My Two Jobs For, Like, Forever

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

I'm certain some of expertise and genius have heard the sad tale before:  A person of some skill and creative imagination decides to honor his parents the best way he knows how to do: By accomplishing, in my case, what my father wished for his own life, what my father could not accomplish as a data processing manager at the U.S. Postal Service.  

My father?  He longed to have been a writer all his life.  Why not honor my father by becoming a writer as a way to say, "Here, Daddy.  I will become your best wishes because I love you to the skies and back!"  

I've told the story: I would wake early on a weekday morning--and see my father busily reading literature.  He had a tattered first edition paperback of Kerouac's "On The Road".  He read Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer, secreted away copies of Miller's "Sexus", "Plexus" and "Nexus".  Certainly, my father had an interesting taste in literature in 1967.  Those tastes today likely could fit into the Outlaw School of American Literature.  

I did squirrel away an inheritance after my father shot himself in the head with a .38 Special on September 29, 1970: His "novel", poorly written, pen on paper, unreadable cursive, folded into two pieces, and titled "Gerard".  Seems to me he offered me a vocalized summary of his book.  

He'd written it while a United States Navy radio operator who provided rear-guard surveillance duties at the Battle of Coral Sea, and later in Saipan, and still later in Okinawa.  Doubtless, his radio operator's job was complex: He had to work with code talkers: men who spoke in a language indecipherable to enemies, mainly because Native American languages often did not have dictionaries or grammars. 

Hence, because my father had a yen for those past accomplishments in speaking English to code talkers, as a U.S. Postal Service data processing manager who played a part in the USPS's first experiments with computer technology (complete with punch cards, stacks of which he gave me) he learned American Indian Sign Language, and hired a deaf secretary, an action that earned enough public admiration that he was commended by president Lyndon Baines Johnson for his commitment to providing stable and amenable working conditions for the disabled.  

Hard to top that in a current (and currency) world whirl of self- and selfish- interest.  Amirite?

  Remember?  That's highly radioactive material that can kill if touched by conservative plutocrats scared shitless by the possibility that popular music might escape their irritable grasping for more, and then more, and then still more, an activity of excess that demands control of all forms of mass media, especially pop music in the United States, Land of the Free.  

Don't worry.  Censorship like that is SoCiAl.  It's "immune" from the law, and apparently, from the First Amendment: buy it, shut it down, protect thyself from self-fulfilling prophesies concerning the "commies" or something dumb like that.   

More ironic is that my father was also going deaf.  But he happened to be a highly intelligent and proactive human being: learning ASL helped employ a woman with a hearing disability.  It must have been really cool to watch him signing dictation to his secretary.  And, while he was slowly going deaf himself, I remember how he went to a costume party dressed as Harpo Marx.  

As Marx, my daddy looked pretty funny with a fuzzy white wig on his head.  his bicycle horn?  Honk!  Honk!  

Yeah, daddy was a hit.  

The punch cards?  The novel?  Lost to theft-by-corporation: While transitioning from homelessness to "life in the real world" after nearly five years of relative horror, relative freedom from obligation, while a caring friend of mine (a socialist?) gave me $250 to help pay back rent for my Public Storage obligations.  

What happened?  Anxiety from that transition (homelessness to housed transitions suffer close to an 88 percent recidivism rate due to the upswing of stuffed emotional trauma from being stigmatized by society for being unfortunate), led me to an old stand-by stopgap: I drank much of that money away.  The rest?  One dollar hamburgers, the Texas Burger, from a Wendy's down the street from where I lived.  

Really?  Did a homeless vagrant have trouble readjusting to the mainstream?  Oh boo hoo hoo.  

That reaction, and recourse to drinking down anxiety and trauma, is a Bipolar-adjacent syndrome called by psychiatrists "self-medication".  

Yup, yup, I was a mess for nearly a year.  Hard times: Lost possessions via underpayment to Public Storage (the new assistant district manager cared not for transitions or adjustments; he only wanted his money), a torn-up office couch, and a mattress on the floor.  Boy!  Isn't reentry to the mainstream fantastic?  

I was terrified.  

I remember sitting up all night for many months and listening to Art Bell of Coast To Coast AM, and that kept my mind on spurious information and conspiracy theories, few of which hold water, unless of course, as metaphors for other types of alien invasions, etc.  

