting coast road, the land displayed an exhilarating spectacle: a dense, green mass, its top going gold in the sunlight, and then the ragged, sharp mountain ridges rise dramatically overhead. Along the road, gracefully bending palms grew in orderly groves along the coast, and there were wind-bent pines like little hunchbacks. The bay was full of enormous crescent beaches that curved one after the other into the distance, their surf breaking in hazy, white lines on the shore. It was almost like a postcard in its beauty. Yet when one of his colleagues at The Washington Post heard of where he was going, he said to him, “You’ll see, from a distance it’s one of the most beautiful tropical views in existence, but when you’re in it, beware, on the ground it’s a mass of slops and stinks and pestilence.”

He became aware again of the smell: the deathly, dank, sourish odor that came from mud, from downed branches, the rotting plants, the incessant working of decay taking place everywhere. And then he realized what it was about the jungle. It wasn’t the thick, steamy matted screens of tropical vines or the twisted creepers. Instead, a sense of something sinister hung over the place; that was it, he thought. Something sinister.

“Hot,” said Bernardo. He looked with sympathy at the American, not realizing that by speaking to him, the man would now have to make the effort to reply.

“Surely not,” Heartrik grinned. Not much got past this man, he thought, a bit sour.

“Always hot. Always fucking hot,” grumbled the heavyset man, mopping.

“You’re all right?” asked Bernardo of the foreigner. He had a way of putting real feeling into whatever he said.

“I’m fine, thanks,” was the reply.

“You have hot places in your country, yes?” asked Bernardo. “You have your deserts and such places?” He seemed to enjoy the American’s company. A sort of comradeship had sprung up between them.

“In mine?”

“There are parts are very warm, are they not?”

“We have deserts, yes. Very bad ones where people die.”

“In your deserts, though, you do have much heat.”

“Not like this.”

Bernardo smiled, canted his head, quizzical.  “Heat is no fun, yes?”

“Not this stuff. I mean, even desert heat is dry, a dry heat,” said Heartrik.

“Well, it’s not much farther,” Bernardo said.

But Heartrik was thinking, only in Hawaii had he experienced heat like this. Hawaii had heavy, wet air, like this air, and it made your body wet, and it dissolved your will to action. Everything took extra effort. You always felt enveloped by something that drained away your strength and purpose.

“But you look quite strong,” said Bernardo, assessingly to the American.

“Ah. That’s the running,” Heartrik said. “Otherwise, you would have left me for dead, way back down the trail.”

While he felt quickened by Bernardo’s admiration, it was a bit of brag, all the same. Running or not, the truth was that he felt like a wet dishcloth with the strong, connecting threads gone, hanging over a line to dry.

“You are right to drink plenty of water,” said Bernardo.

The American, Heartrik, stood staring out, sipping from his canteen, regaining his strength. At least now he knew he would last. During the first half hour, he’d felt so leaden, clumsy and washed out, at times he had feared he couldn’t take another step and would have to stop and rest. But every time he’d felt he’d reached the edge of not being able to go on, every time he had touched the bottom of his stamina, the others had stopped of their own accord. After that, his conditioning had kicked in, and now he knew he could do it if they could. It was not part his makeup to quit what he started.

“Always fucking hot,” said the heavyset man. “Not in the day you don’t want to come out, not in the day, like this.”

But the American, too irritated and tired for small talk, was no longer listening. He was growing impatient. “You don’t have to wait on me,” he said. “Let’s get it over with.”

The heavyset man sighed, pawing at the wet, sagging flesh under his chin, head tilted back as if to admire the heavens, except his eyes were closed. “There is no hurry,” he said. “There is certainly no reason to hurry. For what?”

But there was reason enough. Above all, Heartrik thought, he didn’t want to be in the jungle at night. The jungle got as dark as the bottom of a well. No house lights, no lights from cars, just a deep, dense dark that smothered everything. It was as if you’d gone completely blind. Taking a drink from his canteen, Heartrik thought, “We’re wasting time, goddamnit.” He wanted to get up there and do what they had to do and get out.

“Who’s in control of the area now,” he asked them.

“Where we go?” said Bernardo.

“Yes.”

“They’re long gone,” said the heavyset man. The third man, Pablo, simply stared and said nothing.

“The government soldiers came and did their work and they left,” he said.

“How do we know they’re gone?” Heartrik said.  

“There is little that happens up in here we don’t know,” said Bernardo.

“So they’re gone? The soldiers? You’re sure of this?”

 “They’re long gone. We control this area now,” said the heavyset man. He had sternly serious eyes that seemed to be bearing some great and painful inner burden.

A few minutes passed. The American was growing more and more impatient. He saw they sensed it. A quick, white flick of the eyes of the heavyset man went to the rifleman in khaki. Pablo had a young face – but it had a cold, hard, immovable expression that stayed stonily the same. He straightened and took a drag on his cigarette. The red bead of the cigarette peeped brightly and crawled back along the skinny tube whose edges went black. Then suddenly, the cigarette butt spun away, going end over end.

They resumed in single file. Pablo was far back. Riding shotgun, guessed Heartrik.

Heartrik, the heavy set man, and, Pablo in khaki followed the end of the column, and all toiled laboriously up a path that was pitched steeply up a worn slope. Thorn branches bordered the path, their form very graceful, but they were to be avoided. Just brushing one left a neat row of tiny red beads where the briars had raked the skin. It was hard work hiking the hill, Heartrik thought.

The young, friendly Bernardo in front was turning his head to talk.  “You really must understand that what we want to establish is justice,” he said. “We do not want to replace one injustice with another.”

Heartrik, sweating heavily as he hiked, looked wearily plagued by the effort to keep on the climb. The steaming heat made every step an extra effort on the steep grade.

In any case, he was tired of talking politics. It was all he had done for two days.

“I’m sure you are ambitious to improve the lot of the people,” he said.

