Duped

I was a mark. I was the meal ticket for a nest of borderlines. While surrounded by their darkness, I became privy to their secrets. Calculating the depth and breadth of their lies, or trying to reach the kernel of truth, seemed impossible. Unsolvable. It was too arcane and complex to fathom that which engendered the duping. Once you begin to look, it’s everywhere.

This story reveals those secrets as well as what galvanized the darkness. It exposes the hierarchy and how this well-oiled machine is organized, socially. Through my experiences I learned discernment, which I proffer to you.

It’s easy to see where the duping ends, but where it begins… ah, that’s the question.

Who is duping whom? The unravelling is up to you.

CHAPTER ONE:

New Orleans, Louisiana, October 6, 2014

The bells in St. Louis Cathedral clanged furiously, with alacrity, calamitously, heightening awareness of the presence and power of the assembly of men in red ties, flanked by cardinals and bishops. Jackson Square was in the cross hairs of secret service sharpshooters on the ready to fire from parapets and rooftops if there appeared to be anything untoward in the Vieux Carre. Judges and lawyers with perfectly coiffed wives or paramours who preened in bright red dresses with matching red lipstick, flooded into the cathedral. The men were glad-handing, the women striking their best angle for paparazzi.

Mafioso, Cosa nostra distillates, looked stereotypical: sunglasses, Italian suits, curving closed-mouthed smiles, a satisfied smugness, as if Silvio Berlusconi had scripted their complicity. Vatican City’s message was dictated to decision makers around the world on this day, October sixth, the day of the Red Mass.

Judge Hertzog and his advisor, who was always at his side, the ex-senator most folks in Attaway called Speedy, were in the center of the thrall. Voris, a retired Air Force General, now C.E.O. of Seymour Youth Detention Center, stood beside them, his head bent, listening carefully to the aged politician and judge. They eyed each other in agreement and slowly climbed the steps, entering the famous Basilica. The judge spoke quietly as he ascended: As our illustrious Governor Edwards was fond of saying, it looks like nothing stands in our way unless we are caught with a dead girl in our bed…

Speedy, the confidante, finished Voris’ sentence: Or a live boy.

The Red Mass dates back to the thirteenth century. Its specific purpose is to promulgate the Vatican’s platform for lawyers, judges, elected officials and, evidently, powerful men with controlling interest in detention centers throughout the state. They had all received their invitations in envelopes bearing the ornate, dark wood papal seal.

Blood-red tapestries had been taken out of storage. They were used only for this special mass, adorning the entrance and draping the altar. The perfume from sprays of ruby red roses filled the air. The pews were packed. 

Security guards and local cops held their own vigil outside, guarding the entrance blocked with barricades, as tourists gawked, pigeons fed, a violinist played, and fortunes were revealed at fold-out tables on the gypsy side of Jackson Square.

Tarot and palms! called out a woman at a tiny table with a placard bearing the name Novena, written in calligraphy, as she assessed the others with her eyes. She looked familiar to the old general as he waited at the top of the stairs to be admitted. He squinted in the bright sun, looking in her direction, the gypsy side where she was stationed, and then followed his friends into St. Louis Cathedral.

As the host was raised high a stream of Latin issued forth from the cardinal, proclaiming the transubstantiation. Baby-faced altar boys rang bells in earnest, punctuating the phrases. Unctuous incense made rivulets in the rose-scented air. 

Amelia, the tarot card reader, noticed the three men from her home town. She recalled blacker masses, and the underbelly of society into which she had inadvertently stumbled. She turned up a card from the center pile. It was the Tower. A lightning bolt from the black sky strikes, toppling the crown. People fall, upside down, from high places.

CHAPTER TWO:

Amelia

I stared into the abyss until it stared or rather leered back at me. I fell in love with a man who was bad. Evil. All the signs were there that something was wrong, but he said, looking deeply into my eyes, that he was telling me the truth, and I forgave reality. I let it blend into the backdrop of illusion, like dogs baying at the moon in the tarot deck. They bark with longing at what they can’t reach, or understand…. 

