The Boy with the Red Thumb

A hoe was secured between the curved handlebars of my ten-speed bicycle. Bill carried the rake. We pedaled five miles from our home in Three Springs to our family’s vegetable farm on the outskirts of Saltillo. Most children were sleeping at 6 a.m. on hot summer mornings. We were up early. We wanted to beat the heat of day.

It seemed unfair to Bill and me that our parents chose not buy canned vegetables. Instead, we grew enough corn, tomatoes and potatoes to feed our entire town. Our step-father worked away on construction jobs during the summer. He left strict orders on what chores needed to be done before he returned home on Fridays.

“You kids think life is easy. When I was your age, I spent the entire day working outside in the fields. We didn’t have swimming pools when I was a kid. Let me tell you, if I find one weed in the garden or if it ain’t hoed right, you will be restricted from playing little league or going to the swimming pool for the rest of the summer.”

The land on which we grew our crops belonged by Bob Garlock. He purchased a large piece of property that was once a pig farm and had plans of converting it to a junkyard. Bob was a used car salesman and best friends with our stepfather whose name was also Bob. It angered Bill and me that Ryan and Robbie Garlock, the sons of the used car dealer, didn’t have to work in the gardens that their father had planted next to ours. Although their fields had weeds, their crops seemed to do just as well. Bill concluded that our step-father simply liked to torment us and enjoyed making our young lives a living hell. I tried to stay happy, keep a smile on my face and I always whistled when I worked.

Mom typically drove us in our family’s blue Chevy pick-up truck to the garden, but Bob decided that the family could save on gas if we rode our ten-speed bikes to the gardens instead—

“Your bikes costs me a couple hundred dollars last Christmas. It ain’t gonna hurt you to ride your bikes to Saltillo. Your mom has got enough to do. Just be careful on the roads. Watch for traffic.”

A thunderstorm swept over the rolling farmland of Central Pennsylvania just as we were half-way to the fields. We took off our drenched t-shirts and continued pedaling in the downpour. The rain felt good. At 6 a.m. it was already eighty-five degrees.

The tall weeds that littered perfectly parallel rows of corn came out easy, thanks to the rain. Bill quickly finished weeding twenty- three rows of corn. I finished my task of dusting the potatoes with lime sifted through a burlap sack. I joined my brother in the tall cornfields. I heard a faint cry ahead of me, down the row. I continued to remove all the weeds until I arrived to discover what was making the horrible sounds.

“Bill, come here quick! There’s a raccoon in the trap.”

Our step-father placed metal, spring traps throughout the garden to keep the wild game at bay. Rarely did we catch anything. The animals seemed to know not to touch the sardines that were placed on the traps and preferred eating the fresh corn instead.

The huge creature looked at us with frightened black eyes. The animal’s foot was caught in the trap.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Bill.

“Let it die.” He explained.

“Not in this heat,” I protested as I quickly slammed my hoe upon its head, as if it were hard garden soil prior to a summer rain.

Bill shrieked. So did the raccoon. I finished weeding.

Beat 360

Anderson Cooper needs to spend less time producing Emmy award winning documentaries like “Planet In Peril” and discuss the oil crisis on CNN. We have no time for ‘Name the Caption’ photo contests. I would never wear an “I Beat 360″ t-shirt. They are unfashionable, like Anderson Cooper. He has much media power, yet acts like a childish journalist!

What’s causing $5 gas, Anderson Cooper? Is another “fed move” to lower interest rates really the answer? What’s the story, reporters? Why hasn’t the media or “The New York Times” offered a real answer to the current oil crisis? America is broke and inches away from starvation.

Didn’t most investigative reporters go to college? What happened to America’s free press– the checks and balances watchdog? Have we all sold our souls to filthy advertisers?

Please, do not make us watch more talk specialists who give us gas and a lot of hot air. What is the real reason why gas is so high right now? Why have home values dropped like a Washington whore? What’s going on? America, you are about to crumble, and our watchdog, the media is not doing its part.

That’s why I’m here!

The answer is simple. Israel should give the land that was promised by its Fathers to its bothers.

Cane killed Eve, no?

The Muslims are controlling the world’s purse strings right now. Not Israel. All that Gold that was stolen from Egypt following the “great plagues” was spent long ago. Bible stories are all fantasy anyway– short stories written by prophets like Anderson Cooper, thousands of years ago.

