Forgive Me DADA, For The Eye Hath Sinned...

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL - Jonathan Swift

Forgive Me DADA, For The Eye Hath Sinned...

When in 2025 the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Trumpery Prez-Wannabe Junta happens to be the very first Jewish Confederate Hammerskin in contemporary US history, a sort of Benjamin Disraeli from the right side of the locomotive tracks, one needs to know that a Confederate Hammerskin is also known as a branch of the skinheads.  

Friends?  Remember those?  In the spacey-case of Miller, it should be that he secretly may drive a Yugo.  

I mean, once my eyes cleared, I could almost see him driving an official car, a very pretty Volvo.  

Here in Texas, "Volvo" can refer to a sexy-time joke of sorts.  As in take a look at that bright red Volva.  See?  Miller is the lady-part of the anti-American dream team.  Who could not be for that?  But keep it under your hats; even when a miller invades your home and dusts the walls and ceilings with insectile dust.  

Last night, I had the weirdest dream ever.  I was lost.  In a huge underground labyrinth called a mall.  Lines and lines of stores, some selling chotskies, others loaded with veritable walls of athletic garb, all of which were priced way above even Reason itself: What?  $95 for a pair of pretty sweatpants?  Oh look: It's official, cotton blend with an official brand name.  

The bad dream must have been a visitation from the "good side of town".  

Beyond the chotsky-laden shops and branded sweatpants stood what seemed like a vast labyrinth of cafe society similar restaurants, the kind of places where the eaters and noshers and drinkers sit in a sort of front lawn with low metal fences--all to be seen lisping nouns that cannot be heard by anyone who is not close enough to kiss the mall-whisperers.  

Is that what life is like in Santa Monica, the really nice-looking neighborhood in Los Angeles, otherwise known as LA?  

LA!  As in lalalalalalalala!  Exactly what one'd expect from mall rats on the lurk for some "cat". 

I am not confused.  I actually enjoy luxury.  My mother once gifted me a beautiful yellow cashmere pullover sweater from Neiman Marcus.  I love the gift so much I am almost afraid to wear it out here in the suburban ghetto otherwise known as "the neighborhood love left behind".  

Indeed.  It seems I am stuck in a pretty beaten-up apartment complex which was constructed in the mid-1980s--likely by real estate developers lusting to cash-in on the Ronald Reagan Revolution of the Three R's.  

Remember Pee Wee Herman?  "You RRR but what am I?" 

I'm uncertain of the history of Five Points after the dreadful 1987 Savings and Loan crash-and-burn, accompanied by the Dallas area Liberaces of oil crisis doom.  No, those oily men (and their very important warrior women) and used dirt salesmen, both groupers all dressed much more profusely than Harry Dean Stanton as the bossman of an auto repossession crew in the Michael Nesmith movie, "Repo Man".  

Remember: Repossession in nine-tenths of the broke law here in Dallas, Texas, the land of dirt.  

Say a bunch of folks have been possessed by demons that emerged from each's vanity mirror.  But suddenly, the possession fades due to an economic downturn.  What happened?  Why, that's EZ as a Laff!  Repossession!  

"O, Lardy-Lard, repossesseth moi!"  

BINGO!  It's done!  

Back when my devastated life landed me in a cabana apartment near Dallas Love Field, the huge complex shaped like the vast spread of airliner wings due to its designed intention of housing airline pilots and especially "their" stewardesses, squarish apartments meant to be occupied only temporarily in order to allow those valiant laborers a place to land for a night or two.  

Why did I land there?  An acquaintance from the off-Central Expressway 4422 McKinney apartment complex, a place that, while also a nice place once upon a time, nice and inexpensive enough to offer hippies, and later, local artists in need of low-cost shelter, had become possessed by dope dealers, crooks, fugitives, hardscrabble and often drunken WW II colonels and a few refugees from much-the-same in Central America. 

I'd been evicted from there during an incredibly precarious time when I was beginning to recover a little from decades stricken by Bipolar.  I had a few "friends" back there, namely an artist of sorts, a guy who called himself B.J. Taylor (his real name is Charles Taylor, a not-really relative of the infamous Charles Taylor, the Liberian police-state president known for his leadership in the First Liberian Civil War (1989-96), his starry role as a warlord for the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.  That Taylor was doffed for war crimes.  Kind of similar to the "judge, jury, executioner" fashion slavery involving the destruction of speedboats presumed to carry drugs.  

