Tales From The Blue Reptile

Tales From The Blue Reptile
SCOTT L ANDERSON
by SCOTT L ANDERSON
Copyright © 2003
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Table of Contents
Tales From The Blue Reptile..................................................................... 1
i | Table of Contents
TALES FROM THE BLUE REPTILE
Scott L. Anderson
Tales From The Blue Reptile | 1

As always, this is for Bones and Twinkie.
and
For Dennis, the wildest son of a bitch that I ever
knew. I hope you were in heaven at least five
minutes before the devil knew you were gone.
2 | Tales From The Blue Reptile

I am the lizard king. I can do anything
J. Morrison

BLUE REPTILE
La Mesa is down by Tijuana. It's probably the worst prison in Mexico,
maybe in the whole goddamn world. I was getting close to my third
anniversary there and I was still relatively in one piece. I'd been pretty
lucky so far since I hadn't been shot, shanked, turned out, or even had
my ass kicked.
I had just come back from the weight pile and was relaxing in my casa,
sipping a Corona and sharing a joint with my cellmate, Javier, a huge
biker doing a life bit for murdering a rival gang member by hacking off
his head with a machete. When the Federales pulled him over they
found the head in one of his saddlebags.
Doing time in Mexico is a helluva lot different than it is back up in the
states. In the good old U. S. of A. you can go to the joint and still expect
to get three hots and a cot even if you don't have a damn dime to your
name. In Mexico if you don't have any jack you're going to be sleeping
on the floor in a communal cell with about fifty other indigents and
shitting over an open hole while all your cellmates watch. And you're
going to be over that hole a whole lot because your diet will consist
mostly of beans, rice, and if you're lucky a bit of horse or donkey meat.
All mixed together.
My stay was being bankrolled by my employer in the states. My inmate
account had a check deposited like clockwork in it every month. It paid
for my double cell which I shared with Javier, a semi-comfortable bed, a
sometimes flushing toilet, decent chow, and if I watched my cash, some
cervaze and a bit of smoke to tide me over.
Like I said before, I had been in La Mesa for close to three years. I had
yet to even see a judge.
Javier was squinting through the smoke while wrapping a couple of
rubber bands around his tattoo gun, getting ready for an appointment.
Javier had been his gang's tattoo master on the outside and had kept up
his craft while in the joint. I had become his advertising billboard.
Whenever he came up with some new flash he asked me if he could try it
out on me and if I agreed, would reward me with a case of beer, some
weed, or get me a whore for the monthly communal visit. Problem was I
was starting to run out of space. Javier was currently in the middle of a

huge job that was putting him on edge, tattooing an intricate Virgin Mary
onto the back of very well connected, very dangerous cocaine dealer.
I was standing over the toilet draining out some of Mexico's finest when
I felt the barrel of the rifle pressing against the base of my skull. The
pressure continued until my forehead was flush against the sweating wall.
"Put your dick away, ese, and put your hands behind your back."
Shaking it off, I put my hands behind me and felt the cuffs snap on
tightly. A set of leg irons followed and a pair of hands roughly frisked
me down. A couple of goon squad guards twisted me around and
walked/dragged me past a wide eyed Javier, down the cell hall, through
the yard past hundreds of gawking convicts and vendors, passing through
a enormous medieval looking metal door, and into the back of a waiting
prison van.
I figured the long wait for my trial was finally over.
The van raced off in typical Mexican driving style, about a 120 miles an
hour. I was sitting on a flat metal bench and whenever the driver took a

hard turn I was thrown onto the floor. After what seemed like forever
we pulled into a town because the driver slowed down to about a
hundred. Suddenly the van screeched to a stop, throwing me straight
into the metal screen separating me from the guards. Blood was pouring
from a nasty gash over my eye.
I had rolled over on to my knees when the back door opened. Two
gigantic U. S. Border Patrol agents who looked like their entire diet
consisted of horse steroids and protein shakes, were standing behind the
Mexican guards, dwarfing them. They stepped back and watched
through their mirrored sunglasses as the guards extracted me from the
van and removed my restraints.
The biggest agent stepped forward, punched me in the stomach, grabbed
me by the shoulders, and threw me spread-eagled over the hood of their
Suburban, and handcuffed me again, seemingly all in one motion.
Snatching me by the elbow and back of my belt, he did a neat little
pirouette and literally threw me into the back seat of the vehicle and
slammed the door.
"Stay the hell down, asshole!"

Gasping for air and trying to sit up at the same time, I saw that we were
at the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing. Cars were backed up a
hundred yards waiting to cross back into the states and tourists were
gawking out their windows at the display they had just witnessed. The
driver drove up to the border checkpoint station, honking his horn, while
forcing his way into the line and through the checkpoint without
stopping. We pulled on to U. S. soil.
I couldn't fucking believe it!
"Hey! What the hell is going on? Where are we going?"
The guard in the passenger seat glared over his shoulder at me. "Didn't I
tell you to stay down, shitbird? I have to say it again you're gonna get a
taste of this." He was brandishing a large canister of pepper spray.
Taking his advice, I tried to make myself as comfortable as you could
with your hands cuffed behind your back, and tried to watch the San
Diego scenery drift by, but it was rather hard from my vantage point.
Soon the drone of the tires on the road and the sweet comfort of the air
conditioning lulled me into a semi-deep sleep.

"Get the hell out of the truck."
Before I had time to open my eyes, someone had grabbed me by the
ankles and pulled me out of the truck and onto the hard packed ground.
I was rolled over onto my stomach with a knee jammed into the middle
of my back while my hands were freed of the cuffs. The guard also
taking the opportunity to step on my head.
"Stay down until the truck is in motion, convict!"
The truck fishtailed off, spraying me with sand and gravel. I stood up
slowly, spitting sand out of my mouth. They had left me somewhere out
in the desert. The sun was blinding. About fifty yards away stood a
battered old Quonset hut. As I walked towards it a door opened.
"Look at all those tats! You look like shit, Negro!"
An unusual statement since he was black, and although I had a great tan
that comes naturally from hanging out in the yard of a Mexican prison
for three years, I still considered myself to be from the white persuasion.

"Agent Lawrence, nice to see you again. Always expected a visit but you
must have been busy." I was being sarcastic.
Jameel Lawrence was as always, even in the oppressive heat of the desert,
dressed impeccably. Matching cream colored shirt and pants, silk tie,
brown alligator skin shoes, pork pie hat with a little feather, razor thin
mustache, and hanging from his right hand, a chrome 9mm with pearl
handles. A weapon I had once told him only a pimp would own.
He stepped back into the warehouse and beckoned me in with a lazy
wave of his free hand.
"I'm sorry about that, Buck. But it wasn't too long after you got popped
that some assholes in the media got wind of our operation in South
Central. Took a while for that shitstorm to die down. I was having to
lay low until I could pay off a couple of those wetback judges and get you
released into our custody."
"And now what?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "You're a free man. I got you a little pocket
money to get you back on your feet." He pointed over to a comer of the
warehouse. "You're Jeep is under that tarp. All tuned with new rubber."
I walked over and pulled off the tarp. There sat my old battered Jeep. In
the front seat was a leather valise with some clothes. I turned around
and faced Lawrence.
"Three years! Three fucking years in the worst shithole you could
imagine and this is how I get paid. All the dope I muled for you assholes
over the years and I get new tires and a little spending money!"
"Well, cry me a fucking river. What the hell did you think was going to
happen if you got busted with a thousand pounds of horse? Community
service? Shit, man. Grow up. I could have let you rot in that prison.
You were goddamn lucky I was around for you. If it hadn't been for me
you wouldn't have lived as good as you did when you were locked
down." He reached into his back pocket and threw a envelope to me. "
15 large. We're fucking even."

I opened the envelope and ran my fingers over the bills. 'Fifteen
thousand! You guys spend that much a week on snitches." I threw the
envelope in the Jeep. "They would've had to let me go sooner or later
anyway. There was no fucking evidence."
Lawrence sighed wearily. "What can I say? You lost over five hundred
kilos of heroin and a Cessna 310 in the bust. You earned close to a
million dollars with a us and you were taken care of when you went
inside. Who knows what could have happened if it had gone to trial?
The Agency feels it's done enough for you." His eyes softened. "Just go
home, Buck. Start over. It could have been a lot worse. They found
your buddy Norman wearing a Colombian necktie in a fleabag in
downtown Tijuana. Horrible sight."
He turned to go and hesitated. "You still like to sample the products?"
"It helped pass the time."
Lawrence reached into his shirt pocket and tossed me a glass vial. Inside
was a blue colored gel caplet. "Some new mind expanders from the boys

in the lab, if you know what I mean. Wait till you get home though. You
don't want try to drive after you take this shit."
He headed out the door. "They call it Blue Reptile. Later, Negro."
Fueled by caffeine, greasy burgers, cigarettes, and a bottle of Jack
Daniel's, I made it home to Minnesota in just under thirty hours. My old
Jeep had run like a dream.
With my smuggling earnings I had bought five acres of wooded land just
outside of Moose Lake and built a nice little cabin on the property, both
cash on the barrelhead. Having been gone for three years I didn't know
what to expect. The cabin was heated by a combination of solar power
and electricity and I paid the electricity bill by direct deposit so there was
a good chance that the power was still on. But for all I knew it could
have burned down or been ransacked.
I turned down the dirt driveway and stopped at the gate. The chain still
held it shut and the lock was intact. I opened it up and continued on up
to the cabin. Amazingly from the outside it looked good though the yard
resembled a jungle. When I walked in, other than the musty smell, the

place looked the same as it had the day I'd left to fly the load out of
Ensenada. The VCR was flashing 12:00 so the power was on.
I walked through the rooms hoping not to find a body. Bongo, my big
tomcat, had been left to fend for himself after I had been busted and my
wife left. His gravity feeder which held twenty pounds of food was long
empty. Water was no issue since he either drank out of the toilet or out
of the stream behind the cabin when the weather was decent. He could
come and go as he pleased through a little door in the back porch. He
either had split after growing tired of waiting for me or had fallen victim
to a wolf or some redneck's deer rifle. Bongo was the only remaining
connection to my marriage. I swallowed down a lump in my throat.
I put away the groceries I had picked up in town, pulled my Colt .45
down from it's hiding place on one of the crossbeams, then laid down on
the bed and slept straight through the next two days.
It took a few days to get the cabin back to living shape. When the job
was finally done I was sitting on the front porch, drinking a beer, and
grilling some chicken. It felt so goddamn good to be free. It had all
happened so fast I hadn't had time to think about it. There were no

more counts, no worries about some gangbanger trying to run a shank
through me in the yard, no perverts hitting me up for sex, no guards to
pay off, it was all over. Now I was enjoying a nice breeze coming in off
the lake and birds chirping in the trees. Maybe Jameel was right. Maybe
it was time to start over.
Suddenly remembering the vial that he had given me, I decided to
celebrate. Walking out to the jeep I opened the glove box and found the
vial where I had left it. I popped the vial open and dropped the caplet
into my hand. I held it up to the light and looked through it's clear aqua
blue color. I had taken LSD manufactured by the CIA several times
before. Always in small doses. It was a very different kind of trip. Very
intense since it was engineered for interrogation or mind control,
definitely not the kind of shit brewed up by some burn out hippie in his
basement. I washed the caplet down with a swig of beer.
Within minutes I knew I had made a huge mistake.
Everything was suddenly lit up like it was made out of fluorescent neon
colored lighting, my whole body felt like it was made out of rubber, my
hearing was so tuned in that I thought I could hear ants crawling across

the floor. I closed my eyes and vivid flashes of color were popping and
flashing like flashbulbs. Opening them back up I looked over at the
radio. Led Zeppelin was jamming on Rock and Roll, the notes of the
music were pouring out of the speakers and pooling on the floor, the
volume overbearing. In a rage I took the radio and smashed it to pieces
against the wall. I felt incredibly nauseous, staggered over to the railing
and projectile vomited a geyser of molten lava that rolled down the
incline of the yard like it was bubbling from a volcano. When I looked
up a horned, winged demon was staring at me from the woods, giving
me the finger as he crouched down and stroked his barbed penis with his
other hand. I grabbed my pistol and fired madly at the devil but only
succeeded in shredding a white birch to shreds. Every time a round hit
the tree's trunk it exploded in a techno-color blaze. The demon shot to
his feet and flew off into the woods. A red hot ejected piece of brass
flew over my shoulder and went down the back of my shirt. I felt it melt
into the back of my neck and exit out at the base of my spine. I threw
the gun down and puked again. A rocket ship or some kind of UFO
came screaming over the cabin at tree top level, setting the tops of the
trees on fire.

Staggering into the house I collapsed on to the couch and covered my
head with a blanket. I heard a loud banging and looked up at the rafters.
An enormous multi-colored woodpecker was hammering away at a beam,
then suddenly flew straight at the wall and exploded, turning into a large
blue lizard with bright red eyes.
Curling up in the fetal position I covered my head again with the blanket
and prayed for this nightmare to end. My skin was crawling and my
insides felt like I had eaten a bowl full of spiders.
When I came to, everything was deathly quiet. Uncovering my head I
saw the lizard was still crawling lazily across the wall, his tongue lazily
snapping in and out. I looked at the clock, five hours had passed. The
room was filled with a pleasant golden glow and a toasty fire burning in
the fireplace that I didn't remember lighting, was warming the air. Silver
butterflies filled the air. Seems the worst of the trip was over.
Bongo, my orange Tabby, was sitting on the coffee table looking at me
with a big grin on his face.
A grin?

"How ya doing, Buck? It's been a long time."
Obviously I was still quite high. I sat up and stared at the big tom.
"Bongo?"
"Never knew I could talk, huh?"
I laid back down on the couch and roared with laughter. "Jameel was
right, this is some crazy shit!"
Bongo jumped from the coffee table to the foot of the couch and
sprawled out. "I'm glad you're back, dude. I was sick of eating garbage
and vermin. Where you been?"
"Prison. I got busted on a load and was locked up down in a Mexican
jailhouse." I rolled off the couch and walked over to the refrigerator to
grab a beer. My legs felt like they were ten feet long. I slammed a beer
down in three long gulps and popped another. I opened a can of tuna
and put it in front of the big cat.

"I can't believe I'm talking to a cat." I giggled again. "Guess I'll have to
roll with it
The cat shook his head in disgust. "Drugs again. It's ruined everything"
He glared at me, eyes filled with fury. "It drove Zoe away."
Zoe being my ex. Just hearing her name made me weak.
"I'm sorry, Bongo. But I miss her too."
"Not so much that you couldn't give up the smuggling and dope when
she wanted you to. If you had quit all that shit she'd still be here."
I lit up a Camel, and laid back down on the couch. These incredible,
orgasmic like, weird rushes were going up and down my body. Looking
up at the skylight I saw a tree frog like creature looking down at me. The
UFO must have landed. I was glad my pistol was still out on the porch
or I would have been replacing a skylight. "I couldn't quit then if I had
wanted to. She just didn't understand."

Bongo finished his tuna with a loud belch. He started washing his nuts,
stopped suddenly, and looked up at me.
"I don't understand you. You had everything and pissed it all away.
What's been eating you up inside all these years?”
I flicked my cigarette at the cat, missing his head by inches. "What are
you, my fucking shrink?" I screamed at him. "You're just a part of the
trip! A hallucination! When I wake up in the morning you'll be back to
being a goddamn alley cat! I don't have to listen to this shit!"
Bongo's eyes turned a bright red as he arched up and hissed. His head
expanded to the size of a cougar. It was a frightening display and almost
literally scared the shit out of me. I was still feeling pretty queasy.
Shivering, I closed my eyes and gave into the acid. My voice sounded
like it was a thousand miles away.
My old man was working at Hormel. The company that makes SPAM and that
shitty tasting chili that you use to always like when I ran out of cat food. It was just
him, me, and my grandmother. My mom had run out on us years ago, the old man

never told me what happened to her. It wasn't bad though. We had a lot of fun.
Dad treated me more like a pal than a son. Hell, he got me a six pack and a hooker
on my sixteenth birthday.
But there was one small problem. I was stretching the truth when I said my
grandmother lived with us. She was with us in the house. But she was dead. A
couple years back she had stroked out and the old man still wanted her social security
checks so he wrapped her in plastic and dry walled her up behind a wall in the
basement. He kept signing her checks for her.
Then one Saturday night the old man got tanked on booze and downers. Ran a stop
sign at seven o'clock on Sunday morning. Killed a entire family on the way to church.
He got charged with four counts of vehicular manslaughter, possession of weed, and
burying his mother in the basement and cashing her checks. He got twenty to thirty in
the state pen in Stillwater.
I had no other family so I got sent to a youth work farm outside of Albert Lea called
Frank's Place.
Frank was a retired military man and a burly old alcoholic who ran a tight ship. He
had around fifteen boys on his farm ranging in ages from twelve to seventeen. Even

though I was sixteen I was roomed with another kid who was only twelve. His name
was Stevie. Stevie told me that Frank was shitface drunk by eight every night and
then he left an older boy named Randy in charge. In prison Randy would be
considered your average predator.
At supper time, Randy, who was about six foot and two bills, told me to come to his
room after lights out, he had to talk to me, set down the farm rules.
I had a good idea what the meeting was gonna be about so just before lights out I filled
a sock with pennies out of Stevie's change jar and tied it off with a knot. I wrapped
my right hand with tinfoil out of the kitchen and wrapped athletic tape around it.
At lights out I walked down the hall to Randy's room. I knocked lightly and walked
in.
The lights were out but the moon was full and I could see Randy laying naked on his
bed. He laid there looking at me as he played with his erect cock.
“Get in here and close the fucking door, bitch.”

When he stood up and walked to me, I swung the sock and smashed it against his
head. The sock exploded spraying the room with pennies. Randy dropped to this
knees. I grabbed him by the hair and punched him with my tinfoil covered hand as
hard as I could for as long as I could. He dropped faced down on the floor. I kicked
in his ribs for good measure. I could hear them crack like wood popping in a fire.
Frank found him the next morning and had him rushed off in an ambulance. No
one ever saw Randy again. I ran the farm after that.
Two years later I joined the Navy.
"I never knew you were in the military."
Opening my eyes I looked over at Bongo. He had a mouse pinned down
on the floor and was slowly torturing it to death. The mouse struggled to
escape, his tiny squeaks as loud as the shattered boom box had been, but
the big cat kept him pinned to the floor with his paw as he gnawed on
the back of it's neck. "Shhh. Be quiet now." He looked over at me and
grinned, blood pouring down from his fangs. I fought back the impulse
to barf again.

"Yea, I was in the Navy. Remember that time you pissed all over my old
sea bag in the closet and I chased you out the door with a broom?"
"How could I forget?" The mouse gave a final squeak as his skull was
crunched by the jaws of his conqueror. "You told Zoe you were going to
have me neutered if I did it again. I think you might have regretted that."
Frank signed the papers since he was my legal guardian. I went to boot camp in San
Diego and then went to cook school right after that. Two days after I graduated from
the school I was on a frigate going on a westpac cruise. I spent my first hitch on that
ship and went on three westpacs. Second cruise I brought back five pounds of pot that
I hid it in the galley cooler. Made a small fortune on it. So the next cruise I decided
to expand. Brought back fifteen pounds of pure heroin. Had a connection who bought
the whole load. When I re-enlisted, I got transferred to a weapons and biological
warfare base in Indian Head, Maryland. I kept in touch with my connection in San
Diego and every other month I’d fly out to the west coast and drive back a load of
smack, blow, or grass in a old used car that I'd abandon in a parking lot somewhere
in the District. Indian Head is close to Washington, D. C and I became the main
source for quality H for the gangsters on the southern end of our nation's capital

It was hotter than the gates of hell and I was dropping off a load at my main
customer's place in the projects up on Southern Avenue. Three pounds of smack in a
gym bag. Sid was my connection's name and he was one weird dude. A black albino
with only leg, the other one shot off in an old turf war, Sid was phobic about germs
and noise. The inside of his place was sealed like a recording sound booth to keep the
sounds of the street out and it was always kept at a chilly sub-sixty degrees.
Things felt wrong the minute I walked into the place. Sid's crew of four bodyguards
was there, drinking beer and smoking crack, all of them wearing Redskins sideline
jackets. The damn place was so cold you could almost see your breath. There was a
naked chick covered in goose bumps that was giving out blowjobs as they hit the pipe.
That was all normal.
What wasn't normal was the middle aged black man, dressed to kill, who was sitting
in the kitchen with Sid. The kitchen table was covered with Glock 9 mils still in the
boxes and what looked like some sort of machine gun. Sid introduced me to the guy.
His name was Jameel. The whole deal felt wrong so I dropped off the gym bag,
collected my cash, and split, ignoring the offer of a BJ on my way out.
Three fuckin' days later at work. I’m working the grill in the officer's mess and when
I look out the window I see Jameel sitting with a table full of brass. Nothing but

Captains and Admirals. When I throw a club sandwich up on the window he looks
at me and smiles. After the lunch shift was over he met me out by my car.
Jameel had a offer for me that I couldn't refuse. From now on I delivered the product
straight to him. The money was better but the risk was higher. Jameel wanted double
the load every time I made a run. He even provided me with a bodyguard. An ex-
Green Beret named Norman who had served time in Leavenworth for dealing dope in
Germany. Things were out of my hands now. Jameel was with the Agency. CIA. If
I said no to the arrangement it would be either the brig or a slug in my brain pan. It
didn't take long to figure out what he was up to. He was moving dope to get guns.
The guns were going somewhere down to South America.
"When it came time to re,-up, I got out. The money was better on the outside. Jameel
sent me to flight school, set me up with the Cessna, and I started flying loads in and
out of Mexico twice a month. Jameel had moved his operation to Los Angeles to
concentrate on dealing with the gangs there. LA gangs were getting more juice than the
Mafia. Norman would meet me in the desert north of San Diego and load the plane
for the flight to Mexico and he'd be there to meet me to offload when I came back.
Guns out, dope in. It was a cash business for me. I owned a Corvette, the Jeep, a
Harley, a boat, and bought the cabin. I still had so fucking much money that I stuck
it in plastic drainage pipes and buried it in the barn.

Bongo was chewing on my forearm! Trying to tear apart the tiger that
was permanently inked on there. I tried to slap him across the head but
my reaction time was way off and he bounded away, laughing hysterically.
Blood was pouring from the tiger's mangled head and I stared in
amazement as the gaping wound suddenly disappeared.
"Those tattoos look like shit. You look like a fuckin’ punk." Bongo had
jumped up on the kitchen counter and I swore was now dressed in a
tuxedo and a top hat. His long fluffy tail was clutching a cane.
"You're the second person in the last three days to say that, Mr. Peanut."
I laughed, relieved that my arm wasn't actually mangled.
The lizard had crawled on to the ceiling and was now directly over me.
Looking down with sparkling diamond shaped eyes. I was desperately
craving another beer but didn't think I could figure out how to open the
refrigerator once I walked over to it. This shit would not wear off, felt
like it was gaining strength.
"If only Zoe could see you now. She'd be sickened."