It was my third return to Attaway in my adult life. Seth Smith had always appealed to me. He’d been Farmer of the Year. The Mississippi’s alluvial soil spawned skipped row cotton; his was the first bale in and the heftiest load. He had a perfect ass, was a college kicker, and wore 32 Levi’s starched and tucked into Wolverines. Olive skin and dead sexy. Now, he’d seem more sexy dead. I had a Glock .40 caliber, and I intended to use it. 

The trouble began upon my return to Attaway, Louisiana. My friends had a plan to get me into Our Lady of the Lake hospital through the emergency room, to get treatment for edema of unknown etiology. I had intermittent congestive heart failure, and sudden swelling hit me hard.

My body had been through a lot. Three years earlier, Hollis, my husband for eight years had fallen asleep at the wheel. He’d suffered brain damage from the car wreck and had no emotional memories. Having a broken hip as well, he was on a walker. He could not remember names, children’s birthday parties, or that he had ridden bulls to put himself through college. He recalled business accounts and the number of eighteen-wheeler loads of plastic lawn furniture his company shipped to Target stores in a three-state area each day. But his limbic system was damaged from injuries to the left side of his head, which caused significant shearing of the left parietal lobe. His head smashed, repeatedly, into the driver’s window at eighty-two miles per hour. The vectors of going airborne at that speed, after leaving the grassy median and hitting the tarmac, plus eight rolls of the vehicle, had also broken his neck. 

I had crushing injuries from the car wreck. I received over a hundred units of blood products and was left open from my pubis to sternum for eleven days, in a Propofol-induced coma. My liver was in pieces and I was on life support. My lungs had shut down from ARDS. Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome. My three sons were instructed every afternoon, during the I.C.U. visiting hour, to say goodbye to me, and were told there was no reason my heart still beat, except for the fact that I’d been a nationally ranked triathlete before the accident, with a very strong heart. My youngest son Lucky, who was eleven, had grown tired of this litany. He refused to believe I would die, and I was told that he said, Mom, it’s true about your liver and your broken legs, but your face and teeth are fine. I know you’ll come back. Everything is going to be fine.

We had gone from sharing an amazing life together as a loving, supportive couple and happy family living healthy lives on a sixty-acre peninsula of a lake in Attaway, Louisiana, to what we were now: both of us irrevocably damaged from the accident. These days, Hollis struggled to shave, negotiating around his neck brace, one hand on his walker. Tearfully, I read out loud to him a love letter he had written to me in the past.

Hmm. Doesn’t mean a thing to me. I can’t imagine feeling that way. I sure don’t feel that way now. Listen, do you need…medicine? or should I drop you back off at that place…, what’s it called…, the hospital? His voice was devoid of emotion. He had no memory of the richness of the invisible body of oneness we had breathed life into for eight years.

Significant shearing of the left parietal lobe, the neurosurgeon had told us. The same thing the boxer Alexander had suffered defending his W.B.O. World Title. I had watched from Winky Wright’s seat, second row at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Jesus Lopez had pummeled Alexander’s brains loose from their moorings. I was a boxing journalist after the inevitable divorce from Hollis.

I had driven through Mexico alone in my older model Mercedes, touring ten cities to unearth stories about famous Mexican boxers. Or, to escape the feeling of being a ghost while still in a body. My former life had disappeared. My love was gone. Others were crying to me that I had to bury the man I had known and loved, as the person they knew as Hollis was gone. My sons were out of control.

I drove without a map, not speaking the language, only having to ask, Donde esta Aguascalientes? or some other locale, and after someone did the pointing, with sincere gratitude I would offer Muy amable (very kind). Mexico is a great place to heal.

I had a fluid tumor from the carnage of surgeries, which burst in Mexico. I was taken to the hospital by the fight doctor, in Torreon, where, in a pinch, I was the corner man for Jesus Lopez. The empty spaces in my body — the result of sixteen surgeries — regularly filled up with lymphatic fluid, and sometimes these pockets became infected. My right fallopian tube played double jump rope with my right ureter, as well. I was a mess, filled with scar tissue, but time after time, surgery after surgery, I managed to stay alive.