Regardless, no matter the issues, I continued to write.  I'd begun writing at 13.  Possibly earlier, really.  I made up and drew my own comic books.  Clearly enough for me at least, I had "the creative bug".  The creative bug has never left me.  And why should it?  Should the creative bug just get out of the psyche when "adulthood" comes calling?  

That kind of adulthood is surrender.  And as an outlaw poet acquaintance of mine once said, "Submit but never surrender!"  Get your writing to publications, but don't allow them to force you into compromise.  

Independence, however, in the commercial world, while much hyped by rightist "conservatives" and rightist libertarians, is actually nothing but hype when the humanities are involved.  Poetry?  Who needs it?  

All this time--from my life as "homeless man in the library eight hours a day" to today, I've been interested in how what is called Reason has been instrumentalized into a tool of what is known as "management".  Maverick political scientist Sheldon S. Wolin labeled the consequences of the imposition of instrumentalized Reason a name: 

Managed Democracy.  

Another label he coined: Inverted Totalitarianism.  

What's that?  According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism involves a democratic-republican face underneath which reside the autocratic values of run-of-the-mill capitalist values.  I'm not wholly sold on that concept, but I can understand interpreting today's often unbalanced intertwined relation between capitalism and democracy in such a way.  Wolin's ideas, some of which are now beginning to really gain steam, especially among those of us who are critical of capitalism while remaining loyal to its ideals no matter how far capitalists stray from whatever leading principles the fads of conventional currents should but often do not command them to follow.  

Does democracy need a manager?  Some awfully furious "conservatives" (who are all business all the time and thus do not qualify for that honorific) believe it does.  Why so?  Because those all-capitalism-all-the time versions of "the new man" don't like being told what to do.  What?  A regulation?  Let's bully it out of existence because there is money to be made.  

Fine.  Who gets hurt?  Why does that who have to get hurt in some bum rush for more and more? Who.  Really.  Knows.  

Another observer of current strains in a traditional rivalry between capitalism and democracy, David Rothkopf, has written numerous books in regard to how capitalism and democracy either relate in a healthy or in a dysfunctional way.  He's also written extensive studies on how the social and the political also either relate or become vying adversaries for "turf".  

But what does that have to do with my long-upheld two jobs situation?  The employee goes home, eats, rests, then goes to work at kitchen table, writing and learning to write until either 10 p.m. or late into the night, depending on how hard inspiration strikes.  For years.  And years.  And years.  Through employment and unemployment, plenitude or hunger, alienation or not.  

Hey.  I did get a few letters to the editor into alternative newspapers!  Ain't it great?  Love the support.  Even when one knows plenty and thus has plenty to add, "the agenda" which has now conquered American journalism has no room for those who actually know a few things and also know how to write about those few things in a relatable way.  

Yeah, yeah.  the STEM-dependent advocates of what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci once advised for a wholesale remake of higher education into solely technical and productivity subjects; they'll troll those of us who actually know political science is one of the humanities.  Funny, too.  Yesterday, I read an article in the November 2025 issue of The Nation that details how the University of Chicago has all-but-shut-down its humanities opportunities.  Apparently the opportunity cost of maintaining the human element in a world of too much capitalism is so much that it is to be vanquished in favor of fancy architectural excesses as rad and beautiful buildings.  The UC library, The Nation reveals, does not allow people to actually browse the stacks.  Why?  

Probably "for the sake of automation":  Why bother with allowing humans to wander the approximately four-thousand-year wide agora of knowledge when a machine can select a volume to spit out of a cage like the crazy sluggo-job in Orwell's 1984?  

STEM-dependence: three-legged animals out to hog the culture right out of us.  For the money.  

I had to learn how to write poetry the hard way: Because I lacked the funding to continue into higher post-graduate MFA-style education in creative writing, I ACTUALLY WENT TO THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, checked out books, AND READ THEM.  Can you believe it?  

Lucky for me, Frances Bell, one of the most noteworthy librarians in the United States at the time, stood eager to assist me with reading advice: She was in charge of the poetry in the Humanities Division.  Like my father, Frances longed to be a writer (of poetry) herself.  Frances, always struggling to get me to wake up and see the world's intimate relation between life and language, often to no avail, never lost patience.  To this day, I do not know why she didn't lose patience.  I was a little rowdy as a 20-something to cultivate the tranquility necessary to even begin a poem that offers the overworked and tired "a safe space", a place to go and be rewarded via contemplation and imagination.  Nope.  I was busy being an outlaw, a punk, a troublemaker and rabblerouser, a personification I labeled "a literary terrorist".  

