In his mind, as if it were manned by little men in a nuclear missile silo, the panels go red in alert. He duly weighs the stimulus, the provocation on his sensors moving through different gates of caution. Like a police officer in the course of making a decision, talking into a walkie-talkie as he evenhandedly gauges the situation with measured, deliberate coherence.

Finally, it's time for the "take-down"! Like animal control subduing a wild dog, authorized under the delegated bylaws, he acts. "EEEEEEEGH! 'EEEEEEEGH!", the call of the screaming eagle, practically carrying a sword in it's talons like in all the military magazines of blood and thunder.

Yes, as the sky goes black with the stink of American wrath! It's what smoked the Japs out of the fox-holes, mounting a charred head up on a tank and laughing at "The Kabukai theater". It's what pushed the flag up at Imo Jima, crew-cut soldiers chowin' down on C-rations not much better than dog food AND LIKING IT. Because that's our "Men's Magazine" heart of darkness with ultra-macho imagery, scantily-clad women being whipped, ghoulish images of totalitarian power-- if not "get-rich-quick" gimmicks and how to be a "Hercules" in bed.

"Somthin' for nuthin'"-- an abiding curiosity in the martial arts and the cagey "power of the mind", lightning-fast "tiger punches", ginseng tea, penis-lengthening herbal supplements from the Far East, a Japanese samurai sword picked up from a battlefield in the Pacific islands during a 1943 battle with spit-shined post-World War II reverence, and perhaps an insight above the dregs of this known Western world with a kick of instant, life-altering enhancement.

After the enemy is laid out on the floor, bleeding from the nose, and the ruckus settling down, he goes back to his stool, hunched over the bar like a true man's man. That's how it works in the self-defense videos, at least.

We'll lay down good money to "get the attitude" "to survive" in our "crazy and unpredictable world", sitting around our run-down shack and watching the video once or twice and feeling pumped up like Steven Segal snapping the limbs of some Jamaican VooDoo cocaine lord. But when "the moment of truth" arrives out there in the wild and wooly world, most of us turn out to be "chickenshit" anyway. There is no fight; we roll over in our backs with our hands in the air at the first sign of confrontation. There is no honor either, but such is life in the woeful hinterlands. . . . .

********************

There was Bobby Hayes, or "The ole' Muskrat" as I liked to call him. When he's "up-and-about", he sits out on the front porch of the apartment complex in a rocking chair, smoking cheap "Swisher Sweet" cigars and spitting into what passed as "the bushes". He sucks back on his smoke through bushy whiskers, rocking back and forth with crude, manic, stream-of-conscious conversation. His platform of sub-reality keeps building up higher and higher-- a combination of "Touched by an Angel", Charles Bronson, and the circus.

Like a prophet, "the old man of the mountain" perhaps, he describes eating establishments from memory that you yourself can visit and get a good meal from. Sure enough, it's there-- perhaps an all-night pancake house, a landmark out on the desolate plain exactly as he foretold. If you're hungry, you go someplace and fill up-- preferably a restaurant with a really good deal-- eating a lot without paying a lot, bellying up to the trough like a droop-bellied hog. Burnt-out, bleached-blonde waitresses with bags under their eyes refill your soda glass while you barely look up, grunting over your food like a farm animal. All that was needed was an old pitch-fork to lay on the hay.

Sometimes Dick would come along with us. Or "Dickelous-Pickelous" as my garrulous, obscene friend liked to call him. Easy-going, with tan skin and slicked-back hair he would laugh at this good-natured provocation-- his deeper manias hidden beneath a veneer of utter placidity.

Every weekend he would carry around a 2-liter bottle of ice tea and explore the used car lots by the dozens. Kicking the tires, peering under the hood, surrounded in the aura his harmless obsession. Dick was pretty normal, except for his fear that the government was chasing him down because he saw a top-secret airplane part at McDonnell-Douglass years before-- unveiled by the informality of a back-slapping chum. He would assign conspiratorial meaning to the tapping coming through the thin plaster walls of his apartment up the street from Hayes' and the red laser beams shined into his eyes by a floating light-bulb in the small hours.