The hospital bill, diagnosis, cat scan, follow-up visit, and meds in Mexico came to only ninety-five U.S. dollars. I lost twenty-three pounds in five days as non-serous fluid, chyle, shunted through a superhighway of fallopian tube, 3.3 cm in circumference, and out of my vagina. The body, with its vast intelligence, works hard to heal itself.

I felt so well when the fluid came out, after years of pain and swelling. I felt so light and free that I competed in a race in San Miguel de Allende, and was top female across the finish line (after the cash runners) in a 4.5 miler at 7,000 ft. altitude. Away from my almost adult three sons, I felt marvelous.

The boys and I had left Louisiana and now lived in a beautiful home which abutted a nature preserve, Wild Basin Ledge, in Austin, Texas. The back yard had a creek frequented by deer, which featured two-thousand square feet of decking, and a hot tub. After heavy rains, we had waterfalls. That is where I first fell into the boxing world.

Despite the limits I would set, despite my left hook and my grip on the check book, without a daddy in sight the boys were out of control. All three were good looking and highly intelligent. Renting out our house for a University of Texas frat party as well as other pranks, were everyday occurrences. The house fire that resulted from squirting lighter fluid across my bedroom, aiming at the white marble fireplace was the last straw.

Yet, I recalled other nuances of my existence which had presented their own challenges. I scaled Suicide Cliff to enter the valley that was my home on the east end of Molokai, in Hawaii. Footholds were tiny pukas in black lava rock and Big Jack waves threatened to lick me off and swallow me whole if I incorrectly counted the sets of Pacific pounders or missed my footing. 

Honoko’i and Halawa Valley comprised one of the seven chakra points on the planet, as defined by the Harmonic Convergence, or so we were told. Sub-Pacific ley lines connected with old Druid sites in the U.K., along the Molokai fault line. 

Our valley was filled with spirits. Queen Lilliokalani banished the kahuna kahunas (her advisors, the wisest of the wise) to Honoko’i when she heard of a coup forming. The magicians/alchemists buried their dead in the mountain face, creating hermetically sealed crypts.

The remaining members of the Manson family would trek to Honoko’i once a year to rappel, trying to reach and open one of these secret chambers. I watched them through Swarovski binoculars. They were naked except for bright red loincloths. Jade said they were less of a threat than the Vietnam veterans who grew pot and occasionally came down the mountains to pick Opihi (monovalve limpets) on days the sea was flat, when Kona winds cancelled out the Trades. 

The growers showed up. I was alone. The leader inquired if anyone else was inside the koa where our framed-up ‘town lumber’ house was situated. I lied and said yes. The threatening looking men moved aside and allowed me to access the stream to put water in my plastic ten-gallon container and carry it back to our garden. 

Jade and I had hurled the wood for our home, piece by piece, down the mountain side from narrow trails. These switchbacks were a much longer route to our home site than crossing Suicide Cliff, but they provided a way to get the construction material into our valley. 

Before my adventure of outdoor living on Molokai, I had been a commodities broker, when the prime was twenty and one-half percent. I was selling silver futures in Dallas and running a discount construction company with the help of Mexican ‘runners’, who put flyers on door knobs in Garland and other neighborhoods promoting Creative Companies. One call will do it all. Additions. Enclosures. Discount Carpentry. 

The phone room for Creative Companies’ sales staff was in my house, on lower Greenville, near the Greenville Avenue Bar and Grill, the Three Coins, and The Grape Restaurant. The phone lines were registered under the name Scarlett O’Hara.

More recently, I’d authored papers presented on the Hill to change HUD pricing. I had an apartment in London. I was also an international representative for the alligator industry, meeting with designers and vice presidents, purveyors of high-end luxury goods, providing education about crocodilians, particularly genuine Louisiana alligator. I promoted saving a species through first saving its habitat; sustainable use. 