Turn over the West Bank or go south for the winter!

History repeats itself, but God does not.

Obsessive Compuslive Disorder and September 11th

Since September 11th, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) has run ramped in the city that never sleeps. There was more than just jet fuel and screaming civilians inside the jets that crashed into the Twin Towers. A biological agent was released– one that makes  our minds race at the speed of sound. Take a look around. The symptoms are everywhere. Racing thoughts have infected the thought process of the city of nine million.

***

As I made my way through rush hour traffic this evening, I paused in Union Square to assist a victim of WTC OCD. A man going into the subway had shaking hands; a sure symptom of one who has been exposed to the nerve rattling, invisible, psyco-electronic transmissions that were unleashed, in a white dust cloud, back in 2001. They had a dirty bomb. The black man in front of me was confused at the subway turnstiles this afternoon, like so many others who have brain washed by the media and  still suffer from acute nervousness triggered by electronic devices and cell phones. 

***

Yellow, credit card-like transit vouchers enable commuters to enter the subway system by simply gliding a paper credit card through a thin metal strip. The convenience costs riders $2 each way. The black man was having trouble with his MetroCard. It is in places like the subway, at electronic turnstiles, that the OCD affected, men like the Black man with shaking hands, exhibit the debilitating affects of WTC OCD.

***

There were hundreds of people around– all rushing to get to where they were going– home. We were scurrying like insects in a hive or colony. The mind racing began in everyone around me. We were all temporarily insane. It was rush hour. Paranoia at its highest. New Yorkers were freaking out. A man in front of me was stuck at the subway turnstile. I waited patiently for him to go through. I could have gone to another turnstile, but I waited there for the black man to finish. The electronic machine would not accept his swipe. Over and over again he ran his card, like a manic-depressive in a full-blown psychotic state. I just stood there and waited. I knew he was going to ask me. People with OCD and other severe mental illnesses always ask me to solve their mental dilemmas. I waited. He used both hands to try and get his yellow Metro Card approved. The machine instructed the user to ’swipe again’.

“Take your time,” I said. “Don’t push down hard on the card. Just glide it through slow and easy. Pretend it’s your penis.”

The black man laughed his ass off.

Wouldn’t you know it? It worked. He was approved.

Suddenly, a skinny white woman, one obviously a victim of 9/11 anorexia came storming through the metal turnstile. The metal rods that served as the MTA’s way of dealing with turnstile jumpers quickly swung in a counter-clockwise direction, causing the black man with OCD to freak out.

I wanted to tell him not to “clear” the turnstile by pushing the metal spikes in a 1/4 rotation before he entered the cocoon like entranceway. He forgot that the machine would count the 1/4 turn as a used fare. Thinking he was going to get through the NYC subway system OCT counter-terrorism device, the black stranger was stopped abruptly by the computer that accepted his fare just moments ago.

“What the fuck?” he asked like an obsessive-compulsive; as if I somehow was a token booth clerk and stole his fare.

“They ripped you off,” I insisted to the man, who like me, has been suffering ever since September 11^th.

“Fuck this shit. I’m going through that gate. You are a witness, right?”

I quickly made my way through the turnstile with one simple, light, Metro Card swipe.

“Oh yes. Sure. I’m a witness to it all. I’m sure they will believe me!” I shouted to victim of 9/5.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Salmonella Free Tomatoes

I get washed away by white women who are attracted to men of color. In the Army, the white guys in the barracks had a code name for white Army broads who slept around with black soldiers– “Mud Sharks”. There is nothing wrong with sleeping with a black person, the white soldiers noted. “A girl does not have to change herself, wear big ear rings and ‘act’ black all the time,” they bitched.