“We mean to build a nation, señor. We want to build the nation. That is our only aim. Do you see? Our only aim.” Bernardo was quite passionate.

“Yes. But you say, build…”

“That is all that matters…to build the nation. To…”

“I understand that. But...”

“…to build a new nation that is more than the sum of its parts. For what is a nation but that? The nation comes to life, every time a man or a woman or a child takes a breath that is free. That is the nation we want to establish.”

“But you already have a nation,” Heartrik said, impatient.

“We have a nation, but it is not our nation. It is their nation, the nation of the clique.”

“A clique that governs and has power, all the same...”

“…A clique that thinks the world consists of the people they see at the opera each week, that go to each other’s palaces and estates while the people starve,” said Bernardo. “We want a nation that offers the sum of its benefits for all, instead of just some. It is not a real nation as it stands now.”

“I’m sure they think it’s real enough.”

“Who?”

“The clique, as you call it. They have at their resources the power of the state, you know. They have the Army. They worship force.”

“Supplied by your country,” said the heavyset man.

“It’s the business of the arms business to sell arms,” Heartrik said with a shrug. He didn’t like the arms dealers either.

“But to such people as these?” He made a disdainful face.

“They pay.”

“Yes. They pay. That’s true.” But he was disgusted.

“They pay. To the seller of arms that is all that matters. That they pay. That’s not to say I approve. It is simply a fact.”      

“But why do they give the clique its weapons?” said the heavyset man. “It is because they want to continue as they are, illegally hogging power. But we, we are attempting to build a national unity.”

“Is this why you are setting up communes?”

“Communes are the arm of national liberation,” said Bernardo with force. It came out like a paper slip from a machine after you pressed a button.

“The arm that fights back,” said the heavyset man. His face expressed distress, and he was walking as if his legs were made of lead. “The arm that defends the nation because in them, in the commune, the person legislates and finds itself and gets real sovereignty.”

“And the fighting?” Heartrik asked.

“We regret the clashes,” said Bernardo, “but we did not begin them. They have an army, we do not. As you said.”

Heartrik knew that the government did indeed have any army, and it was completely ruthless, pitiless. It was addicted to massacre. The four of them had driven most of the night, taking side and back roads to escape the army. No one spoke of it in the country, but in every town, one came across a train of parked khaki trucks along a curb, men in green fatigues lounging about. Or if you were driving up a mountain, you suddenly passed a barbed wire enclosure, grim and featureless, where uniformed men with bayoneted M-16s turned and looked at you coldly as you passed. Heartrik had encountered them before on an earlier visit.

For many here, the loathing of the government was based on the loathing for the army.

“And the cliques, as you call it. What happens to them, if you win?” Heartrik panted.

“That is why they mobilize the troops to crush the people at every turn. Because they have one doctrine only -- to crush the people so they can go on as they always have with their exploitation.”

“But what will you do?”

“We? If we win?”

“What will happen?”

“Of course, we will win,” said the heavyset man. “Because those in power have no program, no designs for improvement, no development, no political parties, only the crushing of the people by collective armed force. That is why we brought you here. Because we knew you were a truthful man who would tell the American public what we face in them here.”

“My question was what happens to the clique if you defeat it?” Heartrik looked back at the heavy set man. He looked utterly miserable, entirely worn and played out.

“To them what happens?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “In every revolution traitors and collaborators have been punished. It was so in your revolution?” Bernardo said.

“They paid with their property, not their lives. You’re speaking of the Tories?”

“Yes.”

“They lost their property. Some moved to England. They weren’t killed. That’s not true. A few were killed especially in the South, but their numbers were small.”

“But surely some must be punished. The worst must be punished,” harshly gasped the heavyset man.

“But who judges who was the worst?” Heartrik almost said the words, but pulled back. Of course, the retaliations would begin with a few murders, but then everyone would be swept up in an accelerating escalation of rancor and emotion and a desire to exact vengeance. Then more and more scores would be settled, savagery would feed savagery, until the worst in the new group would do what the worst in the old group had done, until finally, ordinary people, tired of slaughter, would pause in a period of nervous debility and inertia that would gain the name of peace. He had seen it all before.

Silence fell.

It was hot, hard work hiking the hill. It was endless, the hill, Heartrik thought.

“What about private property?” he gasped.

“What about it?”

“Well, what happens to property if you win?” Heartrik puffed.

“What people own?” gasped Bernardo.

“Yes.”

“It is theirs. Like in your country.”

“Given to them? Or is it owned by them?”

“The property? It’s theirs. I don’t understand.” Bernardo seemed not to know where the American was going with this.

“But it is given them?” Heartrik said.

“Given, yes,” interjected, the heavyset, perspiring man. Heartrik saw for the first time that he had a big, broad, clean-shaven chin like the heel of a boot. “We believe that freedom is the giving of everything to all.”

“But can the average person, after you win, can they acquire property of their own by work? In my country, civil liberties were built on the right to own property. Our leaders owned a lot of property, not the people.”

“At first it will be given, but through work it can be acquired,” the heavy man said.

Given, thought Heartrik. Given meant keeping the people dependent on the government, keeping the people dependent on a group of leaders who would give them what they thought they deserved, coin by coin by coin.

“You do not approve, I think,” said Bernardo, carefully.

“Of what?” For a moment Heartrik felt the alarm one feels when he discovers another has been reading his mind. “What we said of punishment. Of repaying traitors. You dislike that, too, I think.”

“It’s hard to keep revenge and retaliations under control,” Heartrik said.

“You forget that the members of the clique are not decent people.”

Heartrik sighed. “I’m sure they are rotten to the very core.”

“Then?”

“Look. I understand that the sense of having been wronged is one of the most powerful of all the human senses. I know this. It’s just that I have seen this sort of thing before,” said Heartrik.

“What sort of thing before?”

“Well, you talk of building the nation.”

“We want to build. We must build,” said Bernardo.