"You know, Bongo, when I first met Zoe she was flashing her tits at a
strip club in Minneapolis, so she has no room to be too fucking
judgmental."
"I know what she did for a job, dipshit. Remember I was around before
you were.
My voice softened. "I remember the night I met her. I thought I was big
time. I had more money than I could spend and a unlimited supply of
blow. I was hitting the Minneapolis night scene, hanging out with pro
wrestlers, actors, rock and rollers, even players from the Vikings. I saw
her up on that stage and swore to God that I had to have her. When we
went back to her place that night you were curled up sleeping in her
laundry basket. You were about as big as that can of beer. Just a little
ball of fur."
Bongo jumped up on to my chest and curled up. His motor started
running as I scratched the top of his head. "I wanted her to stay, Bongo,
I really tried hard. But it drove me crazy knowing she was showing her
ass to all those scumbags at the club and she wanted me out of the Life.
We fought all the time. She didn't understand that I couldn't just walk

away. Jameel had me by the nuts. I wanted to make one more big score
and we could take off. Go to Tahiti or somewhere where no one could
ever find us.
I met Norman out in the desert. He looked like shit. Partying way to hard. All of
Norman's cash was going out for hookers, heroin, and Johnny Walker Red. He had
had some run ins with the cops and had to be bailed out several times. I thought he
was becoming unreliable but Jameel didn't agree. He had a load of Mac10s for me to
fly down. So many of the goddamn things I could hardly get the Cessna off the ground,
barely clearing a bunch of cactus plants at the end of the runway.
What neither Norman or Jameel knew was that I wouldn't be coming back to meet
Norman. Once that heroin got loaded in Mexico, I was flying balls to the wall
straight to a little airport just east of San Diego. Sid and his boys would be waiting
for me there. Sid had been more than a little pissed when Jameel had moved his
operation to LA and started doing business with the west coast enemy. It hadn't
taken me too much convincing to get Sid to take the whole load at a huge discount.
After I collected my cash from Sid the plan was to catch a commercial flight to
Minneapolis, pick up Zoe, and head off to points unknown. A fresh start

I landed west of Ensenada, the contacts waiting with a old U-Haul truck with five
hundred kilos of pure smack. As they offloaded the guns, topped off my fuel tanks,
and loaded on the horse, I wandered over to the side of the truck to take a piss and get
a drink of water. As I was zipping up, I glanced up and saw what seemed to be flash
of light from off of a piece of something shiny, like a mirror or a hunk of metal, way off
on a hillside. Looking behind me I saw dust rising in the air from the direction of the
only road coming in.
Tearing ass back to the plane I fired up the engines and started to taxi down the
runway. I was halfway down it when shots started ringing out. The passenger
windows exploded in a shower of glass and a slug passed through tail of the plane,
buzzed over my shoulder, and knocked out the front windshield just as the wheels left
the ground. Machine gunfire strafed the bottom of the plane. I could hear the tires on
the landing gear blow out.
I was barely a minute off the ground when the starboard engine started on fire.
Shutting it down quickly I banked sharply to the left and headed out over the ocean in
a northeast direction. I was going to fly out as far as I could and ditch the plane.
Hopefully all the evidence would sink with it. About half an hour out I started to lose
oil pressure in the remaining engine. Putting on a life jacket, I took the plane's fire

extinguisher and knocked the remaining glass out of the windshield and started to
make my descent.
The impact was incredible and I split my nose wide open when I was thrown into the
instrument panel, but as soon as the cockpit began to flood I was able to pop my seat
belt and swim out through the broken windshield. The plane and the heroin sank like
a stone. Not one bale popped to the surface.
I don't know how long I floated out there, but when the Mexican Navy patrol boat
found me I was in bad shape. Dehydrated and sunburned beyond recognition.
Luckily the blood from my shattered nose didn't attract any sharks. I woke up in the
prison hospital ward in La Mesa.
After I recovered sufficiently I was moved to a communal cell where I spent two days.
I was the only white guy in there and spent the first day just trying to fight off getting
robbed of my ostrich skin boots or getting ass raped. The second day Jameel must have
finally located where I was and greased some palms because a guard came and moved
me to my cell with Javier.

About a year later a letter from Zoe floated through the Mexican postal system and
found it's way to my cell She was leaving me and wished me luck. I could keep the
cabin and whatever was left inside, including the cat, you.
And that's where I've been for the past three years, Bongo. Killing time, lifting
weights, letting Javier tattoo me, smoking dope, drinking beer, and waiting, waiting for
my trial Hoping that a miracle would happen so I could walk out the gates of that
Godforsaken nightmare.
"Bongo? Bongo?" I shouted.
It was morning. Sun was streaming in the windows and the open front
door. The fire had burned out. Beer bottles, an overflowing ashtray, and
a empty tuna can littered the coffee table. I walked out on to the porch
and retrieved my pistol, popped in a fresh clip and put it down the back
of my pants.
The blue lizard was no where to be found. Either was Bongo.

I showered, brewed some coffee to help try to clear my fuzzy head,
opened another can of tuna for Bongo and put it down on the porch,
and then tried to choke down a plate of eggs and toast.
The coffee seemed to help clear the fog some, so I poured another mug
and settled down in front of the television that Zoe must have missed
when she was cleaning me out. When I turned it on, Norman was
looking at me from the screen, his throat was slit from ear to ear and his
tongue had been pulled down so that it was hanging out of the wound.
"Better listen to Jameel or this is how will end for you!"
I ran forward and kicked the tube in with all the strength I could muster.
"Jesus Christ! How long can this shit last?" I screamed to the cabin.
I needed to get outside, away from the cabin. So I took a shovel out to
the barn and dug up the floor, hoping that Zoe might have missed some
of my hidden cash. After a morning of digging, sweating and cursing, I
came away disappointed. Not a fucking thing.

When I opened the door to the tool room to throw the shovel inside is
when I found Bongo.
I don't know how long he had been dead but his body was sort of
mummified. He was curled up just like he had been on my chest last
night, like he had died in his sleep.
I found a quilt in the cabin, wrapped him up in it, and buried him behind
the cabin in the shade of a big maple tree. Sitting down next to his grave
I contemplated how shitty my life was and how shitty my options were.
A familiar voice in my head began to chant, do it, do it, do it. With one
motion I reached back, pulled out my pistol, and shoved it into my
mouth, the taste of gun oil almost gagging me.
“That’s Jameel talkin‘. That’s why he gave you the acid. That fucking
spook knew what it would do to you. That shit will either fry your head
outright, make ya suck on a gun, or jump off a building.”
Pulling the pistol out of my mouth I turned toward the voice. Norman
was standing there. His gaping throat wound was just a thing pink scar

but both his eyes had eight ball hemorrhages. I could feel the drug, Blue
Reptile, surging through me again.
“Jameel? Jameel wants me dead?”
“Not Jameel so much as our old buddy Sid. When you crashed that load
of weed out in the ocean Sid lost all those guns you traded to the
Mexicans for the dope, plus the weed. Sid’s not the kind of guy to take
that shit laying down. He laid some cash on Jameel to get you out of the
slammer so he could even things up. That’s why Jameel gave you that
LSD. He knew it would knock your dick in the dirt and Sid and his boys
could roll on in here without a fight.”
“But Sid was in on the deal to rip off Jameel. Why would Jameel help
him?”
Norman shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just business between those two
assholes, dude. Nature of the beast. They’re constantly fucking each
other over and then forgetting about it the next a big deal rolls around.
Look what they did to me after you left me out in the desert holding my
dick.” Norman stretched his neck back and the cut split wide open. I

threw myself to the ground, burying my face in the grass as he shrieked
with laughter.
I must have laid there for hours, refusing to look up. Suddenly the
quietness of the woods was offset by the low throaty rumble of a muscle
car. I sat up and brushed the grass and dirt from my face. Norman was
leaning against a tree grinning at me.
“That’s them coming up your road.” He nodded towards the sound.
“Make up your mind quick. Either bust ass and get out of here or stand
your ground.”
I picked up my pistol and opened the slide to make sure a round was in
the chamber.
“I always thought that you were a no good bastard, Norm. But I’m sorry.
I am sorry that I left you to take the fall.”
Walking over to the driveway I planted my feet and sighted down the
barrel at the Pontiac GTO coming down my driveway.

***

MINNESOTA COCKFIGHT
“Throw a hard fucking jab, then a right to the body and a left to the
head. That’s all you’re gonna have to fucking remember in these kinda
fights. When they get in close to you, push ‘em back and bang hard to
the body. I can guarantee you that none of the assholes you’re gonna be
fighting are in half the shape you are.”
I had stopped ripping shots to the heavy bag to stop and listen to the
instructions of my uncle. Uncle Billy sure didn’t look like he’d no shit
about boxing. He looked more like Tommy Chong, only with dragon and
snake tattoos all over his thin but muscular arms, but he had learned how
to box in the Army and was now trying to pass his limited wisdom onto
me.
Billy had come up with a real bright idea, and although I was going along
with it, I was secretly hoping that I just didn’t get killed.
Once a year, a guy who owned a farm over by Faribault, Minnesota,
promoted his own illegal tough man contest. Twenty four men could
enter with a thousand dollar entry fee. The fights would be four two

minute rounds. Winner of the last fight would win fifteen thousand
dollars. Runner up would two thousand. Everyone else would get
jackshit. Along with the fights, it was an all night affair filled with
cockfights, gambling, drinking, drugs, strippers, and hookers. Everything
that was illegal in the state.
Billy had attended several of these gala events and thought that his young
nephew, me, had the brass balls to win the tournament for us.
Life had been different just six months ago. Then I was senior, an all
state cornerback, with three big colleges watching my every move. Then
my dad gets killed driving while drunk with my girlfriend. Didn’t take a
detective to figure out what had been going on. My old man just had that
allure. Couldn’t keep it in his pants. Even with my girlfriend. My mom
wigged out and has been in the state hospital since then. I couldn’t take
the bullshit at school. Everybody laughing at me behind my back. Oh,
how the fucking mighty have fallen. Dropped out and went to live with
my Uncle Billy to help with his business. The biggest pot dealer in
southern Minnesota.

I was privy to my uncle’s greatest secret. Billy done time up at the
penitentiary for sale of narcotics. His sentence had been cut short when
he had agreed to become an informant for the DEA. Every once in a
while, the government would fly Billy off to another part of the country
where they would put him in the same prison or jail cell with someone
they wanted bad and Billy would try to get them to talk. Sometimes they
talked, sometimes they didn’t.
Sometimes if they didn’t talk, Billy made sure they never talked again.
When Billy came home with the idea of the tough man contest I had
jumped at it. If I could get my ass whipped back into shape like when I
was playing ball and could pull off a win, I could use my share of the
winnings to get my ass on the road and out of New Richland. Start all
over someplace else. Someplace warm.
“How do I know that one of the guys that I have to fight isn’t some ex-
pro boxer and I wind up getting the holy shit kicked out of me?” I asked.
“It’s against the rules of the tournament.” Billy answered with a grin.

“Rules? What kinda rules are they gonna have in something like this?”
“Listen to me, Jakey boy. The dude that runs this show doesn’t allow any
bullshit at all. He knows that if anyone tries to slip in a ringer that he’s
gonna get a bad rep and no one will ever sign up to fight again. And this
guy is one bad dude. If anyone is stupid enough to try any shit they’ll
probably wind up in a swamp with cinder blocks attached to their nuts.”
For four solid weeks, I got up in the early morning hours to do my
roadwork, go to work, make Billy’s weed deliveries, and then come home
to pump iron and work out on the bag. I knew I was in good football
shape but wasn’t sure about fighting shape. The only fights I had been
involved in were short scraps during a game or practice that were quickly
broken up. My size alone had intimidated most people.
**
We drove to Faribault in Billy’s four wheel drive. I was silent but Billy
chattered on like a monkey, wired to the gills on crank, and drinking out
of a tall can of Grain Belt.

“Just let ‘em come to you. Let them do the work. They come to you, you
just unload on them. Push “em off, and do it again.” Billy was ranting
like a amped up Angelo Dundee.
“That stick and move shit won’t work here. Just hard fucking shots to
the body to
soften them up and then go to the head.”
“Goddamn it Billy. Will you just shut the hell up for a fucking second so
that I can think?”
Billy glanced over at me and took a swig of his brew. “Sorry kid. I’m just
nervous is all. Shouldn’t have taken that zip.”
“Yea, I know. I’m sorry too. I’m just ready to get this thing going and get
it the fuck over with.” I replied.
We cruised through Faribault, passed by the state mental hospital, and
continued out of town for about three miles and then turned down a
long private drive ending up in a wood covered natural hollow. Cars and
pickup trucks were parked all around a brand new bright red barn.

Already you could hear the sounds of men drinking, and men already
drunk, emitting from the open doorway. We got out of the truck as a
large biker with a clipboard approached us. It was hard not to notice the
.357 magnum strapped to his chest.
“Name?” The biker grunted.
“Billy Morrow and my fighter, Jake Morrow.”
“I.D.?” The biker looked at his clipboard.
We showed our state driver’s licenses which the biker glanced at.
“Through the door.” He pointed to the barn, obviously a man of few
words.
When we walked through the door, I was surprised to see what looked
like an official boxing ring set up in the middle of the barn. In each far
corner of the barn, small stages were set up, and there were nude dancers
on three of them. A bar was set up on two sides of the barn and men
were in a circle watching what appeared to be a rooster fight in action.

The place was packed. It smelled like sawdust, pot, booze, blood, and
fear.
The fattest man that I had ever seen was waving us over to a card table
with a schedule taped up behind it on an easel. He grinned and shook
hands with Billy.
“Hey you old douche bag, how the hell they hanging? the fat man yelled.
“Always lower than your needle dick.” Billy laughed.
Fat man grinned. “Same old asshole Billy. Man, you never change. Still
giving head to the brothers for cigarettes?”
“You know, me and you could in the ring tonight.” Billy joked as he
raised his fists.
“I’m too busy tonight, maybe some other time. This your boy?” He
pointed to me.

“Sure as shit is. This is my nephew, Jake. He’s a tough son of a bitch.
Jake, meet Don Lang, one of the meanest convicts to ever walk the cell
blocks of Stillwater.”
I reached out and shook the fat man’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Good to meet you, kid. I just don’t think you’re gonna be as happy
though when you see who your first fight is against.” He pointed over to
a corner of the barn.
Standing and grinning like an idiot in front of one of the strippers was a
huge black man wearing nothing but a pair of jeans. He looked close to
weighing three hundred pounds and stood way over six feet tall. He was
flanked by two smaller white men.
“That retard goes by the name of Charlie Johnson. He’s a patient from
the nut house in Faribault.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Don?” Billy demanded. “From the
state hospital? What the hell is he doing here?”

The fat man shrugged. “Those two guys with him are attendants who
work his unit. They run kind of a loose ship over there with all the
budget cuts and shit so they’re always low staffed. Their supervisor is on
this, so they just walked him out a side door and drove his ass over here.”
“Why’s he in the hospital?” I asked.
“He raped a little girl, shot her in the head with a .22, and shoved her
down the hole of an outhouse. He’s a retard so he couldn’t go to the
joint. He was over in the maximum lock down in St. Peter for years, but I
guess he was a good boy for a while, so he got transferred to Faribault.”
What the fuck? I couldn’t believe the shit I was hearing. My mother is in
that hospital.
“Can he fight?” Billy piped in as he glanced over at me nervously.
“Shit if I know. But those two boys and their supervisor chipped in the
grand so I don’t give a crap. I heard one of them tell him that if he wins
they’ll buy him one of the hookers.” He shrugged. “Sorry, luck of the
draw.”

The three men stood and watched the giant retard swaying in his tracks
and groping his crotch through his hospital issued pants. Everyone
couple of seconds he would laugh and scream out “pretty lady.”
Don laughed and slapped Billy on the back. “Ain’t that a kick in the
nuts?”
Billy grinned sickly. “It’s a kick in the nuts on all right.” He turned to me.
“Come on man, let’s get you warmed up.”
Don was still laughing. “Don’t get too warmed up, you’re not on until
the fourth fight. Maybe you’ll be lucky and the big dummy will have shot
his wad by then, the way he’s grabbing at his johnson.” The fat man bent
over and rested his hands on his knees, roaring with laughter .
“I should have run a shank through that fat motherfucker in the prison
showers when I had the chance.” Billy mumbled as he led me to a vacant
spot to start my warm-up.
“Jesus Christ, Billy! Did you see the size of that son of a bitch?”

“Don’t worry about it. Here’s the plan. Soon as the bell rings, charge him
and stick him hard with your best shot. If he doesn’t go right way, get on
your bicycle and let him punch himself out. He lives in a insane asylum.
What kind of wind could he have?”
The bell rang for the first bout of the night. Two burly biker types
hammered away at each other and in less than a minute one of them was
punched right through the ring ropes and onto the barn floor where he
was counted out. The crowd roared like they were watching Ali - Frazier.
The winner leaned over the ropes and barfed onto one of the judges
score sheets.
I grabbed my jump rope and began to try to break a sweat. The crowd
roared again as a topless dancer climbed into the ring and began to dance
a jig to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Three Steps.
The second fight was between a obese Mexican who was covered in
jailhouse tattoos and a middle aged truck driver. After pounding each
other for thirty seconds, they spent the rest of the fight wrestling and
clinching and landing one punch at a time. At the final bell the ring was
showered with beer as the crowd booed and screeched their disapproval.

Billy snorted another two lines of crystal and reached into our gym bag
and retrieved the warm up mitts. I fired out the only combination I really
knew in succession. Left jab, straight right, and a left hook. The crowd
screamed in approval at the lesbian act that was going on in the ring, the
promoter had felt bad at the poor showing of the last fight and felt he
owed the audience a little treat.
Fight number three was between a tall lanky redhead with a farmers tan
and a bodybuilder. The redhead knew how to box. He spent the first two
rounds backing away from his opponent and snapping out a solid left jab
which bloodied his opponent’s nose and mouth. In the third round the
redhead got a little cocky and tried the old bolo punch like Sugar Ray
Leonard tried against Duran in their second fight. Only in this fight he
didn’t pull back quick enough and the bodybuilder threw a smoking right
hand that drilled the redhead right square in the kisser and sent him
down and out. When they pulled his mouthpiece out, his two front teeth
were wedged inside.
Don walked by and announced we were up in ten minutes. The between
fights act was a woman firing ping pong balls out of her vagina. Drunks

at ringside were scrambling to pick up the balls and a couple of them
were popping the balls in their mouths.
“Classy bunch of assholes, ain't they?” Laughed Don as he walked by.
A greasy looking man who looked like he might have spent his life
working as a carny approached us. He handed over a set of boxing
gloves. As Billy started to lace them up, I noticed another one of the
redheaded fighter’s teeth still lodged in the glove. Billy plucked it out and
flicked it on the floor.
“You’ve got me into a real nice situation here, Billy.”
The crank was hitting Billy hard. He was talking a mile a minute. “Click
in the reptile side of your brain, kid. This guy’s a retard for shit’s sake.
You’re a trained fucking athlete. He lays around all day jerking off and
smearing his shit on the walls. Get out there and kick his ass. This will be
the only tough one. Rest of these guys ain’t shit.”
I stared hard at my stoned uncle. “Let’s just get in the damn ring.”

Billy leaned his head back and screamed out like a possessed wolf as we
headed toward the ring. I felt like puking
The giant retard was already in the ring with his “handlers.” A fantastic
looking blonde stripper wearing a Tilt-A -Whirl T-shirt that was cut so
that the top two thirds of her jugs and her tollhouse cookie nipples were
exposed to the hooting crowd, was strutting around the ring.
My opponent openly leered and screamed out “pretty lady” at her as she
passed by him.
“Here, take a swig of this.” Billy had tipped back a water bottle.
I took a long swig and felt the inside of my mouth go numb.
“What is that shit?”
“Spring water with a dash of coke. Little bit of peppermint schnapps,
too.”
We began to walk to the center of the ring to get the referee’s
instructions. He looked like he had been let out of the nursing home on a
day pass to officiate this fight. He was also wearing a Tilt -A -Whirl T-
shirt.
“What’s with the Tilt -A -Whirl shirts? Are they sponsoring this thing?” I
asked Jake.
“What? Huh? What the hell are you talking about?” Billy was beyond
manic. Too much crank.
“Why is everyone wearing those carnival ride shirts?”
“Oh, the shirts. They make Tilt -A- Whirls in Faribault.” Now Billy was
leering at the ring girl. Great! My manager and corner man was losing it.
As we reached the center of the ring, my foe raised his glove and said
“Hi.”
The referee began his instructions. He had obviously been drinking and
he smelled like a urinal that had been cleaned out with rum.
“OK men, keep “em up at all times, follow my instructions, and break
when I yell break. Touch ’em up and return to your corner.”

We touched gloves and my opponent smiled and said “Bye.”
Billy was so worked up that I thought he might have a seizure. “Did you
hear that shit? Hi? Bye? He’s a fucking idiot. This is gonna be easy as hell.
Get out there and kick his fucking ass.”
Kick his ass! Is that the only advice I was going to hear?
The bell rang.
I fired out of my corner on a coke induced rush and as soon as he was in
punching distance I wound up and threw the hardest overhand right that
I could muster.
My grinning opponent walked right into it and it caught him directly in
the nose. The giant shrieked, held his nose with both hands and
staggered backwards, knocking the geriatric referee down on his ass.
I took advantage of this and stepped forward and fired a screaming left
hook to the retard’s balls. He screamed in agony and dropped to both
knees. I couldn’t believe my luck! I ran to a neutral corner. But the

referee had yet to get to his feet. One of the giant’s seconds jumped on
the ring apron to protest the nut shot but was grabbed by the back of his
pants by one of the judges, an enormous biker, and was pulled back onto
the floor.
Finally, the ref staggered to his feet and began to start his count. The
crowd was going absolutely batshit!
All I could hear was Billy screaming out “It’s a long fucking count. It’s
goddamn Dempsey and Tunney all over again.”
The coke was making me hyperventilate.
The retard was up at the count of eight. He must have been down for
close to twenty.
I charged and attacked my foe. Left jab followed by a right followed by a
left hook. They landed in succession as often and as hard as I could
throw them. Blood was pouring from the giant’s nose, mouth, and a
gaping cut under his eye. He just stood there and took it. He didn’t even
try to move.

After about thirty or forty seconds of this shit, I was totally exhausted
and dropped my gloves.
Then the giant went on the offensive. His arsenal was even more limited
than mine was. All the retard threw was a round house right to the side
of my body. But wherever it landed it felt like a sledgehammer hitting.
The first one landed on my kidney and the force of the punch picked my
left foot right up off the floor. The second punch landed on my elbow
and it felt like my arm was broken. I was too exhausted to retreat and
tried to tie my opponent up but my foe had learned to fight on the floors
of the state’s roughest mental institutions. He grabbed one of my arms
with his left hand and pounded away to my body with his right until the
bell rang.
I slumped onto his ring stool. Across the ring you could hear the retard
screaming out “pretty lady.”
“Fuck! Jake, drink some of this shit!” The coke flavored schnapps and
water numbed my throat going down. “Box this fucker, Jake. Long range.
Don’t get in close. Stick and move. Stick and move, goddamn it.”

The bell rang.
I was revived for a few seconds by the cocaine concoction and began to
stick out my jab. It landed almost constantly, snapping my opponent’s
head back. It couldn’t miss. But for every five jabs I landed, the giant was
land one crippling shot to my body.
The retard’s face was a mask of blood.
The left side of my body was already turning purple.
After less than a minute into the round, I was spent again.
I stopped moving away from his foe and once more, this time in pure
desperation, tried a round house shot to the nuts of my opponent. But I
was way too tired and the punch landed on the giant’s hip, and
exhausted, I fell into him. My opponent reached out, fast as a cobra, and
hooked my head with his massive arm and tucked it securely in his vile
smelling armpit while he whaled away at my unprotected body with his
right.

I went down to one knee.
“One.. two.. three.. four.. pretty lady.. five.. six.. I get to screw pretty
lady.. seven.. eight.. get the fuck up Jake.. nine.”
I got up.
I couldn’t raise my arms.
My foe advanced on me.
I tried to raise my hands
The retard threw another of his right hands, only this time it was at my
head.
I couldn’t get my arms up. They were made of lead.
The ring floor was soft but it was bouncing up and down. I began to sit
up but almost blacked out so I lay back down. It took him several
moments to realize that I wasn’t in the ring but in the back of Billy’s
truck. I recognized the car freshener that Billy always bought. Smelled
like coconuts. The truck was still bouncing up and down.
With a groan I grabbed the back of this seat and pulled myself up. I
looked out the back window. Billy had the stripper with the Tilt -A-
Whirl shirt spread eagle in the box and was laying the wood to her. Hard.
I laid back down and went back into my fog.

CELLMATES
Even at two in the morning the cellblock in a maximum security
penitentiary was never completely devoid of noise. The main lights were
extinguished, the televisions and radios shut off, and the order for silence
about the cellblock has been blared over the intercom. But it was never
completely silent. You could still hear the graveyard shift guard with his
radio turned down low as he paced up and down the row, the toilets
flushing, tormented men crying out in their sleep, jacking off, coughing,
sneezing, farting, sobbing.
Then there was the occasional cry of pain and anguish as an inmate
decided to take himself out by slashing his wrists with a homemade
shank but then couldn’t handle the pain of what he had just done to
himself or the fear of what was yet to come.
Some nights, like tonight, you heard an inmate, almost always a fish,
scream out “Mommy.” For some reason when a fish, fresh from the
street, got turned out for the first time, he often called out for his
“Mommy.”