And notwithstanding the fact that he wouldn't let anyone sit in the backseat of his nice automobile because he had a squirrely fear that his vehicle would rip in half with the squeal of metal. When my car popped a tire in the unfortunate course of running over a curb in the dollar-show parking lot because Bobby distracted me and wouldn't stop talking, Dick offered to shuttle us back to Hayes' place one at a time. His car was like an alien pod on a strange, grotesque Red-State planet, room for two only as he flew away in methodical sweeps.

He and Bobby shared an unofficial partnership in "chiseling cars", buying them for cheap, putting in a little work, then turning around and selling them for a profit.

Every Saturday night they would sit in the stands at a car auction held at a speed-way on the other side of the river, an overalled announcer waving his hand in a huge sweeping gesture as a bull-dozer pushed a battered hunk of '70s junk out into "reckoning view". A conspirator in the audience artificially drove up the bidding as the audience got more and more excited. The ole' muskrat used to be a salesman and was on to their petty tricks. Nominally a man of "old-time religion", he could yet rationalize selling off a car that he knew had problems with it. A squint, looking away, holding his pair of cards with a cigar-smoking "poker face". Nick was slower, but more honest. And gullible.

Once, a 16 year-old responded to his car ad posted on the internet and wrote something to the abashed effect of "Sir, I'm a young guy, just a 'pup', and this is going to be my first car. Can I bargain down the price?". Standing there wide-eyed, ball cap in hands, a short blond buzz-cut, a gangling youth with an open countenance ripe with potential and all the good things of all-American working-class dreams, Dick didn't make a cent off the deal-- and the river rat reproved him for his sure lack of tight-fistedness.

Once, when no fish were biting for Hayes' and Dick's most recent acquisition, a neighbor across the apartment complex, a young dude, offered to pay half up front and rode off with his girlfriend to "check it out with a mechanic". Then, without masks and in plain view of the cameras in the very same bank a third felon swabbed the floors at, they made a "hold-up".

They were planning to use Bobby's beat-to-shit vehicle as a "get-away car" when they drove off to Florida to live like bandits.

Police cars converged on "Brandy Station" apartments with flashing sirens, not an all-too-unusual occurrence with the drug use/domestic abuse activity of the marginal inhabitants going on a regular basis. To be young, white, skinny, and handcuffed. As the story went, the three were playing "rock, paper, scissors"-- trying to figure out which one would be the prison bitch.

Bobby stood out on the porch with his short friend Paul Tumber, surveying the scene like low-down conspirators. "No Bobby, don't let me and you look at them at the same time, or they'll think we're guilty!". Our musky rodential speciess shuffled in place, lit a cigar with a puff of Swisher-Sweet smoke, and looked away. Our very own "muskrat" hoped that the cops wouldn't grill him because the car had only one license plate.

Paul was prone to majestically leaning over the railing across the street with only the bottom half of his camouflage pajamas like a whiskered, 60 year-old, bald-headed, ill-tempered little bull-dog. When some teenagers made noise outside in the parking lot, he would tell them to turn it down to a reasonable volume.

"Awww, what are you going to do? You're just an old man!". He charged at them with his dukes up, bluffing the boys into running away despite the fact that he had a heart condition. Afterwards, they humbly asked permission to climb his steps to knock on a friend's door. He gave his assent and let bygones be bygones.

He was a realist, an insurance appraiser, an ex-soldier/bitter hippie who worked long 60-hour weeks because his job required a lot of driving. His main hobby was guitar-playing and "cowboy action shooting" when he and his 13 year-old son dressed up in period clothing and paced the supervised sets of the Old West. The boy was inattentive and young, and did not listen to his Dad's gruff lectures.

"Brandon-- no, Brandon. Don't open another soda until you finish your root beer. BRANDON! Did you hear what I said?!". The boy was naturally dexterous with the guitar to Paul's head-shaking amazement, and could play music by ear all by himself.