“But when you punish, when you root out, you divide, isn’t that so?”

“We do not divide,” said the heavyset man. “We simply clear in order to build the nation just the way a woodsman would clear a forest.”

Heartrik said nothing.

They puffed and panted past an obscene twisted knot of roots sprouting from the path.

Ends and means, thought Heartrik. Everyone talked of the ends, not realizing that the means were simply the ends in their youth. The ends did not justify the means. Success simply caused the means to be forgotten. But he was too tired to talk. Besides, who would listen? All they wanted were words that upheld their ideals and character as freedom fighters.

They halted again on the path, all of them breathing like bellows, faces flushed red, soaking wet. Ahead the green tangled ceiling seemed to end abruptly. Beyond, there was a brilliant field of light, almost harshly savage, that seemed to lie far ahead.

The heavyset man eyed the American. “A difficult man,” he thought. “An honest man. He does not bend. He does not trade.”

“We’re wasting time,” thought Heartrik, utterly weary.

Here in the dim, green-black gloom, even though where they stood now was as hot as a humid, baking oven, he knew the weather could turn gusty and cold in a minute, the rain coming down in blinding sheets, turning the ground to slimy, slippery mud, forming pools, making little tunnels that gushed gaily and noisily down the hill. Soon you were shaking with a damp, bone-chilling kind of cold, and, even if the sun came out again, it simply steamed you dry. You began to smell then, and beginning to smell made you unhappy with yourself. He peered intently through the eerie, dim, dark and mysterious gloom, the dank smell of decay in his nose. What a place! he thought.

Heartrik wasn’t surprised that his newspaper had sent him down here. People’s minds are quick to form patterns, quick to characterize as a permanent trait what in fact was only an accident. His first big piece on the paper had been about the homeless being hired by business firms to clear asbestos from old, broken-down buildings. Paid poor wages, the homeless workers had been given no masks, no briefings, and no warnings of the cancer their exposure to asbestos would probably cause. The business firms recognized no obligation to the pay the families of the dead.

It had caused quite a sensation, the piece, and his career was cast, his specialty discerned once and for all: he was the man with a considerate feeling and concern for the weak. He had an affinity with the unfortunate. After that, it was living on Death Row for a month, working in VA emergency rooms, or doing a portrait of a man dying of cancer in a hospital for the poor in the Bronx, or spending three months with 4,500 gang members on Chicago’s south side.

“You have a touch with this stuff, man,” editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee had once said to him, admiringly. 

So he went all over the world, covering riots, bombings, insurrections, always trying to personalize, to bring to life by means of words what such events meant to the people having to live through it.

He thought of the quiet, subdued pride he would feel in pulling this off. As he had left the office, Boyce, a senior editor, a man always needling him and forever out to make him look small and subsidiary, had come out by the water cooler, cradling a steaming cup of coffee against his belt. “What is this, Dave, another one of your coups?” he said, with a slight sneer but with a trace of admiration in his voice.

Because by then all of them in the office had heard how murderous this particular government was. It was massacring its peasants wholesale and blaming it on the peasants themselves. The government soldiers had shot two French reporters in the head as they were disarmed and lying on the ground, and then had blamed it on rebels.

Heartrik was used to succeeding in this sort of circumstance because he brought to it unique gifts. First he brought knowledge of the country’s language, its culture, its people; information about its history and its customs from whatever source he could find. This knowledge he would use to put people at ease, to give them the sense that the country they belonged to was of so much account, that a foreigner had gone to the trouble of studying it. This touched people to the foundation of their souls. In Iran, in Mexico, in Guatemala, wherever he had been, when people saw they were not despised by an American, they became a lot easier to deal with, a lot more forthcoming. Perhaps, by the end, they’d even felt some affection for him, who knew? He had for them. He often thought of them. He had certainly admired most of them.

But he never forgot that the world they lived in was not his world. His fellow reporters often made that mistake. They acted as if the inhabitant of foreign nations were basically inferior versions of themselves. Out of weakness or sycophancy or fear, the American reporters flattered the people, but it was instantly perceived, and it bitterly offended. Heartrik did not make the mistake. He stayed in his own world.  He was loyal to what he was and where he was from. He was there to learn, to listen, to remember, but that was all.

He felt intense sympathy for their lives in the end even though it wasn’t his life. “To love with the heart is to pity,” his father had said, and he had tried to live by that line. But Heartrik knew a great gulf parted the rest of the world and his world. They and he could stand at its edges and talk across, but the gulf remained. And because he remembered the gulf, strangers often found him to be the exception and refreshing, and he had found himself liked. Or so it had seemed. Certainly he had kept up communication with many of the people he’d interviewed. He also brought an alert, discerning eye (which again, he was careful to disguise), plus he brought some intuitive sense of “touch,” some special sensitivity to the inner atmospheres of the people he was with.

Bernardo, the heavyset man, and Pablo, they were honest men, not corrupted yet by wealth or luxury.  Unlike Americans, they needed no comfort to be effective, and they were tough, trained, tireless and were of serious purpose. They were not to be trifled with. You could not lie to them in the least thing.

He would do them the honor of reporting them accurately. What they said and did. If he had misgivings, he would confront them with them there, not wait until the articles came out and made them look foolish when they had no chance to fight back.

All stories entailed risks deliberately taken, but Heartrik had a rule: to never take counsel of his fears. By now he had learned to put out of his mind the possibility of serious harm or failure. Besides, like most people, the desire of being thought special, had gained a hold over his mind. He prized the reputation he had slowly built up among his colleagues and his friends in Washington. He was also aware that they overestimated the danger and thought him a romantic figure, but there was little he could do to deflate or re-proportion their ideas. They simply thought him modest every time he tried, so he had finally stopped.

But he had a powerful attachment to his family and parting from them this time had been very tough. He and his wife were close. Theirs was an attachment of great passion, physical, emotional and mental. Their little girl, Sarah, was the core of their life now.