Thad Jensen had heard grown men scream that out probably close to a
hundred times since he had been locked down for his fifteen years.
Fifteen years today since it was past midnight already. Today was the day.
He be getting his walking papers in about a dozen hours. No parole
guidelines for him to follow, he had done his whole bit.
From an early age the locals always said that he was a bully. A bad kid. A
no good punk destined to go nowhere but jail or the boneyard.
The locals had been right.
He was just seventeen years old the night he committed the crime that
got him sent up. Already drunk one Friday night on the old man‘s vodka,
he had walked into a convenience store and tried to waltz out with a
twelve pack of beer. The clerk, a pensioner in his sixties, had chased
Thad into the parking lot, where Thad who was big for his age, had
broken the clerk’s nose and jaw with a series of brutal punches. After a
witness called in the crime, a high speed chase ensued which ended with
Thad face down on the pavement and his hands cuffed behind him, his
parent’s car totaled against a telephone pole.

He was tried as an adult and was given a sentence of fifteen years but
would be eligible for parole in four if he behaved while serving his
sentence. He had no reaction to the sentence. He showed no remorse.
And he sure as shit didn’t behave while serving his sentence.
Because of his age he was sent to the St. Cloud Reformatory where he
learned that since he was white he was now a minority . He was quickly
recruited by an Aryan prison gang, and because of his size, which would
become greatly enhanced by hours spent on the weight pile, he became a
valuable enforcer. Young naïve Thad bought the wannabe Nazi’s bullshit
rhetoric hook, line, and sinker, and soon he was sporting a swastika on
his chest and carrying around a bootleg copy of Mein Kampf, even though
he didn’t understand a fucking word of it.
It didn’t take him long before he began to build a thick jacket with the
prison administration. He was written up numerous times for assault,
possession of narcotics and weapons, disrespect to officers, and dozens
of other infractions. The day he reached his twenty first birthday, rather
than being released on parole, he was shackled and transferred to the
penitentiary at Stillwater where he was greeted with open arms by his

fellow comrades. Stillwater Penitentiary was the turf of the white prison
gangs. Thad was finally at home.
And that’s where twelve years later Thad Jensen found himself. On his
final night in the joint he laid in his bunk and mentally reviewed his
personal resume.
He had survived dozens of prison gang wars and uprisings. He had been
stabbed. He had been shot (barely grazed but still shot) by a tower guard
during a riot. He had been gassed and maced. He had spent months in
the hole without letting the assholes break him. He was a high ranking
lieutenant with the Aryans. And now he had fulfilled the terms of his
sentence without the benefit of parole. He would walk out the gates a
free man.
He was also thirty-three years old, had no home to go to, no family to
speak of since they had all disowned him over the years, had the
education of a mentally challenged fifth grader, and no idea what life
outside these walls held for him. His counselor had managed to find him
a room at a shelter upon his release along with a job at a aluminum can
recycling plant. The job started at minimum wage.

Thad heard his cellmate stir in the bunk underneath him.
“Sounds like someone is getting it tonight.”
“Yea, it’s Tuesday. Fresh meat always gets brought in on Tuesdays.”
“I didn’t. They brought me in on a weekend.” Replied his cellmate.
“Well, you’re a whole different fucking matter all together. You’re one of
those high profile cases that they always got on the fucking news.”
His cellmate was indeed high profile and more. He possessed what
inmates called a “freak” jacket. Timothy Logan had been a twenty-six
year old mortuary sciences student who had been picked up for raping
and killing a sixteen year old girl who was on her way home from a high
school basketball game. What the police found when they tossed his
apartment brought him semi-national attention.
Timothy had been interning at a Minneapolis funeral home where he
worked the night shift. All by his lonesome. Turns out he liked it like
that. When the police shook down his apartment after they picked him

up for the murder, they found hundreds of nude photos of both dead
females and males which had been taken at the funeral home. They also
found several videos of him engaged in sexual intercourse with female
stiffs.
Timothy’s attorney tried the insanity defense. It didn’t work, and after a
sensational trial which was seemingly covered non-stop by the media,
was found guilty late on a Friday afternoon. The county jail felt that they
could not provide the security that Timothy required for his safety from
his fellow inmates, so rather than waiting out the weekend he was
transferred the following morning to the penitentiary.
In a bit of payback for all of his years of being a pain in the ass to them,
the warden thought it might be a hoot to put a child raping murderer
diagnosed with necrophilia, right into Thad’s cell, who had only six
months left to serve. Thad was pissed behind belief at this show of total
disrespect but he kept his mouth shut. He was just too goddamn short to
bitch about it.

His first night inside, Timothy who was small of stature, had been
cornered in the shower and turned out by a couple of black gangsters
from St. Paul. He didn’t call out for his Mommy. He just took it.
And he took it for weeks until he finally broke down and asked Thad for
protection. For a price of course, Thad could offer him protection
against rival gangs and lone predators, but Timothy would still be
required to take care of the members of Thad’s gang if they so desired.
The fee was a weekly deposit from Timothy’s family into Thad’s inmate
account.
But when Thad walked through those gates in a couple of hours,
Timothy would be on his own. Their deal would be null and void.
“I’ve got a proposition for you, Thad.”
Thad had been waiting for those exact words for a couple of days now.
“And what the fuck can you offer me now? You know I don’t mess with
jailhouse sissies. You think with a couple of hours left that I‘d want what
you could give me? Shit! First thing I‘m gonna do when I get on the

street is get me a good looking whore and nail her right through the
mattress.”
“No, not that. Here’s the deal. If you can make a protection deal with
your brothers for me. That is if they can guarantee my safety after your
gone. I’ll turn you on to a score that’ll easily bankroll your first year on
the street.”
His interest piqued, Thad sat up in his bunk. “What kind of score?”
Timothy got out of his bunk and took a seat on their communal toilet.
“You make the deal to keep me safe and I don’t mean just safe from the
other inmates, I mean no more getting punked by your brothers either.
You get me two weeks of total protection to prove to me that you’re
word is good and I’ll mail you directions to the easiest score you could
imagine. I’ll even give you name of the fence so the whole deal will be
cool for you.”
The graveyard shift guard, a rookie, stopped in front of their cell. “Shut
the hell up in there and hit the sack or I’ll write both of your asses up.”

Thad shot the finger to the guard who stood and glared at him for
several moments but then moved on.
Timothy got up and walked to the front of the cell to make sure the
guard hadn’t stopped to listen in on their conversation. He had already
moved on down to the end of the cellblock.
“What to do you have to lose? I’m still locked up here and if I fuck you
over I know what’s going to happen. So what do you say?”
“You‘re sure as hell gonna have to give me more information than that
before I cut a deal to save your ass.”
“Just before I got busted I had to work on a old broad who died of a
heart attack. Came from a rich family. Stinking fucking rich. For her
funeral the family had her laid out wearing two gigantic diamond rings
and a matching diamond necklace. Must be worth a fortune. Here’s the
kicker. They buried them with her! They didn’t give a shit about ‘em. The
funeral director tried to convince them to take them before we closed her
box but they were adamant about burying the old bitch with them. So we

did. I was planning on digging her up myself but I got arrested before I
could.”
“And just what the hell does that have to do with me?”
“You guarantee my safety and I’ll mail you the name of the cemetery, the
old broad’s name, and the number of her plot. All you have to do is dig
up the old bitch and snatch the jewels. The fence will give you no
problem, either. I’ve known the guy for years. I‘d imagine you‘ll clear at
least 15K.”
He had already made his decision. He had nothing to lose but he tried to
make it seem like he was in turmoil while he thought it over.
“All right. You got a deal. But I’ll tell you one thing. If this is some kind
of a set up or I dig that stiff up and there’s nothing in that box but a
bunch of bones, you’ll regret the fucking day you ever walked into my
cell!”
“It’s no set up. It’s guaranteed. But how can I be sure that you won’t
back out on the deal once you get the diamonds?”

Thad glared down at him. “Because I’m giving you my fucking word!
How’s that? My word’s been good on the yard in this prison for twelve
goddamn years so it‘s good enough for your worthless ass.”
“All right then. We’ve got a deal.” Timothy slid back on to his bunk.
Thad was so geared up he didn’t sleep a minute for the rest of the night.
At breakfast he would clear the deal with his crew. It was to be hands off
Timothy. But once he had the diamonds and had sold them, he’d be in
contact. Then they could do to Timothy whatever their nasty little hearts
desired.
By noon he had cleared out-processing and was given a lift in a prison
van down to the shelter. He started his new job the following morning. It
was shit but he kept his mouth shut. He just had to gut it out for two
weeks. With his meager prison savings he bought a city map, crowbar,
flashlight, a cheap knockoff Buck knife, and a shovel. He wrapped the
items in a plastic garbage bag and hid them in a crawlspace behind the
shelter.

The time passed slowly. Life was torture for Thad on the outside. Inside
he was a big man. A player. A convict. A man of respect. Outside he was
just another minimum wage worker with a record. And the world was
different. Confusing with it’s cash machines, Internet, cable television,
computers, and SUVs. He spent his nights in his shitty little room
drinking rotgut beer. And even though he was free from the constraints
of parole, the second day at his new job he was given a quick visit by a
couple of smart ass detectives from the Organized Crime/Gang unit. Just
to let him know they’d be keeping an eye out for him.
The envelope arrived sixteen days after Thad had been released. Inside
was the name of the cemetery, a map and grid number for the grave, and
the name and address for the fence. So far Timothy was a man of his
word. Too bad for him that Thad wasn’t.
That night he climbed out the window of his room, grabbed his tools,
hotwired a old Chevy owned by another ex-con at the shelter, and drove
carefully to the cemetery. His driver’s license had expired while in prison
and his driving skills were a rusty as hell but he arrived at the cemetery
without any problems. The gates were secured with a wrap around chain
and an old padlock which was broken off easily with a few swings from

the crowbar. He drove the Chevy in, closed the gates behind him, and
wrapped the chain back around it.
Since he couldn’t read for shit it took about an hour to figure out the grid
used to locate the grave. Then he wandered in circles for almost another
hour before he finally stumbled onto it. The gravestone was fancy and
looked expensive so that was a good sign. He stuck his shovel into the
soil. It slid in like butter and he found the digging to be relatively easy. It
had been a wet spring and the dirt came up in huge wet clumps.
After several hours of digging his shovel hit the vault. That’s were he ran
into problems. The sealant glue on the vault must have been industrial
strength and by the time he had broken the seal to the vault with the
crowbar and muscled it open (Thank God for prison weight programs,
the lid was heavy as a son of a bitch) it was almost dawn. He was
exhausted and covered head to toe in mud.
Thad stuck the end of the crowbar into the lid of the casket. It popped
open with a crack.

He turned his flashlight on and scanned over the body inside. The old
girl inside was still in good shape. She almost looked alive. Timothy had
done a good job. Thad had been expecting a skeleton or at least a rotting
corpse with a funky stench but she was neither. Just a little musty. But
Timothy, that child raping pervert, hadn’t been lying. The old lady was
sporting two huge rocks on her fingers and a equally enormous one
around her scrawny chick neck. Thad giggled like a little kid as he pulled
them off the body and climbed out the grave .
Time was running out. Thad had no idea when the grounds keeping crew
would show up for work. So suddenly revived by the adrenaline pumping
through him, he sprinted to the car, threw the diamonds inside, grabbed
a change of clothes and a towel, and ran over to the groundskeeper’s tool
shed. He quickly stripped down and hosed himself off. The water was
freezing and the temperature was probably somewhere in the forties and
it took all Thad had in him not to scream out, his nuts shriveling down to
the size of raisins. He toweled off the best he could and threw on the
fresh set of clothes.
When he pulled out of the graveyard and on to the main road the
morning commute traffic was light. He was almost home free!

It was still early morning, and the fence, who ran a pawnshop, wouldn’t
be open until eight. So Thad parked the car in a alley down from the
shop, put the diamonds in his jacket pocket, and walked over a couple of
blocks to get some coffee and a couple of burgers at a White Castle.
Promptly at eight o‘clock, Thad walked into the shop. The geezer behind
the counter was beyond ancient. Had to have been closed to ninety if he
was a day. This was going to be a fucking breeze, thought Thad. If he
gave Thad a hard time he could always roll him and keep the diamonds.
He peered up at Thad through thick, pop bottle lenses.
“Can I help you?”
“Yea, Timothy sent me.”
“Ah yes. You are Thad then. Timothy’s friend. Timothy called me from
prison. Said that you would have some diamonds to sell. Timothy and I
did a lot of business together. He knows I am always in the market for
diamonds. Let me lock the door so we can conduct our business safely.”
The old man flicked a switch on the counter. Thad jumped uneasily as a

automatic bolt slammed home on the front door. It was the same sound
made by an electronic prison gate.
“Ah, poor Timmy. Who would have thought a boy with such a bright
future would be doing the horrible things he did. But… Anyway, let us
see what you have.”
The old man’s eyes bulged and he gave an audible gasp when Thad
placed the diamonds on to the counter. He had to hold back a grin.
Obviously, the old fart liked what he saw.
“Whe..? Where? Where did you get these?” The old man had picked up
the necklace and was examining it closely. His shirtsleeve had pulled
down and Thad noticed blurred blue numbers tattooed on his wrist.
“Does it matter? Do you want them or not? I don’t have time to fuck
around all day.”
The old man reached under the counter, pulled up a strong box, set it on
the counter and reached inside. But it wasn’t a fistful of hard cold cash

that he pulled out. Fuck no! The crazy old bastard had a German Luger
in his shaking hands and he was aiming it right at Thad.
“What the hell is this? Have you lost your fucking mind?”
Thad could not comprehend this unprecedented turn of events. Here he
was, the meanest motherfucker that had walked the yard of the toughest
goddamn prison in the state for the last fifteen years, and then this dried
up turd has the balls to pull a piece on him for no good fucking reason!
Did he think he was going to rip him off? After all his hard work? He
better think fucking again!
Thad reached his hand around to his back pocket, pulled out his Buck
knife and snapped it open with a flick of his wrist.
“Now you listen to me you old basta…”
The shot hit Thad high on the shoulder and knocked him straight down
to the floor. It felt like a horse had kicked him. He rolled over to his
hands and knees and tried to get up but the pain was incredible. His
breathing was ragged and a reddish, foamy froth was running out of his

mouth and pooling on the floor underneath him. The old man had
shuffled around the counter and was coming towards him. Thad saw his
knife about five feet away and started to crawl towards it.
“Your rob my daughter’s grave and come in here and try to sell me her
jewels, you piece of shit! The same diamonds my wife smuggled out of
Germany when she was fleeing the fucking Nazis!”
Thad knew he wouldn’t be able to get to his knife. He stopped crawling
and tried to look over his good shoulder at the old man. His daughter?
What the hell was he…?
“What? Oh shit! Oh fuck! Man, it wasn’t me! It wasn’t my idea! It was
that goddamn Tim! He set me up on the score! It was T..”
***
Even at two in the morning the cellblock in a maximum security
penitentiary was never completely devoid of noise. The main lights were
extinguished, the televisions and radios shut off, and the order for silence
about the cellblock has been blared over the intercom. But it was never

completely silent. You could still hear the graveyard shift guard with his
radio turned down low as he paced up and down the row, toilets
flushing, tormented men crying out in their sleep, jacking off, coughing,
sneezing, farting, and sobbing.
But laughter was something you rarely heard late at night in prison. But
tonight was much different. One inmate was laughing. Laughing
uncontrollably. Laughing hysterically. Laughing to the point where the
tears rolled down his face and the rookie graveyard shift guard had to call
the goon squad to haul his crazy ass down to segregation before they had
a goddamn riot on their hands.
Since he had been locked up it had always been the inmate’s habit to read
his mail late at night when it was more quiet. So tonight Timothy Logan
sat on his bunk and read the Minneapolis Star Tribune news clipping that
his mother had sent him. It was about an ex-convict who was shot and
killed while pathetically trying to rob a respected local pawnshop owner
with a knife.
And he laughed and he laughed and he laughed.

WONDERLAND AND DEAD PORN STARS
Moose Jaw is cold as a well digger’s ass. The old style heat radiator in my
room is clanging away but it’s still freezing in here. It’s gonna take a
monumental effort just to get out of bed and get dressed, much less walk
two miles to the employment agency to see if any work comes in.
I’ve been on the run now for almost twenty years. Looking behind my
back when I walk down the street, living in cheap hotels, working for
temporary job services for peanuts. My family hasn’t heard from me the
whole time, it would too risky if they knew were I was. Twenty years ago
I was in the navy. Stationed in Hawaii. Young and dumb. Thought it was
cool to deal some smoke on the side for a little extra cash. It didn’t turn
out cool when we got busted. We were looking on doing time in the brig.
Not much, maybe a couple of months. But I panicked and bolted.
Couldn’t stand the thought of being locked up in a cage. Now look
where I am.
***

For close to two years after I took off I had lived in Los Angeles on the
top floor of this old warehouse. Just a mattress on the floor. The guy
who I worked for owned it. It sat behind this huge night club called “The
Slippery T*t” which he also owned. The “I” was burned out on the sign.
Gus was the name of my boss and he was quite the entrepreneur. Beside
the bar, he ran a pro wrestling and roller derby school, and shot low
budget porno movies in the warehouse. He also was a part owner of
several porno and peep show shops in the county. I was a bouncer/bar
tender at the bar, assistant wrestling coach (I let guys pick me and body
slam me or hit me in the head with a folding chair), and light and camera
man for the porno movies. On occasion, several other bouncers and
myself earned extra dough by strong arming people who owed Gus
money.
The Black Dahlia case seemed to have had a lasting impression on my
employer. Do you remember that murder? Way back in the late 40s the
cops found this chick cut in half on a vacant lot. No blood or anything.
Real fucking creepy. Lots of movies and books were done about it.

That shit happens practically on a weekly basis in Los Angeles, so I have
no idea why so many people are obsessed over a murder that happened
in the 1940s. But that’s L. A.
Anyway, Gus had his office just decorated from floor to ceiling with
photos of this broad, bookcases full of books about her, and he even
owned a couple of vintage porno movies that she had starred in. Mostly
lesbian crap. Half of Gus’s films that he made always had an “actress”
dressed up just like Elizabeth Short. That was the dead broad’s name.
Thing about it is, I have a hunch that Gus was involved in it. When I was
in L.A., Gus must have been in his mid 70s, the murder was in the late
40s. He would have been about the right age. He had a real weird buddy,
Wally, that was into this chick, too. Those two were always talking about
her and trading shit about the case. Some local news reporter thought
that Wally had been the one who did it and Wally loved that. I heard the
old loon died in a flophouse fire not too long ago. Drunk and smoking in
bed.
I had got the job after a week or so of bumming around L. A. I looked
up an old gal that I knew in the navy. She was making ends meet by

working for a dentist during the day and exotic dancing at night. She had
also given up men and was living with a female biker who looked like
Sonny Liston, and who made me feel very unwelcome. Strippers tend to
make the sex industry circuit in L. A. and she turned me on to working
with Gus. Said that for being a complete slime ball he wasn’t bad to work
for. That was a good enough reference for me.
I bought a book on how to change your identity out of this catalog from
this weird company up in Washington state. It had all sorts of crazy
books in it like “How To Make Methamphetamine For Fun And Profit”
and “How To Kill People And Then Fake Your Own Death.” Sounds
goofy but it sure helped out in my situation. I wound up with a California
drivers license, birth certificate, Social Security card, and a passport.
Appearance wise, I just shaved my head, got my ear pierced and wore a
big hoop ear ring, and grew a goatee. I had access to a gym since I
worked and lived in a wrestling school, so I started to pump iron and do
steroids. Within the year I had put on roughly forty pounds of muscle. I
didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the scrawny little dude who had
left Albert Lea, Minnesota to join the navy so (what seemed like) many
years ago

Gus’s porno business didn’t attract what you would call real quality adult
film stars. He dealt mainly with heroin addicts who needed some fix
money, Midwestern runaways, a midget husband and wife team, a couple
of the roller derby clique, and every great once in a while an old burned
out formerly famous “star” would stop in to make a quick buck. That’s
where my path would cross with Jon.
Jon had once been a hugely successful porn star. He had zero looks, a
scrawny drugged out looking frame, and couldn’t act even by adult
movies standards. But he had an enormous tool. The guy had made
thousands of short adult “loops” but had pissed it all away on booze and
crack cocaine. Rumor had it (Jon liked to keep this one spreading) that a
very famous singer and actress had once paid Jon big bucks to snort a
line of coke off his giant crank.
He was no longer welcome on any of the mainstream adult sets due to
his erratic behavior, inability to get hard on demand, and known ties to
the flourishing crack industry. But on occasion for pin money he would
make a gay flick or play the heavy in a hard core S & M movie.

Gus signed him on to mainly make appearances at his club, autograph
video boxes at dirty book stores, and attempt to make a movie with him
once in a while if he could get it halfway up. I don’t know how many
nights we all stood around setting up the lights and cameras while Jon
would be laying on a bed on the set with two young ladies straight off the
farm in Wisconsin, who would be giving it the old college try and attempt
to get Jon’s massive stinger to get up and go. Nine out ten times, Gus
would freak out and start ranting and raving about all the money that was
being wasted on this quality feature and it inevitably would turn into
basically a lesbian shot with Jon just kind of rolling around in the middle
and getting in the way.
Once Gus tried to make a porno related Black Dahlia murder film with
Jon in the role of the murderer. Jon had been out partying the night
before and was horribly hungover. He couldn’t get it up as usual, but
what really pissed Gus off was the grand finale. Since we didn’t have any
real bodies to cut up like the real murderer had, we had to settle for a
store mannequin. It took every bit of strength that Jon had to saw half
way through the plastic and then he ruined the whole shot by barfing all
over the dummy.

But people recognized him like he was an academy award winner. He
came along with us one night to the fights at the Olympic Auditorium,
which is a sleazier joint than some of the places Jon made his films in,
and we practically had to fight people off of the guy. Both men and
women were all over him. Wanting his autograph and maybe a shot at his
massive organ.
He wasn’t all bad though. When one of the bouncers got married, Jon
managed to recruit some of the old female stars from his heyday to the
bachelor party. It was held at an incredibly filthy adult motel on Sunset
Strip. Jumping Jesus, what a night! A punch was made in a fifty gallon
garbage can (clean) with cold duck champagne, beer, and a hundred hits
of quality speed. The night clerk came down to complain about the noise
at four in the morning and wound up screwing the porn star he had once
fantasized about as a teenager while he was beating his meat. It was all
great fun.
I was working the door one night at the club when Jon came out to catch
some fresh air. Gus had booked a private ladies stag party and Jon was
the main attraction. He had lost a lot of weight from all the crack and he
looked bizarre as well as idiotic up on the stage. Shaking his money

maker in this g-string that didn’t come close to covering up his once
great python of love.
Gus had been concerned that he wouldn’t show up. Jon had been acting
real nervous lately and a week or so ago had shown up with a black eye
and a nasty looking gash on his chin.
“Got a proposition for you, my man.” Jon always tried to talk like a high
rolling pimp. Kind of hissing out the words.
“And what would that be Jon?” Looking out of the corner of my eye at
the Los Angeles Lakers shorts that he was wearing. No shirt or shoes.
Just these shorts that must have been two sizes too big for him. He
looked like Bill Walton with an eating disorder.
“I got these assholes up in the hills that owe me some serious jack for
some rock that I fronted them. Not a thing really. Their a couple of little
dipshits. Shouldn’t be problem for a man of your stature.” As he grinned
at me I cringed. His teeth looked like little baked beans and the breath
coming out of his maw wasn’t much better than the sight of those teeth.

“If it’s not a thing why do I need to be there?” Sarcasm all over that one.
He didn’t come close to noticing.
“Pure precautionary measures, bro. Tell you what. I’ll double your fee
that Gus gives you.” I sure wasn’t making anything that night on tips
with this private stag going on. How hard could it be roughing up a
couple of crack heads?
“Oh what the hell. When do you want to do it?”
“Tonight. Soon as I get done making these babes cream in their panties.”
The dumb shit walked back into the club wiggling his tongue at me like a
snake.
It was about enough to make you want to give up sex.
***
Jon’s battered Mustang was chugging up Wonderland Avenue. Fucking
thing must not have had a tune up since it had rolled out of the factory
and it was belching out oily, blue smoke.