Ha!  No evidence needed!  Prejudice, embodied!!!

Whatever, after the uncalled for eviction complicated of course by a summary lack of family support for things like a telephone, that "non official necessity" people need to get good job opportunities.  No phone number?  You must be a failure! And we don't hire failures!  

Right.  Toughen up, dude; toughen up.  

Toughened up, then, left derelict during one of the most vulnerable periods of my life, I landed at BJ's studio, a place he called "Stigmata", a place emblemized by a BJ-creation: three hypodermic needles.  Yay!  A supporter!  BJ claimed to be a former Confederate Hammerskin from Oklahoma.  Reformed?  He did date a young, sophisticated Jewish lady named Debbie Tannenbaum--at least for a while.  He broke her heart on some kind of campaign to impress a part-time dominatrix (no lie, no matter how weird that seems!) who, it turned out, had a yen for me.  

BJ had really tricked-out Stigmata Sudios.  All black.  A mandatory upper bunk bed made of two-by-fours in order to aid in the prevention of climbing mice and rats.  

Stop right there.  Rats!  Climbing rats!  In the Trump administration, all dissenters are supposedly rats!  In Mafia-talk, a rat is a stooly officially known as a stool-pigeon, a treasonous, sedition-laden refusenik,a dissenter who refuses to follow his mob-infected "order", otherwise known as "the offer you can't refuse".  

Which indeed is refuse.  Nothing like dumpster lovers following men who have been marked as "yer gonna be one-f us!"  Refuse.  Garbage.  Of the "we could wreck the world" variety of Norwegian Wharf Rats, big black ones, some as big as French Poodles.  

Hard landing.  BJ reluctantly allowed me to bring in my once-lovely sofa (it was expensive for me in 1985) to use as a bed.  That, actually and almost laughably, stood akin to my mother's withdrawal of love tactics whenever my father staggered home at three a.m. drunk off his ass.  To the couch!  Ad Astra!  

Note: immediately prior to my vaunted eviction, two incidents are necessary to recall: 1) I'd been charged with "false alarm", first listed as a felony per a fire-captain's insistence I be punished to the very limits of the law, but then marked down by a judge as a mere misdemeanor.  Is felony still on my papers?  I've never bothered to look.  Words, words, words.  I'd only called the DFD to report that a cat was trapped on the roof of that then-decrepit apartment building.  I'd fretted in the middle of a poverty-led manic episode only six months after leaving a hospital psych ward, successfully treated for Bipolar.  

Yeah, yeah.  I was still in weakened condition.  My mental health doctor said recovery from massive neural exhaustion and possible damage after a lifetime of the hereditary syndrome.  Whatever.  Once I'd begun to experience the sudden tranquility of being freed of the two Bipolar moods called "black and white", BJ was happy to enable a period where I really let loose and into the first happiness I'd known in 19 years.  Yes, he bought me beer.  We lit up.  We stayed up late.  And BJ almost always supplied the supplies.  

I know now I did everything wrong.  Whereas anxiety and a near-futile attempt to stanch it via bicycling sometimes 21-47 miles-a-day, something that had slimmed me down, once the anxiety had gone like a bad wind, all I wanted to do was sit, eat, feel pleasure.  I should have remained sober, clean, and full of exercise.  I went to the poetry slams when the money ran out.  While still on Welfare (for a mandated 14 months, no more), and a recipient of food stamps, I could rest in some security and still have food on the table.  

But what about toilet paper? What about toothpaste?  Or body soap?  Or dish soap?  Or cat food?  

UNBUYABLE!  

No wonder poor and retired people bear bad teeth.  

I soldiered on.  I won six poetry slams in a row.  While that sort of monologue-as-poetry does not fully qualify as pure or private poetry, its combination of spoken word and theatrics was an easy enough formula for me to follow:  All I needed to do was sit in on slams, take notes to see what garnered applause and laughter, and then go to the typewriter and gin-up some truly absurd monologues.  