The night before he’d left, only three, wearing a vivid blue dress, she had climbed on his lap, clutching crayons splayed from her fist, and they had worked together, his wife watching bemused from the big chair facing them and the TV. Sarah had drawn him a “tree,” which meant she dragged with a crayon of any color, a rather wobbly line down the center of a blank page. If he asked for a forest, she bent far over, intent and industrious, tongue poked out of her lips like a cat, and laboriously inscribed a series of wobbly, scraggly unconnected lines on the paper sheet. and, as pleasure beamed in her face, she would scream with joy, her little clenched fists up at her eyes until she twisted to bury her face in his shirt.

Since he’d been down here, all his thoughts of home had awakened in him a sweet ache of pain, a mood of gentle melancholy, and he would sharply miss his wife or see in his mind his little girl, hearing her voice, missing the delight of her climbing into her lap each morning as he read The Washington Post. Except this time, his wife had not liked him going at all. She had grown somber, soft in the face, her eyes anxious, and had just clung to him wordlessly until the taxi came. “This is the last,” he said to her.

“Until they ask you again,” she said.

“No. There are other things at the paper I can do.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” she said.

“No, I’ve done enough. It’s time to do something different.” And they had kissed goodbye.

 

When the four of them came out of the jungle canopy into the sun, it was like coming out of a tunnel into the day. The harsh light fell into their eyes like a lash, and the muggy heat enveloped them like a kind of woolen garment thrown over their bodies.

They stood now on the steep slope of a mountain. Behind and below them, the dark jungle over spread like a green humpy fungus. He could see the curved beaches of the bay, the bay itself blue and smooth like a polished metal plate. Far below, there was a tiny white road that lay like a little piece of dropped thread.

When he looked up, the heavyset man was staring at him piercingly, with a look of peculiar resolution. He turned and pointed.

Heartrik frowned. He turned back. The heavyset man pointed. Then Heartrik saw. It was a village that made a cluster higher up on the slope. It was surrounded by a wall made of mud the height of a man’s head. Heartrik didn’t like the look of it.

They kept mounting the slope, red faced, perspiring, exhausted, their legs as stiff and numb as sticks. The mountain behind rose as a solemn and forbidding rampart, colored a dark, black green.

Each man now seemed busy with his own thoughts. Heads down, bodies bent, they went on hiking up the hill.

They smelled it before they saw it.

First they heard the noise: their heads lifted. They all thought that someone had farted loudly. They came closer. The sound had come from a body ahead lying by the side of the road.  The corpse made a dark, rounded mound. Around it whizzed clouds of flies. Even from where they were, the loud, buzzing of disturbed flies filled the air. The heavyset man was talking of how decomposition here happened very quickly. The immediate attack was by millions of flies, but within four hours came the maggots. Heartrik tried to just listen to it, listen to it with a part of his mind that would be like a desk drawer that he could close when they were finished. The heavyset man was talking, saying that in two days the body would start to swell. He said they had seen one case where a body had finally burst through its clothes, and the penis had stuck up in one final, violent erection. Heartrik and the others had made a nervous laugh. The heavyset man, humorless, just waited, then said how, under the broiling of the sun, the body, beaded all over with oil, finally burst, releasing a foul, sick stench that would be smelled for miles.

Heartrik felt a touch and turned. It was the khaki clad one with the rifle, Pablo. He offered Heartrik a cigarette, and Heartrik refused. Pablo shrugged.

Heartrik wildly batted away a fly that landed on his face. They heard another loud fart. Pablo, the rifleman, took out a cigarette, broke it in two and gave it to the American. Heartrik looked at it a minute, but the man gestured, and Heartrik understood. Gently, he put each stubby segment up a nostril. His notebook and pen were out, and he began to take notes.

“You will see now what swine the army is,” said the heavyset man. “These are people who do not preserve the decencies.”

Bernardo had grown quiet, worried. He kept casting glum looks at the American.

In front, by the wall, were bundles of colorful laundry dropped here and there, lying at the same angle. More dead. “Jesus,” Heartrik said. More bodies lay sprawled, most on their faces. Some lay on their back, eyes open and staring. He gazed at sights so horrible that he knew he could never share with his wife.

But then Heartrik slowly become aware of something. He sensed it more than he saw it.

“What is it?” Heartrik said.

The men around him were acting oddly, he thought.

Alert in every sense and fiber, Heartrik stopped, uncertain. He looked wildly about, flailing at the flies trying to land on his face. Suddenly, with horror, he looked ahead and thought in panic, “Government Soldiers.”

“Is it soldiers?” he said, fearful.

But he saw that they were all over the mud-walled village.

“What’s wrong?” he said. Because some odd tension had seemed to enter them. It was not as though they were watchful and ill-at-ease. It was something else that he couldn’t name.

The heavyset man stopped and looked back, slowly shaking his head. “Nothing is wrong,” he called to Heartrik.

“Are there other men here?”

But the heavyset man did not reply. Heartrik felt himself gripped by some indefinable sense of danger, like catching the sound of something sinister. He sensed some threatening presence. They seemed to feel it although they steadied and kept on straight ahead.

“What’s happening?” Heartrik asked, now frankly scared.

But the heavyset man did not answer. Bernardo just climbed ahead.

Suddenly their four heads snapped up.

Heartrik halted still as stone, tensed to flee. Behind the baked mud wall, a figure in khaki appeared. It held a rifle. It waved, friendly and vigorous.

“He is ours,” said Bernardo, glum.

But Heartrik’s spine tingled as if someone were moving a morsel of ice up and down his back. He didn’t like surprises. The heavyset man looked more stern and serious and sadly burdened.

Heartrik hurried up to them. “Are we okay?” he said. There was still some undercurrent here that he could not quite fathom. Perhaps, they hadn’t been sure of the identity of the soldiers.

“We are safe,” said the heavyset man. He suddenly pressed the American’s arm with affection. “We are fine.” The small group moved forward.