One time, Bobby, Brandon, and a retarded red-scruffed Neanderthal named Scott went out for a picnic. Brandon kept throwing food at his guardians. "Brandon, stop that!" Hayes slurred good-naturedly. But Brandon wouldn't stop, laughing the whole time with incorrigibleness. The final straw came when Brandon hit Bobby in the nose with a chunk of hot-dog. He got up, all bulging-belly and aching back, and chased him around the lakefront. Scott was faster and caught him. Brandon broke away and hid behind a hapless fisherman. "Halp, halp!", shifting one way and then another as Bobby and Scott tried to catch him. Our bearded huffer pulled down Brandon's pants and spanked his bare bottom with a switch of leaves affixed to a stick. The boy showed respect afterwards, and was more of a man for it.

Paul merely shook his head at the story of a man who called himself "The Phantom Patriot", fully armed with a blue paramilitary uniform and his moniker stitched across the chest, wearing a rubber skeleton mask and body armor as he fought off the Feds coming over to seize his property for non-payment of back taxes.

At Walmart he bought a lamp of a ghostly fisherman who unintentionally looked more like a Klansman. Maybe others were too oblivious get the joke, but when Hayes swung by to get his, they were all sold out. Paul would have made a good "Grand Wizard", a "grand poomba" around the council fire, but shook his head at all the foolishness. He certainly didn't hate ALL black people, but dealt with some rather low-life characters in the course of his job who tried "to put one over on THE MAN".

Yet he found it funny when the Ku Klux Klan won the free-speech case to participate in Missouri's "Adopt a Highway" program, having a sign put up on a small stretch of southbound 55. In retaliation, the state legislature officially named it "The Rosa Parks Expressway". Yet down in these parts the "Rosa" sign was defaced with spray-paint and even perforated with buck-shot from a moving pick-up truck.

Paul had once lived in California, the state where all the metaphorical "loose pieces", "nuts", "fags", and whatnot, drifted over with the tipping westward shift of population. He had worked in a car rental firm and had vivid, unflattering stories to tell about the self-entitled perfectionism of O.J. Simpson and Barbara Streisand-- throwing up her hand with the clink of diamonds & bracelets "like a real Jew-bitch".

Why, after the whole O.J. Simpson acquittal business, Bobby joked that a "Grand Wizard" should offer up a $10,000 dollar bounty for O.J.'s picked head in a jar to display in Klan headquarters. Paul chuckled, a bearded face of grizzled mirth, mouth creased and crinkles around his eyes like the roughest rendition of Santa Claus there ever was.

Why, he could be a stock character in an old Western serial, a prospector, perhaps. His son landed a job in Hollywood, gathering up specified types of cars to be junked up on the sets of action pictures. With greasy long hair, he was good friends with the teamsters leaning up against the sides of trucks for half-a-day's work for a whole day's pay and looking surly in the process. Paul just shrugged at the fates, the absurdity of it. He took it for granted that he could slide his fingers up and down the guitar neck, one foot mounted up on the table, with effortless will.

He knew some fellows who aspired to join the ranks of the bounty-hunting trade. Though something like 1200 men claimed to be self-employed in the profession, perhaps no more than a 100 manage to bring in money on a consistent basis.

"Justice will be Served" was the unoriginal motto by these gray-bearded cowboys in a Doc Holiday-style trench coat, holding up a shotgun. When the defendant out on bail failed to show up in court, the bail bondsman struck a deal with the amateur "professionals" to split the money. With a mugshot in hand, they went searching.

Once, they were driving through the ghetto when they saw their quarry. They screeched down on the brakes, leaped out of the vehicle, tackled the mumbling black lady, and threw her into the back of the van. As they carried her across state lines, they feverishly talked about how they would spend the money. As for the rough treatment of the defendant, plaintively protesting her innocence the whole while, she had signed away her civil liberties, after-all. That was part of the condition of being released.