It was fun.  I learned a little.  But I had years to go.  

One of Frances' best friends once stopped by to give me some advice: "As you mature both intellectually and as an adult," he predicted, "your poetry will improve."  

Unforgettable.  I am happy to have met people like Frances and her friends.  One coworker, Steve Housewright, lived with an avant-garde musical composer, Jerry Hunt, one of Philip Glass's friends and colleagues.  The environment at the Dallas Public Library was, and likely is, a rich one for aspiring devotees to a craft we call poetry.  A craft.  As in "done by hand", not by some AI machine that shucks humanity and inspiration in favor of "some audience kudos and props!"  Dumb tech bros: they see everything in black and white bits and bytes.  That definitely bites.  At least when the arts and letters are concerned.  I don;t know how many poets much more accomplished than I am who laugh outloud at tech folks with AI poetry machines--which can calculate, but not qualify.  

Oops.  I must have used an "ideologically incorrect" concept: what is quality?  A price label?  Or a human experience?  If the latter, whose experience is "better" than the others?  And which one is allowed more status: vocation or avocation? 

On the so-called front of the plastic arts--painting and sculpture--most people I know who are perhaps "excessively creative" work as artisans during the day--simply to feed themselves.  

No government support for the people who cultivate and garden the culture.  OH NO!  THAT IS NOT TO BE HAD!  

We know from where that nonsense ushers.  It ushers from some dude in Georgia who writes crappy pulp novels he claims are about war, gallantry, and power: Newt Gingrich.  And more, we in the creative community know exactly what Gingrich wants for we creative individuals and groups:  

To pay the piper by "sell, sell, sell".  Really?  How come there is almost no pay, pay, pay?  According to Gramsci again, an important observation about the fascism he lived to tell about: Fascists will seek more than anything to destroy the autonomy of the subject classes (not moneyed elites) in order to force them into a state of dependence, not independence.  Hence, no valuable critiques and critics who not only take an adversarial stance that defines independence, but expands and allows a culture to grow.  Nope.  Not that.  We must color between the lines or be socially or culturally imprisoned by third-rate writers like Newt Gingrich.  

I do applaud him for trying.  He does not applaud me or anyone like me.  In fascism there is no such thing as reciprocity.  

I read the letters and newspaper columns of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci not as a true believer but as one who has C-H-O-S-E-N to study the harbinger of the American New Left.  Right.  That's the leftovers.  Old hat.  The used-to-be's, correct?   

Why so?  Because that's what the more fascist oriented want the Official Culture to believe.  

Here's a bit of a notes-summary from reading his writings about forming blocs: 

"Deus absconditis--hidden God, i.e. per Gramsci and predecessors, if a superstructure (like a concept or a majority-accepted conceit or social construct) overlays what he determines to be "the actual structure" (always economic to him), then a theological interpretation of on-the-ground conditions hides the actuality behind a masquerade: However, while religion is a socio-cultural construction, basic right and wrong simply are--no matter how interpreted by either religion or an economic abstraction."

I get it.  If an economic interpretation (homo economicus) overlays all we understand about a state or a civilization, but also underlies variants of theological thought, that is nothing but a pretense, a masquerade, a sort of Trick-Or-Treat Halloween visitor: Gimme some treats or I'll pull a trick you might not like!  

"Hence," my note goes on, "we see Gramsci's point: his socialism must always be dynamic, not abstract or conceptual.  He tried to link that with his notion that the Marxist dialectic is in fact the basis of civilization...Interesting observation: Ethnic identity politics and social mores appeared almost serendipitously alongside "national conservatism" and its focus on white dominion, re nationalism.  Two of a kind?  Call and response?"  "Facts of culture are not culture itself."  "Gramsci suggests that ethnic politics as part of the cultural struggle for hegemony (dominance or critical mass) between its presence as an aspect of capitalist dominion versus what is actual, while not necessarily real can be used or instrumentalized via empiricism to thus produce social/cultural stimuli taken from the whole conflict on the struggle's front and then paired with practical reasoning to serve as a weapon or tool of that struggle for dominion."  "The tactical key to the struggle, then, is to aggravate both offense and defense in order to inflame and irritate.  (state-as-force v revolution-->to libertarian use of "non-coercion" to undermine the state.  See: Lenin".  