“We’re sure as shit not gonna sneak up on them in this piece of crap,
Jon.”
He didn’t say a word. Just sat there licking his lips nervously. The night
hadn’t ended well for him. Couple of the broads at the party had wanted
to sleep with him. I imagine so that down the road they could tell their
grand kids about how they had once had bedded a famous “movie” star.
But his pecker once more had let him down. Lost out on a couple of
hundred bucks. But he should have gotten used to that by now. I also
suspected that he had been smoking or snorting something.
That pissed me off. I didn’t like to do a job while anyone was high or had
been drinking.
He parked his wreck at the curb in front of a small apartment building.
We just sat there.
“Well what’s up Jon?” Are we gonna do this thing or what?”

He turned to look at me. “I think it’s already done.” In his eyes I could
see pure fear and he was putting off this nervous smell that reminded me
of the locker room in gym class.
“What in the hell are you talking about? If it’s done what am I doing
here?”
“I just had to make sure that I was in the clear. He said that if I didn’t tell
them who did it that he was going to kill me. And after that he was going
to have find my family and have their eyes ripped out.”
My skin was crawling. “Shit! What you have you gotten me into? Who are
you talking about?”
He was out the door and walking up to the sidewalk to one of the
apartments. I got out and followed him like a stupid shit. The door was
closed but when Jon grabbed the knob, the door swung open.
There were four bodies in the living room and they were beat to a pulp.
There was blood everywhere and pieces of what I guess were bones or
skull were spattered across the tile floor. I could actually see the brains of

one of the bodies. The stereo was on. Warren Zevon was singing about
Werewolves in London. I now knew for a fact that there was a soundtrack to
my life.
“Oh my God, Jon.” I gasped. “Who did this?
His voice was monotone. “Dewald.”
“Dewald?” Oh, Jesus Christ! Not that Dewald! “How in the hell did you
get involved with him?”
Dewald was one of the biggest cocaine dealers in the whole county if not
the state. He had reached untouchable status. Los Angeles cops wouldn’t
even think of pulling him over for traffic violations. He came to “The
Slippery T*t” every once in a while when he felt like slumming. Big
tipper. You felt like you needed a shower after just talking to him.
“About a month ago I set him up. I had been up there to do a private
show for his old lady so I knew the lay of the place. You wouldn’t believe
the amount of drugs he keeps up there. These guys went up to his

mansion in Beverly Hills and robbed his ass. I really needed the fucking
cash. Somehow he suspected me and I had to roll over on them.”
“Somehow? How goddamn stupid do you think the guy is? You go up
there and do your routine and a couple of days later he gets robbed? And
now you’ve dragged me into this shit. Why?”
He had tears in his eyes but was laughing at the same time. “I was scared
to come alone.”
I took my shirt off and rubbed the door knob clean. “Come on, we’ve
gotta get the hell out of here.” I think I screamed that.
Jon dropped me off in front in the club. I didn’t hear a thing from him
for about a month. But I heard about it on the news and in the papers.
Jon was famous again. Just in the wrong way. I kept waiting for the news
channels to run some old clips of his movies. The dead dudes were
known associates of his and it didn’t take the cops long to figure out who
the missing link was in this mess.

The police kicked in the door at a cheap motel outside of Jacksonville,
Florida and found Jon sleeping off a high with a fourteen year old girl.
Turns out that the girl was actually a porn star who went by the stage
name of Anal Annesha, who had been working in the industry for over a
year. Porn industry is slipshod on background and reference checks.
Annesha thought Jon could steer her towards the big show.
Jon was being brought back to Los Angeles for questioning on the
Wonderland Murders, as the newspapers had dubbed the crime. I knew
as sure as there is shit in a goat that Jon was going to spill his guts out
and my name was going to be brought up.
I didn’t know which would be worse. Being wanted for AWOL and
dealing drugs or having one of the biggest cocaine kingpins in the state
wanting to rub me out as a material witness to a crime.
Either way I was busting ass out of there.
***

Jon is long dead. AIDS. He never snitched. Did his time in L.A. County
and never said a word. That I know of. Jon is famous again. All his old
films are on video and he even has web sites dedicated to him.
I just keep walking down the streets wondering about that car pulling up
behind me.

THORAZINE SHUFFLE
If there was a chart to rate hangovers by, say on a scale of one to five,
five being the kind that would knock a gorilla on his ass, and one being
the kind that a cup of coffee would take care of, the hangover I have
right now is off the charts at a seven. I threw up some Blackjack gum
this morning and I don't think they even make that crap anymore.
I think I really screwed up last night. I hadn't drank since I had been
down here, but I hooked up with this tourist couple who thought I was
some fuckin' Jimmy Buffett throwback because I live in a tent on the
beach, and they must have bought me close to a half a case of Corona
and I don't know how many shots of that tequila that the old lead singer
from Van Halen is always pimping. I definitely hit the blackout zone, but
that doesn't bother me. I've done that a zillion times. But somewhere in
my foggy, alcohol soaked brain, the little man that lives up in there keeps
telling me that I royally screwed up.
That I talked.
Told THE story.

The story that I swore would never pass through these lips again.
By the way, my name is Jimbo. Real name is James but I haven't gone by
that for years.
My problem wasn't that I drank. My problem was that I liked to fight
when I drank. And I drank enough and fought enough that I wound up
getting kicked out of high school, getting a record with the juvenile cops,
and ended up working at Jiffy Lube changing the oil in cars. A real shitty
job, but that goes without saying. If it was a such great job changing
your oil no one would be paying the folks at Jiffy Lube twenty five bucks
to do it for them.
So life wasn't all beer and hot dogs for me. I was twenty years old, didn't
have even a GED, had a rotten job, and with a record probably wasn't
going to get a better one. And I was living in my parent's basement.
Wouldn't you want to drink if your life was like that?
So that's what I did one payday Friday. I cashed my check, went home
and showered Jiffy Lube's shit off me, and went downtown to play some
darts and tie one on .

I drank I don't know how many pitchers of beer that night, but it was
plenty. The thing about it was that I wasn't in a real rowdy, fightin' kind
of mood. Really kind of mellow. Thought about maybe trying to get
laid.
Then this hot little blonde walked by me, shaking her fine little ass, and
smiling at me.
I really don't remember how the whole deal went down, but the police
report version said that I grabbed this chick by her sweet ass and her big
college football playing boyfriend got pissed and punched me and when I
got up I hit him with a chair and really busted him up. Turned out later
that the ball player was the grandson of the mayor of St. Paul.
Then the cops showed up and I guess another bit of a scuffle broke out
and one of the cops got a bloody nose and his glasses broke. Big deal!
Two of my ribs got damn near broken and it took twenty stitches to
close the cut over my eye and you don't hear me bitching. I didn't know
that being a pussy was a prerequisite for being a cop!

But this time the judge had seen enough. With my past record and all, he
said he thought I might be "unbalanced", and he was going to send me
down to a hospital in the southern part of the state to have me evaluated.
I guess he didn't buy my feeble explanation that I was just out trying to
get some trim and that it wasn't my fault that the jock couldn't handle it.
I kinda flipped out, which didn't help matters much, and called the judge
a dirty son of a bitch. So the bailiffs wound up escorting me out of the
courtroom right past my mom who was giving me her famous shit eating
smirk while mouthing the words "maybe now you'll learn", and my dad
who was shaking his fist at me and telling me what a no good rotten
bastard I had always been.
The next morning these two big sheriff's deputies handcuffed and
shackled me and drove me about an hour south of the city to the
hospital. Only it wasn't your regular kind of hospital. It's called a
security hospital and it’s the kind of place where they put criminals who
are too goddamn crazy to be in prison. There aren't any bars on the
windows, just glass so thick you couldn't drive a car through it.

I hadn't been on my unit a half a day, hadn't even seen the shrink yet,
before this big old Mexican dude tried to kiss me and grab my dick while
I was sitting in the TV room, watching another one of those endless
fucking reruns of M*A*S*H. Let me tell you right now, one hell of a
fight broke out. The Mexican dude must have been on some sort of
medication or something because he was real slow and I whipped his ass
but good. His nose split like a ripe peach and I actually cold cocked the
motherfucker. I wound up getting put on this special isolation unit, after
I got cracked on the back of the head with a billy club, where there was
only ten of us.
My new unit held twelve patients but only ten cells were occupied. There
was also an super dooper high security cell that held an inmate named
Wes Dibley. That cell was never opened unless there were four staff
present and had video cameras goin’ twenty four hours a day. Wes was
never allowed out. He took his meals in the cell, and had his own
shower and television. Wes was what you would call an "evil genius" and
was considered real dangerous. He had a college degree from Yale and
had been committed after blowing up a savings and loan and the block
surrounding it with dynamite, and wound up killing fifteen people. Wes
had a lot of fun at the hospital by assaulting both security and medical
staff with home made weapons like zip guns, shanks, and mace made out
of Vaseline and pepper, until he got locked up permanently in his
specially designed condo.
The staff didn't come on the unit much. They had a big observation
bubble where they just sat and drank coffee and watched us. They'd only
come charging on the unit if something like a fight broke out or if some
wing nut took a big turd and threw it at the bubble, which I did see
happen a time or two.
There was two Indians, four blacks, and me and three other white guys
on the unit. One of the white guys was about the biggest dude I have
ever seen. He was easily six foot six and way over three hundred pounds,
some fat but a lot of muscle. Big cannonball shaved head with a
tarantula tattooed on the top of it and a swastika right in the middle of
his forehead. And he had mean, beady little eyes that had blue tears
tattooed under them. Now that I think about it, he kinda looked like that
fat bastard, Butterbean, that's always fighting on cable TV.
Supper was being handed out when I got processed onto the unit, and
man, it looked like shit. And I hadn't eaten all day. Suppose to be some

kind of chicken patty but looked more like someone had stomped on a
mouse, fried it up in a pan, and threw it on a bun. There was a blob of
mashed potatoes big enough to feed two men and it was covered with
some yellow gelatin like gravy. All topped with a pile of mixed vegetables
and a oatmeal cookie as big and hard as a hockey puck. Kool Aid to
drink. Kool Aid got served at every fucking meal there.
There were three tables bolted to the floor and each table would seat four
people. Two of the tables were full, the blacks had one table to
themselves, the two Indians and two white guys had one, and the big
man was sitting at the remaining table all by himself. I could feel
everybody watching me when walked over to his table and sat down.
Those beady eyes were burning a hole in me.
"Gotta pay to sit at my table, punk." He had a voice that sounded like it
had been thickened by years of whiskey and cigarettes, but he talked real
low, kinda rumbled.
"Excuse me?"

"What, are you fucking deaf? To sit at my table you have to pay. Today
it will cost you that cookie and half of them spuds."
"What if I don't want to pay?"
“Then you'll have to squeeze in with the rest of the retards over there."
"Hey, man, I don't want any trouble. But I'm hungry as hell. I haven't
eaten all day long."
"Your story is tearing at my heart, but tough shit."
This guy was fucking enormous. There was no way in hell I could take
him on and not get either seriously beat to shit or outright killed. But I
was so hungry you could hear my guts rumbling. I was beyond the point
of caring.
"Look, man. I just got locked in here for kicking one guy's ass about two
hours ago so I'm not looking for any more trouble. I respect where
you're coming from, this isn't the first time I've been locked down so I

know you're the boss here. But I'm fucking hungry, so if you want to get
squirrelly, you just jump."
It got so quiet in there you could hear a mouse fart in the corner. The
big man didn't say a word, just sat there looking at me like I had just
flown in on a starship. Suddenly his face broke into a grin.
"Fucking A! Finally a motherfucker comes in here that's got a set a nuts
on him." He stood up and pointed a sausage sized finger at the other two
tables.
'Unlike the rest of you fucking retards and baby rapers."
He reached across the table to shake my hand. I could feel the bones in
my hand crunch.
"Norm Grabowski is the name. Those pricks may think they run the
show." He shot the middle finger to the guards who were staring at us
from the observation pod. "But this is my fucking unit."

Truer words were never spoken. Norman "Spider" Grabowski was the
end result of over twenty one years spent in the state's finest penal
facilities. From the age of thirteen on, Norm had been locked up in
every correctional institution in the state, eleven months being his longest
break between sentences. He had a rap sheet a mile long. It started off
with shoplifting, and then continued on with burglary, auto theft, assault,
sale of narcotics, statutory rape, possession of twenty pounds of
marijuana, and about anything else you could think of. He was also a
suspect in the unsolved murders of five black inmates. Now at the age of
thirty-three, Norm was a high ranking member in good standing of the
Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, a gang not known for their liberal views,
and had been committed to the security hospital as mentally ill and
dangerous after stabbing a guard at the penitentiary in the stomach .
Guards and inmates alike were scared shitless of him.
Norm shoved his sandwich into his mouth and stood back up and
walked over to the table where the other two white inmates were sifting.
"Let me introduce you to these homos."

Norm stood behind a lanky, greasy haired, foul smelling man of about
forty who was wearing clothes from the disco era.
"This first shitbag is Bob. And he is a shitbag, literally. He got thrown
off a tier at the pen by a gang of brothers who were strong arming him.
Busted up his back and left him shitting and pissing in a bag. They had
to put him in here for his own safety while he recuperated. But Bob,
being the great guy that he is, wound up almost strangling a nurse to
death while he tried to rape her with his useless dick. Now his whole life
revolves around cigarettes and enemas." Norm leaned over and spit a
green lunger onto Bob's mashed potatoes.
He walked over and stood behind the remaining white inmate, then
suddenly grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his face
down into his tray. The guards in the pod all jumped to their feet.
"This puke is Danny. Danny got brought in here for raping his ten year
old sister. Said some demon was talking to him, told him to do it. The
quacks have been pumping him full of thorazine and electric shock three
times a week and now Danny has refried shit for brains. Every night he

lets the soul brothers come into his cell and play ass darts on him. Then
the injuns get sloppy seconds."
Norm wheeled around and faced the guards in the observation bubble.
"Get back to jerking off, you fucking pussies," he screamed. You could
see the guards shuffling uneasily in their bubble.
He came back over and sat down at our table. "I'm not going to insult
you by introducing the rest of these scrotum heads. They're not worth
the shit on the bottom of my shoe." The blacks and the two Indians ate
their supper silently while looking down at their trays.
.'I'm glad you're here, brother. I need a good right hand man," he
whispered hoarsely.
A week passed by and I was starting to work on a wicked case of
claustrophobia slash cabin fever. Being locked up on a maximum
security, crazy as a shit-house rat ward, without being crazy will do that
to a guy. Because of my association with Norm, the other inmates
avoided me like I was carrying a case of the clap, so I didn’t have any
problems in that area. But it's damn hard to live in a place where the

accepted behavior includes sitting in the television lounge jacking off
while watching Oprah, participating in a nightly massive anal and oral
gangbang of a brain fried fellow inmate, throwing your shit around like it
was a baseball, or sitting down with a issue of Rolling Stone and eating the
entire magazine after you got done reading it.
It was recreation time and we were out in our unit’s tiny yard. There was
an old, rusty Universal weight machine stuck in the corner and I was
watching Norm go through his routine on it. He was using every plate
on the stack and was still doing at least fifteen reps per session without
breaking a sweat.
I was voicing my concerns to Norm that I had been there for a week and
had only talked to the shrink once.
“That’s all they need." He grunted as he benched the entire stack of three
hundred.
"Who's they."

"The court, my brother." He sat up and wiped his pumpkin sized head
with a towel. "Look, this is how it works. You got a history of whipping
the shit out of people. Finally you punch a cop. A big no-no in the eyes
of the court. They send you here for a court ordered observation and
you ain't here long enough to have a cup of coffee and you kick some
other douche bag's ass. They got you by the short and curlies now, man.
Shrink comes in and has a little sit down with you. Writes up a nice
report to the court and the next thing you know you get the big M. I. and
D designation. Mentally ill and dangerous. That's the worst you can get
in this shithole."
"How long is that for?" My voice was squeaking.
Norm gave a evil grin and started pumping out reps again. "Could be
years. Could be forever. All depends. Getting committed ain't like
getting sentenced to the joint. That's the thing about the bughouse. Free
world people think that a convict is getting off easy by getting sentenced
here instead of prison. They think it’s like fucking country club."
He let the pile drop with a loud crash. 'What bullshit that is! In here
with the M. I. and D., the big bitch, that can be as good as a life sentence.

You throw in the electric shock and all the dope they pump in you every
fucking day, couple a years you'll be doing the thorazine shuffle and
shittin' in your pants."
I couldn't believe what the fuck I was hearing. I was so stunned I
couldn't speak.
Norm sat back up on the bench. "Jimbo, I'm not saying that it's going to
happen but I seen it happen a dozen times since I been here." He stood
up, casting a huge shadow over me.
"But it doesn't have to be that way, little dude. I know how to get you
out of here. But it ain't for free. Its gonna cost you, big time. You'll
owe me and the Brotherhood."
He started in on his lat pulls. "Up to you."
Norm had AIDS. He had contracted it shooting speedballs and sharing
the needle with his Aryan buddies at the penitentiary. He had done the
hit on the guard because he had nothin' to lose. That was why he was at
the security hospital. Since he was going to die anyway, the state figured it

would be safer and smarter to send him to the security hospital while he
waited to punch out rather than to lock him up in segregation. From the
hole he could still carry out prison business, but by putting him in the
nuthouse they could cut him off from his Neo-Nazi friends.
'Wonder if they don't commit me? What if I just have to stand trial? If I
copped a plea I'd maybe do less than a year county time? I escape from
here, I'm on the run for good."
It was almost time to lock in for the night. Norm and I were the only
inmates sitting out in the day room, the rest of the unit had either already
hit the sack, the medication the committed inmates were on tended to
make them turn in early. Or they were in Danny's cell, pounding his ass
for a nightcap.
'That's the chance you have to take. You can wait it out and see what the
courts say. And you may be right. They may just go to trial and you can
cop a plea. But if they don't, you could wind up being in here until your
a shriveled up old man blowing dudes for Snicker's bars and cigarettes.
Man, look at Danny. The bucks are in there every night nailing him. I'm
not going to live forever. And you'll be in here all by your lonesome.

Think about it. I'm going to fucking bed, got me a new stroke magazine
in the mail today, gotta break it in." The giant inmate lumbered to his feet
and headed towards his cell.
The guard on duty announced on the intercom that it was five minutes to
lock down and as I was walking to my cell, I glanced in at Danny. They
had him stripped down as naked as they day he was born. One guy was
hitting him from behind while another was slamming him in the mouth.
He looked out of the corners of his glazed eyes at me. I turned around
and walked over to Norm's cell.
"I'm in. I'll do what ever the fuck I have to do to get out of here."
***
"First thing you have to do is give me the address of your parents and
any brothers and sisters."
It was morning and we were leaning over trays of greenish scrambled
eggs, hash browns, and a gigantic, sweating sweet roll that was laying on

top of the whole mess. The sight of Norm shoving it all into his gaping
cake hole was about enough to put me over the top..
"What the hell for?'
'That's just the way the system works, dipshit. I get you out of here,
you're going to have to work for us. You decide to bolt, the
Brotherhood needs to know where to find you. They can't find you, well
then mommy and daddy and little sis will have to take the heat for you.
And I can goddamn guarantee you that if they know where you are,
they'll talk." He spread his python sized arms wide. “Take it or leave it."
"When does it happen?" I was going to have to rush to my cell, the
combination of the smell of the breakfast and the thought of what Norm
was telling me was making me want to power puke.
"Couple of days. My boys on the outside have to make sure you gave me
the right addresses of your folks. And by the way, if you try to fuck me
and give me some bogus information you will be in a world of shit."

I was on my hands and knees barfing into my toilet when Norm stuck his
head in. "I forgot to tell you this. Get your armpits wet and soap 'em up
and let 'em dry without washing off the soap. Tonight show the nurse the
rash, tell her that you're allergic to the roll-on deodorant. They'll switch
you to spray. But don't use it, just leave it in your cell. You're gonna
need it."
Straight up midnight and the unit was quiet as a tomb. I looked out the
cell door window of my cell and could see just the tops of the heads of
the two night guards, both of whom Norm said were major league
stoners and never made more than two rounds a night, usually one at the
beginning and one at the end of the shift. They were watching a movie
on the VCR, looked like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I turned back to my
bed to check out my supplies. Two cans of Right Guard, one mine, one
Norm's, a damp towel, and a book of matches.
I stuck a piece of cardboard that I had cut from the back of a notepad to
fit into my cell door window so the guards wouldn't see the flame. I took
one of the cans of Right Guard, lit a match, and sprayed it.
It took off like a fucking flame thrower!

As soon as I directed the flame to the crash proof glass that was installed
in my outside window, I knew that it was going to work. The glass
seemed to start to melt almost immediately. Halfway through a can I had
an opening about ten inches wide. Within five minutes both cans were
empty and I had a hole easily wide enough for me to slide out. I cooled
down the edges of the hole with the damp towel and started to slide my
head out the hole.
"What in the double fuck is going on?"
In a panic I pulled my head back in. One of the guards was standing
inside my cell! He had obviously been smoking weed. His eyes were like
two piss holes in the snow and he was holding a can of beer. I couldn't
believe that I didn't hear him come in. He was standing there in the
middle of the cell with his jaw hanging down and this look of pure stupid
amazement of his face.
On nothing but shit in your pants fear and pure animal instinct, I threw
the hardest fucking roundhouse right that I have ever thrown to this day.
The punch pole-axed him right between the eyes, I could feel the bones

snap in my fist, and the guard dropped to the floor like he had been shot
in the head.
I turned and somersaulted through the window, falling about four feet,
and landing flat on my back, knocking the wind right the hell out of me.
I staggered to my feet and while clutching my throbbing, broken hand to
my chest, I slipped into the shadows and began to work by way down the
side of the building to the cover of the woods that bordered the back of
the hospital.
There was only one light on in any of the cells. It was Wes Dibley's, the
resident evil genius and mad bomber. He was the one who had given
Norm the idea about using the Right Guard as a blow torch. Wes was
buck naked and was standing in his toilet bowl, a Playboy in one hand, his
dick in the other. His head turned slowly towards me, like it was on a
swivel, like he was a fucking owl. He gave me a slight nod and a smile
and turned back to his fun.
I ran into the woods.

When I broke free of the woods on the other side I came out onto a
county road. Following Norm's directions, I stayed down low in the
ditch and ran south about two miles to a closed Exxon station. Behind
the station, a beat up old Cadillac was idling with it's lights off. When I
walked up in front of the car, the lights came on, blinding me. I heard
the door open.
"Are you Jimbo?" The voice was female.
"That's me." I whispered.
"Well, get in cowboy. You can drive."
Sliding over into the passenger seat was a woman child who was crack
whore thin and had the teeth to match. Her hair was spiked up in a punk
fashion and she must have had thirty facial piercings. Her face looked
like it was made out of aluminum and every inch of skin on her that I
could see was covered in jailhouse tattoos. She was smoking a huge fatty
that she was washing down with a peach wine cooler.

I put the car in gear. "Where to?" I was sweating like a whore and
smelled worse.
"Keep going south about four miles and we'll catch the interstate into the
city." She passed me the joint.
"Are you Norm's wife?"
She laughed like a little girl. "Me? Norm's wife? Fuck no!"
That was about all she seemed to want to talk about that, so I let the
subject drop. I needed to calm down anyway. She popped a CD in the
stereo and cranked up some kind of death metal shit so loud I thought
my ears would start bleeding. As I pulled onto the interstate she slid over
next to me, unzipped my fly, pulled out my crank, and slid her lips over
the head of it. I groaned as my eyes rolled back into my head and I had
to fight to keep the car on the road. I felt myself wanting to cum
immediately.
She sat back up. "Oh no you don't." She reached into her purse and
pulled out a vial of white powder. Licking the head of my dick she

tapped out a small pile of the coke onto it and rubbed it all over the head,
numbing it.
"Mmmmm. That's much better." She started in again, blowing me all the
way to Minneapolis.
***
"What the hell took you so fucking long?"
We were standing in this incredibly nasty, filthy house trailer, just north
of Minneapolis, that smelled like B.O., cat piss, pot, and Old English 800
malt liquor. And standing in the kitchen screaming at us was this
enormous, bleach blonde woman, that I figured out quickly was Norm's
wife. She wasn't wearing a shirt or a bra, just a pair of dirty jeans, and her
giant tits were completely covered with a massive Harley Davidson
tattoo. I'll bet the bed she and Norm bone danced on had to be
reinforced with cinder blocks.,
She reached out and grabbed Rita's face with a catchers mitt sized hand.
Rita being the woman that had picked me up.