They brought her into the courthouse and were informed that they caught the wrong woman! They merely looked at each other in horror, and didn't articulate out-loud that most Negroes "looked all the same to them". On the way home, they bought her an Egg McMuffin sandwich and orange juice while they tried to smooth over the awkwardness of their legally-liable predicament with a ribbon of "sweet talk". Why, they even evoked the name of the lord and savior, "Jesus Christ"! Ultimately, they settled out-of-court for $500 and a promise to be less foolhardy in the future. It was less a job than a way of life, after-all.

The outback looses it's character as cable television and mass-produced music conquers all. Digital information in tingling "0101010101010" streams, the lack of resourcefulness, the lack of SCROUNGING found in this new generation.

"Awww, yea. Awww, yea. We be going to hav' a par-TAY", the young, guileless wigger expropriating the slang of the black man. "And we going to be coo' wit dat" as he leans cutely on the steps with a brand-name jacket, a gold chain, an earring, a cap turned backwards, and his knees drawn up to his chest. The angry Lynyrd Skynyrd listener in a flannel shirt and hunting cap inside of me wants to give him a boot to his baggy-pantsed ass. "Hey man-- I'm like, sorry!", the "gangsta" reverting to his "honky" way of speech.

"Yeah, a par-TAY" says the mixed-race girl with black locks of curly hair, standing around with the glazed, vacant look of anybody. Pop reached it's nadir with Madonna wearing a cowboy hat, a midriff-bearing shirt, a belly-button ring, and up-to-date inanity. "Love, bay-BAY", seeming to suggest so much as she stares straight into the camera and gestures you forward with a hooked finger.

"The Backstreet Boys" and "N' Sync" were even worse-- bleached-blond hair, a yellow shirt, and a black tuft of facial hair just below the lip. They rode the wave and retired in their mid '20s as multimillionaires when the trend fizzled.

A new "flavor of the month" climbed the pop charts as the young and perpetually vacant lined up for midnight sneak releases of "hot" recordings, a pop diva declaiming her "independence" as she raised both her outstretched arms into the air.

They wanted to be "cool" with the black man, scoring weed, and sitting out on the stoop. Negroes were seen as "party mixers", having "it", the ones you referred to for "keepin' it real". A black comic like Chris Tucker, ordinarily so ruthless and aggressive on stage, mouth contorting with rubbery expression, now stands around with a complete dearth of words as he's introduced around a gathering of idolaters, pathologically shy in person, shrugging conservatively, for all the world looking like a confused monkey in the jungles of darkest Africa.

The white girl laughs, flits her wrist, and pulls out a fruit-punch wine cooler. The same kind of teenager that flashed her 13 year-old titties at Bobby as he sat on the porch across the complex in amazement. That was before he got evicted for slovenliness.

To describe Hayes' move would be summed up in so many words: "chaotic", "long-winded", "ill-planned", and "filthy". Back and forth from Joanna's-- his girlfriend's-- apartment, up three flights of stairs. But now he sweet-talked her into moving over to his sister's in order to save the couple rent. She was a little "slow", but Mike did the thinking for the both of them.

When he first moved in, he enlisted my brawn to drag up the 500-pound safe on a dolly one step at a time, he pushing up from below to save him the back pain. That's where he kept his valuables. But the safe had to come downstairs eventually, the yowling cats scurrying out of the open front door with my straining grunts of effort.

Thor McGurk pitched an effort to help out his friend. Tall, eyes hanging bug-like and screwy in his head, wearing a scrappy light-green t-shirt, he laughed at the mighty feat of loading up the safe on the U-Haul without the benefit of a sliding ramp. The safe merely laid there on the asphalt, as we debated our strategy, standing around with indecision. I hauled it up with a mighty grunt as the three of them pushed from below.

"Oh, ho-ho-ho. . . . . That's really something", Thor shaking his head with his good-natured murmur. "We couldn't do any of this without ole' Mike Adams, that's for sure!". I could merely hold on to the front of my suspenders, if I had them, in pride.