Of course, thought Heartrik with a flood of relief: he had the answer now to their uneasiness, they knew what had happened here. Of course. That was it.

He looked up. Overhead a great mass of cloud was building forbiddingly over the crest of the mountain. It meant rain later. “We’ve got to get in and get out” said Heartrik to himself. How he hated the slanting, driving sheets of rain, the mud, the slippery mud that would make the hike back take hours longer.

They approached the gate of the village and went in. When the American saw what was in the courtyard, nausea flooded his mind, and he was nearly sick, gasping.

Two more men in khaki appeared. There were four or five in all, and they stayed across the courtyard, watching him. Heartrik was writing in his notebook. The bodies on the ground looked like discarded bundles of colorful rags.

“The Army?” Heartrik said, He sounded as though he had a cold from his stuffed nostrils. “This was the Army?”

“The Army’s work, señor. Now you see,” said the heavyset man.

Heartrik could still get the smell of death through the tobacco, that unique, sweet smell, as if honey had been poured over herring.

“They butchered them all,” Bernardo said, angry and bitter.

“Why?”

“They just shot them. Even the children.”

Heartrik walked carefully, bricking up any sense of sympathy he felt. Sympathy left you vulnerable. It left you open, slow to act. But, at bottom, he knew that what he was telling himself was merely a way to cheer himself up. He felt a sense of utter, sick depletion. “How many people?”

“Twenty-five, thirty.”

“And this happened when?”

“Last night.”

“Last night?”

“Last night.”

“Jesus,” Heartrik said.

He moved from pile to pile, the air above wildly alive with hordes of flies. He moved along, his keen, trained eye noting the details: the lifeless eyes staring into nothingness, the sagging jaws, and the humorlessly grinning mouths.

Ahead was a house, its windows sightless. He turned and looked back. They were there: Bernardo, the heavyset man, and Pablo in khaki with the rifle. Cautiously, he forced himself to go in. It was a shock: the permanent face of poverty and underdevelopment: no furnishings, no tables, chairs, lamps or appliances. Only straw mats. And the festering bodies. He stared down at one, a woman, her grimaced face bloated and twisted as if in an agony of pain. Her skirt was pulled up, and a bayonet protruded from between her thighs. Curiously enough, there was no blood, just half a blade of bayonet sticking out. Heartrik found a dirty blanket, and kneeled to cover her up.  There was a man lying there, three feet away, but his cut off head was sitting under a stool. Then he saw a teenager, a head wound turned into a seething mass of maggots blindly jostling and pushing, crowded like the cells of a honeycomb. The maggots were as thick as clustered bees on a branch. The smell was sickeningly bad, and Heartrik pushed the cigarette butts further up his nose, as he absent-mindedly watched clear bubbles of gas moving under the tightly stretched, brown skin of the dead.

Of course, The Post would remove or retouch most of the animal indecencies. After all, the reader wanted only the embellishment, the noble fight for freedom. Not what you’d really seen.

He realized he was going to be sick and started gulping air. And then he realized a brackish coating of some kind had spread in his mouth. He saw where the blood had pooled under another bundle of clothes and, with shock, found another body in the same condition.

He came out, sickly pale, agitated. Numbness was settling over him like a net. He felt he couldn’t quite shake himself free of a strange, odd daze.  He stood in the bright, baking air, pushing the stubs even farther up his nose. Bernardo, the heavyset man, and the man in khaki, stood not far away.

Then the heavyset man was walking up. He grabbed Heartrik’s arm. “Look,” he said and pointed. It was a v-shaped clump of grass next to a low bush, and then the American saw.

A sudden clutch shut his throat. Something in his throat began to swell, and he widened his eyes, blinking back the tears. It was no bigger than a shoe box. He thought it was something someone had dropped when he saw how caked and smeared with mud it was, and then he realized. The mud, that’s what had kept off the flies, the caked mud. She must have been all of two years old, dressed in a little skirt and blouse. She had black hair, long. Her hair moved as a gust of wind caressed it. An infinite pity surged up in him. He fought it back down. But something was swelling and choking his throat.

Suddenly the heavyset man touched him. He turned and looked straight into his eyes. “This is why we needed you. To see. To tell people of this. You are the man we need, señor. You care. We were right to bring you. The American public must know of these things.”

With an expression full of sorrow, of anger, of heartbreak, Heartrik started to kneel, but the heavyset man said, “I wouldn’t touch her, señor.”

Heartrik, his lips pressed close, was standing then, writing, sketching the tiny girl, blinking back his pain. He had hot flashes of savage rage, but they were mixed with cold repulsion that took the heart out of him.

He was thinking of his own little girl, at her third birthday party a few weeks ago, dressed in her bright, fresh, yellow party dress, sitting at the table, her small face full of innocent pleasure, head back, singing, “Aaapy to-you cake.” When he had taken the birthday cake back to the kitchen, she’d cooed, “Bye, bye to-you cake.”

The heavyset man stood watching him work for a while, and then slowly walked away.

Heartrik wrote and wrote, then finished. He had seen enough. He looked around. No one was in the yard. The heavyset man watched as the American at last came out through the gate, his face looking numb, wasted, and empty. The extremes of pity and horror and suffering had left him a shell. Pablo and Bernardo stood off a bit waiting for something, the one in khaki upright as a post.

Heartrik lifted his face. Then, purpose beginning to come alive in him, he hurriedly jotted an additional note, his lips tightly pressed together as he wrote. He finished, putting up his pen, raising his face to look over at the waiting men, beginning to smile at them, when the club-like impact caught him, he was like a skater who had skidded on the ice. He dropped his notebook and flung his arms out wildly, trying to regain his balance, feet pushing and pedaling backward, thrashing. A violent force he was unable to begin to imagine had smashed straight into his head. Thrown violently back into the wall, there was a loud, dull pumpkin sound as his skull hit and rebounded from the hardened mud wall. Then, his legs slowly caving, he slid very slowly down the wall that kept him upright.