"Did you fuck him? Huh? Is that what took you so long?"
Rita giggled. "No, Glenda. I just blew him."
Glenda turned and glared at me. I felt my bowels loosen.
She shook Rita's head and pointed at me with her free hand. "Now you
listen to me you bag of shit. Rita is off limits to you, you understand?
You touch her one more time you'll find your balls in my martini glass
and your ass in a wood chipper. I don't give a shit what Norm says."
She turned back to Rita. "Strip down and get on the couch." She barked.
Without a word, Rita stripped down, she was even scrawnier naked, and
knelt on the couch, doggie fashion, while Glenda walked to the back of
the trailer. When she came back out, she had taken off her Levis and was
strapping on a huge black dildo.
"Sit your ass down in that chair, asshole. I want you to watch this."
Pushing a sleeping, mangy cat and a couple of empty Budweisers out of
the way, I eased myself down into a recliner.

Spitting in her hand, Glenda lubed up the fake dick and shoved it hard
into Rita's ass.
She looked over her shoulder at me. "Don't you think about fucking
with me! We own you." I could hardly hear her over Rita's screams of
pain.
The sun was trying to stream in through the grit and grime that was
coated on the trailer's windows. The dildo assault on Rita had finally
ended and she was laying in a corner, unconscious. Glenda had force fed
her a tranquilizer that a horse would have had a hard time swallowing.
The whole incident had been like watching an X-rated version of the
Twilight Zone.
Glenda had taken off her crank, but was still lounging naked on the
couch, working on her sixth bottle of Bud and smoking a bowl of hash.
I was trying my best not to look at her.
She leaned back and let out a loud belch that practically rattled the
windows, then glared over in my direction. “Take off your fucking
clothes off and get over here."

"Huh?"
"You heard me, fuckstick! Take off your clothes and get over here. You
got a pussy to eat."
"Glenda, please, I don't think Norm would..." I was stammering like one
of the retards in the hospital.
"Listen to me, little shit. I don't think you quite understand the situation
you're in. Norm and the AB got you out of the slammer. So now you
work for us. What we say, whatever we want, you do. Jesus Christ,
you're stupid. What do you think Rita is here for? She's paying off a
debt her old man owes up in the penitentiary. If it wasn't for us he'd
have an asshole so big you could park a go-cart in it."
She leaned back on the couch, spread her legs, and used her fingers to
open up her gaping snatch.
"Now get out of those fuckin' clothes and get over here. But first get in
my purse over there by your chair and get me a fresh pack of cigarettes."

I shakily stood up and took off my clothes while the fat hog leered at me
and then picked up the dildo and slid it into herself. I shuffled over,
stark naked, and opened up her purse. When I bent over she must have
seen something she liked.
"Oh, yah. I'm gonna break that brown eyed beaver in good." My dick
and balls shriveled up to the size of a thimble and a couple of acorns. I
was close to puking or passing out, it didn't really matter at this point.
Nestled in next to her Lucky Strikes was a wad of cash the size of a Big
Mac. But that wasn't what set my heart to racing. No! What got my
adrenaline pumping like I had just mainlined a dose of crystal, was the
sight of a snub nosed .38 laying at the bottom of her purse.
Glenda had already realized her fuck up, because by the time I had
whirled around and aimed the pistol, almost dropping the damn thing in
the process, she had already staggered to her feet.
"You better drop that goddamn piece right now, asshole!” She screamed.

Without thinking or aiming I fired off a round. But the fist that I had
broken on the guard's head had swollen to the point that I couldn't even
open my hand so I was holding the gun with my left, my wrong hand, so
the first shot went wide of Glenda's head and took out the living room
window.
If you never done it before, you wouldn't believe how loud it is to shoot
off a high caliber pistol in a shitty aluminum trailer.
"Jesus Christ! Have you lost your fucking mind?"
Glenda started to slowly walk towards me. "Now give me the gun you
little pisspot and we'll forget about everything, because I don’t think you
know just what the hell you're doing."
I dropped my aim down to her tattoo covered tits and started firing. Four
quick shots, the force of the them driving her back down onto the couch.
She was sifting there, frantically trying to stop the spouting geysers of
blood that were pumping out her by covering them with her hands, when
I walked over and fired the remaining shot into her head. Some of her
brains blew out the back of her skull and sprayed all over the curtains.

I dropped the gun, bent over and barfed on my bare feet.
After I was through throwing up my shoes and socks, I dressed as fast as
humanly possible and went back to Glenda's purse and shoved the wad
of cash and a big block of hash into my pocket. Rita must have been in a
coma because she didn't move a muscle through all that screaming and
shooting. I picked the pistol back up, wiped it off with my shirt, and put
the weapon in Rita's hand.
Grabbing the keys for the Cadillac, I raced out the trailer door. Someone
must have heard the shots because I could hear sirens in the distance. I
fired up that old Caddy and took off in the opposite direction.
Once I got back to the city, I parked the car in the parking lot of a
grocery store and hopped on a city bus that took me downtown to the
courthouse. They had just opened the doors when I got there so I was in
and out of there in about twenty minutes with a copy of my birth
certificate and driver's license. All I had to do was give the lady behind
the counter forty bucks and a sob story that I had lost both of them
when my apartment caught fire.

That's all you need to get into Mexico. Your drivers license and a copy
of your birth certificate. I never knew that until Norm had told me. The
dumb shit!
I hopped in a cab and had him take me to a hotel just outside the airport.
I was there for two days waiting for my charter flight to Cancun. I spent
the time smoking Glenda's hash, eating room service, peering out
through the curtains, and watching pay for view porno movies. The one
time I turned on the news they were talking about the murder of a
convict biker's wife. I got to feeling sick all over again so I never turned
on the news or read the paper again.
At the airport, standing in my Hawaiian shirt and shorts, I was shaking
like a leaf I was so nervous. I kept looking all around the lobby looking
for cops or tattooed covered bikers, but all I saw was families of tourists
or drunk college kids going on spring break.
Just before they announced my flight, feeling guilty, I decided to call my
parents.
The old man had answered on the second ring.

"Hey Dad, it's me."
"You really screwed up this time, Mr. Big Shot. The police have already
been here. You better turn yourself in. What the hell were you thinking
of, breaking out of that hospital? Now you're going to have to go back
to court, and this time you're going to wind up in jail! Not some country
club hospital. And you know what? I'm glad! Maybe a little time in jail
will straighten you out, you good for nothing bum."
The boarding for my flight was being announced.
"Say goodbye to Mom for me. And Dad? If any big guys on Harleys roll
up into your driveway, you better lock the doors and call the cops. See
ya!"
"What in the hell are y......
I hung up the phone and walked down to the gate.
So that's pretty much the whole shebang in a nutshell. I flew into
Cancun with all the tourists and took a ferry over here to Isla Mujures. I

just never went back. I sell Cuban cigars and other tourist trinkets to the
people on the beach. I don't make a lot of money but I get by. The
main thing is I just try to keep my mouth shut and to stay out of trouble.
I can't afford to get busted down here and sent back to the states. Not
with the cops and the AB and God knows who else is looking for me.
By the way, you got a beer in that cooler you could spare?

CALL ME THE BREEZE
Ed "Cool Breeze" Byrd had come to believe that he was a major player in
the street scene of downtown Orlando. Although he didn't have a string
of whores like some pimps, he did have one, that was a start. Even if she
wasn't the smartest bitch to ever walk down the street. He had a good
side business going on selling quarters, halves, and ounces of weed to the
tourists who were in town to see Walt and the Mouse, and the college
kids who were here to get laid and loaded. Ed had even pimped himself
out a few times to some white college bitches from some backwater town
up north who had wanted to see what a black stud like himself was like in
the sack. He hadn't disappointed. He thought anyway.
He had struck gold though with the blackmail scheme. Orlando was not
only a tourist town but it was also a Navy town. There was a boot camp
here and Florida was full of bases. It brought in sailors and officers alike.
And white boys are no different than them white bitches. Them white
boys want to see what that black trim is all about. That's where Cool
Breeze came in.

Breeze had his whore, Belinda, dumb as a stump but still a damn fine
looking girl, pick up unsuspecting sailors and take them to the Pink Fox
motel, which is where Cool Breeze had greased the hand of the manager
with a three hundred dollar monthly payment and a weekly blow job
from Belinda, to allow Breeze to install a two way mirror in one of the
rooms.
Once the sailor was brought into the room and started getting in on with
Belinda, Breeze would either photograph or videotape the session, which
he would sell to the underground porno trade. Depending on the john,
Breeze would then quite often bust into the room with his .45 drawn and
blackmail the john right out of his wallet and any expensive jewelry he
might have.
Twice it had gone wrong. One white boy, a bodybuilder, had actually
jumped up and charged the Breeze Man. Breeze, while backpedaling in
fright, had fired off an accidental round which caught the john square in
the chest.
The second time the boy had like a religious fit or something when
Breeze had busted in and started screaming about what his momma

would do if she ever found out he had been tapping a black woman.
Breeze had to stick him with his blade to shut him up. He couldn't shoot
him. Otto, the motel manager, had almost kicked Breeze out after the
time he had shot the cracker with his piece. Breeze even had to rent one
of those rug cleaning vacuums you get at the grocery store to clean the
carpet in the room after that one.
He had dumped both bodies in a dumpster. Once behind a Shoneys,
because they were racist bastards. And the other one behind a
McDonalds, because once he had gone into one to use their can and the
manager had forced him to buy something first. Plus, he hated their
fucking fries. No one had fries like White Castle. Couldn't get them in
Florida though. He never knew if the bodies were ever found. Breeze
wasn't big on the news or reading papers.
But with two other marks he had hit the jackpot.
Breeze was behind the mirror one slow Thursday night when Belinda
brought in a john and Breeze almost passed out in excitement when he
saw who it was. It was the goddamn executive officer of the Naval

training facility, the same prick that had signed off on Cool Breeze's very
own dishonorable discharge.
Breeze had enlisted in Detroit after the recruiter had cheated on the test
for him and had reported to Orlando for boot camp. Three weeks into
his training, Breeze had taken it upon himself to expose himself to a
female recruit. He had been arrested, court martialed, and discharged
within a week. He remained in Orlando because he enjoyed the climate
much more than Detroit. Plus in Detroit there was about two thousand
people he had fucked over and who wanted Breeze either very dead or
very hurt.
The man who was now humping Belinda wildly was the same asshole
who had had Breeze drummed out of the service, calling Breeze a
"disgusting piece of crap" and a "disgrace to the uniform." Breeze now
had in his possession the taped around the world event of the officer and
Belinda, and he received a six hundred dollar a month retainer to make
sure that no one ever would see the tape.
His second monthly payment came from another officer. This one was a
ensign but a female. She had paid Belinda a hundred dollars to go down

on her and had gotten so worked up that she had returned the favor. She
paid Breeze four hundred a month to keep the video out of sight, but he
had also sold the video to his underground buddies. No one was the
wiser.
So all in all, the Breeze should have been a happy camper but he wasn't.
He was in fact, a nervous wreck. He was standing on the street, about a
half a block from his digs, a fifth floor walkup, in front of his favorite bar
and grill, The Bearded Clam, with Belinda, and Breeze felt like he could
shit cream corn at any minute. What had happened last night had fucking
freaked him. Scared the absolute shit out of him.
He had been behind the mirror when the door to the adjoining room had
opened and Brenda came in with this big, football playing, weightlifting
type. He had a military haircut but it almost looked like he was trying to
grown one of those mohawk looking things that those Sid Vicious dudes
used to wear around Detroit. More like that wrestler, the one in The
Road Warriors, he used to watch them on Ted Turner's Superstation, it
looked more like that. But the guy was big, he was scary looking, and he
had freaky fucking eyes. Big tattoo of a pit bull on his back. Breeze
decided to let this one pass. He was trouble.

Brenda had given the dude a half and half and after the Road Warrior
had gotten done with the second half, the guy had gotten up, ripped off
his rubber and thrown it at Breeze's mirror. It had stuck right in front of
Breeze's face, and then the monster had grinned right at the mirror and
did one of those finger/gun cocking things. He paid Belinda, had gotten
dressed, and then walked out.
Breeze was freaked beyond belief.
Belinda had to have told the guy. How the hell else would he have
known? He was standing in front of the Clam, holding onto Belinda by
both arms, and screaming so loud at her that her face was speckled with
Breeze's spit. He didn't give a shit if anyone heard. HOW THE HELL
DID THAT GUY KNOW?
The Warrior was grinning as he watched the couple through his
binoculars. He was sitting on a chair in front of a window in Ed "Cool
Breeze" Byrd's apartment. The apartment had a cheap lock purchased at
Wal Mart. It had been a cinch to pick. The door was such a piece of shit
he could have kicked it off the hinges it had wanted to but he was afraid
of waking up the neighbors. The apartment was one of those ancient old

dumps that had been built in the 1950s, had a grace period of a decade or
so, then went straight down the crapper, until a few years ago when it
became trendy to fix up old crack and whorehouses and then rent them
out at upscale prices. Byrd was the only black that the Warrior had seen
in the building. Probably made the yuppies feel good living among the
common folk.
The neighborhood hadn't quite caught up. It was still littered with
hookers, tattoo parlors, adult book stores, and pawn shops, but it too
was becoming a trendy place to go slumming in for an evening. Looking
up and down the street you could see an occasional Mercedes Benz
parked in front of a strip club, or a BMW in the parking lot of an old skin
flick theater.
Warrior gazed around the apartment. It was decorated in a 70s kind of
decor, like a cross between Shaft and All In the Family. He looked back
down onto the street, Breeze was still reaming out his hooker. It didn't
take much to shake the place down, it was really just a big studio
apartment with a separate bathroom. It even had one of those old
Murphy style beds. Breeze had one of those huge, ancient stereo systems
set up on a big book case. When he opened the cabinet he immediately

found what he was looking for. A stack of videotapes and they were even
labeled. The still photos that he had taken were wrapped with rubber
bands and had the date and time when they were taken. Holy shit, was
this guy anal or just plain stupid? Warrior slipped the videos and pictures
he was looking for into the gym bag he always carried on his gigs.
This job had really been a vacation. Lots of other cases had been harder
and smarter, but not this dumbass.
It was hard to believe that the military actually paid him to do this shit.
His dad had been right. All that special forces training would eventually
pay off. The old man just would never know how.
After Warrior located Breeze, who had the nocturnal habits of a pimp, he
spent his days on the beach, and nights tailing Breeze.
The man disgusted Warrior. He was a bottom feeder of the worst sort.
But the third night he had done something really stupid. He had snorted
up a few lines of Peruvian flake and had picked up Breeze's whore, took
her back to the room and laid the coals to her, all the while hoping
Breeze would jump him so that he could beat him to death with his bare

hands. The chick was hot but that had been really fucking dumb. Gotta
be more professional.
Warrior fanned through some still photos in the gym bag. There he was
getting reamed, steamed, and dry cleaned in bright Kodak color. He
stuck that packet in his pocket, no need to let the brass see those, and
continued searching the apartment. In a wooden cigar box on top of the
television was an ounce of some pot that smelled like it came right out of
the personal stash of the King of Thailand, or whatever it was called
now. That also went into his pocket, but he took a single joint that was in
the box and fired it up as he continued his search.
He wandered into the bathroom as he puffed away. Boy, was this some
sweet tasting bud. The buzz was coming on fast and strong. Warrior
grabbed the top of the toilet tank and lifted it up. Bingo! Floating inside
the tank was a shitload of cash inside a couple of zip lock bags. He pulled
the cash out of the bags, in typical Byrd style it was broken up in
twenties, fifties, and hundreds. The hundreds he fit into his pocket and
the rest went into the gym bag.

Warrior finished the joint and dropped it sizzling into the bowl. A quick
check of the window showed Mr. Breeze still in front of the bar. He gave
a thought about burning another doobie while he waited for the pimp to
come home but decided against it, remembering his boneheaded move
from the night before. He opened up a closet door in the mini kitchen
and saw a long object wrapped in a beach towel stuck behind some
brooms and mops.
Son of a bitch! It was the most awesome rifle he had ever seen. The
fucking thing looked deadly. Warrior pulled back the bolt. It was loaded.
Holy shit! This was an AK-47, a Russian made assault rifle. It looked
brand new and had been fitted with a scope. Where had a total shitbag
like Cool Breeze Byrd gotten his hands on a piece like this?
The "shitbag" had stolen it out of the Jeep of a retired Green Beret, who
while drunk on his ass, had been screwing Belinda. Breeze had shelled
out a couple of hundred bucks to a gunsmith to strip the weapon down
completely and give it a total overhaul and cleaning. The weapon looked
like it had just rolled off the factory floor in Stalingrad.

The Warrior started to giggle. Wouldn't it be a kick in the ass to pop
Cool Breeze at long range with his own weapon? Right in downtown
Orlando? He slid the chair back over in front of the window and sighted
the rifle in on Cool Breeze's head. He was still bitching and raising hell
with Belinda. The neon lights of the bar lit up the couple like it was
daylight.
Here I am in the book depository, he thought. Dallas. Here comes
Kennedy. I'm Oswald! Lee mother Harvey fucking Oswald! Cross hairs
straight on Breezes' head.
Just playing around here, he said to himself. It would be totally crazy to
waste him from here. Just goofing around. I'll take him out when gets
back to the apartment. Be a pro, dude. Can't screw this gig up. Higher
ups don't want any heat.
"Bitch, you had to have known! That cracker motherfucker threw his
scumbag right against my mirror after he be done fucking you! Then he
smiled right at me! How the fuck else would have known less you told
him, bitch? Huh?"

"Breeze, why would I tell him, huh? He just be another trick. That's all.
He was just crazy. Just acting crazy. All coked up and acting up. He didn't
know you was there. Dude was probably on them steroids or something.
He scared me." Belinda was close to tears.
"Maybe he’s a fucking cop, bitch. You ever think of that? Maybe you
want to get out of the business and you’re ready to punk out the Breeze."
He slapped Belinda across mouth, hard.
A man walking past the two stopped. "Hey! Knock that shit off." He
took a step towards Cool Breeze.
Byrd reached into his jacket and snapped out his switchblade. "You want
to be a man, asshole? Get in my affairs?" The man put his hands up in
the air and backed down the street.
"That's what I fucking thought," Breeze screamed down the street. He
turned back to Belinda who was wiping the blood from her mouth with a
handkerchief.

"I'm going to the crib and to get me a beer and something to smoke.
Clean your ass up and get to work." Breeze began his practiced pimp roll
down the sidewalk. He stopped suddenly as he glanced up at his
apartment window which was easily visible from the street.
"What in the fu... " The top of Cool Breeze's head vaporized in a Bloody
Mary mist. He fell straight back against a parking meter and sat there like
he had just had one too many to drink.
Belinda put both hands to her mouth and screamed and screamed and
screamed until she collapsed to her hands and knees and puked her
Popeye's Fried Chicken onto the sidewalk.
The Warrior jumped back from the window. "Yes," he yelled, "what a
shot, what a fucking shot!" He threw the rifle onto the couch, grabbed
his bag, and busted ass out the door. He went down the stairs five at a
time and came out in the back alley, where his contact from the base was
waiting to rush him to the airfield.
He still couldn't believe he got paid for having so much fun.

THE DEBT
The mine had remained tethered to the bottom of the Atlantic for three
decades after World War II had ended, before it’s chain, weakened from
the deep currents moving it slowly back and forth, snapped.
Camouflaged by slime and barnacles, it bobbed on the surface for years.
Then, spurred on by the winds and waves of an offshore hurricane, it
drifted into the Gulf of Mexico.
***
The water was like glass.
Bales of marijuana and pieces of the trawler floated in an oil slick around
the raft.
I thought it was the end for me. Everyone else involved in the plan was
dead. I had seen everyone, except my brother, die with my own eyes.
And I sure was wasn’t expecting him to come popping to the surface to
save the day like Lloyd fucking Bridges in Sea Hunt.

There was no protection from the sun. When I had hit the water, all I
had on was a pair of boxer shorts and those had been torn from my body
from the force of the water rushing in from the blown apart bow.
My body was being slowly basted in it’s own sweat. Skin a bright red.
Eyes swollen to slits. The sun and the oppressive heat had rapidly
drained the moisture out of my body.
The sharks discovered us the first day. When I had been able to sit up, I
could see them circling the amongst the wreckage, their dead eyes
peering up at me from the crystal blue water. Occasionally one of the
bastards would run his snout up and down my back through the floor of
the raft as if making sure I was still there.
Karl had been laying across his makeshift marijuana raft. His left arm
blown off at the elbow. I thought that he had been dead the whole time,
he never had responded when I shouted to get his legs out of the water.
But when the shark had snatched him and started off the feeding frenzy,
Karl’s eyes had snapped open like a ventriloquist’s dummy, his horrifying
screams echoing across the water.

Karl, my brother’s cellmate from Huntsville. My brother hadn’t been in
the joint a week when he had gotten ambushed in the showers. Karl had
walked in minutes later, towel over his shoulder, only to find his cellie
being cornholed by two big Brothers. One rapist had his jaw and
cheekbone broken and lost an eye. The other one had checked himself
into protective custody.
No one in the joint ever laid a hand on my brother again.
Six years ago, the Galveston cops, acting on a tip from a local snitch, had
raided our beach house. I had dove out the kitchen window and ran
down the beach, leaving my brother passed out on the couch with a
couple of ounces of weed on the coffee table in front of him.
We had been running a small marijuana smuggling operation. Nothing
major. For me anyway. I just needed enough cash to supplement my
surfing and beer drinking habits. Every couple of weeks we’d drive down
to Matamoros, catch a cockfight, drink some beer, bang a couple of
whores, and cross the border with a couple of pounds of weed in the
false gas tank of our VW bus. It was all a big hoot to me.

But Noah needed the cash. Two years prior to the bust, Noah had come
back from Nam after being released from the military stockade in
Saigon, with a dishonorable discharge in his hand. He was bitter,
unemployable, and hooked on China White heroin.
The cops tried to implicate me but Noah had taken the full fall. Hard.
Texas was Texas and the judge didn‘t bat an eye. Noah was sentenced to
five to eight in Huntsville State Prison. When he was led out of the
courtroom in shackles, I could read his mind when he glared at me sitting
there with our father. Where the hell where you?
Paranoid and scared shitless, emptied my savings account, I gassed up my
brother’s Harley, acquired in trade for a kilo of Panama Red, and fled
Galveston with no destination in mind.
When the money ran out and the bike was hemorrhaging oil, I found
myself on another island. Kodiak, Alaska.
I signed on at a fish cannery. Days I gutted fish. Nights I marinated my
brain with booze and dope.

About a year had gone by when I finally got the nerve up to send a
postcard to our Dad.
His reply had been short and sweet.
You are no son of mine.
I tried to let it all go.
Years rolled by in a blur. Time had no meaning.
Stinking of fish guts, I had gone straight to the bar after my shift. The
bar‘s owner, Wendy, was my girlfriend. A follower of something going
on in England called the punk movement, she had blown into Kodiak via
London several years earlier sporting safety pins shoved through her
cheeks, purple hair and strange musical tastes.
It was a slow night in the bar. We swapped stories, bought each other
shots of Cuervo, and sneaked lines of Peruvian flake as pink as a
newborn baby’s ass.

The next morning I was rousted by the sun streaming through her car
window and a rapping on the passenger window. Squinting through
ravaged, bloody red eyes, I looked down to find Wendy passed out with
her face in my crotch. Leering in the window at her pierced nipples and
shaved beaver was my trailer court manager. He was clutching a phone
message between two nicotine stained fingers. By the front of his pants it
looked like he had been standing there a while.
The phone rang in the hallway of a waterfront fleabag on Galveston
Island. Captain Jack’s had long been infamous as a home for the island’s
hookers, dopers, retards, drunks, welfare cases, and life’s overall losers.
My brother’s parole officer could now reach him at that address.
If Noah was concerned the phone was bugged he sure didn’t show it.
We’d cruise the trawler down to Tampico to fill the hold with kilos of
Mohican Gold along with ten pounds of brown smack to pay off the
Coast Guard. All expenses and front money would be taken care of. All
we had to provide was the boat and the labor.