Is that a lot to swallow? Gramsci is noteworthy for his concept that communist revolution should only be loosely based on Leninist internationalism, but rather be tailor-made for each country's society.  

If that's the case, the reactionaries on the American right are falling in line--as planned.  Hey.  How's that weather?  

Shhh!  Don't allow independent writers tell this story.  That might bust some design--as Old South, Catholicism, Protestantism, neo-Nazism, and "post-Soviet" communism vye for complete control of the US-as-latest-lamb-chowder.  The US, supposedly "the coveted bitch of the playas on the scene".  

Now that's laughable. 

Funny how the short-sighted ignore the obvious in favor of spreading fear of communism while at the same time marching to the tune of the New Left, a movement that never disappeared at all.  

Sigh.  But what does this have to do with my vocation/avocation problem?  It has to do with the possibility that many independent writers and especially poets can serve as proverbial canaries in the coal mines--all subsidiaries of Charles Koch and his "team playas".  

What's weird is that, after I finally gained an opportunity to move out of the shelter 2001, I eagerly joined a program specifically designed to aid those with mental health issues that are either homeless or in danger of being so.  While that program is like Section 8, it comes with two necessities for those of us prone to panic attacks or outright manic episodes: advocates and caseworkers.  It's a good system for those of us willing to work.  

You know: to better ourselves and our lives. 

Here in Dallas, most Section 8 housing is handled by a little fiefdom called Dallas Housing Authority.  It's been accused all too many times by rightist critics of being too lenient in allowing dopers and crack dealers places to create dope houses.  Which might be true.  Thus, should anyone act out or get uppity, DHA is liable to pitch "the offender" to the streets.  This is why I have opted to remain in the housing program that protects something called...

my self-interests.  Which, apparently, are of a much lower station on the caste bar that commandeth all things--at least in its collective mindsets, swingsets, and concretized settings.  

My job as a poet is a difficult, complicated one.  Using words to create a kind of art is difficult.  As writing, though, its use of metaphor and connotation aren't really much different from the skills journalists deploy: they're only deployed in a way designed not necessarily inform with facts and data so much as to elucidate, describe and foster the human element.  

Sans that, a citizenship of zombie machines might welcome a Skynet situation where the robotized and three-legged STEM-dependent can follow Gramsci's diktats that all education must depose of all but courses in productivity, economics, accounting and mathematics.  

That way, a culture is alienated from itself.  What a wonder!  

Wonder indeed.  An employee or a professional rides home from a hard day, half exhausted from simply trying to keep nose above water, only to find a "freedom" in fast food or TV or maybe drinks at the bar or social time with friends, girlfriends or lovers.  Maybe that's enough.  After all, who needs the entirely plebeian vocalizations of Luciano Pavarotti here in an American culture oft misinformed to the degree of ignorance of the Old World mission of opera: entertainment for the plebeian masses.  

An acquaintance 20 years ago, a relatively intellectually-ignorant woman I had befriended as a sort of friend via alienation, scored a job working for The Dallas Symphony.  She sometimes passed out tickets to symphonies and other events offered at the gloriously beautiful Morton H. Myerson hall.   

When the woman offered me two tickets to see a DSO performance of Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 5, I leapt a the chance to hear my favorite symphony life.  A Vietnam veteran friend of mine and I, casually dressed as would any bohemians (or, like, people), drove through baking August heat to hear the performance.  I remember being a sweaty mess as I found my seat and then reveled in beauty.  

What's the 5th about?  It's one commissioned by Stalin himself--to celebrate the Red Army victory at Stalingrad, by far one of the most deft surprise attacks in all human history.  And Shostakovitch, complaining all the way via musical gesture at the irritant of being forced to compose for a brute, completes the job to the point that, sometimes,when I listen to Vassily Patrenko conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's version of the work, I'll discover tears.  

After all, without that stunning surprise attack, the West would no longer exist.  Yes, the West was that close to extermination at the hands of an entirely-reactionary autocratic mess of a government.  Yeah, yeah, the Nazi Wehrmacht was an amazement of efficiency and effectiveness; the government sucked eggs.  Really lousy.  Nothing but servile wannabes for Hitler's attention out-competing one another.  Idiocy, Inc.  