I especially enjoyed slamming a monologue I'd titled "WHITE RAISIN VAMPIRE DUDE", a Cajun take on "Interview With A Vampire".  My best friend, Sam Modica, a former Marine, was somewhat Cajun.  I felt like honoring from the stage of Deep Ellum's Club Clearview.  Boy, while my accent was sketchy, I belted out the story about how the protagonist had been bitten by something--and thus turned into a vampire that bore a shriveled white head that resembled a white raisin in the sun,.  Lots of laughs, and given the night was judged by a famous SMU poet-professor, Jack Myers, a leading exponent of a school of poetry called Conversational Poetry, a poetry designed to actually expand the audience of poetry by bringing the language a little closer to the voices of the average human American; yes, given the approval of him and his wife, Thea Temple, as the ultimate yesses, I won that one hands-down and walked away with $50.  A grand slam I could use for necessities, mainly cat food for my "right arm", a fuzzy black cat I'd named Loopy.  Because she wound around my legs as an expression of affection.  Loops.  Get it?  

2) Prior to the eviction by one John Holmes, a sort of sketchy landlord who ushered from Highland Park, Texas (his office was on the second floor of a building near Snyder Plaza, a very exclusive shopping center and home to the Highland Park Cafeteria), I'd come down with a case of pleurisy: I'd gotten an infection in my lungs.  I was seriously ill with no way I could find to get to a doctor.  Of course, at the time, my awareness and ability to protect myself by simply busing to Parkland Hospital--that was psychologically unavailable to my still-noisy-at-times inability to use common sense.  

After years of manic depression, a sufferer remains locked away into a sense of futility and fatality.  And yes, with pleurisy, I was so sick I could barely stand.  

In that contributing event, I was also going to a smallish poetry circle nearby in a luxuriant shopping area called Travis Walk.  Cafe Society was the product of two beautiful lesbians, and the brand was a suggested appeal to perhaps bring Paris to Dallas, the so-called International City, which, to me had been a Field of Bad Dreams.  

Luckily, with pleurisy in my lungs, I stumbled upon a nurse, Susan Ramsay.  I told her how sick I was, and only days later we met: she gave me an Azithromycin 5 Day Dose Pack.  In five days, she hoped for me, the powerful antibiotic regimen would defeat the lung infection.  

Ah  yes! Broken lungs in the Days of Survival During Poetry Slams!  The nurse fixed that.  I recovered from the immediacy of the bacteria.  But full recovery would take much longer as my body cleared itself of infection and its consequent physical detritus.  

"Go!" BJ cried.   There is a pizza joint up on the corner of Exposition and MLK! I think the guy'll hire you to make sandwiches for him!"  

In hot August sun, I walked with pleurisy on my ability to walk, and overweight and beginning to once again dive into depression, I interviewed.  The man did hire me.  But that lasted only a week.  

Remember?  My body was "dirty"with the detritus of infection.  My body was cleaning itself.  Due to the self-clean, my body stank.  I sweated too much.  Yes, I was a mess charged with meeting the public and making sandwiches for eager customers.  

The owner didn't feel like listening.  He told me to my face how badly I stank.  No questions, no excuses, just get walkin' now, boy!

Back to Stigmata Studios, I took the little cash I had and got as drunk as I could possibly get.  Shoot!  This recovery from manic depression was becoming an exercise in futility.  

At the time, the very night this occurred, an incident of bad luck interrupted an invite from one Matt Seitz, then theater critic for Dallas Observer, a man who sincerely liked my absurd offerings in both letters to the Observer and my then near-incomprehensible L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. 

I remember one person exclaiming to me at another open mic reading at a spot named Chumley's, "Your poetry makes no sense to me, but I dunno, I really like how it feels!"  

BLAM!  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.  "Poetry should not mean but be."  A long-loved axiom offered by one Archibald McLeish in his poem Ars Poetica. Poetry really should be, he advocated in the poem, less an explicit detonation of meaning so much as an expression that needs no interpretation.  A modernist theme that still fits when I'm writing about pure expression.  

See?  I'd read books.  Books suggested to me by Jack Myers himself.  That experience?  I walked--walked--to Southern Methodist University, was granted audience by the head of the English school, offered Myers a longish poem, received kindly his suggestion that "this is almost poetry", and then took a list of recommended books to read on the subject of writing well.  I still have the book by Jonathan Holden, "Style And Authenticity In Postmodern Poetry". I learned as a sort of autodidact by reading that book--as well as one I still own, "The Truth Of Poetry", a survey of European poetry and its influence on America's version of modernism from Baudelaire (who learned from a US citizen named Edgar Alan Poe) to the 1960s.  Another Myers recommendation: Robert Hass's collection of essays and reviews titled, "Twentieth Century Pleasures".  Another?  A real trooper for beginners who want to know what it is they're actually and already doing: "Sound And Sense: An Introduction To Poetry", a battleship of a book that aids in the definitions of many tactics available in a poet's tool chest, provided by Laurence Perrine and Thomas R. Arp.  