Lauren, the skinny white chick who lives next door is a Mud Shark. She’s not into Black guys. She likes Latino dudes. I guess she’s a Sand Shark. She is raising her child as a single mother now. Her boyfriend or husband moved out. I haven’t seen him sitting on the steps out front in over a year. Bradley told me they split up. I thought they were a cute couple. With her hair slicked down all the time, she could pass as a Puerto Rican or Dominican chick. I bet she speaks Spanish too. She seems intelligent. Poor Sandshark must miss her lover. He was so sexy. Her son, the little boy who dresses in a batman costume and runs up and down the sidewalk is a nice mix of the two of them. He looks Spanish– European Spanish– long, straight black hair, strong Caucasian features mingled with the mystery of Latin. The kids who hang out on the block all know my name– “Charlie”. I was on this block as a Mud Shark long before other white people started moving into Bed-Stuy. Not even white chicks who dated Black guys were seen here. In all honesty, the neighborhood wasn’t safe for a gay, white guy. I mean, I’m not a sissy and do not appear as one who would be an easy take, but other white people were not seen around here seven years ago when I moved here to be with Shawn.

It’s nice seeing other white people around. I missed them. Lauren is cool and always so talkative. I try to stay out of their lives– my neighbors who hang out on the steps when the weather gets warm and summer starts. Nobody sat on their front steps seven years ago. Nobody but me, that is. I remember when Quincy Street was empty on summer mornings– not counting the homeless crackheads who seemed to never rest.

It’s all cleaned up here now. Lauren is cleaning out her yard next door today. I’m sure she wants to have a garden like mine. The chain link fence that separates our yards has been cut and one can easily enter my yard from hers.

Someone was ringing my doorbell yesterday. I called in sick from work. Busy in the back yard, staking my tomato plants, suddenly the buzzer rang. I ignored the call three times, assuming the Jehovah Witnesses were back. On the fourth, long, drawn-out electronic alarm, I put down my hand-held hoe and went to the front door.

It was Lauren–

“Can I come through your house. He locked us out,” she explained while pointing to her little boy. “My back window is open. I can crawl in.”

They crawled out my spare bedroom window, like I do every time I go outside to work in my garden. I wish I had a door. I could go through the cellar, but it’s too inconvenient to go outside, and have to step over neighbors hanging out on the front steps, just to escape to my private paradise.

“Look at those tomatoes,” Lauren said. “You got tomatoes already? Oh my! And you can’t buy them in the stores now.”

“I’ll give you some if you make me some Salsa.”

She laughed and realized that I’m a Mud Shark too.

The Drum Major and the Vagina

Cordelia’s bright smile tightened within the gentle caress of my kiss. I didn’t expect to find myself in a lip-lock with my good friend from the majorette squad of highschool band. I was the drum major. Cordelia marched behind me in parades. On the football field during halftime, she spun a sliver bar like a ninja warrior, weaving shiny metal through her fingers, lighting up the night with shiny reflections on the fifty-yard line.

There were instances during practice when I was almost hit by flying batons. Summer band practice was dangerous. While our band leader was working with the brass section and we had nothing to do but chase away swarms of gnats with the backs of our hands, we got to know each other as friends. I didn’t know she was physically attracted to me. She let me pretend I too was a majorette and she taught me to spin and catch the wand without looking.

Cordelia dated my brother Bill for about a year. I know they had sex. Bill told me. He dumped her when they entered their senior year. Being the younger brother of the first-string football quarterback, I caught Cordelia like most of the rebounds that my older brother dumped like spit being released from a valve on a brass trumpet.

A group of friends from band got together at Mark Fish’s uncle’s house near Orbisonia. His uncle had satellite television. Most in the close-nit group of musically gifted individuals obtained permission from parents to spend the night at Marks’ uncle’s house, deep in the woods, on the outskirts of the tiny Pennsylvania railroad town. We promised our parents there would be no drinking. We were all just a bunch of friends in band who wanted to experience the thrills of a sleeping bag party. Cordelia sat close to me on the back porch. The rest of the gang was inside watching porn stations which had yet to be scrambled from massive dishes that were used to capture what was at the time unlimited satellite broadcast signals from stations like Playboy.

Cordelia wanted to go home. Her mother did not grant her permission stay all night at Mark’s uncle’s house. She had to be home by midnight. I agreed to take her home at 11:30, after we finished discussing my Army plans and her goals of obtaining a degree in nursing.

Bad acne was our bond. We shared tips on getting rid of it and how awful it felt to have so much of it. Like me, Cordelia was really pretty under all the red and yellow markings.

“Do you want to come in for a while?” She asked when we arrived at her place in town. “My parents are in bed. It’s no big deal.”

“Sure.”