Whatever.  Most tyrannies and dictatorships coerce independent writers into either silence or collaboration.  And when a culture war tightens up against independent voices, what happens is quite interesting; the target voices become shrill, loud, colorful, very very bourgeoise and operatic or performative.  

Little pets who do a trick for Dear Leader.  

Of course, resistance to that kind of ideological narcissism has always amounted to mice in the walls eating the electrical wires.  Those noted to being "non-cooperative" or "nuisances" may end up caught up in dragnets when, after all, the conventional culture, usually under the gun itself, refuses to protect the dissident by bringing them into visible protection.  Worthy poets of the Soviet variety: both Akhmatova and Pasternak won Nobel Prizes, and Stalin couldn't liquidate them because then the world would see through his lies that the USSR was the culture upon which the world's should be modeled.  

Akhmatova to Stalin: "You will learn to fear me."  He did.  

Stalin's apparatchiks scoured the poetry of Pasternak for clues to the political dissidence they seemed to sense.  How can one find dissidence in a poem about lilacs? 

Hilarious.  What is fun about the use of metaphor is that tyrants only see what they want to see.  Metaphor is after all squishy and uninterpretable.  That's why they're metaphors, not signs attempting metonymy.  

Which job must independently creative individuals and groups choose?  

Right.  Let's let the narrowed minds of ever-concretized ideologues order us to become their pets or meet extermination in an American gulag called ostracism. 

Concrete shoes?  Lots of ideologues wear theirs to work every single day of the week, especially Sundays.  

Poems never were made-to-order or Ukranian brides ads in the backs of adventure magazines.  For some reason, America's rightist pretenders to "conservatism" find that important factor in culture hard to stomach. 

Hope that tastes good enough to give them pause in the newly-planned evangelical skulk into Hollywood and the arts so that all the movies will be about this: 

Warrior Jesus.  Quite a costume for the Prince of Peace.  

 

To Try To Work Competently While Too Underpaid

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

Let's continue with more pre-homelessness oddity.  

Perhaps the entirety of performative freedom and liberty was a sort of theatrical set in Dallas, Texas, 1996.  Dramatic, it was not.  

What led up to the hot July afternoon in 1996 as I packed a few clothes and necessities into a large black garbage bag, left the old cabana efficiency located near Midway and Lemmon Avenue?  No, I wasn't off to live inside a local ice cream shop named Braums, the locally-beloved dairy outlet that offers superior milk, eggs, and of course, ice cream.  

Let's stop to allow me to wipe the trickling sweat off my sunburned face.  Braum is a patronymic that, first, points to Brahms, but is also High German for "brown"--as in brown-haired.  What that is supposed to mean in terms of ice cream makes me think of a movie I watched this weekend: Fassbinder's 1979 Golden Globe nominee, "The Marriage of Maria Braun".  

In the story, Maria Braun struggles to rise out of the ruins of immediate postwar Germany, and waits for her beloved husband, Hermann, to return home from the Eastern Front.  Because work is so scarce, Maria, a lovely and tall blonde matron, chooses to take on temporary lovers.  Her first lover is a U.S. GI (Bill) who happens to be a Black man.  At the outset of her seduction, she connotes to the GI, "I like you, but can never love you."  Needlessly, he falls in love with her.  When Hermann returns home, he sees her in bed with Bill, a fight ensues, and Maria, elated Hermann has returned, smashes Bill with a liquor bottle and kills him. 

This tactic of "climbing", or to put it more bluntly "fucking up", Maria seduces and has an affair with a wealthy entrepreneur, the ironically named Oswald, there in Germany to help the country rebuild after devastation and loss of WW II.  Thus, she's begun to accrue money as a sex worker.  She gains a fortune after Oswald suddenly dies, and buys a luxurious home for her and Hermann once he returns home from Canada.  Then karma strikes: A gas leak explodes when Maria lights a cigarette.  

The end.  Food for a thought.  

In the movie's credits at the beginning of the film, I almost enjoyed the red italic lines of red appearing as if stripes on the U.S. flag.  

