The buses idled with choking exhaust, here in this windswept February ice-box of a community college parking lot deep in the icy bowels of the George W. Bush administration.

Life out in St. Louis urbania was like gray, merciless asphalt rubbered off with a lace of oil where basketball players leaped in the air with the squeak of Nike's, batted the orange "finger-breaker" around, and "tipped it in the bucket" with the in-your-face grasshopper/exoskeleton hip-hoppity athleticism of Congo-fisted empowerment. Meanwhile, a fat black teenaged girl sucked on a grape popsicle and snorfled out crude laughter about "the booty dance".

It struck a chord of deep fear and disgust in most white people, which is why they had long since left this stretch of gas stations, fast food restaurants, and low-slung office buildings along a hilly bump of what was known as "Midtown". Ghettos to the north, poor whites to the south. Liberals with money "too oblivious too know the difference" off in a gentrified area deeper toward "downtown" and the Washington University/Barnes-Jewish Hospital nexus. Conservatives "who have had enough" tend to move out west toward the exurbs and office parks.

Lyndon Baines Johnson with "The Great Society" and Vietnam had attempted to balance too many competing forces like an expert "backroom dealer" where public debate was expertly "stage managed" and geared toward "a noble lie" but was revealed just to be just a pitiful "Wizard of Oz" hiding behind a machine that overheated with the falleness of the world and the failure of "modernism's promise", pitifully overtaxed like a leaky jet engine and grounded like a frond-waving bus station in Guatamala. He retired to his ranch as a bitter drop-out, and grew out his hair and beard as a sour old man "who pretended like he really didn't care anymore".

Meanwhile, the 1960's had been like "a cherry bomb" flushed down "the dean's toilet" and had blown everything up as the counterculture laughed, chanted, and "toked up". Funny thing, was-- "the kids won", no matter how much the repressive "back-to-order" types with joyless expressions and stiff lines on their upper lips (-- as if they had been etched) and all the countenance of a certain "unindicted co-conspirator" (-- who secretly like to "Mambo" down in South America with the intrigue of magical realism and Nazi gold) may have crunched down their political victories with a swung mace. The damage had been done; the cat let out of the bag; and the halls, if not by implication-- all of society-- sopping with sewage as the consensus narrative vanished and the party gradually "wound down".

And it was endlessly fun to fuck with people.

You see, when Lenin died and Stalin took over there was Trotsky, who believed in a kinder, gentler brand of communism-- but he was chased off and eventually murdered in Mexico with an ice pick in a flurry of underhanded totalist struggle as the wolves pulled down one of their own in an act of existential "snuffing out", as stark as a sniper in the woods on a cold, starry night. I had to think to myself that anyone who walked around with such a feral, cat-like expression on his face like Trotsky could afford not to be taken all that seriously.

(-- Nor would anyone who would follow someone like Trotsky, for that matter).

But Jim figured they were brethren in the worldwide struggle anyway. . . . . as a stocky, rotund black woman in a sweat shirt waddled along with her arms at her side, shrilly ordering people to get on the bus like a Billary butch drill-sergeant of "The Health and Human Services" division.