The tangle-eyed woman who cleaned my teeth, as well as many others in Attaway, assumed I was lying about my clients. Someone from Attaway couldn’t work for Gucci and Prada, like she says. 

Money making was something I was good at, because I understood it was all about networking, connections, and belief system. People buy because they like you, I was fond of saying at my sales training seminars.

I had been hired by the Richemont Group to train their sales staff about exotic skins and genuine American Alligator, most of which came from Louisiana’s swamps and bayous.

I would fling myself into new and exciting environs as often as possible. My life jumped from outdoor living in Hawaii to studying spirituality in Santa Fe, New Mexico. From radio production and sales to caring for street kids in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. I worked with and learned from healers and task master yoga teachers around the world. I enjoyed dinner party circuits in London; I had a generous expense account while employed by the biggest money maker in the U.K.

I knew artists and authors, from viscounts to vagabonds. It’s hard to tell the difference between the latter category in some places, such as the Caribbean, the southern coast of Italy and France, and San Miguel de Allende in the high desert of Mexico. They all look slightly unkempt with sun-bleached cotton clothing shades and messy hair.

I was particularly fond of crusty old men, curmudgeons with piercing insights, vast experience, and genius. Perhaps my flexibility and openness contributed to being an easy mark for those dark beings who found me and ferreted me away to the underworld, like Persephone, but called it Paradise.

Upon my return from directing and producing a boxing documentary in Mexico, I remember praying, If only the universe would send a man.

I could picture him, dark, sardonic, and a deep lover. An incredible man who was powerful and in control. I wanted him to be strong. I no longer wanted to mistake weakness for strength in my mad dash to unearth it in a man. I wanted to share that strength with a partner who could live life displaying his truth. God had put a burning desire in me to be the one to see and support that strength, that masculinity, my feminine nature no longer languishing, but met in a double strike of lightning. I wanted him to sleep with me and make love to me and for us to love each other fiercely in every aspect as our lives together unfolded. But I always recall the words of the Tarot reader. The dark stranger will destroy you. The thought made me shiver.

CHAPTER THREE:

Homecoming

Upon my return to Attaway, I stayed with my accountant and his wife. One night, while I was fooling around with Google Earth there was a knock at the door and John came into the study. 

Someone is here to see you, Amelia.

Seth appeared.

I had been looking up my favorite medical museum in Europe, in Basel, Switzerland. The last director before the medical school closed was H.C. Lecter, a lettered European gentleman practitioner of the medical arts.

I’d been hiding out, due to the swelling and feelings of hopelessness. I didn’t think anyone besides Jane and the friends I was staying with knew I was back in Attaway. I had just arrived.

Seth’s mother, Agnes, was in collusion with my C.P.A., the one in all the hunting pictures with her sons; together they hatched the plan. Agnes informed her son of their opportunity to stabilize and advance their positions by preying on me, the ill woman ensconced at their accountant’s home.

I was a woman with whom Seth was already familiar. I’d been his shiatsu therapist before his lumbar surgery, when he was farming. Agnes had pointed the way; she knew I needed health insurance and that if Seth married me I’d get group insurance through Seymour Youth Detention Center… at a price. Seth needed a new truck and the family needed money. A lot of it.

He was wearing a red tie with small black polka dots, wing tip shoes, dark pressed trousers, and a white button-down oxford polo shirt. He later admitted that his mother had not only pointed him in my direction; she had dressed him as well.

I saw your little red Mercedes, he said, his eyes glistening, super shiny.

Did you notice the stickers from Mexico? I kissed him on both cheeks.

No, but I can only imagine. He flashed me a winning smile, and gazed at me with his deep, seemingly warm, black eyes.

I heard you’d become a boxing journalist, and still have a house in Austin. And that the boys are there.

If I could raise those boys, I could easily take on Mexico, sola, I remarked, twisting up my hair on my neck and falling into behavior referred to in the South as coy.

You look wonderful, I told him.