OK.  Let's lift the bloated garbage bag, and stagger, sweating, the Lemmon-Midway DART bus stop.  It's rush hour.  I've left my last link to the real world of the working man (and woman), I pass the Sigel's liquor store, reach the crosswalks.  When I'm signaled by the light to "walk", I make it across a little late, and anxious drivers want me out of the way.  I wait for what seems to me to be hours.  When the bus arrives, I press coins in the ticket machine, receive a pass.  The bus is packed with commuters.  

There I am, ragged, in soiled sweat pants, soaking wet from sweat, already feeling like some kind of freak, and how do I feel?  

Conspicuous. Humiliated.  Ashamed to even be alive.  I see people staring in horror at me.  I have to stand because the bus offers no seating.  

Maybe I didn't leave the Real World of Dallas soon enough.  Who knows?  

What happened?  Didn't I have a job?  

Actually not.  Or no longer.  While I'd managed to find a low-paying but full-time temp job at an accounting firm of all things--with assistance from the representatives of Imprimus, a temporary employment agency that had always been friendly to me--I likely didn't really rate, not enough for Arthur Andersen.  Crazy, eh?  

The job?  Executive courier, 56th floor of the tallest building in Dallas. Nice. But my clothes were second-hand, the pants too baggy, a rip near the crotch, badly sewn up, and torn-up but once fine tennis shoes that just happened to be black enough to (not really) meet the button-down and deeply conservative then-nationally-lauded accounting consultancy firm.  

Flash forward: Arthur Andersen, one of the world's most honored accounting firms, went down in flames after the federal government discovered its executives had been conducting the corrupt form of accounting called "three column accounting".  A real list of costs, a real list of benefits--and then a third line of under-the-table payments.  Enron, Kenneth Lay's Houston area baby, also crashed and burned, as  did Texas Senator Phil Gramm.  The scandal was news for months.  

I mostly remember how associates and executive secretaries protested the demise of Andersen, all of these beautiful ladies carrying signs and wearing badges that declared, I AM ARTHUR ANDERSEN.  

Look at me, practically limping around and around the executive suite floor, practically in rags, feeling and smelling bad, hair disheveled,and most of all slipping into that dangerous and numinous sensibility that marks the edges of a Bipolar manic spike--as well as the abyss of a dark depressive trench.  

Regardless, I worked hard.  Wasn't intellectually challenging work at all.  But dammit!  The stress of being paid only eight dollars an hour, not really enough to even get by in a country where rent always goes up up up while costs agree with the rent and subsequently go up up up.  I had enough each day to have a Pop Tart, cold, no toaster, and then go for a four-or-five dollar StyroFoam container of Chinese food from a spot on the building's basement food court.  

King for a Day, correct? 

At first, I sat next to two executive assistants, one from Australia, the other a local "fauxhemian", one with nice countercultural looks.  Fine.  Nice easy chairs.  I'd eat in the suite's conference room--until, one afternoon, Andersen High Command ordered me to use a sort of cubby hole near a quarter of accounting consultants.  A closet, really.  A tiny desk.  A broom closet.  My Great Big Office.  I'm reminded of the poor protagonist in "Being John Malkovich", a puppet-master of the Abelard and Heloise stick figure tragedy.    

I had to sort important executive-level memorandums and fax transcripts inside a veritable cubby hole designed to store janitorial materials.  

MOST IMPORTANT ACCOUNTING FIRM IN THE REGION

I did have mailroom experience.  As I'd done while working for Johnson and Gibbs in the late eighties, I'd perform a a little for the executive assistants, and also try to wake the STEM-dependent accounting consultants who were nosing the grindstone as if it was cheesecloth.  

While barely making enough to pay the $250 or so monthly rent for my "cabana".  A coolie.  A sort of white collar transient laborer.  I called myself "a pack animal".  Carrying loads for powerful dope lords.  

The head of the executive division seemed kindly to me.  Once, I entered his office to deliver an important sealed memorandum.  "Hey," I chirped.  "What are you doing with your hands behind your head and your feet on the desk?"  

Entertainment--as a perk for people who pay peanuts for essential services like getting memorandums on time.  

He smiled. "Because I can," he grinned.  It was a friendly grin.  