There was complete, ominous silence, except for a cheerful, brisk rushing of water, lively and quick, as if a faucet had been left on, as the blood rushed out of his head. Soon this rush slowed, and there was only a leaden, sparse tick, as if a clock had started. The blood from his head had pooled in Heartrik’s lap. Behind his head was a great red splatter of it on the mud wall. His skull had exploded everywhere.

At the shot, Bernardo had seen the red eruption spew into the air, and he quickly turned his back, seizing his elbows in both hands. His teeth began to chatter, his face a sick, deathly white.

The smoke curled in a lazy thread from the barrel of the gun of the one in khaki, Pablo. His face was without a flicker of life or interest. The heavyset man motioned the shooter back. 

Bernardo came up, teeth chattering, his pale lips twitching. With a brutal tightening of his jaws, the heavyset man gave Bernardo a single, hard, slashing slap in the face. Bernardo stood hugging his elbows, his shoulders sagging, his nerve gone.

The heavyset man stared down. It was over.  “It was hardly a surprise, Bernardo, yes?”

He stared down. The American’s dulling, glassy, vacant eyes were puzzled and unblaming and seemed to ask why.

Yes, he thought. The American reporter was past all things a man could love or hate.

“We must preserve the decencies,” whispered Bernardo, whose face was a very angry, sick white. “We must preserve the decencies.”

“Shut up,” said the heavyset man.

“But we must preserve the decencies.”

“Will you shut up, Bernardo?”

“But he was for us. He was for us. He was such a likable man,” Bernardo chattered, his face stricken with horrible pallor. He still couldn’t bring himself to look down at the American.

“Bernardo,” said the heavyset man, gently, but, with savagery, Bernardo pulled free of his touch and walked away.

The heavyset man stared down. He was squinting. It was hot. A big fly had already settled on a smudge of blood, walking across the ashen forehead. “He was a fine man,” he said. “We must make sure to publish his notes. Mail them to his paper.”

And he had been likable, the heavyset man thought. But later today, Washington would thrill with horror at the news of the murder of one of its famous, most promising foreign correspondents. There would be an outburst of furious repulsion at the government, a cut in foreign aid to the clique. Then American military aid and support, lacking so far, would come flooding in, and, above all, the American press would come. They would come and rescue the cause. What was the fate of one man when the fate of so many was at stake? What was the fate of one? Every cause required sacrifice. This poor, gullible, likable man had met his fate: that was all.

The heavyset man turned and walked away. Bernardo stood, hugging his elbows, horribly pale and agitated. A group of soldiers stood nearby, talking, their backs to the body.

 

###

 

Dear Old Dad Part 3 By Richard Sale

My father had a habit of betraying me. 

I was still a teenager, working as a housemaster in a private school just outside of St. Louis.  In the fall, I was going to go Christian Science college, The Principia, that was just outside of Alton, Illinois. 

One day I got a letter. I opened it with eagerness only to read, only to find: 

“It appears that you had bragged to the people out here that I was a homosexual, and that only my wealth prevented me from disclosure. 

“From now on, you are on your own, 

 “Your father.” 

I cannot recreate the feelings I had as I read this.  The momentary pain blinded me. I had graduated at the top of my class. The teachers had helped me to discover the basic virtues of promptness, faithfulness, listening to your conscience instead of being self indulgent, and now I wasn’t going to go to college.   

So my feelings were too painful to try and recreate. Of course, as got over my festering disappointment and sorrow, I realized that  the letter made no sense. How could I, living back in  St. Louis, intrigue among my father’s friends far away in Hollywood, in order to try and embarrassed him about his homosexuality? 

Especially when the knowledge of his bi-sexuality was widespread.  

I had no funds to send myself to college. Thankfully, I had a stepfather, a corporate executive that worked for the El Paso Natural Gas Company, Jack Evans, and he and I were friends. He was kind. So while my mother was busy denouncing my father at the top of her puny, inexhaustible voice, Jack had an excellent suggestion, He had graduated from Columbia College, a small, all male college that was part of Columbia University. At that time, it was rated number one in The Ivy League. So Jack called up admissions, and got me in. (Jack trusted me enough to tell me that my mother was crazy and being married to her was an ordeal.) He paid for my expenses which were small, like $250 a semester (I was living at home,)  The only deficit was that it took a two and a half hours commute each way from Chappaqua, New York to Grand Central and then up to Columbia. I would get up at 6:00, and we got ready promptly in order to make 6:50 am train. On arrival at Grand Central, I had to take a crossover subway on the West side, and then headed back up town to 116^th Street where the college was. The West side subway was sometimes full of grotesques – the homeless sleeping away like little fetuses, a few transvestites passed out with their penises lolling out of their pants, Etc. 

I was soon to learn, from my step mother, that my father at that time spending $750,000 dollars in one year on gambling, whores, orgies and other amusements, and she had ordered him to cut back.  Refusing to send me to college was, I guess, one of his first austerity measures. In fact, Columbia College was my salvation. I had superb teachers like Mark van Doren, Charles van Doren, and Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun. They taught me to read the classics beginning with The Iliad, The Divine Comedy and French Literature to be read in French. They also offered me courses on the Middle Ages, and Greek philosophy. Etc.)   

My fellow students were really brilliant, and they left me abject and helplessly inferior. One of them had read Freud, Karen Horney, Jung, Adler, and lot of history. Another one, Nathaniel Reichek, was from Bronx Scientific High School and their erudition left me no hope. I was an inferior being. In high school, I had graduated with almost straight A's, and I remember receiving my first grade on some essay question and was shocked to find I had earned only a c-minus.  What had happened to my wits?  Was I really going to turn out a mediocrity after all. But I soon devised a way to remedy my defects. 