Ha!  Arp!  Jean Arp!  Surrealist poet of France!  Oh man.  I slurped up those books.  And the textbook I'd used as an auditing member of Stephen F. Austin State University's MFA poetry composition course, Shapiro and Blum's immortal, "A Prosody Handbook".  

Shhh...!  Don't tell the United Nations or Amnesty International the poet is both self-taught and highly educated!  Without that totally necessary slip of vellum, one may not enter the agora of all poets in human history when they meet all day and all night, apparently in some secret hideout where only the officially educated my enter!  

Other books aided my understanding of the wild-eyed enforcement of "all poetry in Dallas but those approved by hillbillies is to be left on doorsteps and cast away by wind!": One details what art as a subculture espoused: "Art Into Pop", by Britishers Simon Frith and Howard Horne.  This one's an eye-opener.  It details how artists in Great Britain, most attendees of the British government-supported art schools such as the Royal College Of Art and London's University of the Arts London.  

The US?  "Poetry is totally scary and many result in way too many people who know too much and thus must remain unsupported by taxpayer money!"

That garbage-thinking reminds me of Marianne Faithfull's song "Broken English": "What are you fighting for?...It's not my reality!...  Say it...in broken English...." 

Right, America.  Christianity on steroids and ready for some stupid boxing match sponsored by both papists (masters of pap) and those who protest even the very teachings of Christ Himself.  

Remember Matt Seitz?  He'd wanted me to attend a Dallas Observer roof party where, as he'd advocated for me to have a column in the weekly alternative newspaper, I could meet the staff.  Pleurisy, termination, poverty, no good clothing, and WHAMMO!  

Dallas' evil wins again.  

Seitz still travels the corridors of movie and theater criticism on the US East Coast.  

No matter.  Although the Observer staff had always lauded my often-absurd letters to the editor, especially the one where, in "defense" of poetry in Dallas and it's much-abhorred in "official circles" use of profanity.  The letter?  I "defended profanity" in a short letter where I used "fuck" and variations of the word I think 47 times.  The staff loved it.  The editor, a Seventh Day Adventist named Ryan (rhymes with rayon) found it tasteless.  

Ryan had about as much common sense in regard to news as an alternative away from officialdom, and seemed to be a self-run candidate for "Grand Descendant of Queen Victoria Herself". When later, desperate, homeless, and alone, I'd begged for an audience with her to pitch a potential newspaper column as an alternative to, like, tossing fliers and cleaning up after house fires, or landscaping, building decks for suburbanites, all day labor: 

No show, no go, mere manners in a mannerism-fest of a former hope for mass media in Dallas that isn't propelled by rightist business interests.  

Ah yes!  Steely Dan's "The Royal Scam"!  Play it again, Sam?  Seriously? How many times do those fudge-buckets need to tell us all what they and only they desire for poets-as-pets or poets-as-Peter Pan?  

Hence, the American outlaw movement.  It's biggest problem: "We don't want no education!"  

See the double-negative?  I always found that line from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" to be especially enlightening in regard to the proto-Nazi mass movement where its dear leader is a germaphobe careful to keep his fingernails clean when he orders his fools to do the nasty on anyone who disagrees with him.  

Great!  A so-called president afraid of criticism!  What more could a flagging light of the world need to own?  

Thus, while this confession does not end here, we're back to Stephen Miller--out hunting outlaws that are merely projections of his own Jungian Shadow Self.  Interesting: Miller and the vaunted SCOTUS shadow docket.  

"Dock that poet!  Make him pay and pay and pay!"  

Love, the United States Supreme Court.  More like "El Supremo" from another Steely Dan song from the 1970s, the ME decade.  

Nothing like running justice into the ground from the point of third-person omniscience...

A common observance in the homeless community is this: "Out of sight, out of mind".  Let's let paid experts serve as "the one true oracles of America's now-flagging 'superstate'!" 

Wow. Paid to be an oracle!  Totally capitalistic and elitist to the max!  

No, the story doesn't end there.  In fact, my dream mentioned near the beginning of this recounted set of memories that all led to five years of homelessness, continues.  