On another floor, an amazing area. Since Andersen's executive consultancy was worldwide, many accounting consultants were always in flight, across borders, visiting foreign firms, keeping executives and accountants thereof up to date with necessary information.  The PC was fairly new, but Andersen supplied these consultants, many new associates from elite universities; with the very best available.  But also something new: 

"Wavy" and wheeled work tables that could be arranged according to what consultants needed to pair with others.  Ethernet connections. Groovy.  I thought it was a little silly to pay associate consultants six figure salaries and not supply any of them with actual offices but perhaps I was living old school. Nearby, a lovely, neon-lit break area.  A bright pink sign: Pizza!  And soft drinks!  For free!

Temporary workers are not to be allowed at consultancy lunches or after-work socials.  Boo hoo hoo. 

I found myself "realating" to two lovely women.  One, the lovely black-haired Imprimis temporary, a single mother also barely getting by, demonstrated interest in me. Sometimes, she'd drop by my broom closet to sit on my desk and chat.  

The valiant consultants did not appreciate that at all.  Why not? 

 They Feed They Lion

By Philip Levine

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,

Out of black bean and wet slate bread,

Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,

Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,

They Lion grow.

                               Out of the gray hills

Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,

West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,

Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,

Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,   

They Lion grow.

                              Earth is eating trees, fence posts,

Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,

“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,

From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,

From the furred ear and the full jowl come

The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose

They Lion grow.

                              From the sweet glues of the trotters

Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower

Of the hams the thorax of caves,

From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”

Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,

The grained arm that pulls the hands,

They Lion grow.

                               From my five arms and all my hands,

From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,

From my car passing under the stars,

They Lion, from my children inherit,

From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,

From they sack and they belly opened

And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth

They feed they Lion and he comes.

Got it?  

Then, another really enthusiastic and lovely strawberry blonde: Katherine.  Wow.  The electricity could have lit London. 

Katherine, impressed when I slipped a flier announcing a poetry reading, clearly wanted out of the restrictive environment.  One afternoon, for an instance, Katherine, in black, sort of pogoed as she and I rode the elevator down at five.  A nearby consultant, like some kind of besuited SA from an earlier period, did not appreciate any "high jinks" even when consultant is not on the job.  

Misty was fired after, she told me, an accounting consultant tried to bully her into "going out" with her.  He reported her for something-something, and she was gone like a surprise attack.  

Katherine?  Also transferred: To Fort Worth.  Unexpectedly.  She did not want to go. Her quick absence reminds me of the forced removal of Polish military families by the Red Army in the wake of the Soviet victory and subsequent takeover of Poland.  

I remember, distinctly, finding a memo I had been ordered to copy on the reprographics machine.  The memo was to a select group of executives.  It informed them all in short order that a new Andersen campaign would ensue: Hire blacks for consultancy positions; yet, oddly, not because of anything other than to portray a public hyped-up presentation of Andersen as a race-friendly accounting consultancy firm.  

I don't remember if I actually said anything about my find to fellow Andersen workers or not.  Still, the memorandum enraged me.  "Let's not do so sincerely, let's make it look like we're sincere..."

Nasty.  

I did tell friends.  Whatever.  We do have the First Amendment in the United States, whether Arthur Andersen executives like it or not.  Duplicity and Janus-faced weirdness is not King's X. Such information should be made public.  

I would have sent a copy of the memo to The Dallas Morning News, but also knew The News' executive board was likely "buddy-buddy" with those at Andersen, and the entire shebang would be quashed. I almost quit.  

Some afternoons, I'd go into the floor's conference room, find a sofa in the very back so as not to be seen, set my watch for an amount of time, close my eyes, and nap a little.  I was so stressed sometimes I could barely stay awake.  I needed to take care of myself.  

That nap was the reason i was terminated by Andersen.  Or perhaps the cover story.  One afternoon, an Andersen contact visited me, asked me to pack my things into a large plastic bag she'd brought with her and that security would escort me downstairs to a glassed-in room where I was told to sit until an Imprimis contact could retrieve me and explain what had happened.  

Right.  Bond. James Bond.  Once again, I knew too much, and the Morlocks did not wish me to perform little tricks for them.  

At least that's how I felt.  

After returning home, dashed on a rainy afternoon, I later spoke by telephone to my Imprimis contact earlier about finding a better job.   Imprimis did find my skills valuable, but there was one hitch: 

I had a warrant for a misdemeanor on my back.  That's right.  Let's dial it all back to Christmas Eve, 1993.  That's the night I frantically called officials and animal protection organizations after enduring three nights of incessant meowing from above: A neighbor's domestic cat was caught on a roof and apparently could not get down.  In the middle of that weirdness, I was having a financial stress-triggered manic episode only six months after finding appropriate treatment for Bipolar 1.  