All of us students took notes, our pens fleeing across the pages of their notebooks, but I saw something they had not – I saw that  the professors always used books in their lectures, their pages underlined carefully, and I stopped taking notes. I reasoned that writing an essay from notes would produce a diluted and half-baked product. So I began to observe the books that the teachers were using, and I went and bought them, studying the pages that they had studied. I was careful to never bring those books to class, and I went through the motions of taking notes, which were in fact journal entries. But every evening, I read every passage they were using to teach and more.  My grades immediately began to improve.  At the end of my freshman year, my forty male classmates stunned me by electing me the number one student of the class, and I was taken to a congratulatory lunch at a local drug store across from the University by Reichek.  He told me that his family, which was Jewish, was undergoing some religious crisis which meant he was alternating between unleavened bread and ham sandwiches.  

Another Betrayal 

My visits to my father were increasingly stormy.  One night with a lot of people there at the house for a party, he called my stepmother a whore. I couldn’t stand my stepmother – her vulgar, loud, ebullient manner, her protruding teeth, her lack of tact, her conceit, but she was the head of the household. After the guests left and Mary went up to bed, my father and I sat there drinking, and inwardly I was furious. To behave like that was to me completely impermissible.  

My father had just given me a  new T-Bird, and he had boasted to me, “You realize you are a rich man’s son.” He wanted me to follow compliantly in his footsteps, and he had already gotten me an agent from the Goldstone-Tobias Agency in Hollywood, to further my writing career. I was trying to sell scripts to TV while in high school, and my father now wanted me to be a Hollywood writer. But Hemingway once said (I think in The Green Hills of Africa) that New York writers were like worms inside a bottle. They get nourishment from each other but get none from the bottle.) Their experiences were all limited and secondhand. In other words, their lives were empty of unusual events. The great German statesmen Bismarck one said that it was stupid to say that people learned from experience, when the key was, learning from others’ experience. Learning was a combination of both.  Wagner once said that talent was appropriating and using the learning and experience of others, and I believed him. (So that is why I became a reporter – in order to have experiences I could put into prose.  Soon, I applied to LIFE Magazine for the job of a war correspondent.) 

But to return, my father insulting my step-mother to me ignored any semblance of good manners or moral principle or any obligation of gratitude, one of society’s chief virtues. A public repudiation is the worst sort of slight. It is a sudden, brutal devaluation, and it is meant to destroy any esteem for a person the eyes of other people. I told my father that insulting her was truly an outrage, and his face became extremely disagreeable. When he was drunk became belligerent, and he nastily taunted, “You like my money, but you don’t like the way I behave.” First, of all it wasn’t his money – much of his fortune came from my step-mother fortune; yes, he made money but he lost millions in gambling and whores and other dissipations. I grew angry: I told him I didn’t like either of them, and threw the keys of the T-bird his face. He flew into a rage and said sharply and loudly, “You are disbarred.” Those were his exact words. 

So I was disinherited.  

Early, the next morning, I borrowed $250 from a friend, Jim Munch, in Laguna, and flew back to my college in Illinois. I frantically scrambled around, and finally got a defense loan to put myself through the last two and a half years of college. At Alton, Ill. I lived in a small rented room near the college, which in August, had one light bulb in the ceiling, which meant I couldn’t read my books. I survived by bailing hay for local farmers at a dollar an hour, the most thankless, cheerless back-breaking job I have ever had. The good thing was appreciating the generous nature of the hardworking farmers and their families. 

Hollywood was simply a sewer of vice.  Perhaps it has changed, but in the old days that described it perfectly. Nietzsche once said, “Genuine pang of conscience are rare among criminals.” That is Hollywood in a nut. The meaning of guilt was almost unknown in Hollywood. Honors in Hollywood come to the vilest persons. 

It was a place founded on false impressions.  The film industry was all selfish rapacity, tawdry self display, unbounded egotism, lewdness and lascivious idiosyncrasies, backstairs cutthroat competition that worked at undermining of friends or relatives or anyone who stood in the way of what they wanted. Actors I knew harbored great, degraded ambitions which consisted of wanting the great, mute mob to be able to recognize them on sight. The desire to be famous is a degraded ambition. 

In those days, show business was crushing and thoughtless machinery. It took half educated people, spiritual primitives, and used their looks to make money for the studios. The so-called ‘stars’ were thoroughly kneaded and malleable characters who had no vestige of integrity. They had mercenary natures, and were boundlessly vain. Think of Ben Affleck trying to falsify the fact his ancestors owned slaves. But from my experience with them, the only thing that arouses hope and interest was the desire to get their own way at whatever cost.  My father ‘s fearful egotism came from his false belief that he was an artist who was entitled to do as he liked. All mediocrities tend to believe this. 

He was a highly sexed bi- sexual, screwing both attractive men and women. Ann Baxter was one of his mistresses. She was beautiful with a big shapely bust. After screwing her, my father said, “She was so tight, she made even me feel big.” That was the way he talked. Eleanor Powell was another mistress. He once tried to screw Ava Gardner in London in a doorway, but they were both too drunk. I asked him who was the best female star in terms of sex, the best lay in Hollywood, and he answered: Deborah Kerr. He spoke of the affair Kerr had with Burt Lancaster when they made the movie “From Here to Eternity.” 

 I did not look down on my father’s sexuality. I thought that gay people were human beings.  I approached the subject of his lovers with tact, and sometime in there, he grew to trust me and I found that the love of his life was the movie star, Tyrone  Power. My father had directed Power in a film, “Abandon Ship,” made in London, and one day I saw a photograph of the two of them posing by their Rolls Royce which displayed the license plates that said, “TP 1,” and RS 2,” and the story tumbled out from him.  I admired my father for his honesty, and felt enormous sympathy for him. To love someone selflessly is a great and admirable thing, and the two had been very much in love. It is not fair to judge lightly of such things. 

My father still grieved over Power’s death. 