He put his arm around me and we walked outside to see the stars and hear the cicadas. Things have turned around, he said. I have my job back at Seymour Youth. I’m teaching woodworking, running their vo-tech.

~ * ~

Seth’s mother gave me a coming home party. I was feted, welcomed back, by people I’d known in the neighborhood; as a child, I’d been a flower girl for one of the attendees. 

I was so happy to be back in my old neighborhood. I heard the progeny of mocking birds I’d grown up listening to. Pyracantha bushes still lined fences and Four O’Clocks still opened at four in the afternoon beside little clumps of wild violets in the moist dirt covered by eaves, alongside the houses.

I walked past the white Silverado belonging to Seth’s father, and his mother’s matching white Buick, both cleaned and waxed to perfection. Seth and his brother, Hart, Jr., took care of the lawn and hedge clipping, and washed their parents’ vehicles once every week or two. 

I entered the screen door from the garage, Seth holding it open for me. The kitchen had bi-level countertops with yellowed Formica and yellow window sheers further jaundiced the light. There were rows of crystal glasses, Baccarat and Waterford, platters of party food, bowls with floating roses, scented oil. There was hand grasping and hugging without breasts touching, welcoming me back.

I let out my breath in great sighs over and over, in relief. I was back home, everyone knew me, it felt as safe and comfortable as my childhood. And I might have a man who could help put parameters on my unruly sons and supply me with what had been so elusive, health insurance. Then I could find doctors who would help me get well.

I caught a glimpse of Seth’s father in another room, semi-reclined. Agnes said, Oh, don’t bother with him he can’t say anything…I’ll check on him in a minute. She resumed a story she was telling some friends, and I saw his eyes dart and noted that he barely had the energy to motion with one finger. But he did, trying to get his wife’s attention. Agnes was not one to be easily interrupted; she became more animated in her storytelling, planning her pauses for effect. When she stopped speaking for a minute, she examined her fingernails, playing the martyr at the same time she was insisting her husband was well. The family knew Hart wasn’t going to die. After all, they had seen a healing nun in Baton Rouge who told them she visualized a man who liked to fish, and she claimed Hart, Sr., would be healed. They held on to that.

Well Amelia, one of the women said, I hear you’ve been all over the place! I’m so glad to see you. I hope you stay a while…. I do miss your momma. I should’ve gone by to see her more often.

She’s still there, I said, there being the only Alzheimer’s facility in Attaway.

Others waited patiently for their turn to hug me. Their hands smelled of rose water, and they wore brooches and pearls.

Amelia, you just take up all of the air in a room, Kay proclaimed in a laughing manner. But she wasn’t laughing at all. I made her nervous. Kay was so uptight, still speaking baby talk, as we all did in high school, in a voice appropriate for doll play, her lips pursed in pretense. Well sweetie pie, do tell…, she continued. Superficial, but nevertheless interested in knowing what I was doing with this good-looking younger man with the very bad reputation.

There were no men at the party except for Seth, his brother Hart, Jr., and their dying father. The boys greeted each other in their usual fashion, saying Hey, junkie, and receiving a Hey, junkie back. To Amelia, it didn’t seem to mean much.

We ate cake, three different kinds, and there was bread pudding in an aluminum pan from a downtown Attaway restaurant. Bottles of La Crema Cab Sav were opened on the table, along with Barefoot red wine, Agnes’ favorite. The brothers went to the wet bar and poured stiff drinks of Crown Royal and Coke for themselves. 

I made my way to the man I had known as far back as I can remember, the mayor, old man Hart. I meandered past the silver, crystal and china which was ubiquitous at the parties of fine people, toward the big man who was unable to speak because his esophagus had been burned out by radiation. He was stuck in a Big Boy recliner with the television blaring gale force winds, and a bitch of a sea on a reality fishing program, while Agnes spoke as if her husband were not present.

He looked like he would die soon. I kissed his cheek, noticing a formaldehyde scent and heavy-laden stillness. Nothing dynamic remained; it was death by stasis. Perhaps that was what chemo and radiation did, killed everything, including the mitochondria that motivated life.