In a smartass tone I asked him what the old man thought about all this?
“He’s be dead for two years. The boat’s mine now,” was the smartass
reply.
There would be a ticket waiting for me at the Anchorage airport.
There were debts to be paid.
***
The hallway in Captain Jack’s had an unbelievable funk. A combination
of sweaty armpits, dirty bungholes, and White Owl cigars.
The door swung open on the first knock. The joint hadn’t been kind to
Noah. His hair was long and greasy and he had a jailhouse pallor to him.
Never big to start with, he had lost a weight. Scrawny would be the way
to describe him and the graying, prison issued jockey shorts that he was
wearing didn’t help out his appearance.
His room didn’t smell any better than the hallway did.

Lounging naked on the bed, smoking a joint and watching Barney Miller
on a rabbit eared TV, her legs covered with scabs and tracks, was a
vaguely familiar hooker. She gave me a once over with vacant eyes and
went back to her show.
“Bitch can suck start a Harley. Want some of this, bro?” Noah dropped
his shorts and spooned up behind the whore. “We gotta a few minutes
before Karl gets back.”
The ride to Galveston had been quite the experience. Karl had picked me
up at the airport in a ancient Oldsmobile, and without speaking a word,
had driven ninety miles an hour all the way down to Galveston.
“Thanks but no thanks.” I opened up a cooler, pulled out a beer, and
squatted against the wall. “Get rid of the whore, man.”
The hooker got up in a huff and pulled on a bathing suit. As she walked
out she shot me the finger.
My brother sat up on the bed “You got some shitty manners.”

I shook my head at him. “Cut the bullshit.” I sneered at him. “ Jesus
Christ, Noah! Look at yourself. It took one look at you and I knew why
you wanted me here. You say it’s because I owe you and maybe I do. But
we both know that you’re in no fucking shape to run the boat. How the
hell did you stay hooked on junk while you were inside?”
He lit a cigarette and stared down between his feet. His voice a raspy
whisper.
“You can get anything you want in the joint, man. Karl and his boys took
care of me.”
“Yea, looks like they did a helluva job.”
“Oh, you’re a real fuckin’ tough guy? You think you could handle hard
time? You think you could take someone trying to turn you out? I don‘t
fuckin‘ think so.”
“Turn you out? Shit, Noah. You mean you got…?”

That‘s when I found out about all of it. About the rape. About Karl
busting up the Brothers. About Karl being a ranking member of a
notorious prison gang.
Noah owed Fred for saving his ass. The rules of prison. And that’s what
this dope run was all about. Karl’s gang found out that our family owned
a shrimp trawler and making this run would square things with them.
Karl had gotten released from Huntsville first, and five months later
when Noah walked out the gate, Karl had been at the curb, waiting.
Waiting for payback.
I literally couldn’t fucking speak.
“We gotta do it, little brother. If not, we’re both dead.”
***
We pulled out that night. Karl had never been on a boat before and was
blowing chow before we got out of the harbor. Noah, strung out and
shaky, wasn’t in much better shape.

I called Wendy collect, at the bar, just before we pulled out. I told her the
whole story. She had cried, I had never heard her cry, and wanted to
know why I was going through with this.
I didn‘t have an answer.
Ten miles out we were hit by a spotlight. Coast Guard! It was pitch black
out and the light was blinding.
“This is the spot, fucksticks,” a voice shouted out. “This is were I’ll be
and you goddamn better have my shit. I don’t play games.”
Fueled by white cross and caffeine, I never left the helm all the way to
Tampico. Even when we pulled in and swarthy, dangerous looking men
with machine guns loaded thousands of pounds of marijuana onto the
trawler, I never stepped down from the wheelhouse.
Finally, when we were halfway back to Galveston, unable to keep my
eyes open, I relinquished the wheel to my brother and crawled into my
bunk.

It was still dark when I woke up. A warm front had rolled in and I was
bathed in sweat. I rolled out of my bunk and shuffled into the small
galley where I washed down some amphetamines with a Coke.
I glanced up into the wheelhouse. Karl and Noah were illuminated eerily
in green by the instrument panel. Noah, obviously wired, was chattering
on like a monkey about some convict on “E” block who had the
“world’s biggest dick” when he suddenly shut up and backed the engines
down.
“Shit! Karl, do you see something floating out there?”
I stepped up into the wheelhouse when I felt the bump.
There was a blue flash.
And I was in the water choking on diesel fuel.
I didn’t remember climbing into the life raft. The sun was burning in the
sky when I came around. Just before dark, Karl was gone, and I knew
that in my present condition I wasn‘t far behind.

In a watertight pouch I found a flare gun and six flares. That night I shot
a flare off every couple of hours, saving one in case I spotted a boat or a
plane.
I don‘t how long I floated.
The sound of water splashing woke me up. Barely able to lift my head
and peering through slits, I saw someone standing on the bow of a small
boat poking at the remaining bales of weed with a boathook.
“What the fuck happened out here?” He screamed.
I recognized the Coast Guard agent’s voice.
“Where’s my smack? I didn’t put my ass on the line for you assholes just
to come up empty!”
I shook my head and laid back down. “All gone.” I muttered. Where the
hell did he think it was?
“Wake up, asshole!”

When I opened my eyes, the agent was over me, the boathook raised like
a spear. “Any minute a chopper is going to get scrambled. So you
either tell me where my heroin is or I‘ll gut you and throw you to these
fucking sharks.”
I raised my arm and fired the remaining flare in his direction. I don’t
know if I hit him. All I heard was something hitting the water, and then
screaming.
***
It made major news. The wreckage of a mysteriously sunken boat
surrounded by floating bales of marijuana, one survivor, AND a missing
Federal agent. How couldn’t it?
I was being held in protective custody, handcuffed to my bed. Everyday a
FBI agent with a split personality would visit me.
One day he would be fatherly;

“We can protect you, son” As he patted my foot. “We know that Walsh
(the Coast Guardsman) was dirty and that the load was financed by the
Texas Nazis. They’re already looking for you. Just tell us what you know
and we can make it all go away. Witness protection, baby.” He’d give a
sly wink.
The next day he’d be raging;
“You better come clean you punk motherfucker,” His face beet red with
spit flying out of his mouth. “You’ll never make bail so you’re gonna rot
in this shithole.”
But I stuck to my story. My family are shrimpers. Accidents happen in
the shrimping industry. I don’t remember a thing.
***
Three months into lockdown passed. I was in the exercise yard when a
guard handed me her letter. Wendy had sold her bar to post my bail.
She’d be in Galveston within the week. From there we’d work our to
Canada and then catch a flight to London.

Sweet Jesus Christ! Freedom!
I was so caught up in the letter that I didn‘t notice the guard walking
away and that I was suddenly unsupervised. There was a whiff of
jailhouse brew in the air. When I looked up there was an shirtless inmate
standing in front of me. A large swastika tattooed on his chest. The steel
shank in his hand was shining in the sun.
It‘s just business,” he whispered.

CROSSING THE VINCENT THOMAS BRIDGE
There was no other way to say it. He was a dirty agent.
But after over two decades working in the witness protection program,
with less than a month to retirement, it was all going straight down the
crapper unless this intelligence report that just came across his desk was
accurate.
Agent Jameel Lawrence had always played the system. The skels that he
lorded over had always been more than willing to cut him in on the
action to keep from going back to the joint. The whole program was a
joke. Did the idiots up in Washington actually think that you could take a
career criminal, promise him immunity after he snitched off all his
buddies, change his identity, move him to some backwater toilet, and
from then on he was going to live a normal life like John Q. Citizen?
Christ, what a joke!

But Lawrence had severely underestimated Jake Morrow. Morrow was
most likely the biggest drug dealer that the U. S. military had ever called
one of it’s own. A Navy SEAL stationed out of San Diego, Morrow had
run a huge operation involving over fifty sailors stationed on the area’s
many ships. Every time one of these naval vessels returned from an
overseas cruise, one of Morrow’s contacts on board would be bringing
back pounds of high grade marijuana, cocaine, or heroin. Morrow, a
weightlifting fanatic, also had a big hand in the growing steroid black
market. After earning an estimated 1.5 million dollars in only two years,
Morrow had been busted on a sting operation and had been sentenced to
fifty years at the Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks in Kansas.
Jameel Lawrence had cut a deal with Morrow to get him out of the
slammer. To earn his semi-freedom he would have to roll over all of his
major connections on the west coast. To keep his freedom, the ensuing
busts would have to provide a sufficient bonus to Jameel’s retirement
fund.

The problem, of course, was that Lawrence did this all without
Washington’s approval. He had paid off the warden of the Disciplinary
Barracks to keep Morrow on their roster while Lawrence carried out the
drug busts. Agent Lawrence never planned on letting Morrow remain
free. He also never planned on having a .357 magnum shoved into the
back of his skull in the parking lot of Kansas City International only two
hours after gaining Morrow's release. Lawrence had been forced to lay
down on the greasy floor while Morrow's rescuer, a big cowboy redneck,
had removed the cuffs from Morrow's wrists and had cuffed Lawrence to
a Toyota.
Morrow had disappeared into the wind.
For three weeks Lawrence had heard nothing. Then this little bit of
information floated to him.
The USS Dixie, a destroyer tender home ported out of San Diego, had
been robbed one day before payday. Two white males had walked up the

brow of the ship at approximately 0020 hours on a Monday morning,
flashed their military identification and had been allowed onto the ship.
The finance officer had been on duty that evening and had been awaked
by a knock on his stateroom door at 0120. When he answered the knock
he was greeted by the sight of a large man with a rubber Richard Nixon
mask on. Tricky Dick was holding a 9mm in his hand. He was ushered
up to the finance office, which was already opened and the financial
officer, Lt. Conrad Roth, was forced at gunpoint to open the ship’s safe
which contained the payroll for the entire crew. A tidy sum of over two
hundred thousand dollars. The two thieves had packed the cash up in
plastic garbage bags, wrapped them up with duct tape, and had placed the
bags inside of two large scuba diving bags. Duct tape was wrapped
completely around the whimpering body of Lt. Roth, and he was locked
up in the office and wasn’t discovered missing until the following
morning when he didn’t report for morning muster. Two ropes were
found hanging from the main deck of the ship down to the water line.
Lawrence had two suspects in mind, which he was not presently sharing
with authorities involved in the active investigation. This thing had
Morrow and his redneck buddy written all over it. Tony Hendrichs, an

old marijuana dealing buddy of Jake’s, who had been busted in the sting,
had been stationed onboard the Dixie prior to his arrest. Hendrichs had
been a Gunner's Mate, and one of his duties on the Dixie had been the
cutting and issuing of keys on the ship. It all fit
If the civilian authorities arrested Morrow on this charge, everything was
going to explode in Jameel’s face. He poured a generous amount of
Chivas Regal over the ice in his glass and fired up another Marlboro
while he dialed the number in Kansas. Colonel Morgan answered on the
second ring.
“I’ve got an idea where Morrow is. What I what to know is if you can
handle your end of the bargain if he’s where I think he is?”
Morgan sat up in the chair behind his desk. “What do you have in
mind?”

“From what I can gather, he may be holed up in San Pedro, California.
I’m planning on flying out there in about six hours, and if I find him, I’m
going to try to bring him down with either a tranquilizer or stun gun. I’m
going to have a flight crew ready to fly us straight back to Leavenworth.”
“I can lock him back up, that’s not a problem. But have you ever thought
what would happen if he gets hold of the media about this? He has
nothing to lose. I’d be fucked big time. And so would you, my friend.”
Lawrence took a hard hit on his Chivas. “Now you listen to me you
gutless little shitbird. We can make this all go away if you don’t run
around like a schoolboy pissing in his pants. As soon as I get Morrow
back to your prison, you get him down to the hole and make it look like a
suicide. Slash his wrists or string him up so it looks like he hung himself.
But for shit’s sake don’t beat the son of a bitch to death and then say that
it happened during a cell extraction like they did to that convict in
Oklahoma. That’ll bring too much heat. You got me?”

Morgan was silent for several moments. “Lawrence, what happens if you
can’t take him? What if he doesn’t come easy?”
“Then we’re fucked. I’ll put him down and as soon as I contact you,
report him missing on the next count. Report him as escaped. That’s all
we can do. The investigation will be worse that Watergate, but it’s our
only option.”
“Make goddamn sure you get him, Lawrence,” Morgan hissed in the
phone.
“You just do your job, I’ll do mine.” Lawrence slammed the phone down
and grabbed his intelligence folder.
The reports on Tony Hendrichs showed that he had purchased a home
in the San Pedro area while he was stationed at the Long Beach Naval
station. A records check also had shown that he owned a deep sea fishing
rig that was kept in a slip in Long Beach harbor and was regularly hired
out for charters. Pretty impressive for a E-6 in the military who’s ass was
now sitting in the brig.
Jameel, on a whim, had placed a call to a Naval Investigative agent in
Long Beach who had done a quick stakeout at the house. Lawrence had
given him a bullshit song and dance story about how he had information
that drugs were possibly being dealt to sailors on the navy ships in the
local shipyards by some shipyard employees living at that address.
Although there was not a lot of activity around the house, the one
occupant the NIS agent had seen was definitely yardbird material. Big
pickup truck covered in NASCAR stickers and the perp himself was all
redneck. Right down to the cowboy hat and boots. Fucking bingo!
Lawrence glanced at his watch. Might as well call flight ops now and get
that flight going to Long Beach. No need to put off the inevitable. He
slammed down another shot. The stress was getting to him, his bottle of
liquor was getting dangerously low and he was starting to feel it’s effects,

but a couple of toots of blow would help take the edge off that. He
pulled out a replacement bottle of Chivas and threw it in his briefcase
with the file, his service revolver, stun gun, and tranquilizer pistol.
***
A Lear jet that had been confiscated by the government from a high
rolling smack dealer was waiting on the tarmac. Lawrence had taken a
seat facing the rear of the aircraft so that he wouldn’t be observed cutting
his lines on the side of his briefcase and taking pulls of Chivas straight
out of the bottle.
As the jet taxied toward the hanger in Long Beach, the agent checked the
clip in his .45 caliber service weapon and placed it in the holster on the
back of his belt next to his handcuffs. He put a spare clip in his jacket
pocket along with a blackjack and a stun gun. He didn’t really want to get
that close to Morrow. Better to bring the big moose down with the tranq
gun.

The jet stopped with a sudden lunge as it entered the hanger and
Lawrence toppled over into the aisle. “What the fuck?” He shrieked.
The pilot looked out through the cockpit door. “Sorry, sir, I’m not use to
the brakes in this rig. They seem to real touchy,” said the young pilot.
“I’ll show you touchy, asshole,” muttered the agent.
Lawrence gathered up his jacket and briefcase and headed towards the
open hatch where the pilot stood by. “Uh, excuse me, sir.”
Jameel glared at the officer. “What now?”
“Your nose, sir. You have something right here.” The pilot made a
wiping motion under his own nose.

Lawrence wiped his nose with the back of his hand and saw a dusting of
the coke he had been snorting on the flight. “Oh. Yeah. Thanks.”
A generic government four door sedan sat outside the hangar with the
keys in the ignition. Lawrence fired it up and turned the dome light on to
check his map for the directions to the suspected house. Had to cross the
Vincent Thomas toll bridge over to San Pedro, follow the road into
town, stay on the main drag for about seven blocks, take a right and head
up the hill. Not too bad. If things went smooth, he could pop Morrow,
cuff him and load him in the trunk, and be back here to load him up on
the jet within a half an hour.
Lawrence reached over and took a pull off of his bottle. Shit! He quickly
pulled the jug down as he met an oncoming San Pedro police car. Better
cool it here. Wouldn’t be a good time to get a driving while shitfaced
charge.

The agent took a right and started up the hill as he squinted at the houses
and mailboxes for street numbers. There it is! He maintained his speed
and went down another block before he turned around and parked about
a quarter block away. There was a pickup in the driveway. No lights on in
the house, but he could see the blue flickering light of a television set
through the closed curtains. He got out of the car, put the tranq gun
down the front of his pants, crossed the street, and began to walk down
the dark sidewalk.
The house was just your basic rental shack. Square little dump with a
living room in the front, kitchen in the back, and two small side
bedrooms off to the side. Lawrence walked down a little further and
crossed back over. Walking up to the side of the pickup, he took a quick
glance in, nothing besides empty Coors bottles. He reached in and
opened the glove box. Just a couple of maps. He ducked down and crept
into the back yard. With his flashlight he looked into the two garbage
cans. Same thing in there. Lots of beer bottles, pizza boxes, and buckets
from the Colonel. Nothing to show who might be inside.

The drapes were pulled tight on both bedrooms and the bathroom. The
back door appeared to have had the window knocked out of it and had
been replaced with a piece of plywood. He tried the door, it was locked
tight. Lawrence crept back up the driveway to the side of the living room.
The curtain to the room had about a inch to spare at the bottom of the
window, just enough for the agent to attempt a look inside.
Sitting on a ratty sofa, while she drank a Mountain Dew and munched on
some pretzels out of a bag, was a woman wearing nothing it appeared,
other than a T-shirt and a pair of panties. She seemed to be alone and it
didn’t look by the decor of the place that the house was occupied by too
many people. The living room had a couch and old recliner and the TV,
that was it. Shit! The agent’s instincts told him that this might have very
well been a wild goose chase. Better check it out though. Lawrence
pulled out his badge and walked up the front steps.
He gave the door an official rap. Through the door’s window he saw the
woman stand up and walk to the door. She looked out quizzically and
Banks flashed his badge. She opened the inner door but kept the screen

door latched. The TV was blaring. Some made for television piece of shit
produced for idiots just like her.
“Can I help you?” She was bleach blond, white trash, wearing a Raiders
shirt that was cut down to show some ample cleavage and which barely
covered the worn white panties she had on. Banks glanced down, he
swore he saw a glimpse of her bush.
“Uh, good evening, mam. Sorry about the late hour. I’m Special Agent
Jameel Lawrence. We had an attempted burglary at the Bank of San
Pedro and one of the suspects has been reported in this area. I’m
conducting a door to door check to see if anyone in the neighborhood
has seen anything out of the ordinary.”
She glanced back into the living room and turned back and smiled at
Jameel. “Hang on a sec, I need to turn that damn thing down.” As she
walked back into the living room, the agent noticed what a fine ass she
had.

The television shut off, bathing the room in darkness. Sudden
movement. The coke and booze had delayed and clouded the agent's
response time. Holy shit! Something was charging the door. Lawrence
fumbled for the tranq gun as a fist exploded through the mesh of the
screen door and drilled the agent directly in the nose. Jameel felt the
cartilage snap as he staggered back and fell down the short set of steps.
Jake Morrow charged out the door, down the steps, and kicked Lawrence
savagely in the stomach as the agent tried to regain his feet. Lawrence
blindly tried to grope through the grass to find the tranquilizer pistol, but
Morrow punched him twice in the kidney, and then reached down and
grabbed the agent by the throat and front of his belt and proceeded to
actually military press him over his head with a maniacal scream and then
slam him down across the metal handrail of the steps.
Lawrence came down across the handrail on his sternum and felt
something crack. A cloud of red was crossing his vision and he felt
himself beginning to black out. Morrow now had him by the front of his
shirt and was raining one handed punches to the agent’s head. Jammel’s
survival instincts were trying to kick in but all he could do was feebly try
to cover his arms around his head in an attempt to ward off the blows.

“Get some, get some, get some, get some, motherfucker!’” Morrow was
screaming. He let go of Lawrence who slumped to the ground and began
kicking him savagely in the ribs. “Get up and fight me you fucking
pussy,” screamed the frustrated Morrow.
“The police are on their way so you better just stop that right now.”
The cowboy ran up behind Jake, wrapped his arms around him and
twisted him away from Banks.
“Goddamn it, Jake. We gotta get the fuck out of here”
Jake broke free of the cowboy’s grasp and took a wild roundhouse swing
at his friend who quickly ducked and moved out of Jake’s range punching
range. “Jake, stop! It’s me, goddamn it.”

Jake stopped in his tracks and stared at his buddy and then down at the
battered and bloodied agent, who was now face down in the grass and
not moving. If the cowboy hadn’t stopped him, Lawrence would surely
have been beaten to death.
“I’ve already called them, they’re on their way.”
The two men turned to see a large Hispanic woman, her rotund body
illuminated by her porch light, standing in the front yard of the house
next door. “I’ve already called,” she repeated.
The cowboy jammed some car keys in Jake’s hand. “You go! Take the
truck. Me and Angel will get our gear and take his car.” He pointed down
at Lawrence. Turning Jake towards the truck, he gave him a light shove.
“Go! We’ll meet you at the boat.”
Jake gave Lawrence one more solid kick to the ribcage for good measure,
“You were lucky this time, you prick,” and ran to the truck.
“Angel, grab the bags and let’s haul ass.” The cowboy rolled the agent
over to search for his car keys. Lawrence had his Colt .45 in his hand and
reached up and jammed it into the cowboy’s chest.
The force of the slug blew the cowboy up and off of Banks and
deposited him on his back. A large red blossom stained the front of his
embroidered cowboy shirt. He never heard the screams of Angel and the
woman next door.
Jameel rolled back onto his stomach, pushed himself up onto one knee,
and began firing wildly in rapid succession at Morrow as he was backing
down the driveway. The sound of the firearm and the slugs hitting sheet
metal and glass was deafening.
Jake dropped down sideways on bench seat of the truck and stomped on
the gas. The truck shot out of the driveway, across the road, and into a
neighbor’s Firebird, setting off its car alarm. Jake sat up and threw the
gear shift into forward and tore out of the driveway and down the street,

taking out the side of a El Camino as he raced by it.
Lawrence staggered to his feet, popped out his empty clip, and slammed
its replacement home. Looking down at his feet, he saw the lost
tranquilizer pistol, but as he reached down to retrieve it, he was suddenly
driven back down to the ground.
“You killed him you son of a bitch!” Jameel was once more down on his
back as the punches pounded down on his face from the ring covered
fists of the enraged woman. Blindly reaching up, he jammed the tranq
pistol under Angel’s jaw line and fired the dart. She screamed as she
grabbed at her throat and rolled over onto the grass. Lawrence had put
enough dope into that dart to bring down Morrow, a steroid monster.
Shot into a woman Angel’s size would probably fry her brain and put her
into a nursing home and eating Cream of Wheat.
The agent once more staggered to his feet. Neighbors were pouring out
the front doors of their houses and the agent had to fire two rounds over
the heads of two men to back them away from his car. They turned and
hightailed it down the street.

He jumped in his car and glanced up at the rearview mirror. There was so
much blood across his head and face that he couldn’t even see where it
was coming from. He looked like he had been in a fire fight, as did the
neighborhood. Bodies were sprawled across lawns, cars were destroyed,
their alarms screaming as loud as the neighbors. The agent looked backed
down and saw a man coming down the street carrying what looked like a
shotgun. Lawrence threw the car in gear and floored it. The man tried to
get out of the way but was knocked airborne by the force of the impact
and crashed into the windshield, shattering it, before he rolled off the
side onto the street.
Jameel kept his foot right down to the metal. He had heard the cowboy
tell Morrow to meet him at the boat. He had to have meant Hendrichs’
boat that was moored over in Long Beach. The fastest way to get there
was the route that Lawrence had just used.
Over the Vincent Thomas Bridge.

****
The truck was dying fast. By the time Jake hit the bridge, steam was
pouring up from the shot out radiator and the engine was screaming like
it was running out of oil. A slug must have pierced the engine somewhere
and all the idiot lights on the dashboard were lit up. He was a quarter of
the way up the incline of the suspension bridge when the engine gave up
the ghost. Jake wrestled it over to the side and jumped out. He started
running up the bridge.
Car were flying by him as he ran. You could hear the sounds of the
police sirens all the way onto the bridge. Sounded like they had called out
for reinforcements. Jake was almost to the top of the bridge when he
looked back over his shoulder and saw Lawrence in his sedan heading up
the incline.
Jake stopped running. He had no gun, his weapon was back at the house
with the Cowboy and Angel. He was defenseless out here all alone.