Friends 

There was a prominent attorney who held a senior position in the Nixon administration, and he and his wife had moved to California, We will call the wife Natalie, and her husband will be called Peter. Natalie. was pretty of face. She had a high forehead, swept back blonde hair. Her mouth was sensual and prim at the same time. She had large breasts but her figure suffered from short legs and a tendency to gain weight on her rump.  Her mother had been a showgirl in Las Vegas, a subject that I or anyone else was forbidden to bring up.  Natalie and  Peter were very much in love. They respected each other.  Natalie had just been in the cover of Redbook, and she and a neighbor, Joan Zimmelman who lived upstairs in my father’s Beverly Hills apartment, a modest apartment,, and Natatlie was talking about the $25,000 payment the magazine had given her.  Natalie declared that her purpose in life was to amass more and money.  I think she had done a book, and my father made a joke about it being simply “more water under the gate.” Natalie was drinking vodka. Peter had come in, and I saw that he was incredibly bright, yet his manner was hesitating and modest.  He was not ceremonious in the least. He greeted you shyly and hastily, and soon he had a glass of white wine in his hand. He had a very high forehead, thinning hair, and an oval face. 

Peter was working on a book of some kind, but only a little while after the Natalie and Peter had arrived, my father started to belittle me, why I cannot imagine. He said with a hateful jeer, “Look at him – he’s frightened to death of Peter.” Meaning me.  I told Peter that I was not frightened to death of him. My father then told Peter that I was in love with Natalie, whom I had met twice, and she replied, “Don’t be ashamed, Rich. We’ve all been there.” I told Peter that his wife was lovely, but I wasn’t in love with her to the best of my knowledge,” and she said that she liked to have people in love with her, and I told her that I did not know anyone who was not in love with her,” trying to end the conversation. 

If you are about to blow out your brains out from boredom, I  don’t blame you. I thought of shooting myself in the head as I recalled this endless tedium. The great writer and historian Bagehot once spoke of “the tyranny of the commonplace.” I was watching that tyranny in operation. 

But after Peter and his wife left, my father was on the prod again.  He was taller than me, six feet four, I was six foot two, but I was very strong and bench pressing over 300 all the time, plus, thanks to a former U.S. Army tunnel rat, Sgt. George Boomer, I was well trained in hand to hand combat, so when he jeered at me and tried to square off, and I bladed my body to the side, then encircled his punching arm with my left hand and seized his throat with my right. I  dragged my father to the living room bar where I  rammed his head into the wall, not using much force, just enough to deter his antics.  He backed off, a bit stunned, but I had humiliated him and he was infuriated, and he snarled at me and said that he was going to upstairs and get the loaded derringer he kept by his bedside, and come down and shoot me you’re your right eye.”  I called out to him, “You had better run for it, old man,” because I was going to step on the back of his knee and put my hands under his chin and yank back. I forget how that turned out, except he didn’t shoot me. But when he was drunk, he often repeated that threat of shooting me in my right eye, which is sort an unusual thing for a father to say to his son. 

Stories 

My father was working on a script for a movie White Buffalo, based on Crazy Horse, and he began to use a phrase from the Sioux, a declaration of humility that said, “I throw my face away.” That’ll be the day, I thought. Peter and Natilie were both there at the time. Natalie repeated the sentence, “I throw my face away,” and June, the upstairs neighbor said to Natalie, “If you throw your face away, can I have it?” 

June and John then began to play backgammon, while the rest of us talked. (I should state that my father had married for a third time, a  beautiful successful business woman, Irma Stern, on whom he incessantly cheated.) 

The friendship soon sourced. It was clear early on that Peter didn’t care for my father. My father bored him by his endless posturing, the cheap, insincere histrionics, and his attempts to attract attention to himself, using any means. My father, like so many in Hollywood, was driven by an enormous drive to have any new visitors admire him. Natalie was quick to notice this, remarking that when drunk, my father gave himself to the “exaggerations of acting.” A neat phrase. Of course, many people spend a great deal of effort trying to provoke admiring responses from other people.  I try not to do that.  I know Pat doesn’t either. We are not self-promoters. 

 One time, drinking in the evening with Natalie and Peter, my father, for no discernable reason, reached over and slapped me hard on the face, hard enough to start up tears in my eyes. I stood up, ready to damage him, but Natalie was shocked by the sudden brutality, and she was a very determined personality. She was outraged. She immediately demanded that my father apologize or both of them would never set foot in the house again.  She was appalled and outraged and she wouldn’t budge. My father did finally apologize. 

Jabber 

When drunk, my father would impart all sorts of jabber: “Thee I love,” he would say. “You are absolutely, bloody magnificent…There is a certain  Bibility (Bible, sic) about you.” 

After he drank, I would take notes on what he said as soon as I could.  Here are some: “You haven’t been there yet”…”Let’s talk about the real things…” or, “I would kiss you except you are too real. Real, that’s the name of the game. Now, how are your bowel movements?” 

Or, ‘”I can’t get it up anymore, ask the great white-haired cunt” meaning his wife, Irma. He would say to their dog, Max, “You – out!” he would say that to people whom he thought were long-winded: “You – out!” Another of his mantras, was: “I throw my face away.” Or he would say, “Never be afraid to make a mistake. Never. Never…” or “You are a free dog! Free! You are your own man. Uruhu,”  (Swahili for "freedom.” Or he would say, “I will not be a victim of so much nicety.” 

If his wife, Irma, began a story, he would say, “Is this going to be a long story, Irm? She is interminable.” Or he would say to me, “You are fab, simply fab,” adding, “And I’m pretty good myself.” Sometimes he would say, “If I make you unhappy I’ve lost the game,” but it was soon to be followed by, “Fuck off! Irma said to him, “You are exhausting:  and he would reply, “There is no exhaustion in happiness.” 

But enough. I will do a Part Four, and then will quit.  In the next segment my father betrays me for a third time, and I will end trying to make sense of it all.