After being terminated from a dumb job making sandwiches for some dude at the corner of Exposition and MLK Boulevard, an operation that loved to specialize in making sandwiches for the punks next door, those drunken dopeheads who ushered in after a hard night at Bar Of Soap; and after being told to get out by "ex-Confederate Hammerskin" BJ Taylor (he always urged me to never have children, but rumor has it I have several out there); I was "taken in" by one Michele Reed, a friend and wishful contender for me as a boyfriend, and her live in lover, Noah Miller (oh, Miller time again!), and truck loaded up, the couple shipped me to Denton, Texas, a university city 40 or so miles north of Dallas, city of hate and assassins.  

Strange territory to me.  Where was I?  Inside my mind, I was already still figuring it out over a suddenly brightened and colorful world I almost didn't remember is called "normal";outside my head, I had no other options.  Reed, who was living with Miller, thought it good to allow me to use her on-the-edge of Denton apartment for a period long enough for me to get my feet on the ground.  In a strange town.  With unknowable streets or locations of where to even begin to get work.  

Where else was there?  I jumped.  The pleurisy, as I continued to sweat in the "BJ Motel for Sado-Masochism Wannabes", had ruined my prized and expensive sofa.  I'd always called it a couch.   It was hot in there.  BJ wanted to save electricity.  I didn't blame him.  Privatized electricity ownership soaks the common man but those who can change that never bother to ask any questions.  Down in Texas.  Really down.  

No evidence!  Off to Denton, I went along.  Landed in a little girl's menagerie of a college apartment.  Reed was a fantasist of sorts.  She loved the idea of witchcraft.  She had little statuettes of angels and fairies shelved almost everywhere.  Clearly, her parents had ladled enough luxury on the now-adult female to keep her innocence unbitten by the Norwegian Wharf Rats who think they own the arts, the letters, and all creativity--all with nary one clue to what making art with words and spaces between them even means to the wellness of civilization.  

Hence, outlaw poetry.  Art that reciprocates artists being treated like absolute shit by investors in art who only see the worth of an artist or poet's heart and soul as hot investments and tax dodges.  Right.  Make the equity partner a wall piece of a banana crossed by duct tape, charge several million for it, and whoops, investors kindly pick the piece up and, lovingly perhaps, pay the artist.  Still.  Why do real estate developers chase artists and studios around while only interested in the cachet involved in building luxury condominiums in arts districts?  To toughen up the artists until the artists are too callous to even bother being creative?  

The US does not currently support independent artists and poets.  What does the US support?  EZ Laffs: STEM dependence.  No autonomy for the people!  Just get to work and make us some bucks!  Way cold.  

Doesn't everyone just love those commercials to support the starving artists?  One look into one of those convention center gigs reveals mass produced decorative art. And meanwhile, the tech bros are "so enthusiastic" over the ability of algorithms wresting poetry right out of the minds of those who actually celebrate something called imagination and inspiration.  

How dare us!  

My gig in the Reed's apartment didn't last long.  I didn't have much in the name of money, dress clothing and catfood, including the cat litter I knew would be necessary for a cat that, frightened outside, might have gotten lost all too easily.  

Ha! Bad person!  Tries to take care of cat, must be rendered into poverty!  The Texas Way.  

In Texas, a person of some talent must be wired to the wheel and forced to relinquish what is judged a clear and present danger to the used dirt salesmen and Lords of Lard.  

They'll all shatter themselves with pride with the proverbial platitude of "equality of opportunity does not result in an equality of outcomes!'  

Still here, motherfuckers.  Waiting for my "equality of opportunity".  I've looked everywhere for it.  I keep being met with prefab complications.  "To toughen it up, its humanity must be killed!"  

Anyway.  The gig at Reed's lovely apartment went bad.  I didn't get up and out fast enough.  Not for her boyfriend, Noah Miller.  He seemed the abusive type to me: At a "dinner party" where Noah The Chef fixed a nice meal for his mother, Michelle and me, he showed off his and Michelle's new kitten.  But when the tiny cat-tot managed to do what kittens do, namely climb the drapes in the middle of a Dinner of Serenity and "Proudness", Noah Miller grabbed the kitten in his fists and even growled as he scored his knuckles into the poor frightened kitten's neck and body:

Abuses animals, is royalty.  Sound familiar?  

One Sunday night (I had managed to drink much of Michelle's high-priced liquor, mandatory for a college student of financial difficulties trying to get a decent education as I managed to do...), the two showed up unexpectedly.  An intervention: that's what Mister Noah of the Michelle Ark of Human Salvation called it.  