We got out of my green pinto. I walked to the passenger side where she was still standing. She didn’t ask to kiss me. She placed her lips on mine like a bassoon player devouring a reed . Her breath was fresh. What a nice kiss. I didn’t know I could get an erection thinking about or kissing a girl, but I did. It went right up, like a baton. She touched my penis and kissed me harder. I thought about Bill already being in her. In a sense, her whorish attitude turned me on. I touched her large breast just out of curiosity. Could this really be happening? Maybe I’m not really gay, I thought.

I couldn’t help it. She wouldn’t stop. It seemed as if I were a baton being twirled in the fingers of her loins.

Slippery When Wet

Thanks for the beer, Dad
Other kids would have killed
To have a Dad who let them drink

Riding in the back of a pick-up
I passed you a cold beer
Every time you asked for one
Through the sliding glass of the cab

“Want a beer, Charlie?”

“No Dad. Mom would be mad.”

You drove us up and down mountains
Wind blowing my long hair
To go fishing on Lake Raystown

Bill yelled– “Dad’s crazy,”
Every time you smashed a beer bottle
On Slippery When Wet signs
Speeding near fifty
With kids in the back

Bill laughed and drank a beer

“Bill, Mom said no.”

“Dad ain’t married to Mom no more
And he’s still our Dad.”

You and Bill went fishing
I went swimming with your new girlfriend
You kept asking me if she was pretty 
She was standing right next to you 

“Yes. She’s pretty.”

She smiled and wanted me. 

The girls fell in love with me , Dad.

All because of you.

Missing Bette Midler

Bette Midler was euthanized
Master forced into psychiatric care
A band of bitches with DSMV-IV
Locked the queen away

Bette was found nearly dead
On Kosciusko Street
Meowing
On the cellar steps

Lennox the landlord found her
He did not know where the master was
In need of insulin injections
It seemed better to put her
To Rest

Master released on July 12th
Landlord was there
Waiting for the rent

“I had to have your cat put to sleep. Will you be moving?”

Master just looked at him
But didn’t cry
All the landlord wanted was the rent

God and the cat were dead.

Another cat came in the window
A July sunrise, exactly three years later
One not adopted like Link,
A cat from the ASPCA

Master called her

Baby Girl

Calico crawled into his arms
She cuddled in his soft terry cloth robe

Reminds master of Bette,

He sang a song to Bette
Before she was put under…
Every morning
While shaving, Master sang-
“She’s a calico, a calico, a calico…”

He sings “the Rose” now
Realizing

That every life
Has a purpose

 

 

Jewish Board– A Den of Vipers

There will be no more formal complaints made to the New York State Division of Human Rights for disability discrimination relating to my schizophrenia diagnosis. I am flattered that my employer, the Jewish Board and their powerful attorney argued in my favor, insisting that it is not possible for me to have had that diagnosis and that I am exaggerating claims that I was discriminated against due to my severe mental illness . The state and their Human Rights Specialist, Alton Wolf, will not have to spend countless tax dollars trying to defend what is simply craziness in the first place. I’m tired of telling them to get off my back. I simply do not care anymore. The strangest thing happened to my mind during the drama of filing formal human rights complaints against the Jewish Board and the administrative staff that run the place. I’m not paranoid anymore. I simply do not care. I’m free again.

Every month they audit me and the petty cash account for which I am custodian of. I suppose they figure that eventually I will tire and leave the job that I currently hold, especially if they keep fucking with me by investigating me with “desk audits”.

There was a misplaced $5 taken from the cash drawer for Medicaid Transportation expenses and placed in the box where staff store co-pays of clients who come to our clinic. No big deal, but they wrote me up for it. I just giggled inside.

But on Thursday, they pushed my buttons far too hard again. I received an e-mail from the assistant controller, John D’amico, informing me that more than $2,000 was missing from the account and I needed to be prepared to present receipts for the missing cash.

Back in December, I reduced the size of my program’s petty cash account simply because during the winter months we do not use as much petty cash and I didn’t want too much cash simply sitting in the safe. I am ultimately responsible for all the cash that comes and goes from the office and I filled out three forms that were necessary to reduce the amount on the account. I returned four voided checks, made out to me, the Petty Cash Custodian, and attached a memo explaining why the checks were being returned and that the total amount of the petty cash account was being reduced by more than $2,000.