Right. Still shaky.  Apparently not fast enough for the Great Big Whozis of secret Dallas, Texas.  Or something.  I called the City of Dallas--no help.  I called the SPCA--no help.  In an attack of desperate sarcasm, I even called Greenpeace. 

Finally, remembering the teachings in elementary school about the friendly fireman who helps get a cat out of a tree, I called the Dallas Fire Department. 911.  

When three firetrucks screeched to a halt on McKinney avenue, a fire commander demanded to know: Where is the fire!?!!"  

"Cat. On. The. Roof!!!"

Boy, was that guy angry.  The DFD, in his insistence, doesn't do that.  What?  

"Now that you're here, just get a ladder and get the poor cat off the roof..."

He cursed me, and off the trucks roared.  Puzzled, I went inside and panicked.  A huge snowstorm was headed for the Big Duh.  And the cat?  If she couldn't get down from the roof, she'd freeze.  

On came the snow, the cat quit meowing, and I hoped the cat had made it off the roof.  I doubt she did.  

Whatever.  It was Christmas.  I spent Christmas alone.  I wasn't too happy by my mother's reaction  to my inability to find work without a telephone.  And then, and then....?"

Come February, 1993, I was charged with making a false alarm.  At first the whiplash Dallas County DA slapped a felony charge on me. Later, a judge with common sense dropped that and changed the felony to a misdemeanor. 

Nuts while calling false alarm?   Why then did I subsequently learn that SMU frats and sororities had been calling in false alarms all the time?  Connections with the big shots.  They account for so much in this world.  At least in Dallas.  

I  was "the example" of law and order, Dallas County style.  This is why I could not find a better job.  A warrant.  I'd chosen to fight the unjust charges.  Took me five years.  I knocked the DA's hopes for big money down to $150 in court charges, and then, after promising the judge that Dallas County wasn't going to get a flippin' nickel out of me, I opted for community service and then told the judge who cleared me after fighting dumb charges for five years:

"I told you people you wouldn't get a nickel out of me."  

Just as the charging judge in 1994 was surprised when I simply didn't plead out, the judge who marked me free of the warrant that led me into nearly five years of homelessness was also dumbfounded.   

Homelessness, caused by my inability to make money appear magically in order to pay rent, became "a deal", solid, and when a warrant prevented me from climbing out of poverty and definite upset, enough to rankle the imagination right out of my ability to communicate via words, well, well, well, there I was, unemployed and leaving a crappy cabana, emptied of what possessions I could not take with me--with courtesy to the dumpster--ready to join a crowd unfamiliar to the all-business-all-the-time local excuse for a mass media: 

The "ranks" of the homeless. You know: smelly is rank.  Thank you, Dallas.  

As a final shot at darkness, I left the beat-up clock radio that could not tell one minute for another on the kitchen table.  I tuned it to a "Christian" station, turned it to loud, and then broadcast the Dallas version through the apartments behind the paper-thin walls of the cabana.  

Also, given the manager of the cabana complex, the Colonel, a white-haired pervert who "liked to watch", the one who tried to get into my cabana when a girlfriend was drunk and crashed on my bed, I gave him "something special".  Jamie, the pedo who'd gotten me out of the Salvation Army, had suggested I purchase a XXX video on sale for two bucks at a Korean convenience store: One starring porn sensation Heather Lere. 

We'd slammed that into the herky-jerky videotape machine--and I proceeded into disgusting laughfests of the movie, 1-800-LOVE.  A magical genie lifts Heather Lere through variety of great moments in history--Caesar, Freud, and other targets--all where she had every sexual position with famous exponents of the world.  Every time the genie was about to send Heather back in time, he'd yell this: 

BINGO!  

And indeed, like bingo!, I placed 1-800-LOVE on the table where the octogenarian and naive woman who owned the complex sat every morning for her coffee. 

As I was leaving, one maintenance man shouted: "The Colonel got the videotape.  What they did to you was W-R-O-N-G.  

Let's all get on the bus together and have a chat about oppression in other countries.  

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