"You're not working!  You're a lazy asshole!  We've decided to get you out of Michelle's apartment!"  

Lovely.  Noah even tried some Mexican stare down with me as a means of amateurish intimidation he might have learned from a cowboy movie.  Then he told me the ridiculous: "I'm from Naval Intelligence!"  

What???

Then I guessed it. I'd left a trunk that contained almost all of my cherished memories.  Inside the trunk sat a large stack of WW II photographs taken in Okinawa and Saipan, two islands my father visited as a US Navy radio man who helped in rear-guard recon at the Battle of Coral Sea.  The trunk contained documents, documents important to me. Photographs of my father (reality has allowed me a few and I cherish the memories of a suicide father before his life turned into a bucket of horrors).  

Perhaps the predecessor of NCIS had long been a self-administered role model for Naval police work.  No matter, sans "right arm Loopy", I stood up, walked out, found a nearby ditch, and nearly freezing the entire night, I huddled in what I took to be a safe place.  

I found the Union Gospel Mission the next day.  Haven.  Not solace.  I did follow all the rules.  What had I to win by not following them?  

Picture El Presidente Numero 47 sleeping in a ditch or landing in a private and religon-owned homeless mission?  

That'd make a great 30 minute comedy.  We could call the sitcom "30 Seconds Over Donnie".  

"A hit!  A performance of verve and value for the closed caption set!"  

After a mercifully shortish stint at the shelter, actually a cool place save for the very rural of tenants who found me possibly Satanic for the outrageousness of thinking as an independent individual, after I walked something like five miles in October in search of rescue by the local branch of a public mental health clinic, where I was given a free ticket on The Eagle, a bus for students who need assistance in moving back and forth from Dallas to Denton, by a kind counselor who also called the Dallas branch to inform my doctor and caseworkers I had gotten lost in a strange city and wanted to come back to familiar territory.  

On my final afternoon in Denton, Texas, as I walked along with a garbage bag of belongings, the Denton Police accosted me, told me a rapist was on the loose near the North Texas campus, and, when I told them I was headed for The Eagle so as to return to a city I knew, the cop took me to the bus itself.  Nice. Still, I was lost on the inside.  Dumb luck.  Busted in the face by more tragedy, unnecessarily in the life of a man a little too delicate for that kind of rough treatment.  

I remember Michelle's next door neighbor.  I'd met her before.  She'd come to the slam.  Was a modern dance student at NT.  At the time, when I told her I was going to host one of the Clearview slams, she seemed thrilled when I suggested she perform something silly for the audience: "Would you think it would be fun to tap-dance to Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'?"  She had said that would be great. 

However, her response "at me" in Denton was a 180.  I knocked on her door one afternoon to let her know I was OK.  She cursed me out and told me to leave.  

The kindhearted were simply everywhere--all of them "at me", not for me at all.  

Riding on The Eagle, I learned, meant I could get off the bus near the Salvation Army's Carr Collins Center.  That place apparently does everything for a person rendered homeless--always with the prospect of "saving" one for a version of a very exclusive Jesus Christ.  

After bicycling for years, suddenly atrophied (by my own passivity) muscles in my right thigh had seized, likely due to so much of the Stress For Poets Who May Know Too Much Program To Protect Wealthy Hillbillies, and I could barely walk across the street to Parkland's Urgent Care Clinic to see if I could get help.  The morning I was to do that, however, some prison-guard-wannabe counselor charged with waking a roomful of homeless men, tried to evict me when I couldn't easily get out of the cot due to the seized sciatica.  Not fast enough up?  You're out of here!  

I limped across the street, waited several hours for a doctor, who readily suggested some careful leg stretches and also prescribed a smallish amount of muscle relaxers, and then returned to the Carr Collins spot.  

Not to beg to stay.  But to inform the man in charge of the center of what had happened.  Luck!  The man told me unconditionally that I could stay!  

That night, after sitting outside with nowhere really to go, I returned to the Center.  Who did I meet but the prison-guard-wannabe who looked too much like Mickey Mouse to be believable.  He snarled: 

"You know what you did? You got me fired, you little-----".  

Evangelical love, Mickey Mouse style.  

Not long later, I was told I had a telephone call.  Someone was offering me a place to stay.  The voice?  It was of a former 4422 McKinney neighbor (apartment 101), Jamie.  I'll pick you up tomorrow!  He did, and took me to his cabana at the Love Field location for stewardesses.  Sans the stewardesses.  