Thornton mused over all the destructive potential my strength posed, a keen grasp of the absurd narrating the action to a climbing crescendo like a wrestling announcer-- Jesse Ventura, perhaps-- marveling over the overhead-pressing potential of "King Kong" Bundy or George "The Animal" Steele. Why, with my size I could floor Mike Tyson with one punch. With brass knuckles, I could bust through brick walls. With Mike's samurai sword, I could chop a horse in half with one stroke. When I mentioned that last one, he keeled over at the waist with hilarity.

Later that night, he wasn't laughing as he leaned up against the wall in a sitting position, in utter exhaustion. But with the job done, I got him chortling again as I recounted the sullen travails of Larry George. Yes, the same Larry who lived right next to a Schnucks supermarket and seldom went out of the apartment, practically loosing use of his legs through sheer inactivity. Why, he'd hole up there and practically watch CNN for hours, always wanting to talk about nothing except for history and politics. "The Democrats have turned into 'the misfits' party", he mused authoritatively. I agreed with him wholeheartedly, but unlike him I got my act together to actually vote.

However, I found it a little strange when he put on the porno flick, "She-Wolves of the SS" with the flick of a remote as he sipped liquor in an easy chair. Hitler, Rudolph Hess, Mata Hari, agape mid-ranking Nazi officials, and poor editing added to the grotesque incongruity of it all. In his darker moments, scowling there in the chair, Larry mused that blacks should be raised on farms like cattle and ground up for dog food.

He doesn't talk about the time he voted my mellow father off the directorship of "The Self-Help Center", sort of a clubhouse/drop-in center for the mentally-ill, and replaced him with a sociopathic con-woman. His only two strictures were that the director should be more organized with the paperwork and that smoking should not be banned. Well, she looted the treasury while leaving no paper-trail, and her first official act was to ban smoking. She sold off the pool table and declared that members should bring in their own vanilla sandwich cookies. By the time the naive board realized what was happening-- noodling around like "The Three Stooges"-- and changed the locks on the doors, Maureen Bullock was long gone. She even ran off with the $4000 of charity funds the local Lutheran church raised on their pathetic behalf.

So there was awkwardness in the air when I first swung by Larry's to take him over to Bobby's. He was very well-behaved when he wanted to be-- not even beating on the dashboard and hollering. At first he paid gas money, but came up short one week. I said "let it go", but unfortunately it set a precedent: he never paid again. Two dollars would have made all the difference for my young teenaged budget, but he needed that money to pay for cable television and to have take-out Chinese food delivered right to his doorstep. He could always afford to "eat out", though.

Once, in a harsh, bitter winter night when the snowflakes were whirling forsakenly, we were parked at the Arby's drive-thru window mulling over their "five juicy roast beef sandwiches for $5.55". Larry couldn't seem to understand that the bargain was irreducible-- you couldn't buy individual sandwiches for a $1.11 apiece. He contemplated, eyes flecking back and forth as he scowled like a character from a Charles Dickens novel. He proudly traced his lineage back to "Merrie Old England" and certainly looked the part. We sat there for the better part of five minutes, cars stacked up behind us, honking before Larry decided he'd "take it".

One thing he wouldn't take was the sorry excuse for a milkshake at White Castle. He wanted something you could sip through a straw, and was dismayed to find that it was merely soft-serve chocolate ice cream piled in a cup. "Gawd damn-it!" he bellowed at the counter. "For this kind of money, I could have bought ice cream at Schnucks!" The short, fat, pimply-faced teenager in a black cap promptly refunded his money. Afterwards, we drove to Dairy Queen to get a REAL shake. Larry wasn't satisfied going to just one restaurant, though. He had to go to different locations for a burger, shake, and fries because he had particular preferences and I was too scared to deny him.

Perhaps the moment of truth came when he and Thor got into a fight at Mike's place over who would get the bigger soda. They were evenly-matched, about the same size, and had hot tempers that night. Thornton splashed Larry in the chest with a mug of coffee and they both took to a flurry of fighting and scratching. When Bobby returned from the "Motomart" gas station on top of the hill, he saw the two of them moping like two little boys. No one really got the "upper hand" and both backed down. I forgot just who it was who got the bigger soda.