I massaged his shoulders and some of the hardness dissolved. His nod and half smile told me it felt good and gave him some relief… or at least something to focus on besides his pain.

At some point Agnes took the party outside under the veranda, where chairs and tables were already set up for when the afternoon cooled down.

Before everyone was seated, Agnes yelled Seth! Hart, Jr.! Get those fucking birds! She had spotted a nest under the eaves of the metal patio covering.

Everyone’s head turned. Agnes wore a malevolent expression. The boys hopped to and Agnes unwound the hose from the welded rack as fast as a fireman. She held the nozzle screwed tightly, aiming a blast of water worthy of riot control at the mother dove in her nest. The babies fell to the concrete. Their skin was transparent, revealing tiny organs as they flopped about on the wet pavement. Agnes put her Brighton penny loafer down hard on two of them, squishing them like cockroaches. Then she turned her attention to the mother bird which she drowned after forcing the nozzle deep into her beak.

It was disturbing, to say the least. Clean that shit off my patio, she instructed her sons, straightening her wig.

Fuckin’ doves. Agnes said, as if to settle the matter.

Still, I was happy to be home with a handsome man, his brother and parents, the old neighborhood, and Attaway people I had known my entire life. 

I was so happy to shave and massage Hart, Sr., each morning. In his final days, I intimated that I wanted to share my experience of leaving my body after the wreck and seeing heaven. I assumed that since Agnes was in deep denial about Hart’s dying that he didn’t want her to hear any of that. 

It was very difficult for Agnes and me to negotiate the still heavyset six-foot-six man anywhere, as he had already become dead weight. We careened precariously, tumbling onto sofas or beds, depending on which room we were in. Seth was never around to help. Most of the time we made it halfway to our destination before we called Hart, Jr., to come help, which he did, every time. 

Before the feeding tube had been placed the old man had endured over seventy rounds of chemo, plus radiation, in one year, and now he had daily rounds of radiation which he had to be driven to Baton Rouge to receive. He didn’t want to, Agnes acknowledged that, but she insisted he must.

The healing nun said he would live, so of course he would… he just had to listen to his doctor and keep having treatments. He waved them off when they tried to move him, and tears flowed from his eyes. He pointed to his catheter.

Agnes whacked the side of his large, bald head. There isn’t anything we can do about that, so stop complaining! He shook his head defiantly; his eyes filled with desperation. He did everything he could, pointed to the phone, pleaded for help, his hands tightly clasped.

It was a couple of days before anyone discovered that his catheter bulb had inflated prematurely, while it was still in the urethra. The pain must have been as terrible as a kidney stone the size of a bulb which pumped gas into an outboard motor.

Those days, I thought a lot about pain and suffering. In the past, I had lectured on the subject and had written a self-help book about it. I was armed with a level of sophistication from nearly five decades of living, and from boy raising, mostly on my own. I had learned the importance of not seeking out suffering, but when it came, to welcome it like a long-lost lover. It’s going to happen anyway, I reasoned, so you might as well approach it that way, in order to best extract the lessons. 

One morning when I entered the room and kissed Seth’s father on the top of his head, he began signaling something, an invisible ring he slipped off and on his finger. I thought he was indicating that he had lost his wedding ring and wanted it back, badly. I ran to Agnes, who was vacuuming. 

I’m not giving him his fucking ring back! Do you know how many times he’s lost it and I’ve had to bend down and look for it? Hell, no!

I lobbied for him to have his ring. When I returned empty handed to his bedside he pulled me with his remaining strength, yanking the neck of my shirt into his fist, pulling my face close to his. It startled me. He glared intently, trying to convey something that was apparently important. He glanced at the baby monitor indicating we should not be overheard. I turned it off and prepared to tell him the story of my dying; I figured that he wanted to hear it but he knew Agnes would be angry.

He continued to hold me next to his chest. I knew from my days at the Center for the