The controller’s office lost the paper work and six months later, they started throwing accusations of missing funds at me. I faxed Mr. D’amico a copy of the documentation relating to my petty cash reduction that I saved.

One would think that John would e-mail me back to apologize for their oversight. I do have schizophrenia, and at times become incredibly paranoid at absolutely everything. There was no return e-mail. Nothing that said, “We are sorry for accusing you, Mr. Taylor. We are the real, crazy bastards. We cannot help that we are obsessed with every fucking coin in the free market.” Not a word came from them.

I really don’t care anymore.

I’m free.

Army Training after Basic Training

The son of my cousin marched off to the Army today. Fresh out of highschool like I was in 1986, Theodore, dressed in a class A uniform and an olive duffle bag strapped over his strong shoulders, got on a plane in Harrisburg at 1 p.m.. He is about to serve his country like others in his family.

Theodore had Basic Training last summer, so today he was off to Texas where he will receive Advanced Individual Training (AIT) and learn his Military Occupational Speciality. Theodore is going to be a military policeman. The family prays that Theodore will not be sent to Iraq, but chances are, he will walk the desert. I convinced Theodore’s grandmother, Aunt Roxie that Theodore was going to be sent to the Mexican Boarder and not to worry. Roxie lost her first husband to the Vietnam war.

AIT is much more relaxing than Basic Training. I hope Theodore was not nervous today like I was when I was shipped to Ft. Gordon, Ga for radio/teletype training. Arriving at a new duty station is like going to college. Everyone is a new face. Unlike the little town where Theodore grew up, he will meet lots of fresh faces in Texas. There are no friends in life like the friends we meet in the service. I only wished I had stayed in contact with my Army buddies, but that’s how the magical life of the military works to keep soldiers joining and re-enlisting. In life, there is nothing like new beginnings, new people and new places. For kids like Theodore and me, it is the only way to escape the solitude of dead-end worlds where the only work is at places like McDonald’s, a gas station or perhaps as a greeter at Wal-Mart.

He will take that first trip to the communal showers like I did at Ft. Gordon and see lots of naked, well-shaped buttocks for the first time. Theodore will likely be more focused on soap and water.

Theodore will join new friends for nights on the town. There will be lots of drinking in Texas. Perhaps, like in 1986, trainees will go off post and rent hotel party rooms. I wish I had stayed in touch with the young man from Hawaii, the Samoan with green eyes, the soldier who placed my hand on his soul. Under the sheets of the hotel room packed full of at least twenty snoring G.I.’s, he touched me lightly with his dark fingers and slowly increased his grip until eventually it seemed my hand was hovering above an oracle on a Ouija Board.

I was too nervous to go down to read whatever was written below. This was the Army. I came here to escape those sins. I quickly returned my hands to a half vampire, half prayerful clasp between my rock hard nipples.

Everyone was passed out but us. I remained motionless under the sheets until my hands started to move in robotic fashion. It seemed as if I had been ordered to salute or a demon had possessed my soul.

The belt of his ejaculation filled my palm with a sticky thrust matched only by that of an M —16 rifle.

We were too nervous to talk about what happened when we were drunk as thirteen weeks passed in Army college. We blew it off as experimentation and pretended that it never happened.

I sat near him in the recreation room with the other guys, watching re-runs of the Walton’s on television while I carefully spit shined my boots, trying not to think about what these hands had saluted.

I salute Theodore. I hope he watches out for those Don’t Tell guys like his father’s cousin.

There Was No Big Bang

During these times of economic crisis, one should not spend an extra ten dollars a month for high definition television. But if it is a huge flat-screen television that graces one’s livingroom and there are stations like the History and Discovery Channels available for crystal-clear reception, it’s worth the price, considering the current cost of gasoline.

According to premium cable television networks, there are scientists who conclude that the Big Bang never happened. Einstein never would have fallen for the concept, but even the History Channel notes possibilities in such trains of thought.  What if our universe has always been in existence– a never ending loop that is described in theory as a series of interconnected double s’s SS.

Images from the Hubble Telescope grace the exposed brick of my apartment like mortar upon an ancient Greek temple.

It’s fabulous. And I like the theory.

What if we simply do it over and over again in a universe with more constellations than living creatures?

I’ll see you down the road.