The sedan screeched to a halt. A bloodied and battered Special Agent
Lawrence jumped out of the car and sighted his pistol at Jake. He was
holding his side and gasping like a marlin who had just been wrestled up
onto a charter boat after a hard fight.
“Put your hands where I can see them, motherfucker!”
“You look like shit, Jameel. You’re in bad fucking shape. Better get to a
hospital.”
Jake put his hands on the top rail of the bridge and hoisted himself up,
balancing himself by holding onto the one of the huge cable supports.
“I said freeze, asshole,” screamed Lawrence.

“What are you going to do now, Jameel? If you shoot me and I fall in the
bay, how are you and Morgan going to explain how I wound up dead in
Long Beach harbor when I’m suppose to be rotting in Leavenworth?”
Jake could see from his vantage point the blue lights of the police cars as
they came racing down the turnpike towards the bridge tollbooths.
Cops.
Prison.
“Morrow, if you turn yourself in, I promise, I can make this all go away.
But we don’t have much time. It has to be now.”
“Go fuck yourself, special agent.” Jake stepped off the bridge and
disappeared into the night.

“Goddamn you, Morrow.” Lawrence ran as well as he could in his
condition to the side of the bridge and looked over. It was total darkness.
He could barely see the water. It must be damn near a two hundred foot
fall to the water from there.
He could hear the screaming of the brakes and tires coming from the
police cars, but he didn’t turn around. He kept staring down at the water,
looking for any sign of Morrow.
“Let me see some hands! Right now!”
The agent didn’t turn around or raise his hands. “I’m a government
agent,’ he said wearily
“I said show me your hands, goddamn it!”

All these years. All these years and it comes to this, thought Jameel
Lawrence. Jumping like Morrow just did flashed through the agent’s
mind. Fuck that! He was afraid of water.
Special Agent Jameel Lawrence spun and raised his pistol.

AMSTERDAM BLUES
The cable was hooked up, and Superman, the one when he was a kid,
was flying around on the tube. He plopped down on his beaten up old
couch, fired up a smoke, and popped a can of Schmidt. Hanus Miller was
a very happy man. He had cable, he had beer, he had cash, and very soon
he would have some blow. Not that stepped on with baby laxative shit
either. Ice cold pharmaceutical blow straight from the source.
Criminal mastermind was not what came to mind when one thought of
Hanus Miller. He had been busted and had done time, from reform
school to county to the penitentiary, for every crime he had committed,
mostly boosting cars and burglary.
But four days ago everything had changed for Hanus. While cruising
through downtown Northfield in his battered Chevy Nova, two months
out of the joint, high on Dilaudid and three cans of malt liquor, and
flatass broke, Hanus saw a vision straight from God.
On the sidewalk in front of the Northfield Bank were two ancient old
guards struggling to load bags of cash on to a dolly. Glancing in his

rearview mirror Hanus could see the driver of the armored car reading a
newspaper.
Without thinking (as always) Hanus took a sharp right, whipped around
the block to the other side, parked, pulled his aluminum baseball bat out
of the back seat, and with the motor still running, had tore ass around the
corner and charged from the blind side of the armored car. Neither of
the guards had noticed him. Two vicious swings left two bloodied and
unconscious guards laying on the sidewalk and Hanus sprinting back up
the sidewalk with two huge bags of cash. The sequel to the Great
Minnesota Northfield raid it wasn't, but it had worked so that‘s all the
fuck it mattered.
Hanus was running up the stairs of his apartment that was built on top of
an abandoned warehouse just outside of Faribault, ten miles away, before
the second cop car had gotten to the bank. 130 large richer.
Straight up at eight o'clock he could feel the stairs shaking as someone
climbed up them. The old man walked in without knocking and glanced
over at the TV. As always he was wearing his Bogart style trench coat,
but he came off looking more like William Burroughs.

"Superman. Shit, I haven't seen that in years. Did you know someone
wacked him?"
"Superman never died."
"Not Superman, you dumb ass. The guy that played him. George Reeves.
Someone wacked him!"
"I thought he killed himself by jumpin' off a building cause he thought he
really was Superman."
"Naw, that's just a rumor. Typical Hollywood horseshit. Anyway, I don't
have a lot of time. You said on the phone you want as much as I got?"
Hanus belched loudly and grinned. "You got it, Doc. As much as you can
scrape up."
The dealer stared oddly at Hanus, then slowly took in the rest of the
room. The cable, the beer, new TV, and the big bag of weed laying on
the coffee table. He looked back to Hanus and gave a big grin.
"It was you, wasn't it, Hanus?'

Uh-oh.
"What the hell are you talking about, fool?"
"You fit the score. It's been all over the news. You're just lucky I got to
you before the heat. You'd go down this time as a three time loser. I
imagine you haven’t been watching the news. One guard is dead.
Someone's grandfather. Jesus Christ, you're high class, Hanus. Be looking
at life in Stillwater. If I recall, there are some gentleman of the dark
persuasion who wouldn't mind seeing you back out on the yard. "
"I don't know what in the hell you're talking about, dawg. You got the
blow or not?"
Hanus fired up another smoke. His guts starting to squirm. The old man
had always been able to read him. He focused his gaze on the TV,
avoiding those eyes.
The dealer reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his piece. One
shot, right in the middle of Hanus's chest. The noise was deafening, the
slug ripping straight through his body and into the couch. Bits of stuffing

were floating in the air. Hanus stared stupidly at the bloody hole in his
chest before slowly looking back to the television with empty eyes.
He found what he was looking for in a knapsack underneath the filthy
single bed in the corner. Walking over to the gas stove, he blew out all
the pilot lights on the burners and lit the candle on top of the television.
As he walked out the door, Superman was standing with his hands on his
hips, watching the bullets bounce off his chest.
**
The alarm clock was chirping away like a gecko wired on speed. His
weekend over, another week of work. Ziggy groaned as he rolled over to
the edge of the bed and sat up. As usual his knee had seized up in the
middle of the night and it took him a good five minutes to stretch and
limber it up.
It wasn't the only thing that was stiff. He had been dreaming about Lita
again. It seemed like he dreamt about her every night.

Ziggy and Lita. They were going to be together forever. He thought
anyway, living in their little desert trailer in Barstow. Ziggy tending bar,
dealing some smoke, and jamming with his band, waiting for the big time
to call. Lita worked as an exotic dancer, a job that came natural to her.
Raised in Amsterdam, the daughter of a red light district prostitute and
an American army officer, Lita had loved the life.
After he had been released from the hospital following his knee surgery
without health insurance (at a frat party gig, Ziggy had jumped in the air
while attempting a Pete Townsend windmill and had blown out his knee
upon landing), Lita hadn't shown to pick him up, and he had been forced
to take a cab, only to find their trailer deserted and a note on the kitchen
table announcing her flight back to Amsterdam.
She loved him she said, only she needed something more permanent,
more commitment, someone more mature. Not some bartending, pot
dealer who sat around the living room pissing and moaning about his
dysfunctional family, while picking at his electric guitar and dreaming of
becoming the next Jimmy Page.

Ziggy was in the long process of trying to drink himself to death, when a
private dick his father had hired, had found him sleeping off the tail end
of an unsuccessful Quaalude overdose suicide attempt.
He couldn’t even kill himself without fucking it up.
Passed out in his trailer that was hotter than Dante's Inferno, his
electricity not working due to non-payment of his bill, the detective
doused him with a bucket of water and delivered a letter from Ziggy's
father with the return address of a nursing home.
Ziggy's father after living a life that would have shamed Caligula had
been dropped right in his tracks by a massive stroke.
Ziggy had been stunned when he walked into his father's room and saw
him laying on his bed. His father looked like he had shrunk to half his
original size and his red hair had turned snow white.
His voice was a whisper.

“I know it's not much but it’s a start. It'll help get you on your feet.
Forget that rock and roll shit. Time you grew up. Nothing wrong about a
little work. Don't be so damn uppity. Sometimes you remind me of your
mother. Had to pull a lot of strings to get you on there. Damn it Junior,
I'm trying to say I'm sorry.”
After years of stumbling home drunk or stoned, if at all, chasing whores,
driving Ziggy’s mother to disappear forever, and piling on mountains of
psychological abuse on his only son until he left home at seventeen, that
was dear old Dad's way of apologizing.
Robert O. Zigstrom, Sr. had been a highly respected state employee for
thirty years (his employers having no idea about his alter ego) before the
stroke permanently retired him and had him taking his meals through a
straw. He was now trying to make amends to his son by offering him a
gig as a guard at the Minnesota Prison For the Criminally Insane.
Ziggy took the job. His life had already hit rock bottom so what the hell.

His knee finally limber enough to stand, Ziggy limped over to his dresser
to retrieve his stash. He grabbed it and limped down to the kitchen and
fired up the espresso machine.
Ziggy's breakfast of champions. A big fat hooter washed down with five
shots of espresso. Black. After the high octane caffeine kicked in, he
would start in on his daily two hundred push up and sit ups, followed by
an hour on his two hundred dollar exercise bike (which was the only
thing of value he owned in the house). A regime he had started after a
300 pound transvestite sex offender had kicked his ass his first week at
work.
He was just finishing up his ride, drenched in sweat, when Christina
walked in. The night shift was starting to wear on her, she looked liked
crap, not that she had ever been a real beauty. And she was putting on a
lot of weight, her uniform was starting to look pretty tight. Ziggy himself
could be best described as crackpipe lean. He was still hanging on to the
heroin addicted rock and roll star look.
"Dave wants you to drop off a bag on your way to work. It‘s payday.
He'll leave the door open."

Dave being Christina's younger brother and also the biggest stoner at the
prison.
Ziggy nodded while he wiped the sweat off his bike. "No problem. I'll
drop it off after I go see Dad."
Christina started to strip her uniform off as she walked down the hall
leaving the clothes where they fell. "I'm going to bed. Try to keep the
goddamn music down today. I'm getting sick of hearing that shit when
I'm trying to sleep."
Ziggy wearily shrugged his shoulders at her back and her fat ass as she
walked down the hallway and rolled into the bed. Their six month
relationship had never been great but what was left of it was slowly
sailing down the crapper.
Loading up the CD tray, Ziggy put on his headphones and laid down on
the couch. He was dangerously down. Even his music wasn’t helping his
mood and that was about all he had left. Steve Earle was singing about
getting the blues in Amsterdam on Fort Worth Blues. He should never
listen to that song. That one line always made him think about Lita, and

then about blowing his brains out. He decided to get the visit with his
Dad out of the way.
Halfway there he ran out gas. When he pushed the car to the gas station
he thought about dousing himself with premium unleaded and lighting a
cigarette.
The old dude was laying flat on his back staring at ceiling. Only his eyes
moved as his son walked in the room. A nurse stood by his side checking
his vitals. She shook her head at Ziggy.
He beckoned Ziggy over with a feeble wave of his had. His voice raspy.
The old bastard had quit wearing his teeth and his head looked like a
shrink wrapped skull. Hideous! Ziggy gave a shudder when he leaned
over his father’s face to hear him.
"Junior. Key. Get the key in the box."
His father's eyes rolled towards the Cuban cigar box on the nightstand.
The son of a bitch use to smoke expensive illegal cigars while Ziggy’s
mother was forced to clip coupons to buy groceries. Ziggy opened the lid

and saw a single key on a Reno casino key chain. Underneath it was an
envelope with "Junior" written on it. When he looked back to his father,
he was dead. Just like that.
The nurse was shaking her head in wonder. "I can't believe he lasted this
long. I think he was hanging on until you got here."
"Could you give me a few minutes alone with him?" Ziggy sat down next
to his father's bed.
As soon as the nurse walked out the door he ripped the envelope open.
Almost an hour passed while Ziggy kept re-reading the letter then staring
at his now stiffening Dad.
"Is is this another one of your goddamn jokes you old bastard?"
No answer. Although Robert Sr. did have a semblance of a grin on his
face.
Ziggy stormed out the door, passing the charge nurse, and down the hall.

"Mr. Zigstrom, what about the funeral arrangements?" She called after
him.
"Call whoever you want. I'll take care of it in the morning."
He raced out the parking lot and headed for home, making one stop at
the drugstore.
Entering the house as quietly as he could, he showered, put on his
uniform, put a couple changes of clothes and some toiletries in an
overnight bag, and took off for work. All without waking Christina and
certainly not telling her about the demise of Robert Sr.
He drove straight to her brother's apartment. The door was open and he
quietly walked to the kitchen counter and picked up the hundred dollar
bill that was held down by a beer bottle and dropped a half ounce of
weed down.
He could hear Dave snoring in the back bedroom. Going over to the
coffeemaker he opened the bottle in his pocket and poured it into the
water reservoir. Closing the door, he headed for work.

Ziggy worked the evening shift as the yard man at the prison. His duties
consisted of the monitoring the yard activities of the inmates until dusk
and then he spent the rest of the shift making security rounds through
the six units of the facility.
Three hours into his shift the announcement came over his radio. The
voice filled with both disgust and resignation.
"Anyone interested in OT on the midnight shift call the watch
lieutenant." Both staff calling in sick and overtime ran rampant through
the prison like the flu.
Ziggy picked up the phone in the guard shack and placed the call.
"Zigstrom here, Lieutenant. I'd like the OT."
"Your in luck then, Ziggy. Your future brother in law called in with a
case of the blasters. Said he could he shit through a screen door. You can
work his unit."

There was at least one officer calling in sick a night. Ziggy had just
bought some insurance.
All inmates were locked down in single man cells after ten in the evening.
The midnight officer spent his shift in a security bubble, monitoring
security cameras and listening to inmates bitch when they paged the
officer on the intercom in their cell. Every half hour the officer had to
call in to master control to report his status and on hour intervals a
roving officer would enter the unit and do a security round.
After his normal shift ended, Ziggy entered Oaks unit to relieve the two
officers on duty. Day and evening shifts had two officers. Since the
inmates were locked down at night there was only need for one on that
shift.
After briefing Ziggy the two officers departed the unit. Taking his knife,
he dug the point into the telephone cord to expose the wires. He pulled
out a wire and sliced it in half.

Dialing master control, he held the wires together, and when the control
officer answered he began to speak while flicking the ends of the wire
together.
Control stated his message was garbled.
Ziggy got on his radio, turned to the alternate channel normally used for
calling in emergencies and reported that his phone was on the blink and
he would do his half hour calls by radio.
Master control copied.
Ziggy waited until the roving officer came through and completed his
round, and after radioing in to control, stepped out of the bubble,
unlocked the back door of the unit, and snuck out onto the darkened and
deserted yard.
Staying in the shadows he walked quickly to the medical building.
Entering using his yard master key, he walked down the basement steps
and entered the records archives room using the same key. There were
hundreds of medical records lining the walls along with seven locked

heavy metal file cabinets. The place smelled of mold and mice piss and
was covered in dust.
Popping his Dad's key in the first one. Nothing.
Number two. Nothing.
"You bastard! This better not be one of your sick jokes."
Number three. Same results.
"Shit!" Ziggy screamed out.
Number four. The key didn't even fit.
Ziggy looked frantically at his watch. Holy shit! Thirty minutes had
passed.
Keying his radio he called in.
"Zigstrom. All secure on Oaks unit."

"Control copies."
He thought he was going to have a heart attack!
Number five. He jiggled it madly!
"I hope you rot in hell you son of a bitch!"
Number seven.
The locked popped open with a loud crack.
**
"Another Heineken, sir?"
Ziggy looked up from the notebook he was reading from and smiled at
the waitress.
"Please." He checked out her skin tight jeans as she walked away. Man,
what an incredible ass! Jesus Christ, what a great place!

He turned back to his reading.
Robert Sr. had been a dentist with the corrections department. A side
benefit of the job had been his unlimited access to pharmaceutical
cocaine, which he had denied the administering of to his patients, instead
dealing it to his outside connections. Ziggy had always suspected this and
now had the proof sitting in front of him. The notebook was a running
account of his nefarious activities. Names, dates, phone numbers, cash
amounts.
But none of it added up. It was a lot of dough, no doubt. But considering
the lifestyle his father had led it sure couldn’t add up to a knapsack with a
118 grand in large bills in it.
Along with a pistol and twenty grams of blow.
The coke had been quickly snapped up by Ziggy's grass connection. The
pistol went into the Mississippi.
On the way to the airport.

The waitress set his brew in front of him.
"Tell me, sweetheart. How do I find the red light district?"
The waitress giggled and pointed down a side street.
"Cross three canals and take a left. You'll see where it starts." Goddamn,
her accent about drove him crazy.
Ziggy slid Fort Worth Blues into his CD player, drained his beer,
dropped a large tip for the waitress, picked up his knapsack, and headed
down the street.
God how he loved that song. But Steve Earle was wrong. Amsterdam
didn't leave you feeling blue.
Ziggy felt more alive than he ever had in his life.

ROBBING SKYNYRD’S GRAVE
The detective ground his Camel out in the ashtray and made a hand
signal to someone standing behind the two way mirror. Within seconds a
uniformed officer walked in the interrogation room and slapped a legal
notepad and a cheap Bic pen down on to the table. The detective waited
until the officer walked out and closed the door before he spoke again.
“Write everything down that you told me. Don’t forget a fucking thing.”
He pushed himself away from the table and stood up. “Take your time.
I’m going to check out your story. We’re going to check this Nate Kurtis
guy out and see if he exists and then go over to that crackhouse and toss
it. See if you’re feeding me a line of horseshit.” He lumbered towards the
door.
“You want me to write down everything?”
The detective stopped halfway out the door. “Don’t write anything if you
don’t want to. It’s your fucking funeral.” He walked out and closed the
door.

The pen shook in his hand like a dog shitting out a big peach pit.
***
He just couldn’t keep his eyes off of that rolled up rug stuck off in the
corner. The flies must have finally smelled there was a body in there
because they were buzzing around it. They had been inside the house for
a couple of days now and since there was no air conditioning in there it
was starting to get pretty fucking funky.
“Are you listening to me, motherfucker?”
That snapped him out of his trance. “Uh, yea. Sure, man.” He
stammered.
“It‘s called the Crossroads curse, man. It‘s a known fucking fact that
anyone who recorded that song after Robert Johnson did wound up
regretting it. Clapton, Allman Brothers, Skynyrd, the shit hit the fan after
they recorded that song.”

“Which Robert Johnson?”
“Which Robert Johnson? Jesus goddamn Christ! You call yourself a black
man and you ask me which Robert Johnson?”
“Yea, man. Which Robert Johnson? I guess your talking bout the singer.
Shit, I‘m sorry I don‘t know which motherfucker you was talking about.
Christ!
“Robert Johnson wasn't a fucking singer, dude. He was a bluesman!

Everybody wanted to copy his ass. The problem with that though is the
crazy motherfucker sold his soul to the devil to get what he wanted. Met
Satan down at some crossroads here down south and they cut the deal.
But what’s fucked about it is that he didn’t get famous until long after he
was dead. He was banging some dude’s old lady and the husband
poisoned his ass. And that deal with the devil is still going on.”
Jesus Christ, he was getting sick of this shit. He didn’t care if they had all
the crack in Nashville in this goddamn house if it meant sitting here
listening to his big asshole all day. And he very goddamn well knew who
Robert Johnson was. Shit! He was born in the same town that the dumb
motherfucker died in. Greenwood, Mississippi. What a shithole of a town
that it. All these white boys running around thinking their asses are so
cool talking about what a fucking influence Robert Johnson was to them.
Listening to those old scratchy ass records of his. Including this dipshit
honky sitting across from him.
“You got bats in your fuckin’ belfry if you think I’m gonna believe that
line of voodoo horseshit. That sounds like some witchcraft crap my
grandma would be babbling about.”
“I really don’t give a shit what you believe. I was there and I saw it
happen and whether you believe it or not doesn’t mean a good goddamn
to me.” Rising to his feet, his partner walked over and stood over him
sitting on the ratty couch. “And give me my pipe and torch you
freeloading asshole. I’m getting sick of you smoking up all the shit. It’s
time you start carrying your weight around here.”
“All right, Nate. Calm the fuck down. I told you I was good for it.”
“Don’t tell me to calm the fuck down! Get your ass off the couch and let
me sit down there before I kick your crackhead ass.”

Even though he had only know Nate for just a couple of days, Bobby
“Bugs” Grissom knew better to question the big man when he got in
these moods, so rather than stirring up further shit he grabbed his forty
of Old English 800, picked his ass off the couch as requested, brushed
away some crack vials and used up syringes with his foot, and sat back
down against wall farthest from the rolled up rug.
Nate took a long hard hit on the pipe, closed his eyes, and eased his head
down on the back of the couch. The son of a bitch had to have had the
strongest lungs he had ever seen, thought Bugs. He could hold a hit off
the pipe for what seemed like close to a minute.
Bugs took a pull on his bottle and settled back against the wall. God, it
was times like these he wished his was back on his grandfather’s farm.
Away from this city, this dope, this booze, this big cracker who ordered
him around like he was his bitch or something. He missed his grandma,
she was the one that had nicknamed him Bugs. She said that when he
was a baby that he always scooted around the floor like a little
doodlebug, and the name stuck. And now she was dead and he was such
a fucking lowlife he had missed her funeral.
Farm life had been safe but it had been boring, so as soon as Bugs quit
high school he had moved off to the city. To a series of meaningless,

minimum wage dead end jobs that almost always ended up with Bugs
telling the boss, who was almost always white, to go fuck him or herself.
And that was almost twenty years ago! He never had gone back to
Greenwood once even though his grandma called and wrote least twice a
month to try to convince him to come back.
Now she was dead. When Bugs got the phone call, he had cashed his
final check from his last job, a car detailing business where he had busted
his ass all day long under a hot sun waxing rich asshole’s foreign cars for
dog shit wages, and had gone down to buy a bus ticket for the ride back
home. Along the way stopped in at a local joint in his neighborhood that
was known for it’s cheap beer and as a hangout for local crack dealers.
Crack was a taste that Bugs had recently acquired and he knew he’d need
a rock or two to get him through the long trip home on the Greyhound.
His connection, Devon , was always sitting down at the end of the bar on
the same stool nursing a Johnny Walker Red. But he wasn’t there that
night. There was a big white motherfucker sitting there instead and no
one was bothering his honky ass because the motherfucker was big! Scary
fucking big! Hair down to his shoulders, no front teeth, and covered with
scars. And he had a weird smell to him. Like an old goat.

Bugs had walked in the bar and it was like Nate knew exactly what he
was looking for. He waved a beefy arm to Bugs sit down alongside of
him.
"I got what you're looking for."
"What are you? Some kinda cop?” asked Bugs. “And where the fuck is
Devon?”
“Devon is history. He took a fucking vacation. This is my turf now.“ The

big man chuckled under his breath. “Do I look like a fucking cop to
you?”
“Motherfucking cops come in all sizes and shapes around here?” replied
Bugs.
The man nodded his head. “Fair enough. Tell you what. Take this rock ,”
he handed Bugs a single rock in a vial, “go out back and burn it and if
you don’t think that’s the best rock you’ve ever smoked or you still think
I’m a cop, I’ll walk out of this bar and you’ll never see me again. And as a

bonus I‘ll give you this.” The dealer reached into his pocket and flashed a
wad of hundreds.
It was the best goddamn crack Bugs had ever smoked. He wound
shutting the bar down with Nate and then smoking crack in Nate’s
ancient Cadillac until dawn. He didn’t even remember how he got back
to his seedy apartment. He wound up missing both his bus and his
grandma’s funeral.
A pounding on his door woke him up. Shit! It was already after eight at
night. Passed out the whole fucking day. It was Nate at the door.
“Come on. I need a favor from you.”
“I don’t know, man. I ain’t feeling too good.” Bugs had replied.
“I don’t give a hot shit how you feel. You smoked a lot of rock on the
house last night. Least you could do is help me out with a little favor.”

Nate stared into Bugs’ eyes and Bugs tried his best to meet the stare but
the motherfucker was scary! And he did have a point. He had smoked a
lot of Nate’s dope for free last night. Oh what the hell!
They drove the Cadillac down the alley of an abandoned old apartment
high rise and parked at the end. Nate pulled open a rusty side door and
the pair climbed up seven flights of a urine and shit infested stairwell that
was littered with used up needles.
On the landing, Nate pulled Bugs close to him and whispered in his ear.
“Fourth door down on the right. You knock on it. Give two short raps.
Wait a second. Then give three more. The dude will open the peephole
then.”
“And then what?”
That got the glare from Nate again. “Just fucking do it!”
Nate pressed himself against the wall while Bugs stood in front of the
door. He gave two knocks. Paused. Then gave three more.