Hayes and I had the kindness to visit him in the hospital when he once again went off his medicine. Sometimes, Larry took to believing that he was a Germanic demigod and was not bound to the laws of neurological biochemistry. That's what his voices told him. We brought him doughnuts, then, in a hospital gown, he persuaded us to bring him cigarettes. "Gosh," he reflected. "That would be really nice of you". It was a change from the other numerous times he had been hospitalized, when he slapped an overbearing nurse back and forth with a "WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!" and sent her screaming from the room (-- Larry hated pushy women.) Six orderlies got a hold of him, tossed him flying through the padded lock-down cell with a "HEAVE-HO!" and locked the door. For hours and hours he beat on the metal door, hollering out "WHERE'S MY CIGARETTES?!".

The final straw came when he threatened to kill and eat his doctor. "I'm God! You're just a bug!". With his talk of cannibalism, he was regressing into our "lizard brain" state, above which our higher faculties are stacked upon in a cushion of primate sanity. It is the impulse of hating someone so much that you utterly want to consume them, and pass them out through the other end. The doctor in question got his housing subsidy yanked, reasoning that Larry "was no longer fit to live in society" and thus causing him to lose that same little apartment of 14 years. It was the "group home" for him, where he would be bossed around by pushy women 24 hours a day. The last I heard, he went off to live with his mother far out in the rural wastelands. She was a religious woman who was opposed to liquor and pornography, so Larry would have to make some adjustments lest he kill and eat her.

At Bobby's fat old sister's, the phone ringing off the hook with bill collectors, cops n' murder shows on always, we unloaded his humble possessions. "Yup, moving's a bitch", Paul Tumber philosophized in a chair, tilting his chin down and staring you right in the eyes with an agog expression. We had pulled the ramp-less U-Haul up to the front lawn and pushed the safe out with a heave. It landed face down. When we turned it over, the twisting widget had left a hole in the grass. At least we hadn't dropped it on the driveway. That's what we had originally planned to do, bobby vowing to patch up the asphalt on his hands and knees with cement, but Paul had a better idea. Hayes vowed to take us out on his boat someday in thanks, a vessel he proudly christened "The H.M.S. Stud-Muffin". He hadn't yet got around to painting on this most distinctive signature.

"E" the three-legged dog limped around the shambles like an uncanny freak. Then there was "Old Post", blind, deaf, and hobbled with old age that mostly stayed in the basement. Bobby let this grotesque black poodle out into the yard where it sniffed around like a slug and did its business. The dog possessed a giant scrotum that wobbled back and forth gruesomely. Hayes pointed this out, and we were doubled over with hilarity, his high-pitched "HEE, HEE, HEE" exploding forth in manic-depressive glee.

This was the same dog that kept snapping at him when it was younger, growling all the time, to the point when it refused to go through the "doggy door". Bobby beat it with a paint stick, swinging it like a carpenter in a tight space with a hammer-- "WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!"-- until the dog rolled over in submission and never growled at him again. Back in the feel-good '80s Bobby took it to the hiking trails of Poplar Bluff. One time it tried to mount a raccoon, and it ran up into a tree chittering angrily. Another time it rushed at another dog in amorousness and almost fell off the bluff's edge overlooking the nature trail by 200 feet.

As a reward for our efforts, coming to his aid when everyone else had bowed out "with a bad back", he vowed to take us out to "Fast Eddie's" in Alton, Illinois. You know, around 11 AM on Sunday because the tables filled up so quickly with people on to the deal. Hot dogs for a quarter, half-pound burgers for 79¢, beef n' green pepper shiskabob for 99¢. The secret was that they charged $2.00 for soda apiece, no refills. They even gave away free popcorn, but they overly salted it. Bobby planned to make a whole day of it, having this mania for the "Alton Giant" museum as the noble "Paul Bunyan" misfit in our own backyard . . , , , so close yet so far.