Jamie had once confessed to me that he "likes little boys".  I kind of laughed him off. But the cabana?  It was located across a narrow parking lot abutting a nursery school.  Wait.  Hadn't Jamie said something about teenage boys at the mall?  

Whatever.  I was gladdened by one kind episode of unconditional support from a barely-acquainted acquaintance.  Once I settled in on the cabana's furnished couch, I questioned the guy about is life as a sort of pedophile.  I never used that word.  I was curious.  I wanted to know how such an obsession works.  Jamie told me that, no, he didn't hunt young men.  Rather, he said, they often found him when he'd go to places like Northpark Mall.  

"Really?  How do you know?"  

"I just do."  

"Do you signal each other?" 

"Kind of."  

"Do you understand why you're attracted to teenage boys?"

"I think it's instinctual." 

Wow.  I thought. This is totally weird.  Uncomfortable, I asked him an important question: "What do you think of the laws that forbid such behavior?" 

"Why should I prevent what is instinctual?" 

Hell, I thought, I control my impulsiveness all the time.  "Is the impulse to meet and sleep with young men irresistable?"

"I've been with lots of women," he retorted.  

Very odd.  I didn't exactly like being in his presence.  Jamie, always wearing a union blue sweatshirt, a sort of uniform, always pot-laden, happy to remain stoned.  But then something went awry: As my questioning continued, and after I'd managed to use a few dollars to "score" a 90s-era cellphone so I could call my temp agency and get to work again, and after I did get a sort of job that paid too little for me to strike out and get a decent job, and after I learned Jamie had used my all cellphone's time, ostensibly to find a job for himself, he basically left me in a cabana efficiency with barely enough money to really begin to climb out of the mess. 

My belongings at Reed's luxury apartment? I managed to get in contact with a long (and somewhat sinister college days acquaintance, Carl Worsham, and after contacting NCIS Noah Miller (I'm laughing), I agreed to meet him at his mommy's workplace, a warehouse where Noah and another bloatedly overweight partner ran a two-man call center in attempts to sell higher quality ovens.  Weird, eh?  

Old Carl, who'd been using me for the mere fact women are attracted to me (as I am to them, something that has to be within our mutual presences to even happen at all), picked me up and we went to Denton to pick up those belongings first. Yup.  There they were: stacked on the sidewalk for any taker to come along.  We loaded them on Carl's pickup, took them to a Public Storage location near the cabana, and then went to Noah's NCIS warehouse to retrieve the remainder of my things.  

What?  When we arrived to the West Dallas area warehouse--no automobiles.  We were there early too.  We waited for at least an hour.  I even knocked.  No answer.  

Finally, we left.  When I called Noah NCIS Miller, he was sharp: "We were there!  We gave you a drop dead deadline!  We're selling your shit!"  

Wow.  With friends like Miller, well, you know....

I'd lost my valuable trunk full of prized mementos--like my high school graduation diploma and even my high school second place short story contest award certificate, and most importantly, those Okinawa and Saipan photographs, and of course, nearly all the pictures of my father.  

Zombie.  The Cranberries.  That was on the radio that afternoon.  

It was a Sunday afternoon in 1995.  I'd lost some of the most important things I owned.  My treasured WW II era crystal radio--the one I listened in on H. L. Hunt's "Lifeline" radio rant-o-rama on WRR AM late at night.  I'd clip an alligator clip to the airconditioning vent and listen awhile.  It had been my father's gift to me. 

Gone.  

Last night I dreamed of being lost in an underground mall.  I even met a dreamworld transformation of the otherwise fat-calved lardass Noah Miller.  There, Michelle Reed, looking much the same as remembered.  The woman had once shown me a high school photo of herself.  Once, she had been a very beautiful young woman, but then at that time and also in the dream, she was overweight.  I'm sure that change had always been hurtful to her.  

I also noted to myself in the dream, that I had a friend, Valerie Crowe, a fellow poet who also had been dragged around very harshly by a suspicious and abusive husband.  She was in the dream.  But I couldn't find her, a woman who today remains a good and platonic friend who is loath to let me down for anything.  

Gone too.  But without feelings of bewilderment and sadness in the dream, I woke up a little late this Sunday morning, glad to be awake again.  As I returned to awake consciousness, I felt a welcome glow, smiled to myself, and went to the kitchen for coffee.  

One more question: Tell me again there is no such thing as political oppression gone social in the United States of America.