The peephole popped open. “What do you want, nigger!” A partial black
face peered out.
Nate pushed Bugs to the side shoved a gigantic pistol in the peephole
and fired twice. Bugs puked all over the wall while Nate pried the door
open with a crowbar. They found a gym bag with over a thousand hits of
crack in it and about nine grand in cash.
***
“What the hell! Did you piss your pants?”
Bugs snapped his eyes open. He had nodded off and his forty ouncer had
tipped over and soaked his crotch. Nate was sitting up and glaring across
the room at him.
“I’m talking to you and you nod off like a fucking junkie! I sound like a
retard sitting here babbling to myself.”

“I’m sorry, Nate.” Bugs stood up and tried to wipe off the front of his
pants as best he could.
Nate leaned back on the couch.
“I was there, Bugs. I was there when the plane came down. I saw it all.
And now I’m as cursed as those poor sons of bitches were on that
plane.”
***
Mississippi is one hell of a good place to grow weed. Environment wise,

it’s almost perfect. It has semi-tropical weather, is mostly rural, and is
covered with a deep thick woods to hide the growing plants from the
spying eyes of the DEA flying above. Even in the Seventies, bootleggers
of corn liquor and moon-shine were still running stills and the back roads
of Mississippi, so many folks simply turned a blind eye to the longhairs
who were just growing what they considered to be just a harmless weed
that grew along they road anyway.

Nate Kurtis and his older brother, Perry, had been growing high grade
marijuana outside of Gillsburg for over four years. They had started up
just a few months after Nate had come back from his tour of Viet Nam,
and they were both well on their way to becoming very wealthy men.
Perry, with the benefit of a college deferment and a lazy eye, had
managed to avoid both the draft and the war. But Nate, who was as
healthy as a horse, and had poor grades in school due to his lackadaisical
studying habits, wasn’t as lucky. Rather than waiting for the army to call,
he had beaten the fuckers to the punch by enlisting in the navy, and had
spent his one year tour in Nam on a PBR. A PBR in navy terms is Patrol
Boat River. A PBR in civilian terms is a highly armed fiberglass boat,
which runs up and down the rivers harassing the shit out of rice farmers
all day long. Life expectancy is short on a PBR since you are cruising up
rivers totally encased by jungle and are basically sitting ducks for heavy
fire from the gooks.
But Nate had been lucky. Although he had been in his share of firefights,
he left Viet Nam after a year relatively unscathed. But he learned a new
trade while serving Uncle Sam. For almost six months, his boat had
onboard a South Viet Namese guide, who in his civilian job, was a farmer
of rice and a strain of high test marijuana called Buddha, which he traded
to the young crew for beer, C-rations, skin magazines, and American
cigarettes. On a two week R and R, while the rest of the crew had flown
off to Bangkok for cold beer and warm pussy, Nate had gone with the
guide to his village, where he had been given a crash course in the fine art
of cultivating tropical weed.
Nate smuggled out a small packet of seeds in the mail to his brother who
had grown a couple of the plants in his closet under a grow light. His
response had been more than enthusiastic, so Nate began sending home
as many packets of the seeds as he dared without getting busted by the
military mail censors.
When Nate returned home, the American taste for pot and getting high
was running rampant, and the smoking public was demanding a better
buzz than they were getting from the shit that was being smuggled up in
rusty vans from Tijuana. When the Kurtis brother’s strain of Buddha hit
the market the demand became overwhelming and their growing project
quickly expanded. Within a year, they went from growing the weed in the
basement of an old rental house to the couple of acre strip hidden in the
woods on the backside of a large farm outside of Gillsburg. It took two
grand a year for the farmer who owned the property to not notice what
was going on a strip of land he never paid any attention to anyway. Shit,
if two hippies wanted to give him two thousand dollars to hang out in a
swamp full of snakes and gators, they were more than welcome.

The guide and his family had survived the communist takeover in South
Viet Nam and he continued to route seeds to the brothers via a
complicated scenario of mail drops. The first year the covert farm had
yielded five hundred healthy plants of Buddha, each female plant
produced close to a pound of resin soaked, mind altering buds. Rather
than sell by the pound, the brothers had broken the buds down to
quarter ounce, shrink wrapped gourmet packets and sold them
individually.
In the second the season the farm had yield over a thousand plants. Two
years later, in 1977, after expanding the farm even further, Nate needed a
calculator to figure out how many six to eight foot plants were growing
on the farm. Perry had graduated with a degree in business, and with his
savvy on handling a buck, and Nate’s skill with the farming and the
plants, both men soon had very impressive portfolios. The farm was high
tech now with an intricate irrigation system covered by a camouflage
canopy, and surrounded by trip wires and claymore mines. The brothers
traveled back and forth to the farm on eight wheel all terrain vehicles
with wagons towed behind them. They were always armed. Perry with a
pistol while Nate preferred his illegal M16.
It was late October and Thai had been the year’s crop. It was a strain of
marijuana that required a slightly later harvest date, usually by now the
plants had long been pulled and moved to a safe house for drying and
further processing, but this year’s crop had been huge and it had taken
several weeks to complete the harvest. It was always a sad time for Nate.
During the growing season he lived almost around the clock at the farm
while he tended to the plants, his only company being two pit bulls who
helped him stand guard duty although they spent the majority of time
chasing and wrestling each other. Nate slept in a tent but preferred a
hammock if the weather was decent. He loved the quiet and peacefulness
of the woods as he gently tended to the plants that he referred to as his
“girls”. Harvest time meant leaving the woods, and worse, the cutting
down of the girls. He almost felt like he was committing murder.
It was early afternoon and the brothers had been working quietly, the
remaining plants leaves had already been cut down and loaded up in the
van, but what remained from the plants had to uprooted and mulched
and the soil had to be turned over to ready it for next spring’s crop. Nate
suddenly bolted to his feet, scaring the shit out of his brother. Perry was
well aware that his brother’s time spent in Nam had finely tuned his
senses and he respected this, so something was definitely amiss. More
than once his instincts had steered them clear of danger or arrest.
Perry nervously looked over at him through his Coke bottle thick glasses.
“Nate! What is it? You hear something?” he whispered. Perry began to

look around the woods nervously as he pulled his Colt .45 from his belt

holster, expecting to see cops or DEA agents peering out from behind
the trees.
Nate silenced him by holding out his hand. The sound was coming from
above but off in the distance. It was some sort of aircraft but it wasn’t
the sounds of it’s engines he was hearing. Nate had witnessed many
aircraft crashes when he was in Nam and it wasn’t at all like you see in
the movies, with the plane or helicopter shrieking overhead, it’s fuselage
aflame, engines coughing and backfiring, and the pilot bravely fighting
the wheel while screaming out for everybody to hold on.
This was a whistling sound that Nate heard. The aircraft’s engines had
shut down and the plane was quickly gliding down to the ground.
Suddenly the plane was directly over them, so close that one of it’s wings
brushed the treetops. It suddenly banked to the right and then moments
later there was a crash so loud and powerful that the ground literally
quaked under their feet.
“Holy shit. Did you see that?” Perry shrieked as he looked over to his
brother. Nate was already running towards where the plane had gone
down.
“Nate! Nate! Goddamn it, Nate! Where are you going?”
“Hurry the fuck up,” Nate yelled over his shoulder, “and bring the first
aid kit! There’s gonna be a lot of injured people.”
Doing as his brother told, Perry grabbed the bag, and ran after him.
About two hundred yards away he came onto his brother, the crash site
was that close. Nate had knelt down behind a group of palmetto plants,
he turned and placed his forefinger over his lips as Perry approached and
squatted down.
For being the sight of a plane crash it was deafly quiet. There had been
no explosion or fires.
“Could be a dope plane. There’s a couple of them staggering around that

survived the crash and they don’t look like your normal run of the mill
plane crew. If it is dope they’re probably armed to the teeth. Better hang
back and check it out to be safe.”
“It’s a Convair. An old prop job.” Perry knew his planes. For a while the
two had contemplated branching off into smuggling but after careful
consideration they had deemed it too risky. “Fucker broke up on impact
and it doesn’t look like everybody made it. You can see a couple of
bodies farther over past the wreckage. One of them looks like he got
thrown right into that tree trunk.”
Suddenly one of the crash survivors yelled out that he was going for help
and took off running through the woods. Perry felt a chill run down his
spine as he suddenly recognized just who he was watching.
“These guys aren’t smugglers, Nate! They’re a band! That’s Skynyrd! And
that dude who just took off is their drummer! We gotta get the hell out of
here. This place is going to be crawling with more fucking cops than
we’ve seen in our lives in about five minutes!”
“Skynyrd! Are you sure? Holy Christ. We gotta help them, Perry.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind? Soon as help gets here they’re going
to want to know just what the hell we were doing out here in the middle
of this goddamn swamp. In about a day we’ll go from being heroes to
getting buttfucked at Parchman state prison. Now let’s get the hell out of
here.”

Nate hesitated for a second and then gave his brother a grin. “OK.
You’re right. But hold on for a minute. Man, I gotta get a souvenir of
this.” He dropped to his belly and low crawled towards the wreckage
while Perry sat down and contemplated having a nervous breakdown.
Minutes later, Nate was back, dragging a guitar case behind him.
“All right. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Back at the camp they packed up everything they could fit onto the
wagons, and with the dogs sitting on top of the loads, headed out in the
opposite direction of the main highway.
They’d never return to the farm again.
Sirens could be heard off in the distance when they pulled on to the old
farm road where they had their van parked. Nate loaded the weed and
the dogs into the back of the van while Perry pulled the ATV on to it’s
trailer.
Nate had just jumped into the drivers seat and closed the door when he
heard the voice.
“Just hold it right there, asshole!”
Glancing in the side mirror, Nate could see his brother standing in the
middle of the road holding his hands high in the air. He was being
covered by what looked to be a sheriff’s deputy with a very large caliber
pistol. Nate had been so preoccupied with getting the hell out of there
that hadn’t heard the officer’s vehicle drive up.
But he did remember what Perry had just said about winding up in
Parchman Prison.
No goddamn way was that going to happen.
“You in the van! Step out slowly with your hands up!”
The cop was making a rookie mistake. He had moved away from his
vehicle and was standing in the middle of the road with no cover and no
back up.

Nate rolled over to his right and crawled over the bagged up marijuana
into the back of the van, picked up the M16, jammed a clip in, flicked the
switch to full auto, and without hesitation began firing at the deputy
straight through the glass of the back door window. The officer was only
able to get one wild shot off before he was cut down, his Smokey hat
flying off as he took a head shot.
The sound of a automatic weapon being discharged on full auto inside of

a van was unbelievable and the pit bulls went nuts. For some reason
known only to them they decided to attack the front seats, tearing them
to ribbons. Nate kept his finger down on the trigger and continued to
strafe the deputy’s body after the officer had gone down on to the gravel
road, and he kept firing until the clip was empty and the rifle’s bolt
slammed back and locked.
Nate dropped the M16 and slumped down against the wall of the van.
Smoke filled the cargo hold and the smell of cordite hung in the air. The
pits had stopped their assault on the seats and were staring at him with
insanity in their eyes.
“Have you lost your fucking mind! Jesus fucking Christ! You just killed a
goddamn cop! Do you know what they do to cop killers in this state?”

Perry’s face appeared in the blown out window. His face was ghostly
white and covered in sweat.
Nate didn’t answer. He just sat there frozen against the wall while his
brother jumped into the van and drove them the hell out of there.
***
“You’re a cop killer?” Holy shit, thought Bugs. This motherfucker is

crazy as a shithouse rat. I gotta get the hell out of here.
“That was almost twenty years ago. What with the plane crash and all,
there was just too much goddamn confusion. The investigation went
nowhere. We were never even questioned.”
“But Nate, holy shit, a fucking cop! You know they must still be looking
for your ass. How have you stayed on the run for so long without getting
picked up?”

“Prison, man. I spent the next eighteen years after that in Parchman. Just
like Perry said we would. That‘s the last fucking place they would be
looking for me at.”
***
The brothers were paranoid and rightfully so. The van was driven out to
a remote area, stripped clean, doused with aviation fuel and burned down
to the frame. The murder weapon was broken down and thrown off a
bridge in pieces into a lake.
The word on the street was that the cops were rousting any dope dealer
they could get their hands on. After the deputy was found dead it hadn’t
taken long to find the pot farm and the cops to put two and two
together. Nate and Perry agreed that the smartest thing to do was lay low
for a couple of months and then sell the year’s crop in bulk to a dealer in
New Orleans.
Nate took off for a couple of weeks and went off to Memphis. He took
the guitar from the crash sight, a Les Paul, and sold it to an up and
coming country star who he often sold weed to. The singer had been
heavily influence by Skynyrd and jumped at the chance to buy the
souvineir from the crash. The singer never even got a chance to play the
guitar. Two days after he bought it, loaded on a combination of booze
and ‘ludes, he drove his car off a road and into a tree. He was
pronounced DOA at the hospital.
Nate never told Perry about the transaction.
When he returned from Memphis the two brothers worked day and night
breaking the crop into pounds. They loaded the dope into the back of a
rented U-Haul for the trip to New Orleans. Neither of them bothered to
take a look at the back of the truck.
Twenty miles into the trip the cops used a burned out taillight to as an
excuse to pull them over. Mississippi is not a state where you want that
shit to happen to you. The load was big enough to get them both fifteen
to eighteen in Parchman. They hired the best lawyer they could find. It
didn’t do shit for them. They were both sentenced to the maximum.

The brothers were separated at the prison and put in different cell blocks.
Parchman’s population consists mainly of black inmates. Perry had been
to Viet Nam and could handle himself. Perry had been to college and
could not. He became the prey of a bigger and stronger inmate.
Two weeks into their sentence, Perry tried to hang himself. It didn’t quite
take. He wound up busting his neck but survived if you could call it that.
By the time the guards found him his supply of air had been cut off too
long. Perry was now basically a vegetable. He’d spend the rest of his life
in a state hospital where attendants not much higher up on the IQ scale
than him would take their turns on him.
Nate hunted down the inmate who he suspected had punked out his
brother. He found him in the weight yard pumping out reps on the
bench. Three hundred and fifty pounds like it was nothing. He waited
until the inmate strained to push up the last rep then rushed forward and
slammed the bar down onto his chest, crushing his sternum. He then
savagely kicked the unconscious inmate in the head as many times as he
could until he was pulled off of him by a guard who Nate turned on like
one of his pit bulls. By the time it was all over the guard had a set of
crushed ribs, broken nose, and a nasty gash on his forehead that took
over fifty stitches to close.

The kangaroo court held by the prison administration could almost
rationalize the attack on the inmate. They couldn’t for the assault on the
guard.
Nate was sentenced to segregation. The hole. For eighteen years he

refused to back down from their shit. He spent almost his entire sentence
in that single cell.
He eventually lost touch with reality. He began to hallucinate and hold

conversations with old blues singers that had spent their time in the
prison decades before he had. On occasion, he’d throw a handful of shit
or a cup of piss through the bars on to an unsuspecting guard. The goon
squad would be called. Nate would get his ass beat and a shot of
thorazine for his troubles, but not before a few guards took some good
shots.
Nate was sentenced to segregation. The hole. For eighteen years he

refused to back down from their shit. He spent almost his entire sentence
in that single cell.
He eventually lost touch with reality. He began to hallucinate and hold

conversations with old blues singers that had spent their time in the
prison decades before he had. On occasion, he’d throw a handful of shit
or a cup of piss through the bars onto an unsuspecting guard. The goon
squad would be called. Nate would get his ass beat and a shot of
thorazine for his troubles, but not before a few guards took some good
shots.
Time had not meaning for him. It was just his existence.
Then one day the cell door to his isolation cell opened up and it was
over.
The guard was huge. A man of few words. He had known Nate almost
his whole career and despised him.
“I’m only gonna say it once, asshole. Get your shit together. You’re outta
here. Your sentence is complete.”
At eight in the morning he was locked down in the hole. By noon that
same day he was on a bus wearing a set of cheap prison issued civilian
clothes with forty dollars in his front pocket.

Just like that.
***
Bugs felt like puking again. He took a hit off the pipe and washed it
down with a hit off the bottle. Fuck, he had to calm down! Get a hold of
himself! He couldn’t believe the shit he was hearing from this crazy
fucker. Nate was sitting across from him and grinning like fucking Satan
himself.
“You’re scared, aren’t you.”
“Fucking right I’m scared! I’ve know you two days and you get me to
help kill this motherfucking crack dealer and then you tell me you’re a
goddamn cop killer! Shit yea, I’m scared. I just wanted to go home!” Bugs
screamed out.
Nate grabbed the gym and poured the crack vials on to the coffee table
and split them roughly in half. He put one half back into the gym bag
along with a fistful of hundred dollar bills. Probably more fucking money

that Bugs had made in his whole shitty life. He tossed the bag to Bugs
along with the keys to the Cadillac.
“Then take off, asshole. Run back to Greenwood. When you get back
there why don’t you try to find that mother of yours. The one who ran
off and left you to be raised by your grandmother. Ask her who her
grandfather is. Who your great-grandfather is. I’ll bet his last name is
Johnson.”
Bugs fumbled with the locks on the door and then stopped. He turned
out around slowly.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your great-granddaddy checked out too early. He hasn’t quite paid off
his debt. It‘s time you help pay up.”
The insane, maniacal laughter chased Bugs down the stairwell. He

jumped in the battered old Caddy and took off for home. The home he
wished he had never left.

The cops pulled him over before he had gotten out of the city limits. The
taillights were burned out.
He smelled like a brewery. The car wasn’t registered in his name and
hadn’t been re-registered for years. He had a gym bag full of crack and
hundred dollar bills.
He was on his way to county jail.
When the cops opened the trunk they might as well just bypassed county
and gone straight to the penitentiary.
Devon, his old dealer was in the trunk. Wrapped in plastic with his throat
slit.
It took about a New fucking York fucking minute for him to dime out
Nate Kurtis.
***

The detective strutted in and slammed the door.
“Your story is full of fucking holes, shit for brains!”
“What do you mean? You haven’t even read it yet.” Bugs handed the cop
the notepad. The cop threw it down on the table without looking at it.
“I don’t have to read it. We get over to the crack house and part of your
story checks out OK. We did find a dead crackhead rolled up in a rug.
But there wasn’t anyone else in there. No Nate Kurtis.”
“Motherfucker probably took off! He sure as shit ain‘t going to sit

around waiting for the fucking police to show up!”
The detective ignored Bugs and flashed a signal to the mirror. Another
plain clothes cop came in carrying Nate’s pistol, a combat knife, and
something rolled up in a piece of dirty old canvas.

The cop slammed the pistol down in front of Bugs. “By the size of the
hole in the crack head’s forehead I’d wager that this is the murder
weapon. No prints on it. Wiped clean. Ballistics will check it out.”
“That’s Nate’s fucking gun!” Bugs screamed out.
The knife hit the table.
“This big fucking pig sticker is wipe clean too. But I’ll bet forensics
proves that it’s the knife that slit Devon’s throat.”
“I’ve never seen that goddamn thing in my life!” Tears streamed down
Bugs’ face.
The detective continued to ignore him. He laid the canvas covered object
on the table almost reverently and unrolled it.

“But this is the most interesting item we found and we didn’t find it in
the crack house,” he paused and looked up at Bugs, “we found it in your
apartment.”
It was an M16 rifle.
“That’s not mine!” Bugs protested. “I don’t even know what the fuck
that is.”
“That’s an M16 military rifle. The same kind of rifle that killed one of our
deputies over twenty years ago. The case is unsolved but I think we just
may have stumbled to a huge fucking missing piece of evidence. I think
it‘s going to break the case wide fucking open.”
“Nate killed that fucking cop! It’s in my goddamn statement! Just read
the goddamn thing! Nate wasted his ass! He told me!”
The detective opened up a file folder. He leafed through the papers and
placed a faxed copy of a mug shot from Parchman prison in front of
Bugs. A younger Nate Kurtis stared up at him.

“Is that the same Nate Kurtis that killed Devon Williams, the crack
dealer, and who told you that he killed the deputy twenty years ago?”
Bugs nodded his head. “That’s him. Motherfucker has set me up.” His
voice was a whisper. His tears formed a little pool on the table.
“Well let me let you in on a little secret, asshole. I just got off the phone
with Parchman Prison. Nate Kurtis was doing a fifteen to eighteen year
stretch for trafficking in marijuana. His first year in Parchman he severely
assaulted an inmate and a corrections officer. He was kept in lockdown
almost his whole stretch.”
The big cop stood up and walked behind Bugs and rested his meaty paws
on his shoulders. “Nate Kurtis was found dead six months ago by the
midnight shift officer. Somehow he smuggled a razor blade into his cell.
Slit his wrists. ”
Bugs felt his bowels turn to liquid.
Bugs could smell the cigarettes and coffee on the man’s breath as he
leaned over and whispered in his ear.
“It took me twenty fucking years but I’ve finally got your ass. You’re a
lying piece of shit and I’ve got the evidence to prove it. I’m gonna make
sure you fry in hell for this.”
***

Tales From The Blue Reptile

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Tales From The Blue Reptile

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TALES FROM THE BLUE REPTILE

Tales From The Blue Reptile | 1

For Dennis, the wildest son of a bitch that I ever

knew. I hope you were in heaven at least five

minutes before the devil knew you were gone.

2 | Tales From The Blue Reptile

Tales From The Blue Reptile | 3

La Mesa is down by Tijuana. It's probably the worst prison in Mexico,

maybe in the whole goddamn world. I was getting close to my third

sipping a Corona and sharing a joint with my cellmate, Javier, a huge

found the head in one of his saddlebags.

Doing time in Mexico is a helluva lot different than it is back up in the

All mixed together.

My stay was being bankrolled by my employer in the states. My inmate

account had a check deposited like clockwork in it every month. It paid

for my double cell which I shared with Javier, a semi-comfortable bed, a

sometimes flushing toilet, decent chow, and if I watched my cash, some

cervaze and a bit of smoke to tide me over.

yet to even see a judge.

Javier was squinting through the smoke while wrapping a couple of

Whenever he came up with some new flash he asked me if he could try it

out on me and if I agreed, would reward me with a case of beer, some

Tales From The Blue Reptile | 5

me down. A couple of goon squad guards twisted me around and

I figured the long wait for my trial was finally over.

6 | Tales From The Blue Reptile

we pulled into a town because the driver slowed down to about a

hundred. Suddenly the van screeched to a stop, throwing me straight

from a nasty gash over my eye.

Mexican guards, dwarfing them. They stepped back and watched

through their mirrored sunglasses as the guards extracted me from the

van and removed my restraints.

The biggest agent stepped forward, punched me in the stomach, grabbed

me by the shoulders, and threw me spread-eagled over the hood of their

Suburban, and handcuffed me again, seemingly all in one motion.

Snatching me by the elbow and back of my belt, he did a neat little

slammed the door.

"Stay the hell down, asshole!"

Tales From The Blue Reptile | 7

at the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing. Cars were backed up a

stopping. We pulled on to U. S. soil.

I couldn't fucking believe it!

"Hey! What the hell is going on? Where are we going?"

taste of this." He was brandishing a large canister of pepper spray.

Taking his advice, I tried to make myself as comfortable as you could

conditioning lulled me into a semi-deep sleep.

8 | Tales From The Blue Reptile

Before I had time to open my eyes, someone had grabbed me by the

taking the opportunity to step on my head.

"Stay down until the truck is in motion, convict!"

battered old Quonset hut. As I walked towards it a door opened.

"Look at all those tats! You look like shit, Negro!"

Tales From The Blue Reptile | 9

must have been busy." I was being sarcastic.

He stepped back into the warehouse and beckoned me in with a lazy

wave of his free hand.

released into our custody."

"And now what?"

10 | Tales From The Blue Reptile

and faced Lawrence.

happen if you got busted with a thousand pounds of horse? Community

15 large. We're fucking even."

Tales From The Blue Reptile | 11

envelope in the Jeep. "They would've had to let me go sooner or later

anyway. There was no fucking evidence."