The height of humor, a stage where two men stood facing off:

-- "Mine's bigger!"

-- "No! Mine's bigger!"

-- "Mine's bigger and I'll show you!", the man taking off his belt and holding it up in front of the floor-stamping crowd. "SEE? Mine's bigger!"

Paul couldn't make it, (-- or didn't want to be seen with the likes of us!) so Vinita, Hayes' old maid at his former apartment, came along instead. She worked for two hours, then billed the state for eight. Bobby couldn't rightly clean his apartment and all, with his tender, under-used back. Once, I reached for the wrong soda can and spat out a mouthful of flat, watery ashes. . . . . which was testament to this scrawny, stick-like woman in her '60s who looked like a long-lost relative of "The Beverly Hillbillies" family and squinted a whole lot with her white sun-visor hat as she bared her dentures in a vinegary look of small-mindedness. She wanted to find a man to marry and divorce so she would get his house, his truck, and court-ordered alimony. All of this, counting out-loud on her fingers like she was buying supplements at the grocery store.

Speaking of worthless womanly parasites wandering around like vampires, I now turn to Joanna's sisters: Donna and Rebecca. From her father, a "John Bircher" in life, making her promise at his deathbed that the eldest would look out for the two of them. The most stable of all three, it gave Joanna a perpetual "guilt-complex", as they all shared a house together out in High Ridge, miles away from civilization. Her shrieking, abusive sisters drove the weaker one-- Joanna-- out, like harpies in the Greek myths.

One night, I was with Bobby and Joanna when they stopped by to drop off groceries. Thing was, the sisters demanded that they stop off at six different places, spread over 50 miles, to get the exact brand of nail polish and bug-spray, if not food. Shopping took 10 or 11 hours, and Joanna never had the strength to deny them. She was like a horse with infinite patience getting whipped by a pair of cruel mistresses.

We stood out in the haunted moonlight, Hayes not improving matters any when he mentioned that the irresponsible neighbor had three giant dogs that liked to cross the road at night, saliva dripping off of their fangs. But Joanna was standing there, rooting through her fanny pack for something. "Come on, Joanna" we kept telling her, getting edgier and edgier. But her obsessive-compulsive disorder was kicking in, the same condition that took her four hours to balance her check book and pay off the bills. She kept getting more and more flustered with our insistence, and finally threw her fanny-pack into the bushes, beginning to sob in frustration. Mike grabbed her wrist and pulled her up the steps before the dogs came.

The only light in the house was from an old black & white western coming from the T,V. Donna, a hefty woman with curly blond hair, merely sat there like an over-medicated, delusional lump. Then Rebecca came into the room, her red hair in a frazzle, wearing an undignified goofy expression on her face without being able to help it. Prism, the tow-headed, stubborn, five year-old little daughter entered, the result of a one-night fling originating in a country & western bar. Rebecca simply waited around until some cowboy was bold enough to buy her a drink and then had him in her alimonious clutches when he knocked her up and she divorced him.

One night Bobby and I went to the ball game downtown. Free tickets handed out, begrudgingly, by the St. Louis Cardinals, to the beneficiaries of charity. Of course the seats were not great-- they were TERRIBLE-- but the game caught the least of my attention. Several risers above the field, somewhere between third base and home plate, the majority of the 35,000 in paid attendance were within sight somewhere below. The view cranes around to your left or right with the curvature of the stadium.

I watched the ball glide smoothly through the air in coasting perfection, the arc of descent, like a pure mathematical model on a computer screen. Noticing how the finer details of the field coalesced into a larger pattern of green stripes-- light, dark, light dark-- and how the diamond looked like the a reddish slab of pie.

Saw the vendors-- yellow shirts & black pants-- making the rounds, standing out against the distant seated like yellow-jackets crawling over red cloth. My eyes swept over the stadium, focusing on the blue canvas back wall, the empty seats of raspberry behind second base (-- truly the worst seats), the crisply-lit scoreboard, the stadium lights of blinding white honeycomb, and above it all the starless black sky.